Tag: Non-partisan blog posts

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.

Nuclear Politics In Ottawa II

Update of Hilarious Consequence: haha-ahahaha-haha-(cough)-hahah-(cough, gasp, cough)-haha-(falls on floor, cough, wheeze)-haha-ha-ha…ha…

This is getting weirder. Apparently the loyal Harper-appointee who was not so well experienced quit so was used by other loyal-Harperites when the failings of Liberal-appointees were not, you know, sufficiently fail-y. And how do the Harper-ites use their own? Blame him!

Michael Burns told The Globe and Mail he submitted his resignation as chair of the Crown corporation on Nov. 29, before the medical isotope crisis stemming from the Chalk River shutdown became public. His departure was announced last Friday with no explanation, but was soon linked by a key cabinet minister to the Chalk River situation. “I was quite taken aback two weeks later when I heard my resignation had been accepted by the Prime Minister in the midst of the crisis,” Mr. Burns said.

Health Minister Tony Clement has since connected leadership changes at AECL, including the replacement of Mr. Burns, a Vancouver energy executive and onetime Tory fundraiser, as well as the appointment of a new CEO, with the need to give the organization better management. “Well, maybe they do [need better management],” Mr. Burns shot back. “But this is a clumsy piece of political opportunism. If they’re going to do it, they could do it with a little more skill.”

I am sure our rural overlords understand why this is someone else’s fault. That’s what makes having overlords so great.

When To Call In The Universal Postal Union

It’s all so sad – bad service, unfreeing regulation, poor neighbourliness and a very short memory:

The list of import duties listed on Industry Canada’s website is hundreds of pages long. The section governing just shoes, a popular online purchase, and other footwear is 15 pages long. The federal goods and services tax, at 6 per cent, and provincial sales tax, in Ontario 8 per cent, and any excise tax is added on top of whatever duty is charged. Then there’s the problem of clearing customs. Do you pay a private courier service, like UPS Canada, a customs brokerage fee, which can run between $20 and $70, to expedite it for your? Or do you ship through the postal service, which charges a flat $5 fee, but may take longer to deliver? Or do you avoid the fees altogether by making a trip to the customs office in Mississauga?

It would be interesting to find out the expenses related to maintaining all these nutty picky fees. I can’t imagine it pays for itself. And there is nothing prouder than a custom’s agent required to tell you that you owe $5.47. Don’t get me wrong. I pay. I pay or at least show all receipts every time. But sooner or later someone has to twig to the fact that the US dollar is going to rise again and the show will be on the other foot and also that what goes around comes around. Time for a new greater sort of universal postal union. Maybe call it free trade.

You can also take some comfort in the fact that it has been years since I have been charged that cursed $5 GST handling fee – usually charged by Canada Post when the GST being handled is 87 cents.

Group Project: Which Powers Do You Want To See Used?

Isn’t having a minority government that knows it will never get a majority neat? Aside from the image of a runaway train clattering towards the disaster of earning the label “arrogant” faster than any government in Canadian history, it is a real lesson in the actual division of powers within the Parliamentary system of democracy. Yesterday’s action was a classic:

Justice Minister Rob Nicholson said Tuesday he was powerless to block the impending extradition of Karlheinz Schreiber to Germany, even though Parliament’s main lawyer said he has the authority to amend the federal order. Lacking guarantees that Mr. Schreiber will be able to appear before a parliamentary probe, the Speaker of the House issued a rare “Speaker’s warrant” to force his appearance before MPs this week.

For a government that has made the insane choice to label itself as “clean” (never minding that everyone has skeletons) the prospect of the a very public and opposition controlled discussion of why Mulroney was brought back into favour and even why a letter to the Privy Council conveying bad news about said elder statesman did not into the hands of the pan-centric PMO is just delish.

The point is not that this may be all political maneuvering. It that all this political maneuvering is just turning out to be so gosh darn fun. So, as the wheels do or do not come off, whose power play do you want to see? The Liberals actually play their card and pull the rug on Parliament? Maybe a coalition going to see the GG and get anointed this ousting Mr. Grumpy? Perhaps the Supreme Court ordering that a Senate reorg get passed by the provinces for approval? What should it be?