Head Tale

I did this semi-recurring feature a couple times on my old blog but can’t remember what I called it. Five hits? Five Thoughts? Five Things? Anyhew, that’s not important. Here’s your quick hits:

Hockey
If you haven’t watched Battle of the Blades, you should whether you like hockey or figure skating or both or neither. Sunday night was the premier of season two of the show and it was hilarious. My money’s on Theo Fleury but I’d love to see Kelly Chase win, if nothing else than he’s picked the Saskatchewan Children’s Hospital as his charity.

Libraryland
Today was Go Live day for the final group of libraries that comprised Phase III of the Saskatchewan Information and Library Services Consortium. It’s been an incredible year (I duly note that “incredible” is one of my most over-used words on this blog. I’m sure there are others too!) and a great learning experience which I suspect won’t be ending anytime soon. Someday I’ll do a more detailed post with some of my observations about the entire deal but for now, it’s a time to celebrate. (Looks around, takes sip of iced tea.)

Along with a FIMS classmate and fellow Saskie who’s also been heavily involved in the SILS process, we’ve got an application into CLA to present at next year’s conference. We’d like to talk about our experiences as recent grads who’ve been thrust into fairly high responsibility positions (her as an Assistant Director at a city library, myself as a Branch Supervisor at SRL and now in my role as Organization Development Specialist at RPL) with our involvement in the SILS project as an “anchor” for our presentation.

Pace Cuteness
Tonight, he read me “Brown Bear, Brown Bear” from cover to cover which is a first. (Of course, he read it from the back to the front and took occasional side trips to talk about what the animals’ middle names were but otherwise, pretty impressive!) On the other hand, watching the news, they had a story about prostitution and used that typical image of a woman leaning into a car window. Pace’s observation: “Look at that lady and her nice car!”

Politics
Louis Riel Trail and The Accidental Jurist (who recently outed himself – hi Greg!) have both weighed in with their thoughts on Ryan Meili’s withdrawal from the Sutherland race with Jurist providing some particularly insightful analysis of what this will mean for the NDP and for Ryan.

Like my SILS experience, my thoughts on identity politics deserves a much longer post. But numerous commentators – in old and new media – have talked about the impact of a concentrated effort to sell memberships to a particular minority group and the role this played in the (presumptive) success of Naveed Anwar‘s nomination campaign.

To me, I have no problem with this strategy and believe a membership is a membership is a membership (well, most of the time. ;-)) In many ways, it’s great to see Saskatchewan’s increasing diversity represented in the NDP’s candidates (I recently heard that the province’s population growth from minority immigrants is outpacing the growth resulting from births to First Nations people which has long been cited as the main source of growth in our population for the foreseeable future.)

But again, it’s terribly unfortunate that this shift has come at the expense of someone who, to re-use a description I used during the leadership race, had the potential to be a 21st Century Tommy Douglas. I said “had” but maybe I should’ve said “has” as that hasn’t changed.  Lots can happen in politics really fast and if a black man with a Muslim name can become US President within four years, who really knows what the future may bring for Ryan Meili?  Stranger things have happened.  (I also admit that I’m probably still in Stage One of hearing the news – “shock & denial”!)

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