The Band Wore Blue Shirts...

  ...And The Music Played On.

It was not a great morning for C. 

She had to be up early to take a sedative before I drove her down to the off-hospital, West Broadway Medical Industrial Complex located in Lotusland Central for some oral surgery.

All went well and she is now upstairs snoozing while various and assorted pharmaceuticals wear off.

Me, I booked off work for the occasion and am now down in the Subterranean Homesick Blues Room (i.e. the basement) trying to get caught up.

Truth be told however, especially given what happened last night and all that will soon follow, it was good to be out and about with all the other folks scurrying about getting on with their lives this morning.

As for the aftermath? 

I'm avoiding it all for the moment waiting for the sturm, drang and cacophonous clanging of the newscycle to dissipate before the real analysis begins.

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Earworm in the header?...This!

And, if you really want to be blown away by The Man (in blue) shown above...This.

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All Gone To Look For America.

WeHaveNeverHitchhikedTo

SaginawVille

I have a confession to make.

Which is that I have something in common with Elon Musk.

Because, like Mr. Musk, I went to the United States on a student(ish) visa back in the go-go 1990's.

According to a trio of investigative journalists at the Washington Post, Musk ignored a major stipulation of his visa and never actually went to school, in this case graduate school in Palo Alto. Instead, Mr. Musk helped start a company called Global Link, which later became Zip2. Initially, pre-universal search engine, the company sold businesses a service that would give them an online presence. In 1999, just before the first the dot-com bubble burst, Zip2 was gobbled up by Compaq for 300 million dollars. At that time, the immigrant from South Africa, who was not, to the best of anyone's knowledge, eating the pets of Silicon Valley, made a cool 22 million.

I went to America on the reverse brain-drain ticket, which was a J-1 visa designed to lure STEM-types trainees to the country, many of whom stay legally afterward. I was a post-doctoral fellow at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory which is perched above the University of California campus about half-way up the East Bay Hills. Initially, I was involved in a kind of public/private scientific partnership with a now famous pharmaceutical company that survived the bursting of the first biotech bubbles back in the 1980's. I worked feverishly on the project when I first got to the new lab in Berkeley and everything was set to really get rolling after a big Friday afternoon meeting about six months into my tenure. The following Monday my boss got a call from the company saying that they had decided to go 'in a different direction' and the project was dead. So much for curiosity-driven research.

In the end, the science part of my time as a post-doc worked out well enough that I got a few serious job offers, the best of which was to return to Lotusland, which we did a few years before Mr. Musk cashed in for the first time. 

Just as, and perhaps more, importantly than the science stuff, the life thing really worked out well when C. and I lived in Berkeley. It was a truly exciting place to be at the time and we made many wonderful friends. We also had the first of our two wonderful kids, then tiny, now Bigger, E., and we  came to love America and it all it can, and quite often does, stand for.

Here's hoping all of that has a chance to continue.

For America, I mean, come Tuesday...

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While I was really, really steamed at the time, it turned out to be a stroke of luck that the original post-doc project was killed by the company...Why?....Because it never would have worked...We were chasing after something in the soups produced by tumour cells that doesn't exist!...And just in case you might be, for some crazy reason, remotely interested in what we're chasing these days there's...This.

Image at the top of the post...At the infamous UC Berkeley Sather Gate with the two E's on a visit back to town a bunch of years after we left for home.

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Falcon's Ghosts Haunt Rustadville.

From Rob Shaw, breaking away from the herd while writing for Glacier Media:

...In Richmond-Steveston, the Conservatives refused United candidate Jackie Lee. He went on to garner 2,354 votes as an independent, undercutting the less-impressive Conservative candidate Michelle Mollineaux and handing the riding to the NDP’s Kelly Greene by 484 votes.

Same thing in Vernon-Lumby, where United candidate Kevin Acton, the mayor of Lumby, pulled in 4,266 votes, knee-capping Conservative Dennis Giesbrecht and giving the riding to the NDP’s Harwinder Sandhu by 477 votes...

Now, of course, it was Mr. Rustad and his minions who rejected Kevin Falcon's ghosts of the Soccer Party past who, if they had been taken on in those two ridings, could have flipped the entire election result.

So, what does the good Mr. Rustad have to say about it all?

Here's more from Mr. Shaw's piece...

...“There was a lot of people that were dissatisfied (with Falcon’s decision) and wanted to carry on with the fight,” said Rustad. “It's unfortunate.”...

Unfortunate, indeed, for the denizens of grammar-challenged Rustadville.

As for the rest of us?

I beg to differ.

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In British Columbia 45% Wins, And Wins Often.

NoLeaderNoProblem
1952Ville


If you have been perusing British Columbia's punditland since Election Day you will have often read about how poorly David Eby did and how lucky he is to still be Premier.

Case in point, the following from Rob Shaw writing in various and sundry Glacier Media print organs:

Imagine attending your own funeral when suddenly — miraculously and inexplicably — you jolt back upright amongst the living. That’s a bit like being a BC New Democrat these days. The party lost its majority government on election day, faced the prospect of either being out of office entirely or grovelling to the two BC Greens for votes, and then abruptly regained its lifeline in Monday’s final count process to emerge with its majority intact...

{snip}

 ...More than half the voters did not support Eby or the BC NDP in the election. He lost numerous ridings and cabinet ministers. The province is badly divided after a brutal election. Is he the premier to bridge the growing gap between rural and urban B.C.?...

But did Eby really do so poorly with voters, overall, compared to previous BC NDP winners?

Well.

Rather than just prattling on with further fuzzy and thoroughly non-productive pundit parrot talk, why don't we have a look at the actual  numbers...

1972 - Dave Barrett's NDP wins a solid majority with 39% of the popular vote. WAC Bennett's Socred's lost when they only garnered 31% of the vote due, at least part, to the siphoning of 19% by David Anderson's Liberals.

1991 - Mike Harcourt's NDP wins an overwhelming majority with 41% of the popular vote. Rita Johnson's Socred's reach the end of the road when they get only 24% thanks in large part to the 33% garnered by Gordon Wilson's Liberals.

1996 - Glen Clark's NDP wins a close one, with a majority, due to the efficiency of the Dipper's 39% of the popular vote. Gordon Campbell's re-branded Liberals garner 42% of the vote and lose, given that Jack Weisberger's one-hit Reform wonder likely swiped more of their 9% share of the vote from the Liberals than Gordon Wilson's flash-in-the-pan PDA swiped from the NDP to garner their measly 6% vote share.

2017 - John Horgan's NDP forms a minority government with 40% of the popular vote together with Andrew Weaver's Greens, who hit their high water mark at 17%. Christy Clark's Liberals, who actually won the most seats, were ultimately the big losers despite the fact that they also garnered 40% of the vote.

2020 - The big one. Horgan 2.0 wins a massive, Harcourt-like NDP majority with 48% of the popular vote. Andrew Wilkinson's Liberals garner 34% and Furstenau's Greens slide slightly to 15%.

2024 - David Eby's NDP wins his squeaker majority with 45% of the popular vote. John Rustad's Conservatives lose with 43% of the vote as Furstenau's Greens wither down to 8%.

My point?

David Eby just won a greater share of the popular vote than any other BC NDP premier in history except for John Horgan 2.0.

As for the crack, bolded above, from Mr. Shaw about how poorly Eby did because 'more than half' of British Columbians did not support him?

If you go all the way back to 1952 only one BC Premier, ever, won a majority of the popular vote.

And that was Gordon Campbell in the most unusual, and exceptional, clock-cleaning that was 2001. 

To be absolutely clear here, this includes Wacky Bennett, who did not top 50% in any of his six majority wins in a row that spanned from 1953 to 1969.

Interestingly, in every single one of his victories, and that includes his party's pre-majority minority win in 1952, Wacky was greatly assisted by vote splitting, most often due to a significant percentage of folks pulling the lever for the Liberals.

So...

Stick that in your puffed-up pundit pipe and smoke it!



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It turns out that, in that 1952 election, the Socreds formed their minority government, with 30% of the vote, when they made WAC their leader AFTER the election. Just imagine how different this province might be today if the CCF, then led by Harold Winch, pictured above, third from right, who won 34% of the vote, had not been ambushed by Liberal leader 'Boss' Johnson's preferential vote machinations that year.


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Under The 'O'...Number 47.

ThisAin'tNoBingo

ThisAin'tNoFoolingAroundVille


From Elections BC, Monday at 6:00 pm:




And it looks like Chad Skelton's modelling was correct.

Because...

In the end the flipper was Surrey - Guildford:

There will likely be judicial recount in S-Guild as well as in Kelowna Centre where the Con lead is now down to 38 votes. Mr. Skelton also called that one correctly as coming close but not quite flipping.


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There are no longer any issues in the initially concerning ridings of Juan de Fuca and Surrey-Centre where both Dippers pulled away nicely during the mail-in and absentee counting.

Mangled Earworm in the subheader?....Most definitely...This!

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The French, They Have A Different Word For Everything.

 

Link

French lessons?

But what about all that time spent at the Sorbonne?

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On A Sunday Morning Sidewalk...

Ain'tNoRoadsLikeScholarly

RhodesVille


A few notes for this weepy Sunday morning coming down...

Data guy, whose work I miss in the Vancouver Sun, Chad Skelton, has been tracking the rate of change in the close ridings in the BC Election so far. He presents a cogent case that none of the ridings where the NDP has a slight lead will flip Con. Conversely, he does think that Surrey Guildford, but not Kelowna Centre will change from blue to red....4.5 Stars.

Speaking of the Vancouver Sun....Vaughn Palmer blames Sonia Furstenau for sticking by her principles and not playing footsie with John Rustad because, apparently, it will prevent her from gaining leverage over David Eby. What's worse, the Dean of the Legislative Press Gallery, with an assist from current BC Conservative supporter Andrew Weaver, blames Furstenau, who was not the leader at the time, for doing the same thing in 2017.... 0.5 Stars.

It's very difficult for anyone who has been following election updates, even official Elections BC updates, on social media feeds not to notice that the whackaloons are already starting to bleat about voting machines, unreasonable delays, phone-assisted voting,  'late' votes and Brinks trucks, et cetera....Negative Eleventy Billion Stars.

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Earworm at the top of the post?...This!

Want more on Mr. Kristofferson, including the genesis for his biggest hit?...This.

And why not just call the post the title of the song?....Because, Driftglass.



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Will The Orange Stay The New Green?

BC Election Count Update....Early Sat Afternoon, October 26th...

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Saturday at 4pm...Update at bottom of post

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So.

It looks like those mail-in ballots are swinging, hard, toward the NDP.

The two seats they were ahead by a whisker in,  Juan de Luca and Surrey Centre,  are now looking a little more comfortable (the former has gone from 20 ahead to 106 in the lead; the latter has gone from 96 ahead to 162).

That would leave things at Dipper 46, Con 45, Green 2 (you need 47 for a majority, plus you need a speaker which would make commenter Trailblazer's suggestion of one of the two Greeniacs becoming the speaker a realistic possibility).

But...

The gap has closed considerably in Surrey Guildford where the election night Con lead of 102 is now down to 14.

And, get this, Castanet is reporting that the relatively close Kelowna Centre (Con by 148 on election night) has 800+ mail-in & absentees still to count. If that flips orange....Well?

Next Elections BC  update should come soon, maybe even later this afternoon... 

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Elections BC explains the process they are using - which should conclude Monday....Here.

Meanwhile...While we're still looking back at last week's election here in Lotusland, the good Doctor has gone east and is already working on the next one.

And, just in case you thought the 49th parallel was protecting us from such codswallop, Mr. Musk's algorithm is amplifying the braying of the whackaloons re: election rigging.

Update, 4pm Saturday Oct 26th...JDF, Dipper by 106...Surrey Centre, Dipper by 178...Surrey Guildford, Con now only up by 12...Kelowna Centre Con lead shrunk to 72...Elections BC says that mail-in ballot counting is continuing and the next update is scheduled for tomorrow/Sunday at 1pm.

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We Don't Need No Stinking Endorsements!

AmazonStateOfMind
NotTheRiverVille


From Sewell Chan, writing in the venerable Columbia Journalism Review yesterday:

On Friday, the Washington Post’s publisher, Will Lewis, announced that the paper would no longer make endorsements for president—after its journalists had already drafted an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris. The decision was made by Jeff Bezos, the paper’s owner...

For the record, the same thing just happened at the Los Angeles Times.

Ian Bassin and Maximillian Potter, also writing in the CJR, have dubbed this type of cowardly hedging of bets as 'anticipatory obedience' from such titans of the US'ian (formerly) free press.

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Image at the top of the post...Extreme weather fuelled drought in the Amazon basin.


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This Speaker Thing...

It'sAll

InTheChairVille

So.

You've probably heard all the blurble and gurgle about this speaker thing on the TeeVee and in the public prints without having the situation actually spelled out in terms of the, you know, basic math of the thing.

Essentially, you need 47 plus 1 (for the speaker) to rule the province of British Columbia. So with the Dippers currently at 46, total,  they would still be fine if they made a deal with the 2 Greeniacs.

But if the Dippers lose one of the recounts going on in either Juan de Fuca (NDP up by 20*) or Surrey Centre (NDP up by 96), they would lose that majority and, to rule, would have to find Darryl Plecas 2.0 from the other side to act as speaker which could be tough given the vice grip of the Whackaloons on the Conservative party.

And then there is the 'worst case scenario', explained by Cindy Harnett in the Times Colonist with an assist from political scientist David Black:

...If the worst case for the NDP happens next week and they lose two seats in the recounts, the NDP would fall to 44 (or 46 with Green support) and the Conservatives would bump up to 47 but because they would have to produce a Speaker they’d be back down to 46...

Can you imagine any Dipper flipping in that worst case?

Me neither.

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*I assume that the JDF lead has shrunk from Saturday night's 23 to 20 today given that Elections BC is now indicating that the 100% of the ballot boxes (rather than Saturday night's 99.77%) have been reported.
Something else interesting from Ms. Harnett's piece is that she quotes Adam Olsen as saying that Sonia Furstenau can play any part she wishes to with the Greens moving forward...

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Is Orange The New Green...Again?

EveryVote

CountsVille

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Update: Monday morning...In the original post written Sunday morning below, I mention two ridings, Juan De Fuca (Dipper up by 23) and Surrey-Guildford (Con up by 102) where things could still change...I had missed one, Surrey Centre (Dipper up by 96)...That changes the analysis a little because, in the unlikely event that those two orange seats were to go Con we would be in real base-bent crazy town territory...I'm starting to hold my breath again.

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There are now 93 provincial ridings in British Columbia.

Which means that you need 47 to form government.

As you can see from the screenshot, taken this morning from the Elections BC website, the Dippers and the Cons both fall just short.

Which, of course, means that, if things stay the same, the Greens will hold the balance of power.

Of course, that was also the case in 2017 when John Horgan and Andrew Weaver made their deal that, in my opinion at least, gave us a pretty darned good government.

Could the same thing happen again?

Well, luckily, given his recent comments in support of the climate change denier Mr. Rustad, Mr. Weaver no longer leads the provincial Greens.

But the big question is - who will actually lead the Greeniacs going forward?

Will it be Sonia Furstenau, who lost her race, not in Cowichan, but instead in Beacon Hill?

It's going to be interesting to see what happens there, given the potential for both the power and the glory, not to mention good policy, down the road.

And it looks like the Greens and Mr. Eby might have a little time to sort things out because, as you can see from the image above there are still 0.23% of the votes to count. This small sliver represents out of district votes and mail-in ballots which, apparently, will take about a week to collect, collate and count.

Do those votes matter?

Potentially, yes, but it is unlikely.

By my reading the two ridings that could flip are Surrey-Guilford, where the Con is currently up by 102, and Juan de Fuca, where the Dipper is up by just 23.

So.

Let's say, worse case scenario, the Cons hold Surrey-G and the Dippers lose JDF...That would make it 46 Cons (not enough to win) vs. the Dippers 45 (enough to hold on if they make a deal with Greens to go to 47).

Thus, I for one am now able to exhale and almost relax while we wait for the final numbers to be posted by Elections BC next Saturday.

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One of the big surprises was the Greens winning handily in the fully vote split riding of West Van Sea-to-Sky...That, I think, is ironic given how the riding that GordCo's development bund built, may very well have saved us...Somewhere, I'm pretty sure the ghost of Rafe Mair has a little smile on his face this morning.

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This Band Could(n't) Be Their Life (Anymore)

MayAllTheirNickelsBe
DoubledVille

Those who stop by here once in awhile may know that I've been hooked on the music of Japandroids, the sometimes shambolic Lotuslandian duo, for quite awhile now.

The basis of the hooking is pretty straightforward, barb-free and clean.

I listen to their stuff and/or use my digital whiz-bang cheater amp to generate cheesy takes on their most iconic riff because doing such things makes me feel like a kid again.

And when I was a kid I always hated it when my favourite bands broke up - usually for the most squalid and/or saddest of reasons.

But now Brian King and David Prowse have just put out their latest album and simultaneously called it quits, the latter for the best of reasons.

Essentially, they both know that they have lives to live and that doing it with their band behind them is their best chance to do just that.

I'm not sure that I could have handled that explanation when I was twenty-five but now that I am (this very day to be precise) sixty-five, their decision makes me very, very happy indeed.

Selah.


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Earworm in the header?...This!

As for the Bookworm?...Well, begrudgingly due to the faintest whiff of the co-optation (that's the snotty 'No  Sellouts!' kid in me coming out again)...This!



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Doing That Thing You (Used To) Do...

NoHorseRace

NoSaneWashVille


From Marcy Wheeler's post on questions put to Mr. Trump by folks in the audience at a Unavision TeeVee Town Hall yesterday:

...Six minutes in, a man named Jorge Velázquez took the mic (after Trump offered a smarmy compliment him on his hair, which is the kind of beautiful thick mane that Trump covets). Velázquez described that he used to pick strawberries and broccoli and asked, if Trump deports everyone he wants, who will do that work and how much will food prices go up. ...

{snip}

...Trump immediately said he was the best thing to happen to farmers. He seemed to suggest he would bring back the bracero [temporary foreign worker] program (since Elon Musk has begun paying Trump’s bills, Trump has been pushing to greatly expand legal immigration). But he ultimately didn’t answer the question. It was an unresponsive answer to a question that every person who imagines themselves a journalist should be asking.

That wasn’t the only challenging question Trump dodged. After 25 minutes, José Saralegui asked Trump why he lied about the Haitians in Springfield. After 33 minutes, Ramiro González, a Republican who has dropped his registration in the party, invited Trump to win back his support by explaining his inaction on January 6. Trump not only offered the platitudes he always does, lied about his supporters bringing guns, and used the first person plural to align himself with the mob (which may end up being useful to Jack Smith), but he did not answer the question. By that point, a number of the viewers in the audience had a hostile body language to Trump. After 40 minutes, Jesús González asked Trump to explain his gun control policy to victims of school shootings. After 43 minutes, Carlos Aguilera asked Trump if he still considered climate change a hoax...

[stuff in square brackets, above, mine]


Gosh.

As Ms. Wheeler points out, aren't those the kinds of questions that actual journalists used to ask?



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Earworm in the header?....The Own Eee Ders!



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The Season For Training And Camping Is Now Officially Over.

WhenWestWas

EastVille


Given that this year's edition of the Canuckleheads appear, at least for the moment, to be playing like a brand new expansion team...




Wasn't that something?

And, despite the fact that he was only 34 at the time, isn't it amazing to realize that O. J. Kurtenbach still looks like he's your Dad in that video.

As for the big Irishman, Pat Quinn....Don't forget that he was at the time little more than a Maple Laff's cast-off who's main claim to fame was knocking Bobby Orr out cold with a vicious 'shelbow' in the 1969 playoffs.

Ahhhh...

The old days.

When the boards were clean and you could take the whole family, and maybe the kid down the street as well, to the game without skipping an entire mortgage payment.

Imagine that!

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My Afternoon Ride.

EastOfEden
AlmostSookeVille


We made the trip over to the People's Republic of South Van Isle, again, for Thanksgiving with eleventy billion running maniacs.

It was a full ferry on a flip-flop-infested Friday night. But all went smoothly.

Additionally, all went pretty much as well as it could go with our grown-up kids getting together with their cousins on both sides of the family, in shifts, through the weekend.

As for me, I took a bit of break Saturday afternoon and rode out to Matheson Lake.

The idyll was it, news on the dead tree page included.

Monday will be crazy times on the trip back across the Salish Sea I reckon.

Selah.

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