K'naan nets a BBC3 World Music Award

K'naan is awesome and completely deserves the award.

His album The Dusty Food Philosopher is a breath of fresh air in the polluted world of hip hop.

The winner for the Americas category is Gogol Bordello. Their new album Gypsy Punks sounds (to me anyways) like a more frantic while less Latino Manu Chao. If that doesn't sell you on it then you should load up your ipod with nothing but Manu Chao for a week, and then load up on Gogol Bordello for the next week. BAM! Two weeks of contempo-folk-world-punk will make you see the light and sell your crappy major-label hard rock to 12 year olds on craigslist for just enough money to buy a bottle of rum and a couple o cd's at scratch.

More fun than a barrel of baby red-pandas with sweet ass mohawks wearing plaid zoot-suits.

Another streaming mag

I keep trying different solutions (all free) for streaming the Mag. Googlevideo was easy with the uploader, and they don't shut me down because the show is more than 10 minutes long.

Revisiting Citizen Journalism

Just about a week ago I wrote a bit about how I was concerned with France's move to outlaw the distribution of images portraying violence by anyone other than professional journalists. This week an interesting story cropped up right here at home that deals with this exact issue.

A Vancouver firefighter and his son are facing charges after a fight with police. The fight, and a tasty finger-wagging was captured by a tourist (from what I've heard) on their cellphone and was posted to Youtube.

For your viewing (dis)pleasure.


I'm not a fan of violence, and I'm not sure I see much news-merit in the story other than to remember, if this were France sprintrjm would be in some trouble.

Painting and Sculpting with Bees

I have been completely in love with Aganeta Dyck's work for some time now, and I feel she rightly deserves the fancy GG award she just won.

Her shoes are brilliant, and I really really really really like the Sports Night in Canada series.

Marilyn the Poet

I'm pretty proud of my mom.

Leaf Press is using one of her poems on their site.

Le Citizen Journalism

France has brought in a new law that forbids ordinary citizens from distributing video or images showing acts of violence. Not that I'm a fan of violence or anything, but the story caught my eye because of what it means to citizen journalism there.

The law sets up fines of up to 75,000 euros and up to five years of prison time for those found to be distributing images of some offenses - stuff like:

• Torture
• Acts of barbarity
• Violence committed by an agent of the state in the exercise of his duties

That last one is particularly troubling n'est pas?

The law is specifically targeted at happy-slapping videos, but groups like Reporters Without Borders are concerned that the law is so broadly written that it poses a great threat to the safeguard against abuse of authority that is citizen journalism.

Images and video are understandably crucial for television news, but I'm not sure that we actually need to see violence to be informed of its existence. I for one don't really like seeing the stuff, but I think the fact that individuals risk their own safety to expose things like torture and brutality speaks to our collective hope for a peaceful existence.

Banning the distribution of videos and photos like this deals a heavy blow to ordinary people fighting for social justice. It makes one wonder what France has to hide.

What?!?

This was flagged in my email as important

I Love Maps

And I've found some really cool maps here. The countries of the world are all scaled according to statistics. It's kind of predictable, but a few are real eye openers - Overall a great bit of mappery.

5 Ring Circus

Friendly

Wanna give out hugs? Clean yourself up a bit.