Monstaaaaa Truuuuucks!!!

This past Saturday, Marianne & and I went to a Monster Truck show at Skydome, which was totally awesome!! Here’s a short video clip from the event :)

Set to the Jens Lekman song “Friday Night At The Drive-In Bingo”

Hamilton Trading Company

Keith Hamilton hosts Sunday nights at The Boat (in Kensington Market) where he brings local acts to perform acoustic sets alongside with his own Hamilton Trading Company.

Elizabeth and I went there last Sunday and this is my favourite song of theirs.

And they started off with this neat cover of a Peter Gabriel song.

26

Some photos from the birthday party at my apartment:

The Trials of Ezra Levant

This might run a little long, but bear with me since I think this is important.



The above video was shot by Ezra Levant during the opening statement of his interrogation by the Alberta Human Rights Commission.

Until his resignation, Levant was an editor of Western Standard - a famously conservative/libertarian news-magazine based in Calgary, Alberta. In February 2006 he re-published the infamous Danish Muhammad cartoons, which drew the ire of many a Muslim radical.

Now, instead of issuing their standard-order fatwas, one extremist Imam (Syed Soharwardy of the "Islamic Supreme Council of Canada" - whatever the fuck that is?!?) thought out to corrupt our Canadian legal system by filing a complaint with an out-of-control Alberta Human Rights Commission.

The pathetic thing about this commission is that anyone who feels slighted or offended by some politically incorrect expression, can file a complaint which the defendant will have to spend money and time to fight. No matter how baseless the accusation is. To add insult to injury, far from being controlled by actual judges or even competent attorneys, the commission is ran by bureaucrats and bottom-of-the-barrel divorce lawyers.

Rather then attempt to fight the charges that are actually pretty laughable, Ezra refused to acknowledge that the government had any right to put-on these mock trials, or (in case of a conviction) to force him to apologize for what he has done.

Instead, he videotaped the whole proceeding and published them on his blog with comments and explanations. You can watch them all here... it won’t take that long and it’s honestly the closest we’ll get to that scene from Atlas Shrugged where Hank Rearden delivers the speech at his trial (this time with a goal of promoting free-speech rather than unchecked capitalism, which is all that much more admirable).

Here's a quote from his last post, and a video of the closing argument:

As the 90-minute interrogation proceeded, it became obvious to me that it would be morally inconsistent to end by asking for an acquittal, or any other "mercy" from the government. The logical conclusion of denying the legitimacy of the commission was to demand its worst. The point of civil disobedience is not to get off scot-free, but to willingly accept the punishments of an unjust system, to shame that system into reform.

Here's how I phrased it.

P.S. It's quite obvious that Ezra is a dedicated conservative who, let's be honest here, often comes across as being a bit of an asshole who's filled with self-righteous indignation, and who no-doubt made plenty of enemies back in his publishing days. But it's just depressing to see the only mainstream media mentions about this thing come from other conservative publications. I would've figured this was something all journalists could unite under.

PlanetEye Party

My brother just put up a whole bunch of awesome photos that he and I took at the PlanetEye Christmas party last night. Check out this Flickr set, and here's a small selection:

Duelity - Evolution vs. Creationism

Duelity.net

This is officially my favourite thing right now!

Get this: Two videos, designed to be played simultaneously...
One, describing Creationism with the language and animation style of a scientific iconographic presentation (similar to the "Remind Me" video by Royksopp); the other, shows the story of Evolution through Christian imagery and a particularly affected religious speech.

Here's a quote from their website:

According to the records of the General Organization of Development labs (GOD) it took a mere six days to manufacture a fully-operational universe, complete with day, night, flora and fauna, and installing Adam as it's manager to oversee daily functions on Earth.

That's one story.

If thou salt believe the Book of Darwin, t'is five billion years after The Big Bang that we behold what the cosmos hath begat: the magma, the terra firma, the creeping beasts, and mankind, whose dolorous and chaotic evolution begat the gift of consciousness.

Is Photography Dead?

“We live in a culture dominated by pixels, increasingly unmoored from corpor-eal reality. Movies are stuffed with CGI and, in such “performance animation” films as “Beowulf,” overwhelmed by them. Some big pop-music hits are so cyberized the singer might as well be telling you to press 1 if you know your party’s exten-sion. Even sculpture has adopted digital “rapid prototyping” technology that allows whatever a programmer can imagine to be translated into 3-D objects in plastic. Why should photography be any different? Why shouldn’t it give in to the digital temptation to make every landscape shot look like the most absolutely beautiful scenery in the whole history of the universe, or turn every urban view into a high-rise fantasy?”

I don’t know about all that, but I’ve just purchased three Istoica prints last night, to compliment a Rannie canvas print and a Davin Risk photo (“Disco Ball” and “New Grass” respectively). I should really set aside a budget for regularly purchasing pieces from local photographers.

You can check out the “the too-explicit injustice of kind population!” show featuring some prominent Toronto photo-bloggers right now at the Whippersnapper Gallery.

Home Page

Ha! Here's the new PlanetEye home page that we started using this week on our private beta site.