NOTICE: this post discusses and assesses the testimony given by Mr. Bows, so, if any reader who is banned by the court from reading about Mr. Bow’s testimony until his own is finished comes across this post, they ought to leave this page right away in order not to breach the court’s order.
Day 1 part 1 and part 2 are here. (all previous caveats still apply, though I have temporarily borrowed a slightly better tech.)
Alternate account is here: day 1, day 2, day 3, day 4.
Day 3, Wednesday, was the ‘broken-up day’: Madam justice had a previous commitment for a 3 hour meeting smack dab in the middle of the day. So, the court was scheduled from 9:30 to 10:30, then a bit of a break, then again from 1:30 to 5:00. And, as I had commitments of my own which I had been neglecting due to the trial, I took the morning to try and get caught up on some of them. So, I missed the morning hour…
I was there for 1:30, ready to go! But, the most exciting thing to happen was that the bailiff announced that the courtroom clock had finally been fixed!!! It now actually displays the correct time….
After a bit of waiting, we learned that Madam justice had finished her meeting, but needed a bite to eat, so the court would not reconvene until 2 pm. Oh well…
At 2 pm, on the dot, the court reconvened. And, I had another little surprise: Dr. Baglow was not on the stand!
Could he have finished his testimony and been cross examined by 4 people in the span of the morning hour? Not quite…
Because the trial had originally been scheduled for 3 days only, that is how long Mr. Bow had planned to be away. In order to accommodate him, all the participants agreed to permit Dr. Baglow’s testimony to be interrupted in order to let Mr. Bow testify and be cross examined first.
Mr. James Edward Bow chose to swear on the Bible, then settled in to the witness box. In his dark grey suit, white shirt, striped tie, with understated wire-rim glasses complementing his dark hair and eyes, he looked handsome and dapper.
Aside: while talking about what people were wearing…Connie wore a fuchsia cardigan that was almost identical in colour to my own top, but mine was short sleeve, so all awkwardness was avoided! Sorry – humorous interlude over!
Mr. Bow testified that he lived in Kitchener, Ontario and worked as a freelance writer with a web designed business on the side. While he never had any formal training in web designed, he had worked for a number of tech companies in the 90’s and received a lot of on the job training. In 2005, when his daughter was born, he became a stay-at-home dad while doing the writing and web stuff on the side from home. As a stay-at-home mom who also blogs, I can relate!
When Mr. Bow testified that he had received his degree in Environmentalism, I began to seriously doubt Dr. Baglow’s sanity: is he really bringing a capital ‘E’ Environmentalist to try to support the veracity of a contentious claim? Really?!?!?
I had to work hard to suppress a bout of giggles: like ANYONE on EARTH would ever again believe a word that comes out of the mouth of an ‘E’nvironmentlist!!!
Disclosure – my background is physics, field of data acquisition and analysis…and I specialized in helping scientists/technologists avoid ‘conformational bias’…so, I find the modern ‘E’nvironmentalists particularly, well, how can I put this without being defamatory…’not up to snuff’ scientifically and having a very, very deep, perhaps un-bridgeable, credibility deficit.
In my never humble opinion, Mr. Bow’s testimony bore out the expectations one would have of an ‘E’nvironmentalist: lots of claims of technical expertise followed by ‘D’uh, I don’t know how to do that…’
To his credit, Mr. Bow tried very hard to support his friend, Dr. Baglow, but to anyone with an iota if IT knowledge, he simply did not come across as credible – to my never-humble-thinking.
He blamed Dr. Baglow for not updating the comments before they attempted to migrate them to the new platform (without explaining why they could not have simply gone through the steps of updating step by step by step…), completely forgetting that if they had both migrated the site to the new spot (for the hosting of which Mr. Bow got paid by Dr. Baglow) AND left the old site up, instead of shutting it down, the defendants in this case would not have been deprived of access to information essential to their defense. No amount of difficulties with migrating the comments over would have caused this damage had they not actively shut the old site down…
In another bit of testimony, Mr. Bow testified that it was Dr. Baglow’s decision to stop trying to recover the ‘lost’ comments, or he would have continued to look for ways of migrating them over. In my never-humble-opinion, this was Mr. Bow covering his rear end, making sure his incompetence did not get perceived as malice and shifting all responsibility for the ‘lost’ comments squarely onto Dr. Baglow.
At this point, my other-world duties pulled me out of the courtroom: I may have put off fixing my own broken (front) tooth till next week in order to attend the trial, but, I could not put such limitations on ‘my little one’ (OK, he’s taller than I am, but he will ALWAYS be ‘my little one’!!!) and I had to leave the courtroom in order to take HIM to the dentist…
When I left the courtroom in a rush, I found Dr. Baglow pacing nervously in front of the courtroom: by the judge’s order (and as per ‘normal’ practice, he was excluded from the courtroom while other witnesses for his side’ were ‘on the stand’). As we had exchanged pleasantries in the past few days, and as he had always been very civil towards me, I greeted him and had a little (though very hurried – I had stayed in the courtroom well into my time-margin).
During this exchange, he pointed out to me that I had indeed misunderstood the timing when he had joined the NDP. I had reported on this in Day 2: having heard that he had torn up his NDP membership card during Buffalo Bob’s reign, and the accusations that Bob Rae’s political opponents were motivated by anti-Semitism (since Mr. Rae’s wife is Jewish), I wanted to head off any potential smear campaign against Mr. Baglow due to the confluence of this. Yes, I pointed this out in my reporting – but, with sincere and honest statement of fact that I do NOT believe Dr. Baglow to be an anti-Semite – specifically to ward off any potential smear campaign.
Which is why I was very happy that Dr.Bglow corrected my error: he had actually joined the NDP because he had been inspired by Bob Rae’s electoral victory! And, as I understood (and reported), it was Mr. Rae’s subsequent policies that got him so disgusted, he ‘tore up his membership card’.
He accepted my assurance that my calling attention to this was an effort to ‘nip in the bud’ any smears – and appreciated it. I in turn, appreciated being corrected, because I would much rather be corrected in the short run and carry accurate information than be left in error!!!
I promised to correct in in the original post (I put the edit at the top, so anyone reading it will have the correction before getting to the erroneous bit, without hiding I had made an error), and I also promised to describe our conversation on ‘day 3’ to explain how the correction came about.
That was it for me for ‘day 3’ – days 4 and 5 are coming up as soon as I can type them up!
As always: if I have made any errors, if you can correct/add to this commentary, please do so and I’ll be glad to edit this post in order to add your comment!!!
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