Tag: Web, Blogging and Computers

Friday Bullets For Yet Another New Year

Why do we moan about another birthday but not New Years? Consider the alternative. It’s me and the cat this week and I have been inordinately busy. The electrician has been in. The stash now has a light switch thanks to the electricians coming in on Wednesday. One wall has one coat of light sandy old paper sort of colour instead.of a grey plummy tone that looked like great auntie’s lipstick. I changed the furnace filter. I bought a toilet flap. I need to watch it. Handy is not a word associated with me.

♦ Paying a consultant to edit wikipedia to remove bad things people say is a bad business strategy.

♦ These new stats lead me to ask… what if Mr. Harper is not the economic wizz he admits he is?

♦ “…she’s upright…”

♦ What did you learn from Iowa? Can you even name the states that border Iowa?

♦ My in-laws are looking much better all of a sudden.

There. Caught up with the week. Tonight I strike a greater blow against plummy lipsticked walls. Viva! Viva!!!

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Some Weekender Bullety Points For Yulesight

Yulesight. You can see the holidays coming but you are not quite connected emotionally yet. It was an interesting week. I was slagged in the British media. Beer magazine columnist with a chip on his tiny shoulders. Wrote a complaint to the publisher whose response was that they did not feel, that I in fact had been called a Nazi sympathizer. They did remove the article from the web but you can see it in Google cache all the same. Other than that, it snowed for the first time this winter.

♦

Love the Starbucks coffee cup. We may not be the 1% but we do like 1% partly skimmed milk foam.

♦ The caribou were right where they were told they would be.

♦ EU officials apparently had declared that you could not claim water helped with dehydration: “The euro is burning, the EU is falling apart and yet here they are: highly-paid, highly-pensioned officials worrying about the obvious qualities of water…”

♦ Sadly, more than enough bad to go around.

♦ Hey – there’s another bit of Canada’s national administration being dumped by the Feds – immigration policy: “While other provinces have fully embraced their provincial constitutional responsibility of selecting immigrants … Ontario has effectively abdicated its ability to engage in the immigration dossier in a serious way.”

There. Weekend. Scooby-Doo on the TV. Bailey’s in the coffee.

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Friday Bullets For Canada Day And The Fourth

I have been waiting for this arrangement of holidays for years. We are off today so I got up at the crack of 10:15 am. The authorities have noticed. I should mow the lawn, too, but it is stinking hot. I haven’t even been out yet and I know that. Then we roam. Looking forward to the Rochester branch of Dino BBQ as well as the Museum of Play.

  • • On the one hand, there should not be a political penalty for being a practicing Christian. On the other, lying is a sin.
  • • Ben found it! My post with the goofy pictures of Harper that the Grits tried to use against him in the last election. Gold!!!
  • • I know nothing about YouTube channels but was really interested to find that the UK’s Open University has adopted the tool.
  • • No one – and I mean noooooooo one – told me that in 2008 an asteroid slammed into Sudan lighting up the night sky.
  • • I heard an amazing stat this week – that 10% of all CD sales in 2011 so far were Adele’s. Which means, yes, there are taxes to be paid.
  • • I need to make my own skittles. The neighbour gave me a whack of apple tree logs last year which I was going to use for smoking meat but now I am making massive skittles out of them instead. I will only need a cheese to fling at them.

Off I go. Maybe to mow. I have a red t-short on that says “Maryland.” I hope that counts.

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What To Write About Now That There’s A Majority?

I have been writing this thing for over eight years now and, except for the beer stuff, it’s been largely driven by the facts and opinions surrounding the weakness of the Federal government. Way back then Paul Martin killed off the Liberal Party by slow drip poison starting almost a decade ago by dividing the party against Chretien and Harper declared the corpse cold with last week’s election. So, what to write about now? Doctor Who for starters. Just look at this statement today from the show’s top executive, Steven Moffat:

It’s heart-breaking in a way, because you try and tell a story, and stories depend on surprise, stories depend on shocking people, stories are the moments you didn’t see coming – those are what live in you and burn in you forever. If you are denied those, it’s vandalism. To have some twit who came to a press launch write up a story in the worst, most ham-fisted English you can imagine and put it on the Internet … I just hope that guy never watches my show again, because that’s a horrific thing to do. It is exactly like that boring man in the pub, who waits until you’re nearly finished your joke and jumps in with the punchline, and gets it slightly wrong. You hate that guy, you just hate those guys too – can you imagine how much I hate them? … It’s only fans who do this – or they call themselves fans – I wish they could go and be fans of something else!

What a bizarre thing to say. “My show”? “Vandals”? “Go and be fans of something else”? There is, of course, an underlying problem causing the need to discuss the show this year as it become more and more under Moffat’s control. It makes no sense. I made this point over at James Bow’s blog. James has sensibly been writing about centrist politics and pop culture for longer than I have – and done a far better job. I know. I have let the team down, falling into that trap of believing that Twitter and Facebook have made blogging irrelevant. Sure no one reads this stuff anymore but is that any reason to pack it in?

Anyway, less about me and more about Moffat. People are starting to compare the show with that disaster of the post-9/11 culture, Lost. Moffat seems to think convoluted is a fix all replacement for clever. Sadly, this is mostly the case with not only the long arc of the story he controls but the scripts he personally assigns to himself and the new characters he introduces. Most embarrassing is this thing “The Silence” which seems to feed Moffat’s need to one up the Daleks as the main baddies all time. But they make no sense. Other characters must have run into them over the past 48 years. Other baddies must be subservient to them. Oh, but all forget that they have seen them one they turn away… that’s a great fix. Hopefully, there is a Dallas solution at the end of this and the foreshadowed “it was all a dream” scenario plays out.

Confusion plus a general shift in all underlying premises developed over a 48 year run of a TV show. Yawn. Self-indulgence. A return to the slow death of the John Nathan-Turner years as far as I can tell. That was the last time someone decided to remake the show and move it from a fun relatively easily resolved romp.

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Day 17: Thank Heavens The Word “Illegal” Was Removed

Yesterday watching Twitter election 2011 flow by was one of the most bizarre things I have ever witnessed in politics.

Idle yapping about Iggy’s wife citizenship suddenly breaks for the announcement that a confidential draft of the Auditor General’s report on the G8 has been leaked and is out there and, apparently, Sheila Fraser says the Government “misled” Parliament and did “illegal” stuff. Journalists freak. After lunch, Tory pointy-shouty man John Baird comes out and says he has a later draft and misled and illegal aren’t in there so it’s all OK…. and the Liberals are evil [… even though the Grits have nothing to do with anything… OK, he never said the Liberals were evil.] Then, astoundingly, the super secret report draft is handed over by Baird to the press… and the Toronto Sun publishes it including this:

2.20 – For example, we looked for selection documentation for the Huntsville G8 Centre (Community Recreation Complex $16.7 million) and expansion (Facility for Waterloo University $9.75 million), which were constructed for the Summit but, ultimately, not used as announcedc The Centre was intended to be a facility to coordinate overall logistics for the event and serve as an’ accreditation hub to vet thousands of people attending the event. We found that when the announcement for this project was made in February 2009, DFAIT had determined the centre would not be suitable because it was not expected to be completed in time. …

2.22 – In our view, the manner in which the G8 Legacy Infrastructure Fund was presented did not make clear to Parliament the full nature of the request. By including the request under the item “Funding for the Border Infrastructure Fund relating to investments in infrastructure to reduce border congestion” government did not clearly or transparently identify the nature of the request for funding, that is, G8 infrastructure project spending.

So, the riding of a member of Cabinet gets a multi-million dollar G8 facility known at the time to not be needed for the purpose of the G8, Parliament is told its a project which is part of the reduction of border congestion and the fact that Fraser comes out and tells people not to draw conclusions based on a draft makes all the journalists shake their heads at each other and tell themselves they rushed to judgment? Then it turns out the Tories twisted her words in another report and the news flow moves on…

That has got to be the weirdest thing I have ever seen in Canadian politics. Tories still 8.5% up on Grits and the debates start tonight. Oh, and I got offered to blog for the rest of the election for a major national news outlet just like back in 2005/06. But I was supposed to do it without pay. I trust you are proud of me turning it down.

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Friday Bullets For A Heat Wave And The Heat

I watched Lebron. Then I didn’t. Yawn. Going to The Heat. Yawn. Stay in Cleveland? Jump up and down saying “Cleveland Rocks!” and bring out Drew Carey to sing “Cleveland Rocks!” with you and then promise to make something big happen in your home state and screw big cities and screw big money and look in the camera and say “I am the greatest” invoking Ali himself…. that’s what you do when you call a personal hour long press conference live on TV. Going to the Heat? Yawn. Burn baby burn.

  • Hey, I Like This Gig Update: new Tory Senators suddenly not backing Harper’s Senate reform.
  • Jack Hughes Update: Cavs owner goes absolutely MENTAL over Lebron’s decision.
  • Spy Swap!!! I don’t really care that much except that it is fun to write “Spy Swap!!!” I so knew that Flea’s cake candidate Anna Chapman was Anna Kushchenko. I did. I just didn’t tell you.
  • This is a fun web toy to play with at work today … until you remember that it describes out the history of nuclear testing.
  • Will the US catch up to Canada on same sex marriage? Isn’t that so 2004?
  • You know you have been suckered by the seduction of mobile internet when you actually think you can walk around France streaming a radio station from Alberta for free.
  • How do you “challenge” the plain words of the constitution?

Out into the oven again today. Thanks God I got that deep long and restful sleep.

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Friday Bullets For World Cup Starts Today!

It’s now been a few years since I played soccer. Last World Cup I was all still in the, you know, idea that me and – like – slide tackling was… errr… not stupid. I thought that it was very healthy to have rolled ankles, sprained kneed, black and blue shins not to mention aches and pains. Not just aches. Aches and pains. Fortunately, I have embraced non-fitba member me since then. I’ve found a life after exhaustion, hot baths and aspirins all weekend. And looking like a bee. It’s a great game, though.

  • France and Uruguay this afternoon. I have always liked Uruguay and not just because of the abundance of the letter “u” in the name. Blues v. Blues. Hope the blue team wins.
  • “6 Ways To Overcome Social Media Burnout“? Doesn’t it start with not being a nerd when you are six?
  • Nigel Barley?
  • Canada Posts bans dog treats. Bite, doggie, bite… but aim for management.
  • Someone doesn’t like “food bloggers with their wankerish little digicameras”! And it’s that most useless of creatures – a newspaper food critic. Remember: those who cant’ complain a lot and do their best to keep available funds to themselves.
  • New UK PM apparently is having a hard look at Jean Chretien’s masterful decision to take a stand eighteen or so against deficits. Will he seek Steve’s advice as to how Jean did it?

Wish good luck for South Africa. I have cousins there, grew up in a boycott house, have a great pal who was in the Army and then got away before the changes, lived in towns with Boer War monuments. We should be closer.

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The Friday Bullets For Hints Of Spring

Ah, a whole work week has come and gone without any Olympics buggering up the TV. We have other things to think about… apparently. Some think we have little on our minds but I think the nation stands for more than that. Me, I stand for a shot at getting out the Weber char-bee-que tomorrow and basking in plus six sunny weather. Heck, the Red Sox are already 3-0 for the pre-season.

  • Why do my peeps need a hypnotist at a job fair? Why, peeps, why?
  • So what do you call a big government conservative who is not that aggressive over deficits and, yet, not all that progressive?
  • Can you believe that the UK’s governing and perhaps spent Labour party has almost crept back into a tie with their version of the Tories? They haven’t been ahead for two and a half years.
  • Life as bad ugly science fiction.
  • “…if it weren’t for liberal snobbishness, we wouldn’t have civil rights, women’s suffrage, unemployment insurance, public education, Medicare, child labor laws, and the “weekend” – amen.
  • What is social deconstruction?
  • Sad that our forefathers did not share our taste and didn’t have more money to make something grander. Heritage, after all, is all about wealth.

Is that it? What will happen in the next 7 days. It gets very exciting, doesn’t it. Maybe I will go for a walk. Fantastic.

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Friday Bullets For The Beginning Of The Orgy

And so it begins. An embarrassing manufactured jingoistic spend-fest. Imagine the regret in March, the bills, the questions as to whether all the bronze medals and seventh to seventeenth place finishes were worth it. But then it will be spring, there will be baseball, representational democracy will be returned to us and we can get back to ignoring the good of the nation in favour of our petty regional and political interests. Teams I am backing? Canadian hockey (who’s kidding who?), Norwegian cross country (great sweaters), Latvian everything else (plucky and maroon). Name your real favorite teams in the comments. Five extra points for your list of Olympic sports that are not real sports. Me? I’d trade real wooden toboggan races down the downhill ski run for aerial ski flips and twists. Team snowball, too.

  • What an odd speech. Interesting to see the Great Chilly One needed to have the “very well” in thanking people for a job very well done so he could be reminded to actual attempt human contact at that point in the presentation. For someone who has spent most of his life undermining the national identity, it’s fun to watch him choke out a call to patriotism. I have no idea what he means by it but good to see him try.
  • The culture of casual hate framed in a cartoon.
  • If the Mohawk were Amish or another conservative community no one would care much. Yet it is quite the thing to be reminded that the mini-mall world of Olympic-style cultural identify is not the only game in town.
  • Ben, at yet another site, gets the difference between blogging journalists and political leadership. But does anyone really believe the GOP is working hard behind the scenes to create program alternatives that fulfill the wish that “All Americans should receive the same tax benefit as those who are insured through work, whether through a tax credit or other means”? I love all non tax based health care being described as “other means”.
  • Another moment of the “new Canadian pride“: “They have a magnetic component in their sled that does something. It’d be nice to have that investigated.” Something. Something?? Now there’s a stand to take.
  • China fears cyber attacks (cyber attacks!!!) as Iran hones it skills at turning off the internet. In the future when the Iranians keep us from gathering on Fridays, do have a kind thought for me.

That is it. I am off for an eight hour drive today. What fun.

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