What's Your Opinion?

Recently I was discussing this blog with a friend of mine who has only recently become a reader.

It was an interesting conversation, mainly because, as he was giving me his advice on content and editorial slant, he kept telling me I needed to be more opinionated. He said it half a dozen times, so I asked him what he meant.

Apparently, according to him, I don't give my opinion enough.

Which is news to me, since in my opinion this whole damn thing is my opinion. So... What's your opinion?
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Great Barrier Reef: The Bad News And The Worse News

Tourism to the Great Barrier Reef is up, which may be great news for places like Cairns and Townsville and Rockhampton in Queensland who share in the $5 Billion annually generated by tourism, but it's definitely destroying the reef.

In the very near future all tourism to the Reef itself may have to be banned to protect it; that is if the pollution doesn't destroy it first. Currently only part of the region is protected by Great Barrier Reef Marine Park.

Of course, the first tourist to impinge upon the purity of the region was Captain James Cook, whose ship Endeavour ran aground here on June 11th, 1770. But casual boaters and day-trippers have been known to do their share. Already one-third of the reef has been closed to harvesting.

I have no doubt that the Great Barrier Reef will outlive me, and there may even be a happy ending to the story. But happy endings in real life involve the efforts of millions, and may fail despite their best efforts. In the meantime, it is incumbent upon aquariums to have well-stocked saltwater tanks, so that many people can experience the glory of living coral without running the risk of killing it in the wild.
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Ryan Seacrest: The New Merv?

Seacrest out? Not yet. But he is In as the host of the television industry's annual gladhanding festival.

It was announced today that generic metrosexual and perennial closet case Ryan Seacrest will be hosting this year's 59th Annual Emmy Awards, scheduled to air September 16th on Fox.

In recent years hosts as diverse as Ellen DeGeneres and Conan O'Brien have handled the top job, and admirably. However, whatever artistic triumphs these two may have wrought, their ratings all but stunk up the place. For this reason the producers of American Idol have been brought onboard.

And this was the best they could come up with. This fembot with his fifty teeth and hair by Cuisinart. Yeah.

^{Hmm... No one knows why awards ceremonies are getting lower and lower ratings... Could it be because there used to be four a year and now there's four a week? Too bad I'm too smart to be a TV executive, huh?}
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Bif Naked's Engaged

It was announced last week that Canadian punk icon Bif Naked is engaged to marry Ian Walker, a sports reporter with the Vancouver Sun. The wedding, set to take place September 29th in Vancouver, may be traditional, but the marriage promises to be anything but.

No word yet on which tattoo parlour the happy couple are registered at, but as soon as I find out I'll let you know.

[S O U R C E]
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Why Are There Are Outages, But Never Innages?

In my perambulations around Vancouver I am again and again both impressed and distressed by all the construction; there are more cranes in our skyline than at an origami festival.

The Internet, it seems, is going through similar growing pains of its own. Between Blogspot, Wikipedia, YouTube, and Photobucket it's a rare day I can blog in peace without interruption by scheduled maintenance or planned outages.

Today's outage is at Blogspot, which would be fine if it were summer. But just because it's the third week of August means nothing when you live in Vancouver. The current city motto - "By Land And Sea And Air We Prosper" ought to be changed to "The City That Summer Forgot".

Oh well, I guess I can always do some housework; there's some dust behind my fridge that's so old I could sell it to a museum.
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RIP Leona Helmsley

I was brought up to believe that if you can't say something nice about somebody, don't say anything at all.

Of course, that advice stopped making sense the minute my mother got behind the wheel of her car and started impugning the parentage and IQ of every other driver on the road. Despite the lesson on offer, what I really learned was that there's often a difference between what we ought to believe and what we actually do.

Despite her well-publicized bouts with tax evasion and homophobia, I have nothing against Leona Helmsley. After all, there are bigots and shady capitalists literally everywhere, and who has the time or the energy to get bent out of shape every time one of them spews hubris? Or even dies?

The fact that Leona Helmsley made a fortune converting apartments into condos in the late sixties, long before her last name was Helmsley, makes her seem far more loathsome than hearing her subsquently saying "Only little people pay taxes" and firing her staff for being gay. The two events in her life that made her famous seem inconsequential beside the far-reaching ramifications of the real estate development which cost Manhattan its affordability.

If anything the most offensive thing Leona Helmsley ever did was to be portrayed in a TV movie by Suzanne Pleshette; linking that lovely and talented lady to this Skeksi-in-drag was downright immoral.
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