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Well, sometimes there just isn’t quite enough fuel in the tank…and that’s what happened to Westdale tonight. They dropped a tough decision to Sarnia Northern in the bronze medal game at the OFSAA tournament. The final score was 45-40. That brings their season to a close on a bit of a sour note, losing two games in a row. But once the tears have dried, the girls will be able to look back at a very successful year.

In the bronze medal game, Westdale ended up losing three starters with five fouls each in the fourth quarter, and they just didn’t have enough juice to overcome a late game deficit. They were leading at the half by four points, but a 6-0 run by Sarnia to start the third sealed the game, as it turned out. Oh well…it was a great season.

Kelly continued her impressive performance. She had a great tournament, proving that she belongs at this level. She gave consistently strong defence when asked to step in and I expect she’ll be one of the leaders next year. So that’s it for basketball for now…back to rowing.

Of course, Kelly being Kelly, one sport at a time isn’t nearly enough. As well as being busy every day with rowing, Kelly will also be playing on Westdale’s senior girls’ volleyball team! So perhaps another OFSAA tournament is in the works in about three months time?

Well, it was a tough game, but Kelly’s basketball team, the Westdale Warriors, came up just short in this morning’s semi-final game at the OFSAA tournament. They lost 47-37 to top-ranked St. Thomas Moore, also from Hamilton.

So that means they’ll be playing for a bronze medal tonight at 6 pm against the loser of the other semi-final between the third Hamilton team in the tournament, St. Mary’s and Sarnia’s Northern Collegiate.

It’s been a great tournament. But today, Westdale was a little flat in the opening minutes, giving STM the early lead they needed. While Westdale outplayed STM in the second half, they couldn’t score and take advantage of STM’s mistakes. So that 10 point early lead held up right to the end.

Tonight’s game should be good one, as Westdale has got something to prove to its fans. They could have beat STM if they had played the way they did Friday night. So I’m hoping that’s the team that shows up tonight.

Since so many of you seemed to like the Proud Papa stuff for rowing, I thought I’d add one today for Kelly’s Basketball. Kelly’s team, Westdale, from Hamilton, is in the Ontario Senior Girls’ AAAA championships this weekend. The OFSAA tournament is being held this year in Hamilton. As of right now, Kelly’s team is 2-0, and doing all right.

They play tonight at 7 pm in the quarter-finals, and now the games are getting really tough. The quality of the play is exceptional and there are no easy wins from here on. It’s sudden death all the way. The link above will take you to the scoreboard page of the tournament, which they’re keeping fairly up-to-date.

Kelly is having a great tournament. She’s playing a solid back-up centre role and her defense has been extraordinary. It’s a real treat to watch the games. Too bad they weren’t being broadcast, so I could tape them and pass them along to some of you. But I’ll try to keep you up-to-date over the weekend on how things are going.

The quarter-finals are tonight (Friday) at 7 pm. Then the semi’s are at 10 am Saturday, and the Gold and Bronze medal games are Saturday night. Let’s keep our fingers crossed!

FRIDAY NIGHT UPDATE — Westdale won! They beat a very strong Toronto Etobicoke team with an inspired surge in the first half to catch up, then pass the Gators. And once again, Kelly came off the bench with strong support at the centre position. In the second half, they held on to lead at 3 quarters, and pull it off in the fourth. The final score was 74-66, thanks to some great foul shooting. They play the semi’s Saturday at 10 am!

Are we taking this whole President’s visit thing too seriously? I mean really, he’s just coming to chat. And yet our security forces have created the largest security operation in our history (according to one news report) to protect one man. Hmmm…Does anyone deserve that?

The CBC is doing an interesting item all day today. This link will take you to a blog from Ottawa reporter Paddy Moore, who’s walking around Ottawa with a blackberry and a camera phone, filing constantly. It’s kind of interesting, although he seems to always be struggling to find a decent place to see what’s going on. Not too exciting, but worth a look.

I guess I should be more excited about all this, but somehow, it just seems like so much nonsense. Sort of a case of everyone taking themselves way too seriously. I can’t help but compare what’s going on today to what is happening in Kiev. There, thousands of people are milling about, with police virtually nowhere to be seen.

Speaking of Kiev, Salon.com has an interesting item comparing the way that election fraud is treated in Ukraine with what’s happened in Ohio. Take a look.

The Globe and Mail’s Stephanie Nolen wrote about the plight of women in the Congo last weekend. I wanted to provide a link to her story, but the Globe now has a paid subscriber policy, and this article is now only available to those with “Insider Edition” subscriptions. I don’t have that…nor, I suspect, do many of you. What a shame, because Nolen’s story is worth reading.

Nolen is an astonishing reporter. Her work from Africa has been without peer in the Canadian media, at least, as far as I am aware of. And her newspaper, the G&M, deserves praise for funding her activities. Her travels around Africa, and most recently, the Middle East, are always interesting. In fact, the whole Globe foreign correspondents group deserves kudos.

Anyway, Nolen’s articles on the travesties that have befallen the Congo in the last decade are sobering reading. If there is a hell on earth, this would appear to be a good candidate. What has been done to the citizens there during the seven-year civil war, and in the months since a “peace” deal was reached…words fail me. Especially the horrors inflicted on the women. Nolen’s brave reporting is without embellishment. She wraps up the truth and delivers it in clear, precise tones. You are left as the reader to form your own judgements. I can only imagine the personal hardships that she has gone through to interview her subjects. She hints at it occasionally, but never dwells on it. Yet it must be an amazing story on its own. I hope she tells it one day in more detail.

While the first story is no longer available in the free edition, the second and third of her four part series are on the website. (I’m not sure how long these links will be active.)

Well…perhaps not just for the holidays. The CBC in Saskatchewan puts out a package of card each year, with the images supplied by their loyal listeners. Here’s the link to this year’s version.

Disclosure note: I was one of the esteemed judges this year, and I’m happy to say that all of my picks made it into the final 12. As you’ll see, the range of photos was pretty impressive. And be sure to check out the rest of them. There’s pages and pages of really interesting stuff, all contributed by listeners of the Morning Edition in Saskatchewan.

One interesting thing I noted was how few of the pictures had any people in them. Seems like Sask people really like that big sky country, and they’re sure in love with the landscape. For all those Ontario folks who ask me what’s so attractive about my home province, I think I’ll just point them to this picture gallery.

I’m sure you saw the story last week about the U.S. Marine who shot an unarmed Iraqi in Falujah. It caused a lot of commentary from both pro- and anti-war types. But here’s a story that you probably haven’t seen or heard. This is the story of what happened that day in the mosque, told by Kevin Sites. He is the reporter who filmed the incident. It’s told in his personal blog, in the form of a letter to the Marines he was with that day.

Since the story came out, Sites has been painted as a crusading anti-war activist, implying that his decision to release the tape was the wrong one. Listening to him talk about the conflicting emotions the story raises is instructive. It’s also a vivid example of the stress that war reporters are under every day.

Read it yourself. It’s instructive. In war, there are no easy answers to complex questions.

Usability guru Jacob Nielson has some interesting thoughts on where the Internet is taking society. He calls it “Undoing the Industrial Revolution.”

Nielson is one of my favourite writers about the Web and all things to do with it. He’s been at the forefront of many of the design revolutions that have turned the medium into the useful one it is today. I find his arguments interesting, provocative and sometimes “way out there.” But his record speaks for itself.

At any rate, my new business is one of the ones that he’s talking about. And I like to think that I’m staying at the forefront of things…even if my day-to-day experience makes me wonder sometimes…

I’ve always been a bit ambivalent about dangerous dog laws. On the one hand, I do agree they’re necessary. There are dogs out there that shouldn’t be allowed. But how do you decide? One breed might be bad, but individually, some dogs might be worse than others. On the other hand, any time the state wants to arbitrarily make a decision that infringes on people’s rights — censorship, obscenity, morality, etc. — my instinctive reaction is caution. I don’t trust those kinds of judgements.

Last week, we had another attack by a pit bull here in Hamilton. Fortunately, no one died, but a little boy and his mother were seriously hurt. It’s lending fuel to the Ontario government’s efforts to ban pit bulls. So this article by Jon Katz in Slate is timely. He looks at the issues of dangerous dogs in his usual, considered fashion and ends up in a place that might surprise people who know him.

As an owner of two large dogs, I know how tough it can be these days to find places to walk them without worrying about how others will react. Not only do I have to keep an eye on them to make sure I don’t miss any of their daily droppings (lovingly collected in my little plastic bags) I also have to avoid having them run over to “greet” other dogs and people in the park. I never know how people will react.

Things would be a lot easier if the dog park was closer. There’s one in Burlington, but it takes 20 minutes to drive there. Here in Hamilton, we’ve got baseball diamonds and soccer pitches coming out of the ying yang, but let your dog run free on one of thse and the bylaw guys show up in a heartbeat to slap you with a $100 ticket. It doesn’t seem fair somehow…and it’s making criminals out of a lot of dog owners.

I’ve been looking at some stuff on-line that extolls the benefits of speed. High speed. Whether it’s information or inventory or your connection to the Internet, speed is good, and faster is better. No argument there, right?

Well…I’ve got to pause for a second to consider this. I am a proponent of high speed communications. But I don’t know whether faster is always better. I’m also a bit of a fan of the new “Slow” movements that have sprung up, dealing with food, mostly, but also life in general. I know I’m a big fan of the slow pace in Mexico that I experienced last year. But on the other hand, I love the speed of modern communications. I like being able to instant message my daughter at university and chat in real time. Heck, we could even have visual links, if we had a camera.

This post doesn’t have a point, or a resolution. It’s just something to consider. Here’s” a story from Fast Company that extolls the virtues and the wonders of Dell’s zero tolerance for inventory. They build 80,000 computers a day, yet they often have as little as 2 hours worth of inventory on hand. It’s interesting.

For another take at the benefits of speed, consider this Wired News story about bloggers making no apologies for running things that conventional media didn’t want to touch. This issue concerns the US election, and the fact that some bloggers started running exit poll information on election day. As it turns out, the information wasn’t right…leading to some interesting results.

I point to these stories because they both centre on speed and raise the question of whether it’s always a good thing. As an editor, I know the value of letting a story or a report sit for a bit, before I give it that final once-over. I usually find something that needs some work. But in today’s work place, that’s a luxury that most of us don’t have. Of course, some will argue that I can always go on-line and correct something that turns out to be wrong. But what about the people who look at it before that? How will they know that I’ve changed my mind, or that some of the information they read, and perhaps copied, forwarded, or printed, is wrong?

No answers today…just grist for the mill. Comments?