26 June 2010

Traffic drivers: June 21-25

  1. A Crown corporation by any other name
  2. China and CSIS:  the naive and sentimental writers
  3. Today in history (Meech Lake)
  4. The Spleen (Bill Rowe)
  5. Government of Newfoundland and Labrador Hiring Test (Communication Directors)
  6. Rowe book due this fall. Why?
  7. Public money in inflatable shelter company now hits $4 million in four years
  8. The Money Program
  9. Suns News?  Ya gotta be kidding.
  10. Government Talking Points:  the oil spill will never reach the shore edition

Bonus:  Spleen Audio! Here’s Bill in all his call-us interruptus glory.

This is what people in the blog business call a bizarre week.

Why bizarre?  Because an old post about Bill Rowe eclipsed the one posted fresh this week.

More on that way below, but other than that the traffic drivers were pretty straight forward.

Clearly people are interested enough in a company getting huge wads of public cash in a short time.  Three top posts this week relate to Dynamic Air Shelters.

Meech Lake grabbed a bit of attention even though the topic isn’t at all obvious in the headline.

China/CSIS and Sun News were popular national stories so that pretty much makes sense.  Undoubtedly more than a few people were surprised to learn the current administration in Newfoundland and Labrador had signed a pretty generous  memorandum of understanding in 2004 with a company they should have been more cautious about. Then again, this would be the first time they’ve blundered into something anyone with basic google skills could have warned them about.

The hiring test is clearly humourous.  Some people make have mistakenly thought from the headline it might be real.  Hopefully, they enjoyed the chuckle.

Posted late in the week, the oilspill quotes clearly hit a chord, just eclipsing a post about Dipper candidate in St. John’s South-Mount Pearl Ryan Cleary and the discrepancies in his story about why he left voice of the cabinet minister as its late night talk show host.

If the problem with VOCM was that Cleary wanted to spend more time with the family, being a member of parliament would be more incompatible with that goal than spending five nights a week yacking to the locals about whatever is on their sometimes less-than-sober minds.

Usually, it is a bad idea to draw attention to your own major shag-ups.  In this case it turned out to be a really, really idea for PAP as the smear attempt backfired big-time. Anyone who clicked through to BP clearly loved that Cleary post plus the old stuff about Billy Rowe. 

Double own-goal!

Just like the IRA bomb-maker in Belfast who liked to shift the nitrogen fertilizer around on his concrete garage floor using a metal shovel.

They never did find all of him, let alone the shovel or the garage or chunks of the backyard.

-srbp-