Your Friday Bullets For The Last Lingering Cold

It has been a late spring, hasn’t it? I put out the squash and tomatoes this week but only half of them… maybe less. You never know if it is going to be in the 70s or the 30s this week. But I think that is over. We have the best dandelions on the block. Always do. Has something to do with the push mower I think. Not sufficiently black hole like in its capacities. But I do not apologize. I am not like Mitt in that respect. Unlike our stumping skills where we are one. This weekend may be dedicated to whipper snipping.

♦ Good for my old home Kings and good for us all that the selling of citizenships on PEI will now be properly investigated.

♦ Is this bad or good? I would have to know what the other applicants asked for. Who got bumped. But at the Federal level we never learn these things.

Sloppiness. That is what I say about a lot of things, too.

♦ A great depression has fallen upon Red Sox nation. Why. Apparently they have decided to continue to suck. Time for the mega trade that should have happened last February.

Is that all there is? For a tra-la it’s May Friday do you really need more?

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It’s The Bestest Christmas Present Ever!!!

I love when a dictator dies. Sadly, as with today’s death of the North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, sometimes it isn’t when surrounded by your subjects who are filling your body with bullets. But, nonetheless, ding dong the witch is dead. The British keep an oddly stiff upper lip:

Speaking today the Foreign Secretary, William Hague, said: “The people of N Korea are in official mourning after the death of Kim Jong Il. We understand this is a difficult time for them. “This could be a turning point for North Korea. We hope that their new leadership will recognise that engagement with the international community offers the best prospect of improving the lives of ordinary North Korean people.”

Difficult time? Difficult time??? The man who is nuts is dead. He fed his people juche and grass and ignorance and gulags. We only have hints of how bad it is. Now he is in Hell. Good.

At least there is hope. It’s not like Canada’s secret mission in 2006 was going to be a real breakthrough. Maybe these people can now get a chance to enjoy their lives.

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English-Speaking Atheists Lose Their Columnist Saint

I can’t say that I am particularly struck by the loss of Christopher Hitchens but its in the same way that I was not moved by the death of Steve Jobs. Like Jobs, Hitchens was something of a presentation of himself – not a bad thing in itself but it does distract from whether the output was as valuable as claimed. That being said, David Frum has an excellent memorial to the man in the National Post that captures bits of his appeal:

As the event broke up, a crowd of questioners formed around him. I created a diversion thinking it would help him escape for some needed rest. But Christopher declined the offer. He stood with them, as tired as I was, but ready to adjourn to a nearby bar and converse with total strangers till the bars closed. Hitchens was not one of those romantics who fetishized “dialogue.” Far from suffering fools gladly, he delighted in making fools suffer. When he heard that another friend, a professor, had a habit of seducing female students in his writing seminars, he shook his head pityingly. “It’s not worth it. Afterward, you have to read their short stories.”

Frum called him “a man of moral clarity.” I would have thought “amoral” or perhaps ethical was more the proper word. The man he most reminded me of was Mencken. Both had that sort of rhetorical skill that aligned well with their failure to actually meaningfully participate in anything that added to the public good. Both were keen observers and skilled reporters. The sort of person who can tell you what a poor job someone, anyone, yourself even has done but would not actually engage with the doing themselves. Both were famous drinkers.

I am sure that we benefit somewhat from these columnists, folk who can sharply report on the human condition. But they never really get to anything of value as to the why of it all. They have their own belief system which is immune to denting and judge all from that place on the orb with skill, charisma and something of an ultimate pointlessness. Humans already know life is hard and confused, that our leaders make many bad calls. Directing us to that obvious state of affairs, however insightfully or entertainingly, is not the stuff of heroes.

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Friday Bullets For The Weekend Of Opening Day!

Screw the election. It’s fine as far as those things get you but the affairs of man bow to the affairs of life, the cycle of the seasons. The Giants and Dodgers were on last evening and LA took it in a one nothing game. Sad is life that we needs five months without baseball so that the other seven months can frame all meaning. I am also off to NCPR today to answer phones and deliver fabulous prizes. Again, there may be snow. My favorite single day off of the year and not just because of the trip to the grocery afterwards to buy things we are denied in Canada.

  • Its session day and I am hosting. Not sure my topic is any good but the early responses are interesting.
  • Coalition fret? Bow-ring. Glad it died an early death. At least I hope it has died off.
  • By the way, the day the working man calls a hot dog “Liberal food” is a very good day for Iggy and a very bad day for the conservative movement generally.
  • Ships seldom find themselves in the wrong place as much as they used to. Captains must have been clumsier in the past.
  • Wish your April away, TV boy. You know you will. “ooh-WEEE-oooo. WEE-ooo-wooo.”
  • Is April Fool’s just a prank? I haven’t pranked for years. If I should take it back up again, let me know. Told the boy he was late for church this morning. Got a “Dad, it’s Friday” from underneath a pile of pillows. My prank skills are definitely gone.

That’s it. The road beckons. The Session beckons. The 2011 season does, too. It’s going to be alright.

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The Barenaked Witness Statement

I sometimes wonder why Canadian news media report on the reporting of things. So often the CBC or major papers go out and find out what person X thinks about or can explain about what happened to person Y. There is a level of abstraction that isn’t the case elsewhere. As you likely know, I watch local Watertown NY news in the morning – initially for a better sense of the weather and now for all those fun police reports. It’s amazing how much pre-conviction detail is set out for the public, servicing as both information about the workings of the court justice system as well as a conduit for that oft stated goal of justice, general deterrence.

The arrest of Barenaked Ladies singer Stephen Page in nearby Fayetteville, NY, an easter suburb of Syracuse, is a good case in point. The Globe and Mail include excerpts from the statement given by Page’s girlfriend’s roommate while The Star gives only a summary. Syracuse’s Post Standard, however, has a far fuller and more detailed account:

Ford’s statement to police provides the following account: The two women walked to the bar about 10 p.m. About 11 p.m., Page showed up. “After about 30 minutes, Steven and Christine got into a huge fight because Christine was flirting with another guy. Steven left the bar and I followed him back to the apartment,” Ford told police. Page said that he was going back to Canada, but Ford was concerned because Page had been drinking. Back at the apartment, Page lay down on the grass and Ford sat on him so he couldn’t drive away. “While we were on the front lawn, Christine showed up and started yelling at me not to take Steven’s side. I’m not sure how it happened but Christine ended up with Steven’s keys and drove away in his car leaving hers in the middle of the driveway,” Ford said. Page and Ford went inside the home. Eventually, Ford found Page at the kitchen table with a bottle that said “calcium” and contained capsules with white powder, but the rest of the label was in French. “There was a pile of white powdery substance on the table, near one of the capsules,” Ford said. “There was a Canadian bill on the table which Steven rolled up and we used it to snort the white powder. “We never discussed what the white powder was but I thought it was cocaine,” she said.

What have we learned? The abstraction of celebrity and perhaps a measure of national embarrassment, things I think may be fueling the abstraction in the Canadian press, are not there. But neither is the unspoken menace. It’s a pretty banal scene and the participants appear co-operative. People are trying to do the right thing, keeping the incapable off the road, while doing the wrong thing. The comments to the Syracuse news article are interesting as well.

This may well be a more serious matter than we are learning about in Canada. The are articles about how the business of the band will be affected, a matter Canadian media is somewhat invested in given all the spin-off radio and TV shows the band have generated. Is that projecting an actual Canadian cultural point of view? The view from Fayetteville Village Court is likely less engaged in that respect. And look at this opinion piece from 2007 about sentencing inequality in New York – a ten gram possession appears to attract years of incarceration, though this snippet may indicate months. This may be a far more serious matter than we are being told.

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Friday Bullets Celebrating The Defeat of The Spammers

Rejoice! The war is won!

You may have noticed that there has been spam recently. The move to Recapture has apparently attracted a band of manual spammers who focus on sites who use it. Spiteful bitter Romanians for the most part. Anyway, this site’s admin also allows me to customize the spam filter quite easily and yesterday I thought that I would try filtering “URL” and “a href” – the tools used to create a link of any sort. I realized only spammers link. Hans has been posting here for four years and still can’t link. And even if you do, it will just be hidden until I check. Rejoice! Rejoice!!!

  • Timekilling Update: Death from above via John Gushue.
  • Asteriskman Update: A good commentary on SI about the indictment of Bonds. I guess we don’t have to worry about whether he shows up when the ball goes into Cooperstown.
  • I should find a copy of The Cult of the Amateur – a book setting out how stunned the infiltration of Web 2.0 mentality has made us all. Here is a screaming example from Metafilter. Can you believe someone is still citing the Cluetrain Manifesto? How many times can Dan Rather get fires in the minds of dopes with bandwidth?
  • As Mohammad is to Denmark, so too are nudy Royals to Spain…except the enemy is within.
  • We are entering Senate reform season again despite “vehement objections from some provinces which insisted the chamber can’t be reformed without their consent.” It is beyond me how it is possible to provide for such change without the provinces. I pray every night for an application to be made from PEI to the Supreme Court of Canada demanding a say if anyone touches their four seats. Because if you can shift the Senate seats without consent, the Feds should be able to shift the four seats in the House of Commons.
  • If killing a cat is a crime, is stealing virtual furniture?
  • I no longer watch much NHL hockey. In part it is the strike but in part it is also that I am a Leafs fan. Damian Cox in the Star neatly summed up the Leafs this week:

    A 22 per cent return on investment can buy you a lot of things, apparently, but just not a soul or a sense of professional pride. And just think: Ontario’s teachers own the majority share.

    Good dig at the elementary school teachers, Coxy.

That’s enough for now. You’ve had a few weeks off the bullets and need to reintegrate slowly. The bends can be hellish.

Up By Three With Five To Go

There is a certain type of jockeying going on to be sure. Joe Torre does not put Kyle Farnsworth in the game the Yanks end up losing in extra innings (best call of the night after the bottom of the ninth, all tied up: “Free Baseball!”) if he is not sure the greater good is being served. But was it? Tampa, which has been inordinately – actually unbelievably – strong since the first of August…won.

Meanwhile, the Sox smoked a disinterested Oakland. Shilling threw a good six innings. Youk is back and Manny is back.

Tacos Are Easier Than BBQ

I made my own fresh tomato salsa yesterday. Just ripe tomato, lime, onion, cilantro and…was there anything else? In fact I made a whole Canadian-Mexican feed for 12 (even though there were only five of us) in about 45 minutes. This is nutty and may have to be explored more. I don’t know if it was a life filled with Dora and Diego or the Taco Bell ads but one kid insisted we had to have tacos this weekend and I obliged. When they want BBQ, the marinade gets started the night before.

I suppose now I have to spend the winter going through Rick Bayless’s books…or maybe just getting it for free off the interweb.

Update: and they are good for breakfast, too. Reminds me a lot of eating Lebanese food in the 80s care of my pal’s mom teaching us all the way of kibbe, mishi, falafel, babaganoush and tabouli. Heck, I used to make my own Syrian flatbreads. Life before kids. Nothing like a big table spread and time to chow down. We Scots? Innards. Nothing but mammal guts. Quite different thing all together.

While we are at it – fresh figs. Bought a flat from the ever excellent Produce Town, Joe’s Figs of California for $6.99. Joe, sadly, has no website. Figs go with coffee. What other fruit does that? Yet figs are not fruit. You know that, right? In fact, figs and beer are closely related.

But What About the Surfers?

Shocking news at the lack of consideration being paid to surfers in the face of a new apparently perfect energy generation project off Cornwall England:

The Wave Hub – a seafloor “socket”, will connect wave energy machines to the mainland. The proposed power station will involve up to 20 sets of machines, with pumps, pistons and turbines, about 10 miles (16km) out to sea off St Ives Bay, generating electricity for 14,000 homes.

There was some objection to the scheme among surfers who were worried the farm would reduce wave height on the beaches.

Oh. My. God. The inhumanity of it all. Anyway, I wonder how common these sorts of things might become before I kick off. You look at all the efforts to capture energy coming off the air movements above the Great Lakes, for example, but there must be far more that might be done with the power of the water itself. Less surfer backlash as well.

Soviet Bombers

Much in the news about the Soviet era bombers again floating around international airspace. Apparently all that windfall oil revenue that is floating into Alberta is also floating into Russia – mention that next time a Calgarian gives you the lecture on the moralnomic superiority of western Canadians – allowing them to spend spend spend on expeditions to claim the Arctic, on joint military exercises with China and send out the long-range bombers. Excellent. So 1975. A reminder that there are scarier things than wingnuts with dirty bombs.

As a lad near the Greenwood air force base, the local military newspaper (was it called The Argus after the submarine hunter?) often had close up pictures on the front page of the Soviet bomber crews waving to their Canadian escorts on the front page. There is even a Russia-Canada hockey series this fall – note all Canadian games are played out west. Expect the minders and “cultural officials” to be taking note of oil well infrastructure locations.