Abandoned Stuff by Saskboy

I learned quite a bit at the Minifie Memorial Lecture today. I didn’t know that Canadian “peacekeepers” killed almost 60 soldiers in Croatia in a single battle. Unfortunately for the civilians, the Canadians arrived too late at Medak Pocket. It was certainly a surprise that I hadn’t heard of it before. Most Canadians are like me. Many more know of the disgrace in Somalia where soldiers killed a teenager. It happened at about the same time. Guess where the journalists focused attention?

Ms. Off was critical of the lack of coverage for the Medak Pocket slaughter. Indeed, she seemed to suggest that the lack of collective knowledge of the battle back home, ended up destroying most of the Canadian soldiers who fought there. Collective Canadian thought told them they were insignificant, and their killing of the other soldiers was thus not vindicated. To them it may have felt like murder, instead of a defense of the innocent. There’s a danger for that to happen to our soldiers returning from Afghanistan.

After the lecture wrapped up, there was plenty of time for questions and answers. No one got up to the microphone. Eventually after about 15 seconds, someone moved to a microphone. Many others followed in turn, including myself, and a student I’d convinced to come to the talk as well. I hadn’t intended to ask any questions when I arrived, but I realized I could ask about Ms. Off’s opinion on so called “new media”, blogs and other independent news sources like student newspapers.

I’m sure the answer given would interest most political bloggers. At first we started out as a monolithic group that uses only the main stream media for our sources, and as Ms. Off talked her way through the answer, she evolved her point to conclude that blogs will be an important part of shaping Canadian journalism in the new era of media. I unfortunately missed her 360 degree about face in the video clip I recorded. She was talking to a lot of ‘traditional journalism students’ in the room, and it must be hard to tell them that they face a job in a corporate owned monolithic employer if they don’t fight to be independent journalists.

After the Q&A finished and people were milling in the hallway, I had some snacks, and spoke with a fellow from SaskPower who reads Cathie in Canada, and several American blogs. He recommended this Onion video. (All of the other Onion headlines are pure gold on that video’s page.) There was also the parents of my friend Peter in the crowd, and a pair of women asked me how they could find blogs on the Internet. I directed them over to Saskblogs, and explained blog commenting, privacy, and search techniques for a few minutes.

I had my photo taken with Ms. Off, thanks to a journalist student, and listened to some stories in the crowd around her and attempted to contribute a joke about trains, which I didn’t realize I’d forgotten the set-up to until I’d already announced I was telling a joke. Talk about the train leaving the station with some empty cars… Let me off at the next station, please.