Life is full of odd little coincidences. Take the fact that on the same day that ‘Deep Throat’ is unmasked, Gurmant Grewal has finally released his collection of Dosanjh and Murphy bootlegs.

(Well, maybe it’s a mix tape. At least one blogger is asking why the “four hours of conversation” only comes out to one hour, fifteen minutes.)

Though separated by three decades, two scandals involving reluctantly-released surreptitious taping have finally met, however glancingly. To mark this occasion, a list of similarities between Deep Throat (or W. Mark Felt) and Gurmant Grewal:

Deep Throat: Doesn’t look a thing like Hal Holbrook, who played him in All the President’s Men.
Gurmant Grewal: Doesn’t look a thing like Hal Holbrook.

Deep Throat: Doled out information to reporters in dribs and drabs.
Gurmant Grewal: First mentioned recordings way back on May 18th, and released a mere eight minutes. (Think of it as a trailer.)

Deep Throat: Was never an honorary Liberian vice-consul.
Gurmant Grewal: Also was never an honorary Liberian vice-consul. Claimed to have been one, then said he was only offered the position.

Deep Throat: Operated under an assumed name.
Gurmant Grewal: Hired Rachel Marsden, who worked for him under an assumed name.

Anything else?

Fox News’ London bureau chief Scott Norvell explains what they mean by “balanced”:

Even we at Fox News manage to get some lefties on the air occasionally, and often let them finish their sentences before we club them to death and feed the scraps to Karl Rove and Bill O’Reilly.

He’s making the point that, at least with Fox, you know about their biases, whereas those sly bastards at the BBC insist on wearing business suits over their Mao jackets.

Except in this case, Norvell is chatting with a fellow reporter (and, given that it’s the Euro edition of the Wall Street Journal, a reporter for a very friendly media outlet). So long as he’s talking with other members of Those In The Know, he’ll be charming and joke about how what a naughty scamp Fox News is.

What’s galling is this: Norvell’s viewers will never hear that kind of confession from him or his colleagues. Fox News will treat them with exactly the same cynical contempt that drove Murdoch to found his network in the first place, promising fair and balanced and delivering the polar opposite.

CBC Radio is wonderfully, fantastically open to freelancers. But one of the harder aspects of working with them is their understandable reluctance to use phone interview clips.

Little wonder: phone conversations sound awful, and nearly always have some irritating background buzz that can stump even the most gifted sound engineer.

But if you want to do a story where the setting goes further afield than just across town, what’s a freelancer — without a handy travel expense account — to do?

The answer may be to download Skype, the free Internet telephone-without-a-phone-complany software. Available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and even Pocket PC, Skype users can call each other online and enjoy high-quality audio conversations without paying a dime in long distance charges.

Now the BBC is getting in on the act, according to BuzzMachine:

Read on…

CBC News reports on a Harvard study, based on documents obtained thanks to a settlement in a massive lawsuit against Big Tobacco; the upshot is nicely summed up in the headline, Tobacco companies designed cigarettes to addict women, study says:

Read on…

So you’ve been reading blogs for a while. You get a lot out of it, but you can’t shake the nagging feeling that there has to be more to it than this. Surely you ought to be able to read blogs more easily, filter content more effectively, and maybe even start blogging yourself…

Indeed you ought, and now you can. Alexandra Samuel has assembled her list of 10 tools that tap the power of blogs:

In my own presentations I have talked both about how to use blogging as an engagement tool and how to use blog tools for improving knowledge-sharing and collaboration among e-deliberation practitioners.

To that end, here’s my list of the 10 technologies and tools that together unlock the power of blogging as a very easy and effective way to track news, discover information, and collaborate with colleagues.

(Full disclosure: In addition to being one of the smarter people on the planet when it comes to online deliberation, citizen engagement and blogging technologies, Alex is also my wife.)

From the great folks at Terminal City, news that Yuk Yuks feels kind of possessive with its signed comics:

Sometimes jokes are no laughing matter. A local comedian who organises a monthly talent showcase says the Canadian comedy chain Yuk Yuk’s is warning it will ban any performers who appear at his show, something Yuk Yuk’s vehemently denies.

….Mike Breslin, General Manager of Yuk Yuk‚Äôs Vancouver, paints a different picture. He says only signed acts are not allowed to perform at The Cellar.

“We’re allowing everyone to play without any ramifications at all. Except paid people, people who make a living off Yuk Yuk’s, who are signed with Yuk Yuk’s,” he said. “I’m not prepared to supply my competition with my headliners.”

So it turns out that “No Child Left Behind” isn’t just an empty Republican promise on education… it’s also a recruiting strategy for the U.S. military:

This federal law [the "No Child Left Behind Act"] that is supposed to help create better educated children also mandates that all public secondary schools hand over students’ previously protected private contact information to military recruiters. Schools must now allow them on high school campuses, just as they do with college admissions officers. If schools refuse, they face losing the federal portion of their already lean school budgets. Parents can “opt out” of handing over home phone numbers and addresses, but that assumes that harried administrators get around to giving families notice before Uncle Sam comes calling.

Advocates of the recruiting provision contend that the military should be on the same footing as colleges when it comes to providing students with career information.

…One difference being that in college, if you decide to walk out during your mid-terms, your proctors won’t wrestle you to the ground and jail you. And heated though the football rivalry with State Tech might be, nobody’s shooting at you.

If there’s a word you rarely associate with the political left, it might just be “glee”. (It might also be “highly-paid”. But let’s run with “glee”.)

Well, rarely-associate no longer. Scott Piatkowski revels in schadenfreude over the spiky beds that Conservatives and Liberals have made for themselves over the past while. A sample:

A question for former Mulroney Cabinet Minister John Crosbie:
When did you decide that people changing parties was contributing to “the democratic deficit” in Canada? Can we assume that it was sometime after you left the Liberal Party (where your own provincial leadership aspirations had been thwarted) to become a Conservative?

A question for Prime Minister Paul Martin:
When did you decide to call on all parties to restore the dignity of the House of Commons and political discourse in general? Was it before or after one of your ministers compared Conservative MPs to the Ku Klux Klan? Was it before or after another of your ministers referred to a Conservative MPs low placement on “the gene pool”?

Go read, and – depending on your political stripe – laugh or wince. (I laughed. Lots.)