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Friday Not Going Postal Chatfest

An interesting week for we and Canada Post. One day a package that hardly registered for weight within province was taken for posting and the clerk said “eight bucks.” “Eight bucks! Forget it. Give it to her next time we visit.” On another day, two packages with identical size and identical content were taken to Canada Post, one going to Philadelphia (ten hours drive, in another country) and one to Toronto (two hours drive, in my province.) The Toronto package cost a buck more. My world has turned upside-down.

Via John, I learned about Yorkshire forced indoor rhubarb. There used to be a show on PBS called The Victorian Garden and there was an entire episode about forcing houses where vegetables and fruits were grown and kept through the winter. I always wanted to live on pale homegrown foods.
Check out footnote nine on page six of this .pdf copy of a Canadian Senate Committee Report on border security. They want to allow us to bring back up to $2,000 bucks a day from the US including hooch, booze and other sippables. This is new information to me and changes my otherwise dim view of the legislative body. Imagine the right to pop over to Alex Bay for a 2-4 of Thousand Island Pale Ale. Imagine.
What has the Internet really done for us? I think it is fair to say that the idle magazine reader question is a valid concern. It has been a long time since I bought thirty bucks worth of magazines to go through on a Saturday morning. In fact, I cut back all magazine buying to just Sports Illustrated. I like pictures.
This is as important a transitional weekend as Labour Day. By the next one of these bullet points comes into being, there will be an NCAA champion crowned and the baseball season will be in full swing. The bulbs are popping up in the garden and if there is any drying out I may stick a shovel in the ground. I need to thing about seeds and which tomato to grown. Think Stokes and Vesey’s.

Not much today. These are the times of plenty. I am doing real things in real time. I have a real time life in many ways.

Web 2.0 For Suckers

This is hilarious…in that tiny sort of hilarity that really does not affect anything that you really need, care about or have thought much about before this point:

The row blew up after MySpace asked her to remove a link that let visitors buy songs from a competing service, pointing out that “we retain the right to block or remove content that violates our terms of use, including unauthorized commercial transactions”. The unauthorized commercial transaction here was that Ms Tequila’s profile included a widget – a small piece of code – that took visitors to the Hooka music service instead of the MySpace-approved Snocap.

The web shall set you free, if you pay the proper fee.

Help! I Hear A Guru Thinking About How To Earn More Money!!!

Yawn. Never heard of Kathy Sierra. Never heard of Tim O’Reilly. I have never even heard of the “blogger Ms Sierra described as ‘far more prominent than me’.” Time to remember no one really cares or should really care about blogs – for good reason. But pump up the non-issue and – WHAMMO! – conference fees go crazy.

Remember: you are hearing is from a prominent blogger. Send $29.95 for further details and my plan for the future.

Tory On Tory Handbags!

Sooner or later chickens come home to roost. They really do. I’ve never seen it but cliches do not lie. So it is fun, then, to watch someone somewhere who is a more principled, more confident leader than the bad batch of all stripes we have to deal with in Ottawa these days:

Danny Williams, the Newfoundland and Labrador Premier who has promised to make the federal Conservatives regret last week’s budget, on Tuesday ratcheted up his attacks on Prime Minister Stephen Harper. His government has launched an advertising campaign calling into question the honesty of Mr. Harper. “If we can’t accept at face value the promise of our Prime Minister, then who can?” asks the ad, which will run in newspapers across the country. “A promise made should be a promise kept. And as Mr. Harper pointed out, there is no greater fraud than a promise not kept.”

What a shocker! Imagine holding the PM to account rather than playing hide and seek when he glowers and grumbles as he stumbles as appears to be the wizardry of the Loyal but Not Very Capable Opposition. I remember the first week of law school in Halifax when all the keener sons of Bay Street partners of Calgary politicians opened their yaps to answer a question condescendingly only to face the wrath and wit of the baymen Newfs in the back, ripping them and their answers apart as the rest of us giggled and got out of the way. Go Danny! Remember – Atlantic Canada is right on this point and Ottawa promised. It is as simple as that.

Group Project: What Were We Like And What Are We Like Now?

…and what are we becoming? I know I go on but this new report on the state of privacy and surveillance technologies in the UK reminded me of this one about blogging, especially this passage:

…before the telegraph, for example, almost all ordinary people read entire newspapers and were generally very up to date on all issues of the day. It was not uncommon for politicians and other famous people of the day to come to town and speak literally for hours on end about complex issues facing people. Ordinary townspeople would know exactly what was being discussed and were not spoken down to or had the subject matter dumbed down for them. Postman relates one typical example where Lincoln was speaking somewhere for something like six hours, excused everyone to go home and eat supper, and then resumed speaking again an hour later. Then the telegraph made the spread of information much, much quicker. But because of all the dots and dashes, information became sound bites overnight. As a result, people’s tolerance for lengthier, meatier writing began to wane. And newspapers at the time who began getting their news from far away over the telegraph began writing shorter and shorter stories.

It’s the general proposition that I think interests me – as usual – how we as humans go about largely unaware of these sorts of quick shifts and are not very good at assessing whether they are good or bad, whether we are smarter or dumber because of them, freer or less free. The promise and the payout. We no longer think about things that were quite common ideas quite recently, like the information divide – which I think I think is as much due to the general ease of internet access as much as the awareness that most internet use is idle and recreational. No one considers access to a phone as a measure of full functional participation now either.

So, without getting into the goodness or the badness, how far could people go in immersing themselves into the unimportant and the abandonment of individual privacy while still being functional in a democracy? Are they even related? Do I need a coffee?

ADQ Whippersnappers Take Control In Quebec

We are declaring early and not just so we can get in an little extra early snoozing. There shall be a minority ADQ victory in Quebec’s provincial election and we are frankly stunned – but mainly with the realization that people in power are starting to look like they are younger than me. Not that I am not a very young 43. Precocious many say. Dainty. But the point is politicians should look like Lester Pearson when they do not look like John Diefenbaker.

Update: Ok, Ok – so Jean McCurlytop won in a way that can only be considered losing. Who’s happy now? And who is happy that shouldn’t be? And should Stephan Dion just quit now? No one won the pool, by the way. But Jay lost it.

Sports Pool 2007: Final Standings For The NHL

The next question is one that has been long clamoured for so we better give in or we won’t hear the end of it:

5. Identify and put in order divided by conference the 16 teams that will make the playoffs. Ten points for each correct team minus one point of the number of places the team is out of order. For example, picking Detroit for second but they come in fifth makes it a seven point pick.

Get your picks in before April 1, 2007. I better figure out the points so far so this thing doesn’t get out of hand.

Complete sports pool 2007 links here.

Friday Bullet Point Chat…No “-a-ramas” Or Nuttin’

How many ways can you write the same thing week after week before there is any coffee on the desk in front of you?

It’s the Kingston Brew Pub’s Wellie Toss tomorrow afternoon at 2 pm. We are talking the kids as this is the closest thing we have to a good cheese roll around here. Wellie Boot Hurling seems to be a legitimate Highland Games activity so maybe I will have a wee nippy sweetie while we are at it. Definitely a KSPC sanctioned event.
The Flea and others point out the decision to raise the right flag at the 90th anniversary of Vimy Ridge this summer. I added my two cents to remind that Newfoundland had its own flag of its own Dominion and that should be added, too. I even let my mole know. I have a mole again now. A mole with ambition as well.
Besides that good move, it was a tough week but was it as tough as the Prime Minister’s? He showed his dopey mean side, practically offering the nation the wisdom of the person who asks the question “are you still hitting the bottle?” while politicizing the troops in Afghanistan for his own purposes. Nice. He may have guaranteed the separatists win in Quebec. Brilliant. He seems to be cooking the books of the electoral reform review. Perfect. Oh yes, and the transparent intention budget leading to the fastest Federal-Provincial tax break transfer in history. I will be so happy to think of that and the other “special interest placation through tax break” aspects the NuGov National Vision as I prepare my own taxes this year.
Best Blue Jay’s slag of the week:

Who else is ready for another season of Jamie Campbell starting his home run call for pop-ups that get caught by the shortstop?

Days to go now.
Rita Joe passed away, too. One of the good things about growing up in Nova Scotia with a cohesive people like the Mi’kmaq in the community, with neat aspects like creation stories mentioning things you take school bus trips to see like Glooscap’s canoe, is you hear about people like Rita Joe when you are a kid and you get fed some respect. Not really enough but some.

That is it for now. Thanks for all the kind thoughts about the Frobster.

Martin Frobisher Cat 1999-2007

“Frobie” left this life today at the vet’s. He’d been sick off and on for a while but things got worse over the last few days and was in a lot of pain. The time had come.

Really, The Guardian, newspaper of record…or rather “rekerd”…in Charlottetown, PEI, ought to have a headline in the obits “Islander Dies” tomorrow as Frobie, runt of a litter at the Human Society seven and a half years ago, was one of that small land. We were looking for mousers. After buying our first house in 1999, we came home one day to find a mouse party in the middle of the living room. We needed allies in the animal kingdom and so we took on responsibility for the lives of the last two cats from two litters that were in cages side by side. Frobie proved himself as he grew out of kittenhood as a great set-up man, cornering the mice for his lady friend Beaton who finished them off at her, frankly, cruel leisure.

Years passed and the family grew and PEI was left with cats crammed with everything else into two vans. With the lack of mice and even stairs, came effective retirement and Frobes blossomed as an entirely idle mammal. The purchase of light cat food did nothing for him – though he still ate plenty. He spent his days and nights exploring ways to not have his limbs touch the floor and inventing new aromas. His last moments came swiftly and were spent with those who loved him and/or fed him as well as a really nice vet who helped everyone understand how this was all for the best.

Many met Frobie through these many years and wanted to share their thoughts:

“I first saw him in the cage next to the quite stunningly good looking Beaton and wondered for a moment what kind of thing he was. Sickly and thin, he made his life’s work to attain a stoutness that would amazed. He lived the dream.”

“When we lived in PEI, another kid who was visiting dragged him across the kitchen by the tail. He didn’t scratch or meow. He was the nicest cat, just so laid back.”

“Frobie was a really cute cat and a nice one, too. He was cuddly and snuggly. I hope he has a happy life in kitty heaven. There is a huge building filled with just cats where they get to be friends, eat all the time and no one ever bugs them.”

Please share your thoughts about Frobisher in the comments.

Ask What Your Country Can Do For You

I was wondering what to say about the Federal Budget that came out yesterday and what it says about the vision of the NuGov for a new nation being forged by private enterprise and getting the monkey off everyone’s back. But Andrew says it more plainly than I ever would as he voted for these guys:

Today’s budget is an embarrassment for those who consider themselves fiscal conservatives (especially those who poured countless hours into helping bring this government to power in order to change how business is done in Ottawa). Aside from a few small measures – including a continued commitment to pay down the national debt and some baby steps towards preventative health care, the budget is an undisciplined mish-mash of high-flying spending and ridiculous wealth redistribution. There are no true tax breaks, no obvious signs that government bureaucracy is shrinking and, worst of all, a 7.9% increase in overall spending – far more than the GDP’s growth.

Hokey-Ka-Bokey! Sounds like the red flag is flying once again from the Peace Tower in Ottawa. What is it in the water there that makes everyone a centrist? For me and my family, we get the “you have kids” break and the “you have a spouse” break but no income splitting, the real fiscal imbalance as far as I am concerned. My pal and his wife make what we make and have one kid. They get about $5,000 from the Feds we do not due to the bias against one income households. All so unfair to me.

So I won’t likely vote Tory now…and I was this close. Because if you are going to buy my vote, you really have to buy my vote. Maybe that is what we need now. NuGov 2.0. Personalized tax breaks defined to everyone’s own specifications defined by the person. The ultimate in government for I, me, mine. Maybe in a way then I could vote for me, the only thing that should really matter in an honest values system.