Category: Uncategorized

512 MB

Care of Best Buy and 65 bucks US, we can now take 831 1.2 MB photos with our digital camera.  That is 1/2 of the memory on the hard drive of my last computer – sure I bought it in 1996 but it cost 3,000 bucks so I thought I would squeeze it for everything it was worth.   Memory is like air now.

What am I going to take a 22 minute movie of anyway.

Mailbox Money

I recalled this morning, reading about the sponsorship inquiry from a certain distance…because I am down here…that twice in my young and fawn-like life I have actually heard about the same sort of thing happening from the horses mouths except it was money arriving from provincial governments – “the program without a name”.    But without the taint of the kickback, I suppose.  Or perhaps there is a difference between a kickback and a long-term relationship.  Dues served and all that.  Intergenerational patronage kind of thing.

Why do I have this suspicion that these guys either just did it so badly or they just got caught?

April In Portland

Isn’t there a movie where Maurice Chevalier sings about Maine’s industrial seaport?

Anyway, hitting the road for a week to eat marine life and boo the Yankees. So the mantraps have been set and the pride of lions released from their cages at our house. I have never taken more than a long weekend in the spring and certainly never gone south in the winter – being albino between the freckles it is a bit pointless – so I am looking forward to some version of that beach life even if a bit chillier. Beach.

Update: for my pal Michael – this is a mantrap.

Update #2: [Some road notes that you probably do not need to care much about.] As sweet a six hour drives as you would want with little people to Holyoke MA and the Holiday Inn: 401 to I-81 to NYS Thruway to Mass Turnpike to I-91.   We were here before and I will pay for a little time passing since refurbishment as long as there is a good indoor pool. Ninety-nine bucks.   The Mohawk Valley is quite a something and around Little Falls there steep incline in the highway for six miles that makes me wonder about those poor saps that actually built the Erie Canal.  WRVO Oswego NPR is audible from Kingston to halfway between Utica and Albany – 350 km or so.  I bought some instant grits to bring home even though AA Gill described it as something like the throw-up of someone else’s child.   Also Friendly’s never disappoints and never surprises.  If you think sugar is a poison you probably should not go.  Not that there is much sugar but I’d have to put up listening to you bitch about everything else as I ate a few booths over.

First Post-Gomery Poll

The Ipsos-Reid firm has released the first polling since it has been revealed that the Federal Liberals are, well, not quite recalling what is “theirs” and and what is “ours” in terms of money. [Maybe they just listened to Raffi’s children’s song “It’s Mine But You Can Have Some” one too many times.] Anyway, the poll results are astonishing…almost explosive:

The survey found that if an election were held tomorrow, 34 per cent of decided voters would vote for the Liberals, down three percentage points since February 2005, when Ipsos-Reid conducted its last poll. Thirty per cent would vote for the Conservative Party and 15 per cent would vote for the NDP. In the June 28, 2004 election, Liberals received about 37 per cent of the popular vote, while Conservatives took about 30 per cent and the NDP about 16 per cent…The greatest shift regionally was seen in Alberta. There, the Conservative Party has seen a 14 percentage point shift in its popularity, to 57 per cent, while the Liberals have seen a 16-point drop, to just 13 per cent.

So the Tories finally hold a difference-settling policy convention while the media is on fire with the fact that the government is playing light with the books…and the Tories pick up exactly – not – one – voter. This is pathetic and they should be as embarrassed as Liberals by these figures. The funniest thing is that it does not matter if Alberta shifts from the Liberals as if every seat is one by 100% conservative vote they will still have only pretty much all the seats.

The rest of us really must have clear recollections of Mulroney.

Speaking of…Well…

I never knew that cheese was that difficult.

Just to be clear, when last across the border I bought this…for someone else…someone who has begged me (then threatened me ever so subtly) not to reveal his name. He later admitted on a recent trip he had bought four cans for his own needs. So it was left to us. Children tried it once. Then it sat for a couple of weeks and I thought I would try it. Sort of a lighter Cheese Wizz meets aerosol – more like cheese wazz all in all.

Note: It’s been kind of downhill since the green pants.

One More Day Closer to Deadwood


New Englanders in Iraq bowling candlepin

I am taking a week off this spring. There is a Boston wedding to attend which will be fun but that is at the end of the week. First, we are off to the Gulf of Maine coast in search of friends and family and a good amount of candlepin bowling. Ontario teases you with five pin as well as Freddie Flintson big ball ten pin but I grew up with candlepin – played only in Atlantic Canada and New England. Whatever I play, I score pins in my head one point at a time like candlepin – like I measure distance in feet rather than metric. It is fair and equitable every pin being meaningful. I do not, however, throw a ball like the Friday night Brookfield Elks softball pitchers of my 1980-ish teens at the Beazley Lanes near little T.O.’s Fletchers Restaurant and the old Crappy Tire. They might as well have been throwing fastball, ball bouncing once on the wood before hitting the pins well off the floor. Pins in the gutter and, half the time, into the next lane. You can’t do that with Freddy Flinston big ball. First time I played Freddieball with Jim from Newfie after passing the bar we hit strike after strike. Like shooting fish in a bucket. You also leave the pins where they fall, leaving you to deal with them through the second and third balls. No sweeping machine delay. You can hit the deadwood among half the others still standing and miss them all, guided by those down to the gutter. Cruel mistress the deadwood. Gotta learn to play the deadwood.

The game dates from the 1880s, when a shipment of narrow pins – later widened to two inches wide – gave a guy an idea. You can find an inordinately detailed history here…and another here. I recall hearing that Howie Meeker brought it to Newfoundland after he left the Maple Leafs and before he was Don Cherry before Don Cherry on Hockey Night in Canada. In 2003, CBC radio’s Inside Track ran an 11:30 minute piece on the sport. [Click the link and a .ram or RealAudio file will trigger.]

Funtime Lanes in Holyoke, near our Sunday night stop, has 20 candlepin lanes…maybe the most westerly in North America. Smokefree and bumper bowling for the weejins. Practice.

Boston Wins

It has taken a few creeky starts but Boston beat the Yankees last night. Apparently the great Mariano Riviera had an off night (again) against the Sox as is explained from this example of the wonder that is the baseball writing in The New York Times:

It was the first time Rivera walked three in one game since Aug. 23, 1997, his first season as a closer. But he said he was more discouraged by Tuesday’s blown save, when Jason Varitek homered off a pitch that missed its spot. That was a mistake, Rivera said. Yesterday, he suggested, he was beaten more by the circumstances. “The result wasn’t what I wanted, but I was happy with the pitches,” Rivera said. “I feel comfortable with the selection I made. It just didn’t happen.” For Rivera, though, it keeps happening against the Red Sox. He has blown six of his last nine save opportunities against Boston, starting with Mueller’s game-ending homer last July 24 and including the playoffs. Since the start of the 2001 season, 43 percent of Rivera’s blown saves in the regular season (12 of 28) have come against Boston.

Yea! That is a great stat. For all the money and all the skill, one key to the Yankees just gets a little off his game for the Sox. It is amazing that the two teams played each other 56 times over the last two seasons and have already added three more so far this year. Over all those games they are just about tied. You know, I think I could follow soccer fairly well if it was on the TV but I only had the standings. I do not know how I would follow baseball without the great reporting on it.

In other sporting news, the mighty Morton has been slowly ceeping up on Stranraer for the second promotion spot in Scottish Division Two fitba, now lying only 4 back with five games to go including one against them and the rest against weak teams…

Pos’n Team Games Goal Diff Points
1 Brechin
31
37
64
2 Stranraer
31
9
57
3 Morton
31
19
53
4 Stirling
31
0
45

Fingers are very much crossed and hopes are high for another big finish to the season.