I don’t want be just another kevetcher on the Olympic bandwagon, but we’ve been given so much to work with.  At first, I wanted to do a short piece, Charlie and the Inukshuk Factory.  It was to be based on my recent landings at the Vancouver Airport, only to be overwhelmed by the plastic and wooden Native simulacrum, and carwash brush-esque flag bombardment (printed with tribal symbols).  After dodging the “bring your tired, your poor and your humbled travelers to the res” themed baggage claim area, I was going to rant on about the neglected state of the urban reserve on Hastings, and Vancouver’s attempt to cover up the needs of our First Nations people.  But that sounded so bitt

The 21^st Century has been earmarked by many prevalent themes, one of the most pertinent being the dominance of a consumer-driven, media ridden society.  Globalization has sprouted the birth of a pluralistic world wherein media forums everywhere have cropped up as hegemonic forces in people’s daily lives.  While we may be far from the Renaissance historically, we find ourselves in a new colonial era wherein media giants from Europe and North America have filtered their values, ways of life and systems of governance across the world’s continents.   By creating a network of media giants, who are mostly white and primarily Christian, we have transposed territorial colonization with m

In my adolescent years, I spent most of my free time (whatever that means?) obsessing over my baseball card collection. I would beg my dad to take me to the flea market, the supermarket, and any other market where I might find the latest brand of baseball cards. I’d rip through wax covered packages emblazoned with brand insignias of companies like Topps, Fleer, Donruss, and Upper Deck; I’d slowly reveal each image in whichever ritual I thought might yield the best cards; I’d count and recount the cards; and I would sit hunched over the lot, sorting through the hundreds and eventually thousands of pieces of bubble gum-stained cardboard hoping that I might find the face of one of my favourite ballplayers looking back up at me.

Let me deviated even further away from the central theme of my blog for a moment (if only slightly). I was traveling from Philadelphia to Baltimore yesterday, when I decided to indulge my ever-present biscuit craving and patronize my favorite of McDonaldized interstate road-purveyors: Cracker Barrel. For those of you who may never have eaten at a Cracker Barrel restaurant, imagine your local, homogenous, transnationally-corporatized, cookie-cutter eatery with a Southern twist; layered with ‘country’ signifiers (from the blaring bluegrass and gospel music to the service workers’ ‘overalls’) and serving only the finest selections of regional fare (collard greens, biscuits and gravy, and chicken & dumplins).<!--StartFragment-->