Category: Uncategorized

The Last Friday Bullets Before February

Janufeb. The grey blur before the melt, made more grey those three out of four years without Olympic curling. It is the time when the Morton teeters, when show turns that other colour. We’ve seen the dark edge of the storm and even had double lake effect this week. I heard an ad for large screen TVs telling me how they bring the family together.

  • Australians should be scared of coming to Canada? What a load. I thought Australians were fearless of backpacking though third world gang zones blind drunk, spraying the combatants with obscenities and just emptied beer cans? Bleaters of the right will go on about the terrorist references but note this:

    “Heavy snowfalls and ice in the winter can make driving dangerous. The wind-chill factor can also create dangerously cold outdoor conditions. … The province of British Columbia in western Canada is in an active earthquake zone. Alberta and British Columbia are also subject to avalanches. … Tornadoes can occur in some areas of Canada between May and September. Bush and forest fires can occur any time in Canada.”

    Whimps! This is the real crisis and a funny one as we consider what terrorism and natural disasters really means to an Australian – no access to beer for a couple of days.

  • What happens if two pass too close and the lines tangle?
  • One point on the Manley Report that is important and telling in the brader context is a critique of the Government of One policy that we are living under these days:

    The panel members called the policy unhelpful and said it was undermining public support for the mission and presenting a skewed picture of why Canadian troops are being asked to put their lives on the line in Afghanistan. Chairman John Manley, a former foreign affairs minister, said the decision taken at the “centre” – in the Prime Minister’s Office or the Privy Council Office – to allow only the Defence Department to speak on the mission means Canadians are being told their young men and women are dying without being given “any context in which they can say this is why and this is meaningful and this is tragic but it’s worth it.”

    Leadership tells us why we need to do things, makes it compelling. Shutting up is the same as creating confusion. No wonder he gets treated the same way. Would you vote for Manley now? Who wouldn’t?

  • I haven’t watched tennis for years but maybe that will change now that the log jam has broken.
  • Rampant freeloadery and responsibility shiftery which can’t even get its act together on a 42 year timeline for achieving something!
  • The Economist puts it well:

    Mr Harper has been unable to do much more than survive. Respected for his competence, he has all the charisma of an automaton. “I thought that people needed time to get used to Mr Harper,” says Roger Gibbins of the Canada West Foundation, an Alberta-based think-tank. “But it’s turned out that to know Harper is not to love him.” That is especially true for women. Opinion polls show little change in allegiance since the last election—except for a brief moment of Conservative advance last autumn…This year is shaping up to be Mr Harper’s most difficult so far. But there is not yet any sign that the opposition will feel sufficiently emboldened to bring him down and trigger an election.

    So more of the Great White Yawn…except to Australians. Boo!

How long until The Beat Authority? How long until Darcey posts the Beer and Blues? Lord, how long?

It’s Like No One Really Want To Win This Race

Another day another come back kid:

Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor who ran as a son of Michigan though he left the state nearly 40 years ago, won a commanding victory Tuesday in the Republican primary here with a message aimed at voters deeply anxious about the state’s ailing economy. Mr. Romney defeated his principal rival, Senator John McCain of Arizona, by winning a clear plurality of Republicans and conservatives, who turned out in greater numbers than they had in the 2000 primary, which Mr. McCain won.

Now I am hopeing for Fred or Rudy in South Carolina. A new winner for every state, I say!

Ann Arbor went 9% for Kucinich. Watch out for Kucinich. He is coming on.

Friday Bullets? It’s The First Friday Bullets Of 2008!!

Iowa rocks. It’s a whole new reason to blog. Even though blogging is now like collecting 45s, most people having voted and having voted for the dreary contentlessness of Twitter and Facebook and stuff like that, by standing up in church halls and on basketball courts, the people of Iowa say no, they have listened to Oprah and Chuck Norris and shaken things up by introducing a little reality. To that end, a poem:

What you vote, what you vote today?
For Huckabee and Obammy.
A bad, bad day; who threw the money away?
Clinton and Mitt Romney-ee-ee.

Who writes lyrics on Iowa in the style of an Irish folk tune? Nobody, baby. Nobody.

  • Update: There is a European Vodka Alliance which champions Europe’s diverse vodka traditions. Who knew? Do they have summer jobs?
  • I am now excited for Michigan. By holding its primary on January 15th, it now stands weeks ahead of all other large states and after only the two traditional testing grounds of Iowa and New Hampshire. The Votemaster has his opinion up now and, because it’s unlinky, I will tell you he says it is still a race amongst Giuliani, Romney, and McCain for the GOP and Obama-Clinton for the Dems. Tiger, when not panicking theoretically, prefers following Real Clear Politics but that has none of the statistics theory chatter.
  • In other news, a little recollection of Canada’s role in crushing fascism showed up this week:

    He didn’t think much of it at the time, but as he drove home he considered the bag and its contents and assumed the flag might be the Union Jack. On further reflection, however, he recalled seeing black on the flag, a colour not found on the Union Jack. When he arrived home, he unfolded the flag and discovered it was not what he was expecting. In addition to the giant Nazi symbol that unfolded before him, the flag was signed by Canadian soldiers from the 2nd Anti-Tank Regiment that fought in Normandy in the Second World War. It lists various battles and the soldiers killed in action. A Lethbridge soldier also signed his name, although it is hard to read. Mr. Coburn realized he had found more than just a flag. “The hair stood up on the back of my neck.”

  • Once a pal of mine, with an evangelical bent, proved again for me that God had a great sense of humour by giving him both a telephone number and license plate with “666” in them. Apparently a whole town has had the same problem:

    A town in the US state of Louisiana is to be allowed to change its telephone prefix so that residents can avoid a number many associate with the Devil. Christians in Reeves have been unhappy since the early 1960s about being given the prefix, 666 – traditionally known as the Biblical “number of the beast”. For the next three months, households will be able to change the first three digits of their phone numbers to 749.

    What is “668”? The number of the neighbour of the beast – rimshot!

Busy week. Not really. But I need a weekend all the same. The Session tonight as well.

The Year Of The Infideleolympiad Is Here!

How fun! There’s more than just the Smoglympiad going on:

The Olympic Games’ ability to attract controversy is enjoying a new twist after China’s equivalent of Des Lynam was humiliated at a television ceremony by his wife storming onstage and accusing him of conducting an affair…As Zhang dithered, clearly uncertain as to whether to intervene or not, she began a simple appeal to the country’s sense of honour. “Today is a special day for The Olympics Channel, and it’s a special day for Zhang Bin, and it’s a special day for me too,” she said. In a particularly brave move, she quoted a French politician critical of the Games who said that if China’s “values” didn’t improve, they would have been for nothing. “That French foreign diplomat also said: until China is able to start exporting its values, it won’t be able to become a great power,” she said. “Yet Zhang Bin can’t even face up to his own hurt wife. I think China, to succeed as a great power… Don’t any of you have any conscience?! Let go of me! We’re very far from being a great country.”

I am reminded of my favorite guy and hope that this lady’s cheatastic husband is sufficiently important that she does not get a disappearing for her efforts.

Your Neanderthal Update

Was they we?

Modern humans may well have evolved from hardy Neanderthals who suffered through a dramatic cold spell that descended on Europe about 40,000 years ago, according to a new study that throws another coal into the already heated scientific debate about our origins. The report, published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, disagrees with the widely held belief that humans’ early ancestors came in waves out of Africa to overwhelm the separate and distinct Neanderthal populations of Europe.

We heatedly discussed the prospect of the working out of Neanderthal DNA back in Nov. 2006. This new study relates to the number of narrow-skulled voles found near Neanderthal sites. I am all a giggle over this news but the question remains – what will this do to the putative humour of the GEICO ads? Is it not now much the same as saying “So easy a Hittite could do it”?

The Best of 2007: My Year Interacting With Stuff

Stuff becomes me: I like it and I assimilate it. Every year I think that the stuff I was introduced to was the best stuff and then more stuff comes along and I realize that that is pretty damn good, too. Here is the best stuff of 2007:

  • Pear Juice: pear juice from South Africa in particular. Sounds like a real big whoop but pears are that stealth food that pervades our lives without having all the pushiness of apples or the fear engendering pits of plums, peaches or apricots. Wilde 100% pure pear juice from South Africa is also politically correct and fairly cheap. I never thought that the blackcurrent juices of Poland could be unseated as the juice of the future but there you have it. Life constantly surprises.
  • Sean Kingston: first noticed due to the vaguely menacing joke single “Beautiful Girls”, this Jamaican teen pulls off calypso Zep while saying “girl” just like Bob or maybe Shaggy or maybe Peter. “Shorty” has been added to the vocabulary. “Take You There” plays on winter-get-away package jingles with “Trench Town”.
  • My bench and canoe: really this “best of” is just a celebration of US shopping but the 400 bucks the canoe and bench cost collectively stunned even me, an avid border crosser.
  • BBQ: once again proving that techniques from 57,483 BC still rule, scotched and smoked meats lead the way. Best new ‘que? Smoking extra pork shoulder roasts which are then sliced thin and frozen for mid-winter sangwhichies. Next year? Dropping the wood shavings for solid apple wood blocks.

Not the fanciest stuff nor the most rare to be sure but, really, doesn’t stuff need to be available, reasonable and useful?

The Friday Bullet Points Of Christmas

Here we are. Another Christmas is upon us and the worst Friday for the idle clock watcher. What to not do when there may not be much to actually do? Eat candy canes in the morning, feel ill and ridden with guilt in the afternoon.

  • Sad Tech Update: Twitter as best bloggy app thingie of the year? Worth having the italicized statement that it “matters“?? While it is sweet to read that some people believe that some others don’t “get it” when, in fact, something just sucks and/or sucks time, how it is possible to think that something as useless (if usable) Twitter “matters”? Love matters. Health matters. Twitter is a place on the web for people who cannot sustain sufficient attention to write, comment upon or even read a blog. The content-driven internet without the obligation of substance. Warning: thought-fraud is afoot. Look out for consultants. Observation: Snood was the last great addition to the world of computing.
  • Update: David updates his post on Catholic rights and I respond sorta thusly with less than success technically speaking so I repeat myself:

    As much as to make sure I comment here as anything, Catholic rights seems a very odd concept to me but, as you will say, it is there plain as plain can be and most likely it is the lack of relation to me that makes me scratch my head. These rights are like PEI being a province, a fact of positive law making it so regardless of the need. But unlike PEI, Catholic rights now seem unbalanced as they are not balancing against their former nemisis – Victorian era Protestant power. Left to its devices, PEI would become Anticosti – but would Rome in Canada fall so easily? In the secularized Canada, is it not the faithful against the materialist shallow Hitchenites as much as the violent puritanical terrorist hijackers whether of Oklahoma City or 9/11? But could there be general Christian rights to state funding, to acceptance as a minority? If not, can Catholic rights (surely now a sub-set homogenous within the whole of the shrinking Canadian patch of Christendom) be anything other than a historic quirk locked into our Constitution? This is not to be anti-Catholic so much as contemporaneously contextual, something admittedly the constitution and perhaps the Church cares little for.

  • Speaking of the workplace, is boredom the natural outcome of the technological miracle of the last 40 years? Not only have we not received out jetpacks, we have not entered into that leisure society that was promised as someone has to answer the phone – or at least record their voice mail message – every single day.
  • Are they morphing into one? Pete Roger Rose-Clemens? Is Schilling that nutty?
  • From meany-pants to Mr. Drip. Please oh please can we be given an effective Federal opposition communications campaign under the tree this year?
  • Wow – doing the right thing actually is a heck of a lot less painful than doing the wrong thing.
  • Rejoice! Now there is more Europe for neocons to crap on. The most successful economic and social experiment since WWII is taking in the poor and making them kings. What will this mean for the dirt poor guy on the bus in Poland who looked at me like I was from outer space when I was there in 1991 teaching in a small Baltic city, when bootlegged western shampoo that smelled like a flower instead of industrial effluent was just showing up in the market?

That’s it for now. Someone has to get to work to wait for the Yule buffet to begin.