The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

Ren Bucholz, who works for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) here in Accordion City wrote to me:

I wanted to let you know that Online Rights Canada (or “ORC”), a new grassroots collaboration between EFF and CIPPIC, just launched an online petition drive on Sam Bulte’s copyright-for-cash scandal. 

People can voice their support for Michael Geist’s “Copyright Pledge,” which asks all politicians to swear off money from copyright lobbyists if they’re involved in setting copyright policy.  We’ve also got a pretty comprehensive backgrounder on the issue, including links to your coverage.  Finally, we have some ways for people to get involved offline.  For example, Bulte is going to be at two all-candidates meetings this week, and we’d love people to show up and ask all the candidates about taking the pledge.  Even if they’re not in that riding, attending all-candidates meetings and asking politicians to sign the pledge would be super-helpful.

They’ve also got a petition you can sign, requesting that Canadian politicians take the copyright pledge.

Keep up the good fight, Ren!

Here come the bloggers…

Technorati, for those of you not familiar with the site, tracks what’s going on in weblogs. You can use it to see who’s linking to a blog or specific blog entry or see what topics are currently popular in the blogosphere.

Some examples:

• As I write this, Technorati reports that over 19,000 sites link to the 800-pound gorilla of the blogsphere, Boing Boing, which ranks in the top 100 of the nearly 25 million sites it tracks. I’m doing nicely, currently ranking at #944, with 757 sites providing nearly 1,700 links to this site. Thanks, folks!
• On the keyword search front, a Technorati search for “Brokeback Mountain” reveals that nearly 38,000 blog posts contain that phrase. It’s been getting mentioned in one to two thousand blogs every day this week.

This blog’s politican of the moment, Sam Bulte, has been getting a fair number of mentions in the past week. The chart on the left, taken from a Technorati search on the word “Bulte”, shows her rise from non-entity to topic du jour over the past few days. The intrepid research of Michael Geist and Boing Boing’s “juice” seem to have catalysed the local blogosphere, making Ms. Bulte’s coziness with the copyright cartel has been a regular topic of discussion over the past couple of days. If you want to see what they’re saying about Sam, click on this link to see the latest blogosphere chatter about her.

In case you were wondering, I do live in the riding of my current favourite blog punching bag, Sarmite “Sam” Bulte: Parkdale-High Park. Although I moved into the neighbourhood only recently, the riding has been my place of work for the past couple of years (Tucows is at its easternmost edge).

It’s also my old stomping grounds. When we first moved to Canada back in 1975, we lived at the corner of Glenlake and Pacific Avenues, practically falling distance from the apartment that Wendy and I now share. The first school I ever went to in Canada, Keele Street Public School, is still there, as are many of the little parks and tuck shops scattered throughout the neighbourhood surrounding High Park station.

As a technologist, card-carrying member of the EFF, amateur musician and music lover, Bulte’s cozying up to the copyright mafia really gets up my nose. She’s in the pocket of a handful of companies who’d like nothing better than to hamstring technology because it harms their pre-digital-age business models. Can you imagine what it would be like if the ice harvesters of the early 20th century were able to lobby the government to restrain the icebox and refrigerator manufacturers?

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Here are the last election’s numbers, courtesy of the Parkdale-High Park entry in Wikipedia:

Canadian federal election, 2004
Party		Candidate	Votes
	Liberal	Sarmite “Sam” Bulte	19,727
	New Democrat	Peggy Nash	16,201
	Conservative	Jurij Klufas	7,221
	Green	Neil Spiegel	3,249
	Marijuana	Terry Parker	384
	Marxist-Leninist	Lorne Gershuny	130

Less than 8% of the vote separated the NDP from the Liberals in the last election, while the Conservatives trailed them by 27%. It would also seem that 384 of the people in our riding are seriously baked, maaaaaaan.

Between the Bulte brouhaha and AdScam, crazed promises and idiots in their ranks, I have decided to vote for the candidate who has the best chance of ousting the Liberals in my riding. I’m holding my nose and voting NDP. Peggy Nash, I’m voting for you on the 23rd.

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For those of you in the Parkdale-High Park riding, the Bloor West Residents’ Association has organized an all-candidates meeting at Runnymede United Church (432 Runnymede Road) tonight at 7:30 p.m.. I’ll probably drop by, take notes, pictures and video. Say “hi” if you see me.

This one’s a good deal simpler, as I’m rather busy debugging software today. Here’s Greenbacks and Sam, which makes reference to the $250-a-plate fundraising dinner being thrown by various capos of the copyright mafia for our soon-to-be former MP:

If anyone feels like writing Seuss-esque poetry to match the image, do so, and post them in the comments!

By the bye, if you’ve concocted your own Anti-Sam Bulte images and want me to display them here, drop me a line!