Month: October 2005

Brendella

Here I’ve been lamenting the fact that I haven’t heard much from Brenda since she left for Seoul, and tonight I discover she’s been keeping a blog! I may have to turn in my connected music geek card.

Respect

My sister Anne and my friend Nancy each reached significant educational milestones in the last little while. (My sister also got married, which is an accomplishment in its own right.) Anne received her Masters of Public Administration degree two weeks ago; Nancy did her one better by earning her Ph.D. in Medical Biophysics.

Needless to say, I’m incredibly proud of both of them.

Respect

[Being] in court this week got me wondering if the same amount of respect Canadians show their judges was passed on to that other hugely important field — education. […] But if the culture we lived in encouraged students — and parents — to show admiration and added respect for the weight of the responsibility teachers carry on their shoulders, maybe we would all be a better society for it.

What it’s all about

[The CBC] cleaves to two fundamental objectives: to knit the country together by appealing to citizens’ highest inclinations, and to be an authoritative check and balance on a heavily concentrated private media. […] The [CBC]’s mandate is to transport viewers and listeners out of prosaic reportage on people and things, and into the world of ideas, into issues contextualized through documentary programming.

via Antonia Zerbisias

Advice from the Minbari ambassador

Here’s something for CBC employees—freelancers, temporary, part-time, full-time, and management alike—to think about, particularly those few (anonymous, naturally) that need to get some serious anger-management therapy, and soon:

Fighting a war is easy. Destroying is easy. Building a new world out of what’s left of the old, that is what’s hard.

The people I’ve talked to on the line here in London understand this, and I know there are a lot of others in the corporation that do too: just read their weblogs. They understand the purpose of public broadcasting, and they know it needs to be strong in the face of opposition so that all Canadian voices continue to be heard by all other Canadians.

The vocal minority mentioned above, however, seem bent on destroying this communication by razing the organization they purport to defend. They’re a sect of fervent, crazed individuals who twist the meaning of the union and the CBC as a whole with every word; in another situation, these people are the ones who would become suicide bombers.