Brad Wall wasn’t elected to extend the term of the NDP. Contact your SaskParty MLA here and ask why the Saskatchewan government is supporting this intolerable rent-seeking scheme.
(press release, via email)

Friday, 9:00 am, June 25th, 2010, at the Travel Lodge in Saskatoon, Second Time Office Equipment plans to present a long list of complaints and charges of anti-competitive actions by SWEEP (the Saskatchewan Waste Electronics Environmental Program) at SWEEP’s Annual General Meeting.
Section 45, of the Canadian Competition Act, the cornerstone cartel provision of the Act, prescribes criminal sanctions when two or more persons agree or arrange to prevent or lessen competition unduly or to unreasonably enhance the price of a good or service, an offence known as “conspiracy”.
Second Time Office Equipment is a free enterprise ewaste recycling operation that has been denied full, fair and equal participation in the SWEEP program since its inception.
SWEEP is a non-profit organization banking millions of dollars of profits from Electronic Handling Fees charged consumers of Saskatchewan every time they purchase obligated
electronic devices.
Second Time Office Equipment filed its first complaint against SWEEP with the Department of Environment December 4th, 2006 regarding SWEEP’s anti-competitive structure and the complete lack of free marketing involvement in the province wide program. The OWMA (Ontario Waste Management Association) has presented similar complaints to the Ministry of Environment with respect to the Ontario ewaste recycling
program.
“When recycling collectives with significant power and scale are permitted to use that power to limit access to markets, either through restrictive contracting practices or quota systems which allocate defined quantities of materials to different processors, then open and competitive recycling markets are undermined, business certainty is eroded, and investment and innovation in the recycling industry is compromised.” – OWMA
Second Time Office Equipment has contended for years that the SWEEP program, as currently being administered, has been unfairly interfering in the Saskatchewan ewaste market by failing to allow full fair and equal competition to collect, consolidate, transport and process Saskatchewan ewaste.

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Tonight, as a public service, I’m posting an instructional video from a land across the sea where emotional continence is a way of life, bordering on an art form. In it, the character known as Galstrim calmly teaches outsiders How To Speak Norwegian. He’s a world class joke teller too, but I’m not going to link to that video because of the mild profanity, and because it’s strictly Norwegian culture…part two.
Money quote from the comments under tonight’s video: “I’ve always been afraid of pokerfaces, but it was actually quite fun to listen to…”
The comments are open for your Reader Tips.

Count Basie was an American composer and bandleader famous for his various big bands. They were always jazz bands first and foremost, but his characteristic arrangements were tilted slightly in the more accessible direction of Glenn Miller-style swing. Here, from a 1957 in-studio performance, the Count Basie All Stars – including Roy Eldridge on Trumpet, and Ben Webster and Coleman Hawkins on sax – play Dickie’s Dream.
The comments are open for your Reader Tips.

Tonight’s featured amusement is a clip of what is arguably the single most intense piece of acting in the history of moving pictures. There have certainly been some colossal moments of scenery-chewing over the years – Robert Shaw’s “I’ll catch him, I’ll kill him” speech in Jaws comes to mind, as does Charlton Heston’s display in Planet Of The Apes when he sees the top of the Statue of Liberty sticking out of the sand, and rages “Damn you! God damn you all to hell!” – but in terms of creating sheer dramatic intensity with just a single look, nothing could ever top this scorching moment from the late great C.J. Prairie Dog. He’s the best damned actor I’ve ever seen, that’s for sure.
Your Reader Tips are welcome, as always, in the comments.

In commemoration of this year’s summer solstice, tonight’s featured music comes in the form of a thoroughly summer-drenched song by American musician Jonathan Richman.
You can almost smell the lawn as he sings. Richman’s earnest, almost child-like narrative stands him in stark contrast to the prevalent faux-countercultural ‘tude that grasps for credibility through attachment to large-scale political concerns and the appropriation of the corporeal suffering of others. Richman’s unapologetic invocation of life as it was actually lived, by people who were neither impoverished nor troubled, approaches the level of poetry; when he recalls the salad days of this window in time, it’s an incantation, a palpable, almost limbic recreation of a feeling that is familiar to anyone who grew up in the suburbs in the post-war era.
The song is a celebration of the sights, sounds, and smells of summers past; even when he sounds a note of warning in the bridges that these memories of lost youthful freedom will become mildly tormenting with the passage of time, it only serves to redouble the bittersweet pleasures he conjures up. From the 1992 album I, Jonathan, here’s Massachusetts native Jonathan Richman summoning up That Summer Feeling.
Happy summer solstice, everybody!
You are invited to provide your Reader Tips in the comments.

Mahalia Jackson is considered by many to be the greatest spiritual singer of the twentieth century. She wasn’t as flashy, for lack of a better word, as many other gospel singers; she could certainly belt out with the best of them, but when she did so there remained a fine, rock-solid sense of control as she seamlessly shifted between power notes and an almost conversational style of delivery.
Those hearing Jackson for the first time may well get the feeling that they’ve heard her before; although she refused throughout her life to sing anything but spiritual songs, many popular musical artists (including Aretha Franklin, who Jackson mentored) speak of the great influence her music had on them. From an archived radio broadcast, here’s Mahalia Jackson singing Move On Up A Little Higher.
The comments are open for you Reader Tips.

Tonight’s featured amusement en route to the Reader Tips thread is a slinky, laid-back song about the daughter of a poor family who eats the poisonous plant phytolacca americana, aka pokeweed. To safely prepare polk salad, which was traditionally eaten only by impoverished folks in the rural southeastern United States but is now considered a traditional, if uncommonly eaten, southern food, one must gather only the young leaves, before they turn red, and repeatedly boil and rinse them to remove their toxicity.
As for the gators, well, that’s another matter altogether. Here’s uber-laid-back southern swamp-bluesman Tony Joe White (who also wrote Rainy Night in Georgia) performing a song most famously covered by Elvis Presley, called Polk Salad Annie.
The comments are open for your Reader Tips.

The soundtrack to tonight’s Reader Tips thread comes from yet another strong and remarkable Saskatchewan woman. Born to a Scots Irish mother and a father of Norwegian stock, Roberta Joan Anderson and her family moved between a series of small towns in Alberta and Saskatchewan before finally settling down in Saskatoon, which she still considers her home town. Serious childhood health problems, including a near-fatal bout with scarlet fever and, later, temporary polio-induced paralysis, stoked her inner life and her creative talents; determined to become a folk singer, she left at the age of 21 for Toronto, where she met and was briefly married to a folk singer by the name of Chuck Mitchell, whose name she kept throughout her professional career.
Spotlit in the dark surrounds of Wembley Stadium, just her and her mountain dulcimer, here’s Joni Mitchell singing Carey.
The comments are open for your Reader Tips.

Some people complain about the Reader Tip musical selections, saying there’s too much piano, or not enough cowbell. By far the most most common complaint is that I don’t feature nearly enough of the music of theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking and astronomer-astrophysicist Carl Sagan. It’s almost impossible to find online videos of Hawking’s Wheelchair Ballet, or anything from Sagan’s showgirl-festooned Vegas spectaculars, so tonight you get the next best thing: Backed up by Symphony of Science, here are Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking taking star turns in a performance of A Glorious Dawn.
The comments are open for your Reader Tips.

Tonight’s featured amusement en route to the Reader Tips thread is a light-hearted musical number from one of the Marx Brothers’ lesser-known feature films. The sound and the images in the video are more than a bit out of sync, but the performance is just too amusingly blithe-spirited to pass up. From the Marx Brothers‘ 1940 comedy film Go West, here’s Chico, Harpo (on mouth harp) and Groucho Marx joining John Carroll in some open-air singing about the pleasures of Riding the Range together.
Clippity-clop those Reader Tips into the comments.

The name Curly Putman doesn’t ring a bell for most people, but millions of people are familiar with the Alabama native’s songs, which have been recorded by Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Tom Jones, Dolly Parton, and many, many others. “Green, Green Grass of Home” first topped the charts in 1964, and has subsequently been recorded by more than six hundred artists “in most of the world’s major languages.” Two songs that Putman co-wrote with Bobby Braddock became monster country hits: Tammy Wynette’s “D-I-V-O-R-C-E” in 1968, and George Jones’ 1980 recording of “He Stopped Loving Her Today.” Tonight’s featured song, another of Putman’s collaborations with Braddock, was a hit for two solo artists, Charlie Rich and Bobby Vinton, but tonight it’s performed as a duet. From 1970, here’s Bobby Bare and Dry Ridge Kentucky’s own Skeeter Davis singing Claude “Curly” Putman’s My Elusive Dreams.
You are invited to provide your Reader Tips in the comments.

A lot of recent hit songs aren’t really songs in the truest sense of the word, in that if you were to strip away all the ear-candy sounds and the, erm, posing, there isn’t actually a song structure to speak of; if one were to play with one finger on a piano the – putative – melody of one of these songs, there’d be nothing resembling a song that anyone could remember. In contrast, the old folk songs from the oral tradition had to pass through a kind of multi-generational human filter; they only lived on, in the years before the advent of recording and playback, because their inherent, pleasing treasures could be released at any time by anyone at all, using just melody, words, and rudimentary chords.
Tonight’s musical selection, by Maine-based American songwriter David Mallet, is a modern-era song that would definitely survive in the oral tradition even if there was no recorded music. Over the last forty years or so it’s been sung with pleasure, around a million campfires and family get-togethers, by amateur singalong-ists with just the barest of guitar skills, for one simple reason: the words and melody unite to create a timeless, heartfelt song that speaks to people of all ages, from two to two-hundred. So gather up your loved ones and celebrate the yearly miracle of rebirth by singing along with Tommy Makem & Liam Clancey’s fine version of The Garden Song.
You are invited to plant your Reader Tips in the comments.

Tonight’s featured amusement en route to the Reader Tips thread is a patriotic song by American songwriter Randy Newman. While the Los Angeles-based Newman, a prototypical Democrat, wrote the song during the years of the Bush Administration, the song is actually a defense of the long-term ship of state, as he uses historical context to take a shot at – or at least, to plead the case against – the naysayers around the world who constantly criticize America and characterize its leaders as the most immoral in history.
Sad, funny, and touching in turns, here’s Randy Newman’s A Few Words in Defense of Our Country.
The comments are open for your Reader Tips.

Tonight’s featured amusement en route to the Reader Tips comments thread is a song about a unhappy fellow who has been dumped by his girlfriend. It’s not touching, poignant, or heart-rending in any way; no, we’re talking pure catharsis. Here’s a video of Ben Folds Five, fronted by – wait for it – Ben Folds, performing Song For The Dumped.
The comments are open for your Reader Tips.

I’ve always favoured Arthur Rubenstein’s interpretation of the Nocturnes, so much so that I was always disappointed with other pianists’ recordings. Then, two years ago, a friend played me a recording of the great Chilean pianist Claudio Arrau that floored me with its beauty. Rubinstein’s interpretations of Chopin might be a bit more tranquil and liquid and luxurious, perhaps, and Arrau’s a bit more forceful, but those are highly relative terms; both are superb.
A biography at the Princeton University says of Arrau,

One regards him as a sort of miracle; the piano is the most machinelike of instruments except the organ – all those rods, levers, little felt pads, wires, no intimate subtle human connection with it by breath, tongueing, or the string player’s direct engagement with speaking vibrations. But Arrau makes it live, like God teaching Adam on Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel roof; liquid, mysterious, profound, alive.

From a 1997 Philips Classics release, here’s the late Claudio Arrau playing Frederic Chopin’s Nocturne in E flat major, Op. 9, No. 2.
The comments are open, as always, for your Reader Tips.

In a Reader Tip thread a few weeks ago commenter Black Mamba referred to Baker Street’s “horrible, catchy, self-enchanted, faux-passionate, gloopy saxophone bit.” The description was apt. Tonight, as a palate cleanser, we offer up a soothing saxophone poultice in the form of a Duke Ellington song which showcases the end-of-the-world expressive skills of the late Johnny Hodges. Do yourself a favour and listen to this one: from his 1960 album Blues In Orbit, here’s Duke Ellington and his band playing the deep, achingly beautiful Brown Penny.
You are invited, as always, to provide your Reader Tips in the comments.

It’s been said that the definition of a gentleman is someone who knows how to play the accordion but refrains from doing so. This rule of thumb certainly doesn’t apply to Belgian-French accordionist Gus Viseur, whose musette-style accordion music turns everyone within earshot into a continental sophisticate. So grab a seat at a sidewalk cafe, order a glass of red, stick a lit Gauloises in the corner of your mouth, and dim your eyelids in a world-weary way as you watch the world go by to the accompaniment of Gus (Gustave-Joseph) Viseur and his group, as they breeze their way through Django Reinhardt’s Djangologie.
Don’t mind the video dropouts – it’s the terroir, non?
The comments are open for your Reader Tips.

American actor Jim Backus, perhaps best known for his portrayal of slightly-addled upper-crust gentleman Thurston Howell III in the 1960’s sitcom Gilligan’s Island, had other famous roles as well. He was the voice of the bumbling, good-natured cartoon character Mr. Magoo, and he co-starred in the iconic Academy Award-winning film Rebel Without A Cause in which he played a cursedly ineffectual father whose bourgeois conformity drove his son, played by James Dean, into paroxysms of incoherent, scenery-chewing rage.
Backus also released two novelty singles, one of which is tonight’s musical selection. The humor in the odd little soundtrack-vignette stems from both its lack of context – all you can glean is that an unnamed man and woman are drinking champagne at a cozy table in a restaurant – and, especially, from the over-the-top giddiness of the euphorically tipsy couple, who give the impression that they’ve gotten away with something spectacular, perhaps a cleverly-engineered tryst.
From 1958, here’s Jim Backus and an unidentified actress performing the cartoonishly carefree Delicious.
The comments are open for your Reader Tips.

As a kid I always loved Rolf Harris; I remember listening to his performances on the radio when my parents thought I was asleep. I loved the sound of his Perth-accented voice, so lively and mischievous yet sincere. Tonight’s Reader Tips companion is Harris’ 1969 version of a song about unquestioning, unflagging loyalty to the bitter end. It may be too childish and sentimental for some people, but I’ll always like it. In a time of post-ironic, too-cool-for-school attitudes, it’s remains a pleasant, perhaps rosy-tinted, reminder of what seems in hindsight to have been a more straightforward, upright time.
Here’s Australian entertainer Rolf Harris, performing the touching 1902 song Two Little Boys.
The thread is open for Reader Tips.

Welcome to SDA Reader Tips. Tonight’s musical accompaniment comes in the form of a song by the late Judee Sill, a remarkably talented but largely unheralded musician whose beautiful voice and spiritual, baroque pop songs are so beautiful, gentle and clear-headed as to be hard to reconcile with her dark and troubled life.
Tim Page, in the Washington Post:

Tom King’s “The Operator,” a 650-page biography of David Geffen, who founded Asylum and signed Sill as the first artist to record on his new label, devotes only one sentence to her, calling her “a former prostitute and reformed junkie.” King might have added “stick-up artist,” “drug dealer” and “street hustler” to his capsule biography, for Sill led a troubled and unsettled life. And yet…she was also an artist of extraordinary gifts, one whose best songs are suffused with a radiant, prayerful and excruciatingly tender innocence, all the more affecting because it must have been so hard-won.

The immediate temptation is to classify her with some of her more famous contemporaries — Joni Mitchell, Laura Nyro and Carole King — and, indeed, the similarities are there. Yet Sill’s body of work is both more limited and more perfect. Virtually all of her songs are intensely devotional; along with J.S. Bach and Mahalia Jackson (two of her acknowledged influences), Sill believed that the purpose of music was the glorification of God. Instead of sharply etched social vignettes or cosmopolitan evocations of modern life and love, she wrote her own sort of hymns — guileless, urgent, naked, absolutely personal.

Here, for your Sunday evening pleasure, is the late Judee Sill’s 1971 release Jesus Was a Cross Maker.
The comments are open for your Reader Tips. Please read on for an important note:

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