The Conservative Party of Canada has done an excellent job of marketing itself in the Canadian election by making party leader and Prime Minister Stephen Harper the face and focus of their campaign. As far as the ads go, this election is all about him. The Conservatives’ ads mostly boil down to “Stephen Harper is not a dick” and the New Democratic Party’s ads essentially say “Stephen Harper is a dick”.
The Liberal Party’s ads conspicuous by their apparent absence. Has anyone seen a Liberal Party ad on TV? I haven’t. Stranger still, with the notable exception of the Conservatives’ “slot machine” ad, I haven’t even seen an ad by the Tories or NDP that acknowledge the Liberals’ existence; if you didn’t live here, you might be led to believe that it’s a two-party race.
I’d heard of the ice cream parlor Cold Stone Creamery but didn’t get a chance to try it out until February 2007 while vacationing with the Ginger Ninja in San Francisco. It’s an ice cream shop with a twist: they create ice cream mixes by taking an ice cream flavour and toppings such as oreo pieces and graham crackers and blending them by hand on a chilled marble-like slab, as shown in the video below:
While this is fun to watch as it is, workers at some Cold Stone franchises like to add a little “flair bartending” style to the process, as the videos below show:
And Now, Marble Slab Creamery
Marble Slab Creamery is the company from whom Cold Stone took the idea — they predate Cold Stone by five years. They’ve come to the ‘burbs surrounding Accordion City.
According to their site, they’ve got locations in:
Aurora (SmartCentres Aurora East)
Milton (RioCan Centre Milton)
Newmarket (SilverCity complex)
Oakville (on Lakeshore, close to Trafalgar Road)
Thornhill (Bathurst Centre)
Woodbridge (RioCan Colossus Centre)
…and “Toronto” is listed as “coming soon”.
I heard about Marble Slab from my coworkers on Friday at noon, and that night after dinner, the Ginger Ninja and I hopped in the car and went to Oakville to give it a try.
Wow, is it goooood. Wendy had white chocolate ice cream with smashed-up bits of Coffee Crisp and Oreos, while I had “Birthday Cake” (sweet cream ice cream with cake flavouring, similar to a flavour called “Cake Batter” at Cold Stone) with smashed-up bits of Kit Kat and Oreos. There seem to over a dozen ice cream flavours and two dozen or so toppings to choose from, as welll as a helluva lot of types of ice cream cones.
We’ll be back.
Related Reading
Quite unsurprisingly, there are Wikipedia entries for Cold Stone and Marble Slab creameries.
In case you missed it, here’s the opening skit from last night’s Saturday Night Live, in which alumna Tina Fey returns to play the role of a lifetime: the “hockey mom” governor. It was pretty much the only bright spot in a pretty limp episode, and Fey’s Palin impression was spot-on:
Gov. Sarah Palin lives by the maxim that all politics is local, not to mention personal.
So when there was a vacancy at the top of the State Division of Agriculture, she appointed a high school classmate, Franci Havemeister, to the $95,000-a-year directorship. A former real estate agent, Ms. Havemeister cited her childhood love of cows as a qualification for running the roughly $2 million agency.
Ms. Havemeister was one of at least five schoolmates Ms. Palin hired, often at salaries far exceeding their private sector wages.
When Ms. Palin had to cut her first state budget, she avoided the legion of frustrated legislators and mayors. Instead, she huddled with her budget director and her husband, Todd, an oil field worker who is not a state employee, and vetoed millions of dollars of legislative projects.
And four months ago, a Wasilla blogger, Sherry Whitstine, who chronicles the governor’s career with an astringent eye, answered her phone to hear an assistant to the governor on the line, she said.
“You should be ashamed!” Ivy Frye, the assistant, told her. “Stop blogging. Stop blogging right now!”
David Foster Wallace, the novelist, essayist and humorist best known for his 1996 novel “Infinite Jest,” was found dead Friday night at his home in Claremont, according to the Claremont Police Department. He was 46.
Jackie Morales, a records clerk at the department, said Wallace’s wife called police at 9:30 p.m. Friday saying she had returned home to find that her husband had hanged himself.
Wallace, who had taught creative writing at Pomona College since 2002, was on leave this semester.
If you’d like to hear him in his own words, this interview on Charlie Rose is a good start. His segment starts at 23:17:
It’s been ages since I watched UFO, so I don’t remember its title sequence, which takes the Andersons’ storytelling-by-montage approach and bears the “future as seen from the seventies” look that is the Anderson’s stock in trade. I also don’t recall its theme music, which has to be the most jazz-a-riffic theme for a science fiction show ever. Here it is, for your enjoyment:
Yesterday, I saw a number of articles on the ‘net saying that Republican Vice Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin seemed to have no idea what the Bush Doctrine was. I’ve been busy with work and other stuff, so I decided to bookmark them for later reading.
This morning, while thinking “It’s pretty sad that Palin, with her much-vaunted ‘foreign policy experience’ (remember: she deals with it every day — she lives close to Russia!) doesn’t know what the Bush Doctrine is” came up with a more interesting question: Do I know what the Bush Doctrine is?
So I decided to hold off until I spelled out what I thought the main points of the Bush Doctrine were before watching the Palin interview video and Googling for “Bush Doctrine”. It’s only fair, isn’t it?
If you feel like playing along, don’t scroll down until you’ve written down what you believe to be the main points of the Bush Doctrine. I’ll stick a big picture below so that you don’t peek at my answers until you’ve come up with yours…
What I Thought the Bush Doctrine Was
Here’s what I came up with:
Pre-emptive strikes are now cool. The Cold War-era doctrine of deterrence does not apply when fighting terrorism, which isn’t like fighting another country. If someone poses a clear threat to the U.S., get in the first shot; don’t give them another 9/11.
If need be, go it alone. When possible, try to get the cooperation of other nations, but it’s not absolutely necessary. You see this sentiment reflected in a lot of the right-wing blogs and books like Mark “Lotion Boy of the Neocon Bathhouse” Steyn’s America Alone.
Ensure that the U.S. remains the #1 military power. The world is a better place when the U.S. is the superpower.
Regime change. Peace will abound when unfriendly dictatorships are converted into friendly democracies.
Free Markets. Peace also comes through prosperity, which in turn is created through free markets.
Well, that sounds like the Bush Doctrine to me, or at least like what I heard in the time between 9/11, which led to the Bush Doctrine, and the Iraq War, which is its first serious exercise and test.
What Does Sarah Palin Think the Bush Doctrine Is?
Here’s the part of the video in which ABC’s Charlie Gibson asks Sarah Palin about the Bush Doctrine. It gave me a sense of deja vu: it reminded me of all those times when a classmate (or hey, sometimes it was me) who didn’t do the assigned reading got called on to answer a question in front of the class.
Here’s the transcript of the video:
Charlie Gibson: Do you agree with the Bush doctrine?
Sarah Palin: In what respect, Charlie?
Gibson: The Bush — well, what do you — what do you interpret it to be?
Palin: His world view.
Gibson: No, the Bush doctrine, enunciated September 2002, before the Iraq war.
Palin: I believe that what President Bush has attempted to do is rid this world of Islamic extremism, terrorists who are hell bent on destroying our nation. There have been blunders along the way, though. There have been mistakes made. And with new leadership, and that’s the beauty of American elections, of course, and democracy, is with new leadership comes opportunity to do things better.
Gibson: The Bush doctrine, as I understand it, is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense, that we have the right to a preemptive strike against any other country that we think is going to attack us. Do you agree with that?
Palin: I agree that a president’s job, when they swear in their oath to uphold our Constitution, their top priority is to defend the United States of America.
I know that John McCain will do that and I, as his vice president, families we are blessed with that vote of the American people and are elected to serve and are sworn in on January 20, that will be our top priority is to defend the American people.
Gibson: Do we have a right to anticipatory self-defense? Do we have a right to make a preemptive strike again another country if we feel that country might strike us?
Palin: Charlie, if there is legitimate and enough intelligence that tells us that a strike is imminent against American people, we have every right to defend our country. In fact, the president has the obligation, the duty to defend.
Gibson: Do we have the right to be making cross-border attacks into Pakistan from Afghanistan, with or without the approval of the Pakistani government?
Palin: Now, as for our right to invade, we’re going to work with these countries, building new relationships, working with existing allies, but forging new, also, in order to, Charlie, get to a point in this world where war is not going to be a first option. In fact, war has got to be, a military strike, a last option.
Gibson: But, Governor, I’m asking you: We have the right, in your mind, to go across the border with or without the approval of the Pakistani government.
Palin: In order to stop Islamic extremists, those terrorists who would seek to destroy America and our allies, we must do whatever it takes and we must not blink, Charlie, in making those tough decisions of where we go and even who we target.
Gibson: And let me finish with this. I got lost in a blizzard of words there. Is that a yes? That you think we have the right to go across the border with or without the approval of the Pakistani government, to go after terrorists who are in the Waziristan area?
Palin: I believe that America has to exercise all options in order to stop the terrorists who are hell bent on destroying America and our allies. We have got to have all options out there on the table.
If you haven’t yet come up with your list of points describing what you think the Bush Doctrine is, you have one last chance to write them down! Don’t scroll down until you’ve come up with that list!
So What is the Bush Doctrine?
The National Security Strategy Report [PDF] published in September 2002 is the reference document for the Bush Doctrine. The chapter titles after the introductory chapter spell out the main points of the doctrine:
Champion Aspirations for Human Dignity
Strengthen Alliances to Defeat Global Terrorism and Work to Prevent Attacks Against Us and Our Friends
Work with others to Defuse Regional Conflicts
Prevent Our Enemies from Threatening Us, Our Allies, and Our Friends with Weapons of Mass Destruction
Ignite a New Era of Global Economic Growth through Free Markets and Free Trade
Expand the Circle of Development by Opening Societies and Building the Infrastructure of Democracy
Develop Agendas for Cooperative Action with the Other Main Centers of Global Power
Transform America’s National Security Institutions to Meet the Challenges and Opportunities of the Twenty-First Century
A shorter and oft-cited description of the Bush Doctrine is The Bush National Security Strategy, a paper by Keir A. Lieber (Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Notre Dame) and Robert J. Lieber (Professor of Government and Foreign Service, Georgetown University). It distills the Bush Doctrine to these four key points:
Free Markets. Sounds like point 5 of the National Security Strategy Report, “Ignite a New Era of Global Economic Growth through Free Markets and Free Trade”.
My points sound more like Lieber and Lieber’s summary of the NSS Report than the actual NSS report, but I think I did a decent job considering everything I know about the Doctrine comes from poking around political blogs, watching the news, reading some magazines and some casual perusing at Chapters and Barnes and Noble. I’m not so much a political junkie as I am a person who is interested in systems of all kinds and especially systems of people. It might also be the by-product of having emigrated from a country that was a kleptocracy at the time, and is now just a half-assed corrupt banana republic-style democracy.
What’s Sarah Palin’s excuse?
(If you went through the exercise of listing the points of the Bush Doctrine, feel free to let us know how you did in the comments!)
On that note, let me leave you with one more image (and yes, the second image is Photoshopped):
