Tag Archives: role models

Blogging, Coffee, Facebook, memes, personal, playfulness, podcasts, politics, Quiet Revolution, randomness, social networking, tagging

Keeping Up With the Loshes

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Elizabeth Losh has tagged me:

virtualpolitik: Pieces of Eight

I actually feel honoured. I met Losh randomly, on a rather high-profile blog she contributes to. I simply posted a comment. And here I am, tagged by a high-profile blogger (and, it seems, a very interesting person).

This “meme” seems to be about revealing eight random things about yourself. As silly as this may sound, I like the idea.

What Losh did was pretty neat. She used eight (presumably consecutive tracks on her iPod Shuffle as inspiration for her facts. Since I can’t get coolness points for doing the same thing, I’ll reverse the randomness factor by using Losh’s facts as inspiration for mine. I’ll then associate some music with every fact.

  1. My family has never been into partisan politics and none of us has been very faithful to a political party. I did attend, as a child, a meeting of Parti Québécois during the 1980 referendum. (Stéphane Venne, Le début d’un temps nouveau, Renée Claude)
  2. Though I’m not a sports fan by any stretch of the imagination, the only time in my life I skipped school was to see the parade when the Montreal Canadiens won the Stanley cup in 1986. There was a riot later that day, IIRC. (Dolores Claman, The Hockey Theme)
  3. I listen to a lot of podcasts and I archive episodes that I want to blog about. I only use a very small fraction of those archives. Guess I should find an easy way to nanoblog based on podcast episodes. Too bad iTunes doesn’t have any blogging/sharing feature. (Fabio FZero, Samba do Aeroporto, Gerador Zero)
  4. I pretty much never had a hero. My role models have been my mother, my paternal grandmother, and my wife. No wonder my “PersonalDNA” has me at the 72th percentile for femininity and at the 10th percentile for masculinity. (Claude Dubois, Femme de rêve)
  5. I never got my driver’s license. As surprising as it may sound, not driving hasn’t been so much of an issue for me, even in car-intense parts of the United States. (Tracy Chapman, Fast Car)
  6. The comment I originally left on one of Losh’s blog entries was about addictions. I don’t think that I’m addicted to anything. There’s a number of things I do quite regularly (drink coffee, play solitaire on a PDA, spend time online…) but none of them I ever feel compelled to do. (Robert Palmer, Addicted to Love)
  7. Though I haven’t been baptized, I’m culturally Catholic meaning that I probably behave like a Catholic by mere virtue of having been raised in Catholic Quebec during the end of the Quiet Revolution. (Jacques Brel, Les Flamingants)
  8. Among the first things which tickled my philosophical curiosity was thinking about an infinite universe. I kept thinking about what would lie beyond the Universe. I was quite young (10yo) and didn’t know much about (astro)physics. I still wonder about the grander scheme of things. (Nancy Hamilton/Morgan Lewis, How High The Moon, Ella Fitzgerald)

(Can anyone guess what took me longer while preparing this entry?)
Now, who should follow this meme? Here’s a list of people I’m tagging:

Sydney Hutchinson, Mireille Caissy, Jean Crawford, Yara El-Ghadban, Erin McLeod, Aurora Flewwelling-Skup, Hélène Recule, asphaire

(Notice a pattern, here?)

Let’s see who goes along.

Canada, CBC, constructivism, mass media

CAs and Heroism

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Watched George Stroumboulopoulos’s The Hour last night. He did an interview with Canada’s Auditor General Sheila Fraser who is widely known for her role in unveiling the sponshorship scandal which rocked Canadian politics during the past few years.

Not sure what other people’s reaction has been but, the first time I saw Fraser, her approach and behaviour impressed me as heroic. I don’t tend to have heroes, idols, or even role models (apart from my mother, my paternal grand-mother, and my wife). But I’m touched by people’s sense of duty and Fraser seems to have exactly that.

This isn’t to say that Fraser is a better person than anybody else. But there’s something truly glorious about her work. Maybe there’s something in her attitude which oozes both self-confidence and selflessness. At any rate, I get the feeling that we need more people like her. And I wish she won’t go into partisan politics.

What’s interesting here is that, in her interview with Stroumboulopoulos, Fraser addressed the issue of how chartered accountants (CAs) are perceived. Typically, accountants are thought to be boring, uncool people. Currently, there’s a campaign in Quebec to fight this perception. Some ad agency (Cossette, most likely) has been putting posters in metro cars with actual CAs pictured as glamourous Stars on the covers of fake gossip magazines. There’s also a TV show about CAs (haven’t watched it but it seems to approach the same idea of glamour).

Can glamour backfire on the definition of what a CA should be?

In anthropology, we often have the “Indiana Jones Effect” as people take anthropology to be all about a sense of adventure. There’s also the “CSI Effect” about forensics, which influences the way some people interpret forensic evidence.

Mass media may tend to produce heroes of a specific kind. Is this process detrimental to the type of heroism displayed by Sheila Fraser and, say, Louise Arbour?

Is heroism defined by the epic genre or is the epic genre defined by heroic characters?