Author: Alan

Logo-a-Go-Go

Apparently the British Tories have chosen a new logo and are getting a bad reaction causing them to have to deny “any resemblance to communist iconography”.

I think they would be lucky to get away with communist iconography as at least that would be like a political party – it really looks to me like someone with a burning sambuca at a toga party. Why is the naked arm reaching through a small motorcycle tire? Why is the candlestick upside down?

My Ivan

Pray for the land of good BBQ.

It is looking like Ivan is not going to take off into the north just dumping it all right there. Consider New Orleans which is in bits about 6.5 feet under sea level and is facing a sea wall of raised water of 10 to 15 feet above sea level to be followed by a flood of all the collected rain down the Mississippi river to where the city sits at the mouth. On top of the battering surf…besides that it will rain there…and 135 mile an hour sustained winds. And the center of the storm is missing it. Heading for Mobile, Alabama.

The highest winds during Juan in Halifax last year was just 158 km or under 100 miles an hour.

Keeper

The annual tournament was today. Held every year in honour of a local soccer star who passed too early, eight teams from Toronto to Chelsea, Quebec in the 35 and older category showed for two pools of three games each. I was picked as our keeper. We scored 1-1, 2-0 and then lost 0-5. Funny enough, the last was the best. While those who know me know I am big and slightly glacial, I actually managed a few honest to goodness tips over the bar as well as two real cracked shot toe saves…and also got to scream instructions to everyone on on the field – call me “Aliver Kahn”. The last game was against Chelsea, Quebec and saw a few fists flying, a red card for a punch in the face, and us down to ten men fairly early on. But it was great fun.

I have a great friend who in his youth was a great rugby player in a great rugby nation. Once, while we were playing pick-up soccer, he shared that he never told us truly who he was, told about his skill in that other football and that once a stadium of 60,000 chanted his name in a national level contest. Today, after I made each save in the 0-5 game, the beer tent of the team that was in the 1-1 game cheered. It was my small slice version of my pal’s greater fame. It was good.

Serious and Nutty

I know it is all deadly serious whether the CBS memos about Bush are fake or not but I think it is hilarious when any major news item attracts this kind of reporting:

Some former engineers who worked in the typewriter division said they were not aware of a standard typewriter that could have produced the Killian documents because the superscript letters in question were so rare. Robert A. Rahenkamp, a former I.B.M. manager who wrote a scholarly history on its typewriters for a company journal in 1981, said, “I’m not aware that we had any superscript technologies back in those days” on standard proportional space typewriters. Bill Glennon, a technology consultant in New York who worked for I.B.M. in Midtown Manhattan for 14 years and repaired typewriters throughout that time, said that the Executive had proportional spacing and that its typebar could be fitted with superscript characters. Documents from the period show the Air Force tested the Selectric Composer as early as April 1969. But spokesmen for the National Guard and Texas Air National Guard said it was impossible to trace the machines that Colonel Killian’s unit, the 111th Fighter Intercept Squadron, or any unit, used so long ago. Mark Allen, chief of the external media division of the National Guard Bureau public affairs office, said there was no way to reconstruct the equipment or whether Colonel Killian typed the memos or had a clerk type them.

“…the Air Force tested the Selectric Composer as early as April 1969” – Classic.   I am so glad that the US general election, the vote for who gets the nuclear bomb codes, is going to turn on the fact of whether the IBM Selectric Compostor model was in the Texas Air National Guard’s secretarial pool or not.  War, deficit, character of the candidates – nah, who needs to consider that stuff.