38.2% of Winnipeg voted

... and all we got was this lousy mayor:


The results:

Marianne Cerilli	38,227	22.56
Kaj Hasselriis	22,401	13.22
Sam Katz (incumbent)	104,379	61.60
Ron Pollock	4,444	2.62
Number of Polls	638/638
Total Votes	171,395

For details on all races, CBC's Winnipeg Votes 2006 section has it covered.

I voted for Hasselriis and I expected him to finish ahead of Cerilli, but it really was never going to matter much with Katz winning easily. The low voter turnout, pegged at 38.2%, is pretty disappointing, but with the choices available, at least in the mayor's race, it's hard to blame anybody.

Four more years of fixing roads and synchronizing traffic lights. Who isn't excited?! Hopefully Katz will start by smoothing over the stretch of Pembina that gives my rump a pounding every day that I bike home from the university.

I changed the title, because a commenter makes a good point: less than a quarter of Winnipeg's eligible voters actually cast a ballot in favour of Katz.

To cheer myself up, I went trolling for interesting mp3 blogs this morning. Finding nothing interesting, I searched instead for what MSTRKRFT had remixed lately. This is what I found:

All Saints - Rock Steady (MSTRKRFT remix) [yousendit.com link]

Does anybody else remember this British girl-band? Seems like a strange choice, but the track is decent enough that I listened to it twice.

Books and Bombers

Winnipeg's downtown library, formerly the Centennial Library, underwent a major overhaul for several years and re-opened in late 2005 as the Millennium Library. It has a lot of tables, and nice, bright, airy spaces to read.

Although the tables by the windows, along the main staircase, are nice, I prefer to do my reading on the 4th floor. This is partly because the express Internet terminals on that floor are less busy than those on the main floor, and partly because the reading area is frequented by a more varied clientele.

The 4th floor houses the vast majority of the library's non-fiction and reference holdings, so you see a lot of do-it-yourself types reading up on various subjects. When I was there the other day, there was a boy, who couldn't have been more than 12, who had a stack of calculus and other math textbooks and a financial self-help book called Instant Millionaire. On another occasion, I sat down at a table with a man who had gathered together a half-dozen teach-yourself French volumes. Why he would need more than one is beyond me. Once there was a man who had grabbed every conceivable book on knives and swords. I kept my distance.

And yesterday, someone left this stack of books at my table after spending a morning of contemplating his or her mortality.


Tomorrow: Bombers-Stamps

Result: Another successful evening. It was cold (-2 C at game time), but not more than you would expect from a late-season home game. Of the games I've seen this season, either on TV or in person, this was easily the Bombers best performance, with an efficient, if not exciting, offense, a dominating defense, and touchdowns for Milt Stegall and Charles Roberts.

The win puts the team's record with me in attendance this season at 3-1 (overall the Bombers were 4-5 at home). If the Bombers win next week and earn a home playoff date perhaps I'll be there, otherwise that's it for me until next season.

Winnipeg votes

Municipal elections in Manitoba are a week from today, and here in Winnipeg that means voting for mayor, city councillor and school trustees. Voting in the city elections is, for me, more fun than the federal and provincial versions because of the fancy machines and the fact that you vote for more than one person at a time.

The incumbent city councillor in my ward is Jenny Gerbasi. I don't see her opponent doing well, if only because I couldn't think of who it might be. Turns out it is a guy named Wilf Makus.

In the mayoral race, it seems like Sam Katz will have little difficulty being re-elected. I'm not a big fan but with the lack of quality candidates this time around it is no surprise that he is heavily favoured. A few of his bigger campaign promises have been a plan to co-ordinate traffic lights and delivering on a city-wide 311 system (WFP subscription req'd), so you can tell he's running not to lose, rather than to win.

Kaj Hasselriis will probably get my vote. On his website he lists and expands upon the following priorities:

• "enhance our existing neighbourhoods"
• "broaden Winnipeg’s economic environment especially for young people and newcomers"
• "create a 21st century transit plan"
• "improve public safety"
• "strengthen democracy at city hall"

He's a left-leaning candidate with a few business friendly planks sprinkled in to broaden his appeal but I doubt he'll fool too many right-wing types. Still, apart from his love affair with lowercase characters, I agree with a lot of what he has to say. More interesting is a campaign blog post, since deleted, suggesting some funny business by Sam Katz' internet people. Here is what's left, from blogsearch:

Illegal Links To SamKatz.ca?10 Oct 2006 by kajformayor
The Katz campaign web site is clearly a web site for the election campaign of Sam
Katz. Many of the reported links on Google seem to have been removed in the very
recent past. What appears to have happened is that Katz had links ...
Kaj Hasselriis for Mayor of Winnipeg - http://kajformayor.wordpress.com

I remember reading the post before it was deleted and I think the gist of it was that there were over 200 incoming links to the Sam Katz campaign site from the City of Winnipeg website in order to boost its search engine ranking. I think the same post suggested that Marianne Cerilli's website was hosted by a porn maven.

Marianne Cerilli entered late and was accused by some of splitting the already small left-wing vote. The most interesting factoid I came across was a Winnipeg Sun article which states ' She's a far-left ideologue -- a self-proclaimed eco-feminist'. Not being familiar with eco-feminism myself, that doesn't tell me much, but I suspect she'll finish comfortably in 3rd place.

Ron Pollock is perhaps the most fringe of the three fringe candidates. Mostly what I've heard from him are radio commercials, done in a semi-spoken word/rap incantation, that promise to bring back the Winnipeg Jets. I'm not sure if people the types of people who would consider that the most important election issue are likely to vote, but if they are he might do OK.

I learned in a Free Press Q&A with the four candidates that Pollock shares an apartment with his sister and runs his campaign out of my neighbourhood Starbucks. He doesn't have a website, but I googled him and read about an appearance he made before the Standing Committee on Law Amendments, regarding the Court Security Act during which, among other things, he complains that the new security measures will prevent him from doing cut-and-paste work in the library:

I use the Law Library on a daily basis and actually the kind of scissors that I do need are these. I do not need cuticle scissors. These are useless. I need these for doing paste-up work with paperwork, and I have been through Security hundreds of times. Yet, this might be seen as a weapon. So I think that the legislation needs to be clarified.

You can't say he's not entertaining.

Check the list of candidates here (PDF) or here (non-PDF) for the story in your riding.

Update 20.10.2006: This week's Manitoban has a couple of good features on some of the election issues that I consider important:

Get on the bus?
Bike at your own risk

In fact, a lot of the better civic election reporting has been in this U of M campus paper and the U of W weekly the Uniter. Unfortunately, the articles on the latter's website are a couple of issues behind the dead-tree edition.

Election Eve Update: I enjoyed this post, which pretty much sums things up in the mayoral race with a healthy dose of cynicism.

Russians and other musicians

I'm currently, for the second time, slogging through Fyodor Dostoevsky's Demons. I read it a couple of years ago but, because I took a long break from the book at one point, I rather lost the thread of the story. This time around, I have a clearer mental picture of what is going on. Still, I'm growing rather tired of the Russian novel.

You see, for the last 5 or 6 years, I've convinced myself that I enjoy classic literature, especially Russian novels, and particularly those of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Of Dostoevsky's 14 major works listed at wikipedia, I've read six. They are (chronologically, by publication date): Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, The Raw Youth, and The Brothers Karamazov.

But the old thrill is gone. So, unless I decide to have another crack at Karamazov or War and Peace (to me, the most compelling novels in the Russian contingent), I'll be taking a prolonged break from this branch of literature. I'm just getting a little tired of keeping track of diminutives, patronymics, saint-names, and all of the socialist intrigues that fill the pages of these books.

Also, for the next month, or so, I'll be trying to be a musician again. The meatier of the works that I am rehearsing for are Bach's Mass in B minor and Symphony No. 2 by Jean Sibelius. In style and purpose, the two pieces couldn't be more different, but I'm excited about both.

And, since I'm a nice guy, a little something for the kids:

Buck 65 - Kennedy Killed the Hat (MSTRKRFT remix)

mp3s, mp3 players, losers, readers, clicks

I don't normally pay much heed to mp3 blogs, nor do I intend to start one, but every once in a while, I stumble upon something that I really like:

The Notwist - "This Room (Four Tet and Manitoba Remix)"

I came across this link after I had listened to the Notwist album Neon Golden a few days ago, and was trying to find information about what that Teutonic troupe had been up to lately. The thing I enjoy most about the album is the over-enunciated, English-as-a-second-language vocals of Markus Acher -- they're endearing somehow. When I was living in Amsterdam, I saw a show billed as "13 & God (The Notwist vs. Themselves)", a mash-up between the Germans and some American spoken-word/electronic act. Unfortunately, the frontman for Themselves was at the helm for most of the show, a rather grating egomaniac, so I missed out on what I had come to see. It was only when some original Notwist numbers were played in the encore that people started to enjoy themselves.

This track is from "Neon Golden", but the remix is quite a departure from the original. Like the Four Tet remixes of Radiohead's "Scatterbrain" on Com Lag, and Bloc Party's "So Here We Are" from Silent Alarm, this track is a creative, rather than derivative, interpretation of the original. At over eight minutes, it slips in and out of styles and beats rather seamlessly, and I was hooked the whole way. Once you get over the initial noise for the sake of noise intro, you'll probably like it too.

10/3/2006: A couple of days later, and two more mp3s.

Junior Boys - Double Shadow
Junior Boys - In The Morning

Both are new tracks from their album So This Is Goodbye that I came across at a music blog called usounds. I knew these guys were coming to town this Friday, but I got turned onto them after hearing "Double Shadow" on my friend's radio show this Sunday. I've been listening to the album more or less on repeat ever since -- it's that good.

Speaking of mp3's, my "portable audio solution" (seems like good business-speak) is on its last legs. I am the proud owner of a Sony Net MD MZ-N707 minidisc recorder/player. Proud, because I think minidiscs never really caught on the way they should have, considering the advantages they hold over CD players (100% skipless playback, size, battery life) and tape walkmans (size again, sound quality, no degrading of media) that were the main competitors when they came out.

In any case, the inner workings of the machine are just fine, but it has taken a lot of abuse since I picked it up on eBay a few years ago (the price was good and low because it was already obvious that the minidisc wave had come and gone). I've dropped it too many times to count, on all kinds of hard surfaces, and screws and springs seem to have gone missing. So while playback is perfect, opening and closing to change discs has become somewhat of an ordeal. It needs to be replaced, and while I can't really justify spending money on a new digital music player, I'm still looking at my options.

Of the iPod family, I could only really think about buying the Shuffle ($89) or the Nano ($169). The Zune looks interesting, but out of my price range. SanDisk also has some decent looking devices, but I haven't looked too closely at them.

Any recommendations of other players that are

• cheap
• small
• at least 2GB capacity

would be appreciated.

More from the world of audio, I recently downloaded have been listening to Gang of Losers by The Dears (yes, on my dilapidated mp3 player). Pitchfork didn't really seem to get into it (by the way, for an uncanny assessment of Pitchfork reviews, check out predictfork), but I don't much care what they have to say these days. I caught 20 minutes of a set by these guys at a festival in Rotterdam a few years ago and wished I had seen the rest. It's nice to hear vocals from someone who can actually sing, and the tunes are pretty catchy as well.

Quick hitter: I think that I now prefer Google Reader to Bloglines for all of my RSS feed needs, particularly because it is ease to include on your personalized Google page.

And finally, now that September has come and gone, I've added up my cycling kilometers for the month. The grand total is 472 km (15.7 km/day). I'll see if I can beat that in October. Ever since I bought these gloves a few weeks ago, I've started to enjoy biking in the cooler fall weather that, today excepted (23 degrees!), we get a lot of in September, October and, if we're lucky, November.