Q: There has been a lot of talk and objections to giving administrative control of our ports over to a company of the United Arab Emirates. As far as Middle Eastern countries go, of course, the UAE has been one of the most capitalist-minded and more uniformly supportive of our War on Terror than just about any other save Israel. So the question is whether, considering UAE's relative support for us and the fact that our government will still be controlling customs, is there a more clear way of demonstrating (a) how little faith we have in our customs systems and (b) that no matter how much any Middle Eastern country resists the anti-American tide over there, as long as they are Arabs and Muslims we will view any and all of their kind with abject suspicion?

A: No.

Bonus Loaded Q & A:

Q: How do you reward a nation that is surrounded by hostile states, hosts your armed services in said hostile region, has been threatened by your mortal enemy for being too friendly to you, put its citizens in mortal danger when traveling throughout the rest of the Middle East, helped facilitate the CIA's infiltration of a terrorist's network, hosts port calls for your military, has embraced trade and capitalism moreso than almost all of its neighbors, and tightened its bank regulations in response to 9/11? [1] [2]

A: Equate it with a terrorist state. [3]

All this talk of anime reminds me of a story.

A little while back I was driving down one of the town's main drags and I saw a marquee that said "Anime is back!"

I thought, "cool" as last I knew there wasn't actually a place to get anime in Pocatello (besides the paltry selections at the national chains). Being that this is a college town (of sorts) that it would be good for them to have a place that puts enough of a value on anime as to put it on their marquee.

I figured that it must be a comic or gaming shop or something.

I should have figured that it was a porn shop.

A while back, Ebert made some negative comments about the potential of video games:

I am prepared to believe that video games can be elegant, subtle, sophisticated, challenging and visually wonderful. But I believe the nature of the medium prevents it from moving beyond craftsmanship to the stature of art. To my knowledge, no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers. That a game can aspire to artistic importance as a visual experience, I accept. But for most gamers, video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic.

My first post on the whole thing was regarding Ebert's comments. Now I'm interested in writing about video game fans' almost insanely bitter response.

As most of you know, I have or have had at one point a pretty extensive collection of comic books and anime. I'm not aggressively collecting either right now, but that has more to do with time and money constraints than it does with "outgrowing" any of them. If you read my last post on the subject you know that I am not an avid gamer. However, I see some really interesting connections between the overlapping fan-base of the three: An intense desire for respectability.

Back before anime was what it is now, I recall a great hope that one day animation could be considered a serious art form in the US as it is in Japan. Some wanted anime itself to become respected in the US and others simply wanted American animation to stop having song-and-dance routines, but the desire was there for us to have what the Japanese do.

The same is true, to an extent, of the comic book world. A large number of the "serious comic book thinkers" hate the fact that comics still focus in large part on superheroes because superheroes will never be considered respectable or they wanted to make superheroes themselves respectable by making them more "dark" and "realistic" and essentially take all of the magic out of a magical genre. They also insisted that comic books be called graphic novels, something I don't disagree with because it is more accurate, but something that reaks of the pretension that the movement is infused with.

To an extent, I signed on with both of these movements. Ten years later, though, I somewhat regret doing so. The comic book movement has largely failed. Both DC and Marvel are stuck doing whatever they can to hold on in an industry that's in a lot of trouble. The anime movement, on the other hand, has partially succeeded. Anime is everywhere. It now has mass appeal and not just to younger people. And what does anime have to show for it, really? Not much.It's still largely geared towards the younger crowd and those that are now translating it are now watering it down for more mass appeal.

That's ultimately the rub. Looking back, I don't think a lot of the people clamoring for acceptability of alernative media of entertainment really wanted what it took for it to succeed: trading in what it made it so different and appealing for the fan-base to begin with. What they really wanted - and want - was social acceptability for their interests and themselves.

It's no secret that comic book collecters and anime fanatics are often very unappealing people on a personal level. But for all their concern about trying to score seriousness and intellectual heft for these sorts of things, the fact is that the intelligence level of the average anime viewer and comic book reader is considerably higher than the mean. Social skill level, however, is considerably lower. Popularity level... well I don't even need to go there.

To that extent, the push for acceptability of alternative cultural choices is merely a front on the wider battlefield of acceptability for those that partake in the alternative "geek" culture. These people have spent a lifetime being outcast by people neither as intelligent nor as accomplished as they (though the accomplishment of these people often wanes in the college years as their inability to integrate themselves with society at-large and follow its rules, as well as an overstimation of their intelligence that stunts the growth of an aggressive work-ethic). It's no accident that it's usually those that have the least going for them socially or economically are often the most vocal in the effort to mainstream their entertainment choices.

It's partially for that reason that these efforts are in vein. Those that have the social skills and admirable economic success are the least likely to wave the banner. Mainstream social acceptance of their culture isn't as important to them because they have found fulfillment elsewhere. Additionally, the sense of appropriateness that has allowed them to succeed in mainstream society also gives them a good idea of who is and is not receptive of their ideas. Negative personal experience also leads them to err on the side of caution in that regard.

The result is that victory often becomes only partial or even pyrrhic. Anime becomes mainstream, but it's a bastardized Sailor Moon and Dragonball Z that get the nod rather than Neon Genesis Evangelion or Escaflowne. New serials are brought over, but then altered in ways strongly disapproved by those that once lead the movements. The suits come in, the conventioneers are slung out.

There is apparently a debate brewing in Texas as to when the school year should start. According to The Chronicle, the state has mandated that school can't start earlier than the 21st this year without a waiver*.

But I digress. The case in favor of an earlier start date is ostensibly so that they can end the first semester before school starts**. The case against an earlier start date has to do with August electricity bills, summer jobs, and summer school. The focal point of the debate, however, comes down to whether or not Winter Break should interrupt a semester.

So I started weighing it over in my mind to try to figure out which, if any, side I was on in the debate. Then it occured to me:

We are debating whether Summer Vacation should be two months and one week or two months and three weeks because we are concerned about how much our students are going to forget in two weeks. Let me repeat. We are worried about cutting down summer break to two months or so in the summer in order to prevent our students from having to retain information after two weeks.

Is an education that evaporates after two weeks of dormancy really an education at all? Is our grip of our kids on what they're being taught that perilously loose?

Of course it is. And this entire debate outlines how much we, as a society, don't care. This is why year-around schooling has never really taken off. We would rather have a flexible summer than not have to seemingly spend the first two months of every schoolyear going over what they've forgotten over the summer.

I've never really been a proponent of year-around school. I've mostly been indifferent. But I completely understand the pull against having a two-week break right before exams. Changing the context, however, suggests that it is more a symptom of a larger problem rather than a problem in itself.

* - This must be at least somewhat new because my sophomore through senior years school started significantly before the 21st. The only thing that actually prevented it from starting on my birthday my senior year was that for the first time ever they started school on a Wednesday rather than a Monday. My first couple years in junior high were had us taking exams after break, but school was practically starting in September about then.

** - I'm not sure I buy this, however, because I'm pretty sure that they have started around the 21st before and still gotten out before Christmas. Some of it apparently comes down to wanting a full week off for Thanksgiving and not having lopsided semesters (I think two of the "six-weeks" periods back then were 5 weeks in the fall and 7 in the spring or something).

The Idaho State Journal's worthless education "news" writer is at it again. Last time around he ominously suggested that the business community and colleges wanted higher standards in the maths and sciences because they stood to financially benefit (because, after all, high tech employers and colleges have no other interest in an educated population coming out of high school).

This time around the subject is expanding the charter schools, which Boyd is pretty transparently skeptical of.
The number of paragraphs dedicated to voicing some concerns about the program: 11
The number of paragraphs dedicated to either defending the above skepticism, defending the expansion, or supporting it: 3

The number of quotes from charter schools administrators: 3
The number of charter school administrator quotes that support of the expansion: 1
The number of charter school administrator quotes that promote skepticism of the expansion: 2

The one quote supportive of the expansion: "I struggle to understand the criticism about accountability," [Pocatello charter school administrator Martha Martin] said.

And just for the heck of it, I will point out a statistic that the article doesn't mention:
Number of parents forced to send their kids to these "unaccountable" charter schools: 0

To be blunt, I don't know a great deal about the state of Idaho's charter schools. They may be gawd-awful and worthy of the skepticism heaped on them. But I find it interesting that according to educationists, a school that's accountable only to parents (who can pull their kids out at any time) is de facto less worthy than one that's not accountable to parents (who can't pull their kids out) at all but is accountable to school district administrators.

When you have someone that did something wrong, you pin them against the wall for having done something wrong. When you can't prove that they actually did do anything wrong, you pin them against the wall for not telling everyone what they did or leaving the appearance that they might have done something wrong.

Is the media bored? Or just exceedingly self-absorbed and/or petulent?

That's the most benign explanation I can come up with to explain the media's fascination with Dick Cheney's shooting incident. Don't get me wrong, it's interesting stuff. Possibly tragic, depending on what all comes of it. And I would expect the New York Times to try to make hay of it and I'm not surprised that a former press secretary or two takes the opportunity to point out some pretty valid flaws in the handling of the situation.

But even so, I find the ominous tone of it all to be quite curious, to say the least. According the the Judd clan, reporters are even asking if there will be federal charges filed or if Cheney will have to step down. Folks, if you have any reason to believe that this was anything accept an honest accident besides the belief that Cheney is just that evil, please step forward with it. If you can even think of a motive for why Cheney would intentionally shoot a donor and supporter, I'd like to hear it.

Absent that, there is a noticeable lack of meat to the story.

Cover-up? There was nothing to cover up. Fitzwater compares it to an incident where George H Bush collapsed. That kind of thing is significant because it affects the chain of command of our government. Had Cheney been accidentally shot, that would be Page 1 news. Right now this is news, but more of the entertainment variety. Even the likely lawsuit or settlement is probably more celebrity news than political news. If the man dies, of course, everything changes. If they bring Cheney up on charges (beyond a fine for not having all the right licensure), that changes things as well. But both of those appear to be unlikely and this, at present, is more interesting than hard newsworthy.

So all I can think of is that the media is really bored, really interested in stories (including non-story stories) that let the administration look bad, or so self-important as to be the most important thing to consider when someone is accidentally shot.

I agree with the main thrust of Cory Doctorow's piece on Google Video DRM,I think. I'll have to ponder at least a little more on the matter. But even so I found this argument strange:

DVDs were the first widely-released DRM media. The effect of DRM on DVDs was to deprive DVD owners of the fruits of an open market in players. In the ten years that DVDs have been in the marketplace, no new features have been introduced for the platform, robbing us of the dividends on our investment in DVDs. By contrast, DRM-free CDs ushered in the era of the MP3, home karaoke, time-shifting, media servers, iPods, mashups, MP3 CDs and all the rest of the value that has accumulated in our music collections, the dividend paid on our investment in the CD format.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that CDs got at least a couple years headstart over DVDs. If not in invention, then at least in widespread implementation. I was a slow adopter on both, but by the time I bought a DVD player there were already more CDs than audio tapes at record stores.

Secondly, bearing the above in mind, DVD isn't that far behind CD in versitility. The MP3 era is being matched pretty ably by MP4, AVI, and Divx encoding. The CD in my car can play MP3s from CDRs, but the DVD Player I just ordered will be able to play Divx filed burned to DVDRs. iPods are coming with little screens these days. Too small to be useful, maybe, but not exactly the fault of DRM (besideswich, you can get portable DVD players and if they don't offer portable DVD players that can play Divx files and the like, they will).

Granted, some of this stuff is in spite of DRM and because people have been able to circumvent it. But if nothing else, it demonstrates that DVD DRM may not be benign, but is sufficiently incompetent.

None of this is to say that I am okay with DRM. I hate the fact that I had to buy a separate piece of hardware to get the DVD I purchased to play in the player I purchased on the TV I own. I also hate that a number of TV/VCR combos were rendered completely incompatible with DVD players because everything necessarily went through the VCR. So I'm not enthusiastically defending DRM here because I don't like it, but I found that particular paragraph to be pretty off-base.

"Mr. Clooney was the fellow "brave" enough to make a movie about — cue drumroll as I open the envelope for Most Predictable Direction — the McCarthy era! How about that? I don't know about you but I was getting so sick of the sycophantic Joe McCarthy biopics churned out year in year out — Nathan Lane in McCarthy! The Musical was the final straw — that thank God someone finally had the "bravery" to exercise his "right to dissent." I only hope George Clooney isn't found dead in the street at the hands of some crazed nonagenarian HUAC member..." -Mark Steyn

Though my father is a UT grad, he also attended East Texas State University in Commerce, not far from the even smaller town in which he grew up. ETSU has since become a Texas A&M franchise school and its old identity largely forgotten.

Except that it makes an appearance in the new Disney movie Glory Road:

In the movie, East Texas fans are shown throwing drinks and popcorn and yelling racial slurs at Texas Western, now known as the University of Texas at El Paso, during a regular-season game in Commerce, Texas. A scene after the game shows a vandalized hotel room, with racial slurs written on the walls in red.

"It was just too awful for words," Pace said.

It never happened, Pace said.

According to UTEP athletic department archives, the Miners played the Lions in El Paso on Dec. 9, 1965. The Miners won 73-51. The Miners won the game in the movie, but the margin was much closer.

I can certainly see why the folks in Commerce are so upset. I'd be interested to know whether the fabrication came from the movie or the autobiography it was based on. Presumably if it was from the autobiography we can attribute it at least somewhat to faulty memory (maybe it was West Texas State or North Texas State or East Tennessee State), though something like that seems easy enough to check. If it wasn't in the book and the whole thing was a fabrication by the makers of the movie, it gets a little more problematic. If you're going to set a school up as an exemplar of racism in Texas at the time, you need to just go ahead and make up a school rather than malign one that already exist. Perhaps they didn't know that East Texas State still existed and thought that it was safe.

In any case, bad move.

The University of Kentucky, who are the "big team" the Miners play in the championship game, have also complained. I'm not sure whether those complaints are the portrayal of UK as the big, bad, white school or if there are particular inaccuracies at the time. From what I've read UK's basketball program was particularly ivory even for its time and I recall hearing somewhere that blacks in Kentucky were not sorry their state school lost. But that could be circular -- from the movie itself, which has already demonstrated itself to be not-entirely-reliable.

Dustbury's CG Hill points me to Salon's King Kaufman's thoughtful (if lefty) piece on how sports is managing to move even further out of the hands of the poor:

So what's happening here is that the NFL, like other major sports entities, is sliding toward more and more games being on pay TV. The league has a policy of showing all cable games on free, over-the-air TV in the home markets of the two teams involved, but that bone doesn't mean much if you're, say, a cableless Cowboys fan in San Antonio, which is Cowboys country but not part of the home market.

Too bad. The reality is if you're a sports fan without cable, the world is passing you by. Cable is where the money is because cable is where teams and leagues can control their own programming, and cable networks like ESPN can pay higher prices for programming than broadcast networks because they collect income from two sources, advertising and subscriber fees.

This is a sad thing because, with very few exceptions, the people who don't have cable -- and there aren't many of them in the scheme of things -- don't have cable because they're too poor to afford it. Sports have long since left poor people behind in the arena by pricing tickets beyond their means, and now they're in the early stages of leaving them behind on television and radio too.

Pensioners who have loved the Boston Red Sox through decades of futility were recently informed by the 2004 World Series champs that the number of games on free TV starting next year will be a convenient, easy-to-remember zero, except for the odd late-season Saturday game on Fox.

The St. Louis Cardinals this winter announced that their games are moving from the clear-channel behemoth KMOX to a smaller station the team bought an interest in, a move influenced by the rise of satellite radio, which figures to lessen the need for teams to broadcast on huge stations or cobble together a team network over a wide area.

My initial response is to roll my eyes because, among other things, an obscene number of poor people who reportedly "can barely afford to put food on the table" can nonetheless afford the no-longer-luxury of cable.

But... he's got a point.

Either professional sports are a community-oriented affair or they are not. If they're not then the owners need to stop using the community as an ATM. If it's not a community service, then they need to stop trotting that out as a reason to keep building trendy new stadia. But if they are a part of a city's civic identity, then there are obligations that need to be met. Ticket prices need to go down and meet the the supply-demand curve (which does not include half-empty stadia). And games -- or at least away games -- ought to be on free television.

Because there are only thirty or so professional teams in a given sport out there when there are probably forty markets big enough to hold pro teams, they use the false scarcity as leverage to play both sides of the coin: Public investment, private profit.

"That is far from the customary image of a loner freshman zoning out in front of the screen in his dorm room. Ever since Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1953), media critics have believed that watching the boob tube "atomizes" individuals, so that even when viewing the news they have no real social engagement. The college ritual of The O.C., March Madness, The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, and other favorites reverses the process, and television watching isn't the only leisure habit shifting from "isolationist" to collective." -Mark Bauerline

I recently purchased a ATI All-In-Wonder (AIW) video card in part so that I could transfer some old tapes onto the computer. VCRs are getting more and more difficult to find in stores and it's starting to make less sense keeping them in that format. Some of the tapes I have were never actually released to DVD so I couldn't buy it if I wanted to, and included in the goodies are videos that I made with my best friend when we were in junior high.

So I get everything all hooked up, but it seemed like I couldn't get a solid connection from the VCR to the video card. The sound was choppy and the video looked like it was getting a bad reception or had a poor connection. It would only do so, however, when the VCR was playing. The blue screen was quite peaceful. Co-ax cables are sometimes spotty, so I tried hooking up my playstation with a RCA yellow-white-red cable. My video card apparently came with two "out" (PC->VCR) cables and no "in" cables (VCR->PC). Luckily I had an old AIW and could use that cable.

By this point I was getting pretty agitated, though I did feel better when the video started coming through.The sound was still choppy. When I tried to record, however, I got a message saying that it couldn't be done. Copy-protection, it seemed. Except that it recorded just fine. The sound even worked!

So determining that the problem may have been the co-ax cable the VCR was connected to, I took a special trip to the store to get the RCA cable. Unfortunately, the problem has persisted. It doesn't matter wether the tape is copy-protected or not, for some reason it's not going through. Last I checked, the VCR worked fine on the TV.

So I'm guessing there's some sort of universal copy protection coming from either the Philips VCR or the ATI video card.

If it's the VCR, that would be an odd thing because the VCR knows when a tape is copy-protected and when it isn't. I don't see why it would make the distiction going from VCR to VCR but wouldn't make the distinction going from VCR to PC. A brief scan of the Internet found people mostly wanting to copy protected VHS tapes and getting confronted with a different sort of copy protection. Also, the method of distortion seems to differ between VCR-VCR and VCR-PC transfers. The former is a color distortion, mild vertical flipping, and almost completely muted sound. The latter just acts like it's not connected right.

If it's the video card, though, I don't understand why a copy-protected DVD would work, but an unprotected VHS tape wouldn't. I also imagine that if it was coming from them, it would refuse to play copy-protected DVDs the same way that it refuses to play copy-protected tapes. At the very least, it would stop me from recording it (like it proclaims to do).

It could be that I just have a bum video card with a weak connection. That is the only explanation I can come up with for the sound. The computer is an Athlon 3500 with 2GB of RAM. I'm hard-pressed to say that it can't handle streaming audio from a card that itself has 256MB of RAM. But while that may explain the audio, it doesn't explain the video.

If it's the VCR, then, I need to find a VCR that is not so aggressive with its copy protection that it will block even unprotected tapes. This line of hardware has been recommended by some. The VHS clarifier costs $70. The fact that I'm willing to spend $70 to get copies of tapes that I spent less than $50 should make it clear that this is not about money. The problem is that if the VCR is not the culprit, I've thrown that money away.

If it's the video card, then I need to know where in the process this is getting distorted. Maybe there's another program I can use to rip the video? Or that will process it better?

The last strange thing is the degree of distortion. The one that comes out the best (some distortion, but only in the top 1/10 of the screen) may or may not be copyrighted, but the one that comes out the worst (Jay's and my home movies) is certainly not copyrighted.

Here's a rundown:

Good

Title	Tape Quality	Import Quality
Second Civil War	Good	Top half of screen is in black and white and distorted.
Wings of Honneamise	Pretty Good	Top half of screen has distorted color and bends to the right.
They Might Be Giants: Direct from Brooklyn	Decent	Nothing is visible, though sound comes in decently.
Evangelion Death (fansub release)	Pretty good	Alternates between "as good as can be expected" to "Am I having an LSD trip now?", just like the movie. Except that it's not supposed to do that.
Stuff taped from TV	Watchable, but Not Good	You can't see anything.
Matchbox Twenty: Live from Australia	Good

I'm kinda at a loss as to what to do on this matter. Does anyone know anything about this subject that I apparently don't?

Last week in the New York Times, Joseph J. Ellis calls for a little perspective. 9/11, he says, was not a big deal in the grand scheme of things. And to an extent I honestly don't entirely disagree. It wasn't what 9/11 was that changed everything, but it was what it represented. It was what it could have been. It was what it will be in the future if we continued the course we were taking. In the greater scheme of things, Pearl Harbor wasn't a big deal. But it justifiably changed everything.

But that' s neither here nor there.

What I found interesting is that Mr. Perspective had this to say:

My list of precedents for the Patriot Act and government wiretapping of American citizens would include the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798, which allowed the federal government to close newspapers and deport foreigners during the "quasi-war" with France; the denial of habeas corpus during the Civil War, which permitted the pre-emptive arrest of suspected Southern sympathizers; the Red Scare of 1919, which emboldened the attorney general to round up leftist critics in the wake of the Russian Revolution; the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, which was justified on the grounds that their ancestry made them potential threats to national security; the McCarthy scare of the early 1950's, which used cold war anxieties to pursue a witch hunt against putative Communists in government, universities and the film industry.

On one hand we have wiretapping domestic/international calls to or from prospective terrorists, and on the other we have the rounding up of Japanese Americans and throwing them in to prisons. On one hand we are allowing the government to conduct investigations (involving subpoenas, searches, and warrants) without the suspects knowledge, and on the other we're allowing the government to shut down any and every newspaper that disagrees with our government's policy.

Whatever your views on the wiretapping (I've no problem with it) and the USA PATRIOT Act (I'm leaning more and more against its continuation), that's an questionable perspective on perspective.

As many of you know, the Canadians elected a new Prime Minister last week. The victorious Conservative Party is a somewhat recently combination of the Canadian Alliance and the Progressive Conservative Party (who were allied with the Democratic Representative Caucus, a group that left both the PCs and then the Alliance). The Canadian Reform Conservative Alliance itself was formed when disgruntled PCs and the Reform Party came together a few cycles back (as side note: their original name was going to be the Canadian Reform Alliance Party until someone looked at the initials). That's about how fractured the Canadian conservatives have been since being decimated in the early nineties by the Liberal Party that has held power ever since.

Of course, as many of you know, even their conservatives are either comparable to our Democrats are a bit to the left of them. Even so, one of the liabilities that the Canadian conservatives have to shake off is supporting their becoming too much like us. Canada is remarkably comfortable in its relative liberalism in many ways as a distinction against its southern neighbor. So the election of Stephen Harpor, the incoming Conservative Canadian Prime Minister, is a surprise in many regards.

What is perhaps more of a surprise is not only did they win nationally, but they also made a respectable showing in Quebec, where the party or its predecessor parties have barely been a blip on the radar:

In the dying days of the campaign, as the Conservatives' climb in Quebec became undeniable, a mystified Bloc Quebecois tried one, final shot. A full-page advertisement appeared in newspapers in eastern Quebec, declaring in huge print, "We will not let Calgary decide for Quebec." A black Stetson sat atop the word 'Calgary'. The message was clear: Beware Stephen Harper's Conservative cowboys.

Jacques Gourde, who raises beef cattle on his hay farm in Saint-Narcisse, about 40 kilometres south of Quebec City, was not amused. "You could say I'm a Quebec cowboy," said the Conservative who won the riding of Lotbiniere-Chutes-de-la-Chaudiere by more than 12,000 votes over the Bloc incumbent.

"I think that advertisement did more damage than good."

Election results tend to support his position: In the area targeted by the ad, the Conservatives won eight seats.

Both the Liberals and the Bloc tried to demonize the Tories, insisting the party's small-c conservatism was anathema to modern Quebec. "Mr. Harper's positions go against values that Quebecers defend," Paul Martin said. On election day, voters decided differently, giving the Tories 25% of the votes in Quebec compared with 21% for the Liberals. At 42%, the Bloc remained the most popular party, but well below their 50% target.

The Bloc is Quebec's homegrown nationalist party.

Several years ago, when Liberal Prime Minister Chrieten won his last term as the top dog, I happened to run across a Canadian Prime Ministerial debate on C-Span. What I found surprising was that the Bloc's leader, Gilles Duceppe, came across as more of a Republican than anything and more conservative anyone else on the stage besides Alliance Party nominee Stockwell Day (including Progressive Conservative Joe Clark, who came off like one of those northeastern Republicans that mostly sound like Democrats).

Duceppe was mostly concerned with crime. He was the only one on the stage that even made mention of traditional values. Federalism (or the Canadian equivalent) was unsurprisingly important to him. His economic program sounded pretty aggressive and populist, but outside that (and disregarding the multiculturalism that comes with representing the only French-speaking province in a generally English-speaking country) he sounded like a moderate Republican or conservative Democrat (with a French accent).

But from what I understand the Bloc almost always aligns with the Liberals. And the voters in Quebec see themselves as having more in common with (lowercase-L) liberals than (lowercase-C) conservatives. Majority politics is and will always be interesting for the alliances it creates. In the US it's the Free Marketeers with Religious Right and the urban seculars with generally religious minorities. Future generations will probably look at that as strangely as we do of the Democratic Party simultaneously housing JFK and George Wallace.