A dual US/Canadian citizen, his career goes back to before he had a role on the quintessential Canadian TV show, The King of Kensington (he missed The Beachcombers). 

Jiam Gomeshi of CBC Radio One’s Q interviewed him in February of this year.

Of course, even if his name means nothing to you, you’ll recognize him from the roles he’s had in movies like Dances with Wolves, Whale Music, Entrapment or The Sweet Hereafter.

I was pleased to hear him mention — along with Whale Music — one of my favourite films among his favourites, too: the Diane Keaton-directed Unstrung Heroes, starring Andie MacDowell, John Turturro, Michael Richards and Nathan Watt.

61 is awfully young.

[edited for formatting; added title & image]

Boy, he covers a lot of ground in this 6-minute bit, but he speaks the truth.

Black Dub w/ Daniel Lanois: The Birth of Bellavista Nights from Daniel Lanois on Vimeo.

Sadly, the purchase option on BlackDub.net seems not to be working. Hopefully Lanois will recover fully from his motorcycle accident soon.

• May 7, 2010 — Wired kicks things off with “Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative”. Best lines:
  

  Facebook thinks that your notions of privacy — meaning your ability to control information about yourself — are just plain old-fashioned. Head honcho Zuckerberg told a live audience in January that Facebook is simply responding to changes in privacy mores, not changing them — a convenient, but frankly untrue, statement… In Facebook’s view, everything (save perhaps your e-mail address) should be public. Funny too about that e-mail address, for Facebook would prefer you to use its e-mail–like system that censors the messages sent between users….

  I’d like to make my friend list private. Cannot.

  I’d like to have my profile visible only to my friends, not my boss. Cannot.

  I’d like to support an anti-abortion group without my mother or the world knowing. Cannot.

• “Facebook Executive Answers Reader Questions” — The New York Times publishes Elliot Schrage’s answers to readers’ questions about Facebook privacy (Schrage is vp for public policy at Facebook).
• May 11 — I deactivate my Facebook account.
• Why I’ve (re)joined the 6,400,000,000 people who aren’t on Facebook, my post explaining my reasons for deactivating my Facebook account.
• The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook — an infographic showing changes over time in Facebook’s privacy settings.
• Leo Laporte publically leaves Facebook. (But he likes Google Buzz, so what does he know?
• “Facebook Privacy: A Bewildering Tangle of Options”, The New York Times publishes an infographic depicting Facebook’s Byzantine configuration options. Money quote: “Everything is opt-in on Facebook”; in the limited sense that if you opt-in to Facebook at all, then it’s open season on you and your privacy, in other words. The mind boggles. (I especially liked John Gruber’s response to this article: “Or you can manage it my way, by never having signed up for it.”)
• Diaspora, an open, distributed (vaporware) alternative to Facebook gets a lot of attention and some funding for their project. Keep an eye on this one.
• Facebook and “radical transparency” (a rant) by danah boyd of apophenia. Favorite quote:
  

  What I find most fascinating in all of the discussions of transparency is the lack of transparency by Facebook itself.

  Boyd puts her finger on Facebook’s core issue, for me:
  

  A while back, I was talking with a teenage girl about her privacy settings and noticed that she had made lots of content available to friends-of-friends. I asked her if she made her content available to her mother. She responded with, “of course not!” I had noticed that she had listed her aunt as a friend of hers and so I surfed with her to her aunt’s page and pointed out that her mother was a friend of her aunt, thus a friend-of-a-friend. She was horrified. It had never dawned on her that her mother might be included in that grouping.

  If too many people come to this realization, Facebook’s in serious trouble.

• TidBITs, the venerable Mac-focused tech journal, publishes “How to Protect Your Privacy from Facebook”
• “‘Firestorm of anger’ hits Facebook after EU condemns privacy policy”. Opening paragraph:
  

  A friend of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg asked him, back in 2004, after the 19-year-old had casually mentioned in an online conversation that 4,000 people had uploaded their personal information to his fledgling website: “How did you manage that?” He typed back: “They just submitted it. I don’t know why. They ‘trust me’,” then indiscreetly described them as “dumbfucks”.

• A bookmarklet that can scan your Facebook account’s privacy settings is launched.
• quitfacebookday.com launches.
• From Facebook, answering privacy concerns with new settings, Mark Zuckerberg’s Washington Post op-ed in which he says he’s sorry. He also writes to Scoble.
• Adopted children face anguish as birth parents stalk them on Facebook — in case anyone doubts that people have good reasons to care about their privacy.
• Tim O’Reilly’s “My Contrarian Stance on Facebook and Privacy” — he’s willing to give Facebook a chance, for now.
• Macworld Quit Facebook Day was a success even as it flopped | Security

Put me down as unimpressed.

It has been suggested that Facebook will be regulated, and that might make everything okay. The oil industry is regulated; how’s that working out?

I don’t actually expect Facebook to make any serious, long-term improvements to privacy. It’s in their members’ interest for them to do so, but it opposes their own financial interests. Guess which will win? I don’t expect many people will abandon their accounts over this, either. It has long been shown that people don’t value their privacy, and Facebook knows this.

Seriously. I’m out.

Wired has an article on Facebook privacy that articulates a number of my reasons.

Fundamentally, I think people are missing the big picture with regard to online services such as those offered by companies like Google or Facebook. Yes, they offer services, and those services have value.

And while they might be free, they also have a cost. Whether or not they’re worth the cost is a decision you have to make for yourself.

Facebook, like Google, makes its money selling advertising, and the more they know about the users of their services, the more they can charge for their ads.

The members are the product. (Marshall McLuhan would love it.)

This isn’t my idea (I’ve forgotten where I came across it now), but it’s a powerful one. It explains fully why (Facebook founder) Zuckerberg has zero interest in protecting anyone’s privacy.

His best interests are directly at odds with his site’s members’.

For me, Facebook became more nuisance than it was worth when I started wasting more and more of my time trying to locate settings that would allow me to opt-out of whatever it was that they’d just decided everyone on the planet needed to know about me that they have previously allowed me to share only with Friends.

Enough.

That’s why I’m out.

People talk dismissively about Twitter, about how insignificant it is since it only has an estimated 100 million users* compared to Facebook’s 400 million.

How many hundred million “friends” does any one person need?

The last straw was how Facebook taunted me by telling me that my friends were going to miss me, and how none of them would be able to contact me any more. Unbelievable arrogance.

Count me in with the 6.4 billion people who aren’t on Facebook.

11 pm Update: The New York Times interview with Elliot Schrage, vice president for public policy at Facebook, underscores my reasons: Facebook is opt-in, he claims, because if you’re a member, you’ve opted-in for whatever the hell they decide. No, thanks.

11:07 pm update: NY Times’ Facebook privacy infographic: “A Bewildering Tangle of Options”. Via DaringFireball.net. [Also added "Privacy" tag.]

Hitchens dissects the best-known commandments (there are, of course, far more than the top-10 that they teach in Sunday school) and proposes 10 new ones (begins at 6:16):

1. Do not condemn people on the basis of their ethnicity or their colour.
2. Do not ever even think about using people as private property or as owned or as slaves.
3. Despise those who use violence — or the threat of it — in a sexual relationship.
4. Hide your face and weep if you dare to harm a child.
5. Do not condemn people for their in-born nature. (Why would god create so many homosexuals only in order to torture and destroy them?)
6. Be aware that you, too, are an animal and dependent on the web of nature; try to think and act accordingly.
7. Don’t imagine that you can escape judgement if you rob people with a false prospectus rather than with a knife.
8. Turn off that fucking cell phone (you can have no idea how unimportant your call is to us).
9. Denounce all jihadists and crusaders for what they are: psychopathic criminals with ugly delusions and terrible sexual repressions.
10. Be willing to renounce any god or any faith if any holy commandments should contradict any of the above.

I don’t know if this qualifies as dumb, exactly, but it was wrong and it has stuck with me for a long time.

When I was in second grade, I noticed the moon up in the sky as I was walking to school in the morning, probably around 8:45 am.

With a child’s knowledge of astronomy, that didn’t fit with what I thought I knew — that the sun was up in the daytime and the moon only came out at night.

Excited by my ‘discovery’, I told my second-grade teacher about it when I got to class, and she proceeded to tell me — in front of everyone — that I was wrong and that everyone knew the moon only came out at night.

I was 7. I wasn’t a rebel, and I wasn’t about to tell her to look out the window. I was taught that teachers were authority figures, and that they were to be respected.

Looking back on it, I suppose she was just a kid herself; probably new to teaching, overwhelmed by having 30-some 6- & 7-year-olds to deal with, maybe not enough time for coffee that day, and who-knows-what kinds of problems outside of the classroom, but the way she dismissed me out-of-hand was wrong.

While it may have seemed like an easy way to deal with a question that didn’t line up with the day’s lesson plan, or maybe made her feel insecure about her lack of astronomy knowledge (I have lectured in introductory astronomy at the undergraduate level — trust me, even most educated people have a very limited grasp of astronomy), it was wrong.

She no doubt forgot it immediately, if not sooner. It was more than 30 years ago and I remember it like it was yesterday.

It wasn’t a crushing humiliation; I wasn’t scarred by it. I don’t remember the other kids teasing me about it or even mentioning it.

‘Teachers pretend to know more than they do’ was the most important thing I learned in second grade, though. I guess she did me a big favour.

I believe that if, at the end of it all, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this, and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.”

—Roger Ebert

Via John Gruber’s Daring Fireball.

Wow. Just wow. It’s hard to believe people would do something like this.