The new TTC Web site is supposed to début in “April.” That’s after two rounds of usability testing and an outside accessibility assessment that they probably sent to Ottawa for no objective reason.

Now, what about all the bidders on this contract? I’ve been telling you as much as I know. I had filed an information request to see the actual bid documents. This process takes forever, but I have been given a list of pre-cleared documents I can look at. I didn’t ask for copies of those documents, a needless expense. But this is not a free service. And I believe I am going to have to file an appeal to see certain blocked documents.

I do well more than enough unpaid work. So I’m gonna make you a value proposition: If you want me to pay TTC’s existing fees, schlep up there and paw through 1,511 pages, and file and stickhandle an appeal, then shove some money in my PayPal account. (Use the Micropatronage link.) 15 people putting in 15 bucks each would do it and give me a profit that, while marginal and incommensurate with my expended effort, would actually exist for once.

Look at it coldly, as I am: This is a cheap way for losing bidders to gain intel on their competitors. They’ll still be your competitors tomorrow, you know.

I have till 2008.05.09 to get this thing going. The option is yours.

Because it does. Now let’s fix it.

The Trojan Horse is a CBC miniseries in two parts débuting Sunday, 2008.03.30. (It’s the sequel to H₂O [2004].) Starting after 2000 hours Eastern time on that date, I will be writing a superspecial liveblog of the show, which will not be at this address. (I’ve also been Teamade.)

Kottke (for it was he) did the same thing with the most-anticipated-ever episode of Myþbuþterþ. That’s one inspiration – if you want to call it that, since I’m pretty sure Kottke thinks I’m an asshole. I’m doing this mostly as a meta-riposte to Wedgie Fulford, who cannot shut the fuck up about CBC’s anti-Americanism, which, like Communism, he sees everywhere.

“Different show, same message”

Peter Raymont, the executive producer of The Border, has said his show resembles… 24 – “but with a conscience.” You can’t get any more CBC-sanctimonious than that…. The evil deeds of both CSIS and the Americans are frustrated…. This is the third anti-American drama on the CBC schedule this season, the others being Intelligence and H₂O…. All of them depict public-spirited Canadians fighting off the influence of greedy or just plain vile Americans. Apparently, our immigration department’s real enemies aren’t terrorists or smugglers. They’re Americans.

“CBC’s torqued Intelligence” (sic)

Low-life bad guys may shoot each other on the mean streets, but the really bad guys are sitting behind desks [and] we know precisely who those bad guys are: Americans. […] It sounds like the darkest fantasy of a Canadian nationalist. Mary may be devious and greedy for power, but she’s still a patriot. She throws all her resources into the struggle against the American empire. […]

[W]hen it comes to Washington’s power, [Chris Haddock is] addicted to the conventional wisdom of hysterical nationalism. On the question of water rights, for instance, he assumes we all agree that fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly and Americans gotta steal our water. It’s their nature.

In the old days, paranoid anti-Americanism at the CBC appeared mostly in news shows and documentaries. That was enough to infuriate some of us. But in recent seasons it’s seeped into drama as well. There’s no question that the CSIS heroes on Intelligence consider the Americans our most dangerous enemies. […]

Conspiracy theorists will say that all this indicates a plot devised by latte-lapping leftists among the filmmakers in Toronto and Vancouver. Unlikely. Their motive is probably pure calculation. Their shows appeal to the anti-American mood that Liberal and NDP politicians, as well as a few editorialists and TV critics, have done their best to foment. They also, I imagine, attract nods of approval from grant-giving Ottawa bureaucrats who consider their product “relevant.” Our TV drama producers have learned at least one rule from American TV: Success begins with an appeal to prejudice.

Here’s to you, Wedgie. Stars and stripes forever!

Just tall and handsome enough, just manly enough, good with his hands, nonjudgemental, with intelligent eyes and a rich sonorous voice, shivering, cold, vulnerable, needy, beaten to shit and crying.

Surely by coïncidence, most of my “friends” as designated “on the Facebook” are bobsledders. Some are Republicans, Christians, Harperites, Monacans, Utahans, Australians, Calgarians, Moroccans, or some combination thereof.
(Incidentally, what is it with Monaco and bobsleigh? In the principality that A.A. Gill derides so much, bobsleigh is to the winter Olympics as equestrian is to the summer.)

A bobsledder is pretty much guaranteed to be a weightlifting sprinter in tip-top condition. The skinniest ones weigh 200 pounds soaking wet in a Speedo, which means that the gold-medal podium at Nagano, where Italy and Canada actually tied for first, groaned under the weight of 830 pounds of bobsledder.

As with sports heavily reliant on equipment, bobsleigh is almost entirely pointless (a plus), and, like car racing, there isn’t much to recommend it as a spectator sport. Nonetheless, nontrivial bobsleigh photography is achievable, as wee Moroccan French Monacan bobsledder Anas Adoui (no relation) demonstrates.

There are barely any big, strong, tall sprinters in the world. You might be some of those, but you need all of them to push a sled. The kind of guy who might be biomechanically suited to bobsleigh is the same kind of guy who is socially more suited to football or hockey (or just spending an hour a half a day in the weight room). Bobsleigh “federations” worldwide are constantly short of athletes.

Are they looking in the wrong place?

In the vein of a previous freakonomics study (does wymmynz body size keep them off male hockey teams?), I wanted to do some research on the following question: Could athletes with certain disabilities succeed in bobsleigh?

On the surface, the answer is yes.

• A single-leg amputee almost couldn’t possibly run fast enough to push a sled. Getting into the sled fast enough would be difficult with a prosthesis, which might just fall off. So let’s eliminate them.
• Paralysis pretty much knocks you out of consideration, too, as would many kinds of cerebral palsy (maybe not upper-limb).
• A single-arm amputee, I contend, could push a bobsleigh – maybe not as brakeman, where you have to hold on to both sides of the back of the sled and pull two cords to stop it, but easily any of the other positions. You’d want to stay on the side of your good arm to reduce torque. Just barely possibly, you could even drive.
• Severe visual impairment knocks you out of contention, but minor visual impairment doesn’t.
• You could probably be stone deaf and still work on the team. There would be some adaptation required at starts, which tend to be cued by sound (i.e., by big, strong 200-pound guys hollering).

If you’re running a bobsleigh team and you’re in dire need of colossi, then you aren’t hiring on the ability to count to 20 on their fingers and toes, or drive a bus, or hum a single jam by the Dave Matthews Band. You’re accustomed to having perfect specimens all around you, but I thought you were hot for performance.

So I started doing research. I have a line on sprint times for any number of relevant disability classes in the Paralympics. To do a reasonable comparison, I needed some kind of clue about the sprint times bobsleigh coaches are looking for – “if you can run the 50 metres in x seconds, we want to talk to you” type of thing. (The recruiting pages I’ve seen – e.g., Bobsleigh Idol™ – aren’t specific enough.)

I sent along various requests, and even got an acknowledgement once. But since then, bupkes.

How am I supposed to solve your problem here if you aren’t gonna help me?

And yes, of course there is such a thing as wymmynz bobsleigh. Wow, do I ever not really care.