Work, Life and Blogging

Thanks to those of you who wrote me or commented here about my absence from blogging, its nice to be loved.

I have been away from blogging for two months now due to work and life changes. During June when I last posted, I was busy with work commitments especially around training and teaching.

I was elected President of the Edmonton Branch of the Association of United Ukrainian Canadians, and thus this has taken up much of my time as we celebrate our 90th Anniversary and look forward to making ourselves a prescence in the progressive community once again. Our hall is being used again by the progressive community after several years of inactivity.

I was also elected to Chair the Gaia Gathering, the Canadian National Pagan Conference, which will be holding its fifth annual conference in 2009 in Vancouver with the theme Left Coat Paganism's.

Finally I was involved in organizing this years PanFest which took up much of my time as Programming and Events coordinator.

Because of these commitments I have not had the urge to blog as much about local, national or world events. It doesn't mean I haven't had anything to say, rather I did not feel the urge or urgency to blog.

However I will be blogging on an occasional basis and will probably return to more regular writing by the end of summer.

Oh yes and I should mention that with the nice weather we have had I have been enjoying my backyard and garden. Beer in hand, reading interesting books and listening to music.

Work and life trump blogging.

"Love, work and knowledge are the well-springs of our life. They should also govern it."

- Wilhelm Reich

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1

5000 Posts

As of March I have officially passed 5000 blog posts. Whoa. 5023 blog posts since I began blogging back in November 2004. Pop the champagne and read on.

Of course that's just my blogspot count. Originally I had three blogs when I started, the other two defunct blogs, Red Between The Lines and Heresiology, can be found in the side bar. Total blog posts would then be closer to 6000.

And I of course also blog over at the Carnival of Anarchy.

So again even more Plawiuk pontifications.

Which began on the web way back in 1997.




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I Won, I Won.

See what happens when you don't pay attention someone springs an award on ya. I got nominated in various categories in the unofficial 2007 Blogging Dippers Awards. And I won the award for best Labour Blog.

Aw Shucks. Guess this blog is union made; 'I'm stickin with the union.'

The One Big Union, that is.













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Lefty Blog Awards

Engaged Spectator has launched the First Annual Canadian Lefty Awards.

The Lefty’s 2007

Nominations in progress.Go to sidebar click on “Nominations 2007″ then submit your nominations.

Accepting nominations ;June 11 - July 14

All participating _Cnd Blogger’s_ in the first annual Canadian Lefty Blog Awards get a chance at a draw for $100.

Whether the $100 bucks will be in Canadian Tire money has yet to be revealed.


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I Thunk It

I must say thank you to Politics n Poetry and Werner Patels who nominated me for a Thinking Blog Award. And so as this is a meme I will now nominate my five favorite blogs that make me think.

The participation rules are simple:

1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think,

2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme,

3. Optional: Proudly display the ‘Thinking Blogger Award’ with a link to the post that you wrote (There is an alternative silver version if gold doesn’t fit your blog).

These will be shameless plugs for folks who I consider kindred spirits.

1. Larry Gambone, my old pal who publishes Porcupine Blog, and is a long time anarchist activist. Larry represents the ideals of Proudhon and the mutualist traditions in Anarchism, voluntary cooperation, self management, and is a fellow pantheist.

2. Pat Murtagh, another old anarchist pal who publishes Molly's Blog under the pseudonym of Molly's Mews. He is decidedly not a fellow heathen, but that can be forgiven since he is critical of scientific fundamentalism as he is of religious fundamentalism. And I like the fact he does a weekly round up on his blog.

3.BigCityLib Strikes Back who shares with me a fascination with cryptozoology.

4. Mike over at Rational Reasons, because he comments here, and because his blog should be read by more folks, who think you can't be libertarian and support the NDP.

5. Idealistic Pragmatist a fellow Redmontonian and anonymous female blogger, whose commentary on fellow bloggers and political news is always worth reading.


There you go, I could add more, but the meme says five. So thats what ya get, a high five guys.

On to you.


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Carnival of Socialism 13

So, following from that drum roll, the topic for the 13th Carnival of Socialism is "Why is the left obsessed with the Middle East?". Deadline will be February 24th 2007. You therefore have a fortnight folks - contributions to Shiraz Socialist or by email to voltaire_reincarnate@lycos.com





See
Carnival of Socialism

Carnivals


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enMasse

Came across the alternative to Babble at Rabble.....still going strong with a blog and discussion forum.

Q:

How did enMasse come to be?

A:

Well... you'd better take a seat... Where to begin? EnMasse came into being after Audra Williams, the moderator of the babble discussion forums at rabble.ca was fired by the Management Committee by e-mail during a series of life crises. Audra was an extremely well-liked moderator and was largely responsible for the creation of babble at the time of the Quebec City protests in 2001 and for its success until April of 2006, when she was summarily fired. After firing Audra, the Management Committee proceded to adopt an extremely hardnosed attitude towards her and towards outraged members of the community, of which there were many. The Management Committee refused to negotiate and some members of the community began actively spamming the discussion forum in an effort to secure Audra's re-instatement. At the same time as the spamming of the discussion forums, a movement for a "strike" against babble developed, largely led by the babbler with the handle Kevin Laddle. The strikers refused to post to babble until Audra was re-instated. The "Babble Strike" movement grew and on April 10, 2006, a new discussion forum was created on a server paid for by The JF. This forum was initially known as the Babble Strike Forum (BSF). In the first two days over 150 babblers left to join the BSF. At first the BSF was used as a forum to debate the response to the actions of the rabble.ca Management Committee and to debate the possible future of the BSF as an independent progressive discussion forum. As it became increasingly clear that the rabble.ca Management Committee would never agree to the re-instatement of Audra or any of the accountability and democracy reforms demanded by the babble strikers, a consensus developed to forge ahead with the creation of a new progressive space on the internet. At that time, the site was re-named "Temporary Left Wing Board" while a decision was made regarding the naming of the site. On April 28th of 2006, only eighteen days after the site's founding, the name "enMasse," often shortened to EM, was chosen by a significant margin in a vote of the membership. EM has suffered through growing pains and several unfortunate and painful divisions among the membership leading to the departure of a significant number of members. However, as of September 2006 seems to be on a steady footing and is a thriving and vital community.

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