Blamblog - Brett Lamb's Blog

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Muddle Duddle

Sometimes the Google ads serve up a curiosity. Yesterday it was an ad [left] for the bizarre Women's Post free newspaper you've seen scattered around the city for a decade or more. While you might think from a glance at the name that the "Women's Post" is a progressive publication, flipping through the pages reveals a mash-up of old-school sexual mores and right-wing ideology (local blowhard, Michael Coren, is a contributor) mixed with a hint of flowery, new-agey language. Because the news is emotional, after all.

But wait! There's more! Publisher Sarah Whatmough is growing her empire:

As CFO my husband has evaluated the market, studied past sales and created projections that Women’s Post has met and at times surpassed. He knows our potential and has watched the newspaper grow and flourish.
...
This week we bought into an online radio station, giving us the ability to offer more to our readers and extend our reach even further. Now we must figure out how to take the intimate, passionate and informative moments we've created on paper and put them into a format that will work on radio. We launch the radio station in mid November with our new web site.

Wow, that means you can expect more great ditties like Enough Already About the Blacks:

So can we give it a rest? It makes us look so provincial, so pathetically uninteresting, so deeply vindictive. And it points to something in the Canadian psyche that is more than a little disturbing, which is that we are way too “judgy.” All that much celebrated tolerance is only the greasy slick insincere public face of a culture that is envious as the crabbed virgins of small-town Ontario a hundred years ago and as idolatrous of the rich and beautiful and accomplished as any silly teenager. And as vicious and mean spirited when one is brought down as a pack of starving wolves.

That's it, Liz Nickson is not invited on my next long walk.

But when you start wallowing in that sort of nonsense, where does it end? Well, in the US Bush just appointed this women [left] chief of family planning programs at the Department of Health and Human Services. She's a contraception critic. She doesn't just oppose abortion, she opposes contraception! That's the direction Women's Post slides.

The Mike Harris Tories used to give names to things describing the exact opposite of what they really were. Women's Post is like that.

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