The award for the “Best Use of Background Image on a Website” goes to Brittany Ferries.

I think “mass customization” is the way of the future. Jones Soda leads the way.

“Bill Graham”	James Cromwell
Ed Broadbent	“John MacCallum”

Careful photographic analysis has revealed that the Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs we are told is “Bill Graham” is, in fact, noted actor James Cromwell, star of Hollywood movies like Babe: Pig in the City and Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron.

And that’s not all.

Rather than going to the trouble of finding a brand new cabinet minister, the Liberal party somehow convinced former New Democratic Party leader Ed Broadbent to go undercover in the roll of “John MacCallum,” the putative Minister of Defense.

The rationale for this subterfuge is unknown, and the jig has been almost universally ignored by the media.

The Island Regulatory and Appeals Commission released its audit [1.7MB PDF] of Maritime Electric today. One of the interesting things you will find in the audit is this:

Every utility will use the cheapest source of power to satisfy its own energy needs first. For example, hydroelectric power will always be used, if available, because it is cheaper. As the need increases, a utility will obtain more energy from the next cheapest source available, with oil-fired generation generally being the last and most expensive source. The nature of the new 2001 energy supply contracts with NB Power and Emera generally requires Maritime Electric to purchase the most expensive power being used at that time, since NB Power and Emera will use the cheaper power to satisfy their own energy needs first. This arrangement forces Maritime Electric to manage energy purchases carefully, and indeed, this is done on an hourly basis at the Energy Management Centre.

What this means is that Prince Edward Island is basically getting what’s left on the table once New Brunswick and Nova Scotia have doled out the cheap power to their own residents.

After seven months of e-silence, Catherine has fired up the boilers at CatherineHennessey.com again. Welcome back.

I’ve created an RSS Feed for her site for all your XML speaking readers.

Tonight on Charlie Rose:

• David Martin, National Security Correspondent, CBS News
• Evan Thomas, Assistant Managing Editor, Newsweek
• Jon Lee Anderson, The New Yorker (from Baghdad)
• Walter Russell Mead, Council on Foreign Relations

Among the best documentary reporting you will find on American television is the PBS programme Frontline. They have a special section of their website called The Long Road to War with links to all of their pieces on the war against Iraq.

Not only is the reporting well-produced, balanced and comprehensive, but they also have, in Will Lyman, the best narrator around.

Here’s the full text of Michael Moore’s acceptance speech for Documentary Feature Oscar for Bowling for Columbine:

Whoa. On behalf of our producers Kathleen Glynn and Michael Donovan from Canada, I’d like to thank the Academy for this. I have invited my fellow documentary nominees on the stage with us, and we would like to ? they’re here in solidarity with me because we like nonfiction. We like nonfiction and we live in fictitious times. We live in the time where we have fictitious election results that elects a fictitious president. We live in a time where we have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons. Whether it’s the fictition of duct tape or fictition of orange alerts we are against this war, Mr. Bush. Shame on you, Mr. Bush, shame on you. And any time you got the Pope and the Dixie Chicks against you, your time is up. Thank you very much.

Missed in the melee, and very under-reported here in Atlantic Canada, is the fact that the film was produced from Halifax: by Moore’s wife Kathleen Glynn and Michael Donovan from Salter Street.

The item that originally appeared here has been removed at the request of the subject of the original interview.

Several weeks ago I wrote about a radio documentary I co-produced in 1989 called The Emotions of Activism.

I’ve digitized another of the raw interviews I taped for the documentary, this one with Richard Hamilton.

I met Richard for the first time on the same day I met Ken Hone. Richard, like Kenny, was one of the instigators of Projects for Change, and through that group we became friends. Several years later, after I had moved to Texas and Montreal, and then back to Peterborough, Richard was one of my roommates in a big house on George Street. Catherine was my next-door neighbour. The rest is history.

Richard is a straight-talking, no-nonsense guy who came by his activism honestly.

The tape is unedited from the original. As an added bonus, you can hear my old dog Penny barking in the background about half way through.