Go to bed!

What are you doing up so late anyway?

As it melts away...

In the depths of winter, I had a snowpile on my front lawn that was higher than the car, which required me to take advantage of sunny days to trim the top down so I could see something easing out my driveway. With only a few hours of sun per day, this was quite an achievement, although to be fair, we got lucky with a mild winter. For this reason, putting in new insulation in my attic is now the high priority home renovation this summer, because my heating bills were nowhere near as bad as they should have been.

Still, the smug satisfaction of seeing that snowpile reduced to a small blob on my front lawn, probably no bigger than beach ball, is one of the many joys of spring. Seeing light past 6pm is another, and driving with the windows down is DE-light-ful.

I'm *sniff* getting all teary-eyed at the thought of patio season...*chokes*, so beautiful!!

YAY!!!

Shelley Page is a whiner

For those of you who aren't familiar with her, she's a CanWest journalist who writes on a variety of women's issues, usually with some interesting, if biased, insight. Some of the topics are high-value, and her writings make some interesting contributions to hot-button issues.

And yet, every couple of weeks, she writes a whiny, boo-hoo-hoo column that seems to be an embarrassing attempt at winning the award for most pathetic, self-indulgent, whine in the world. Her most recent entry was a bitter tirade about the Tim Horton's Roll Up the Rim to Win promotion, known to Canadians of all ages. This contest, an annual fixture, garnered some unusual publicity this year when two pre-pubescent girls fished out a winning cup of coffee from a garbage can at their school, which then led to, I am not making this up, the parents hiring lawyers over who gets the prize money (versus sharing) and the teacher who threw the cup in the garbage hiring a lawyer and calling in CSI to prove that it's his drool on the cup and he should get the prize.

Shelley's whine is about how she hasn't won anything in these contests, and how people in Ontario are discriminated against because their odds are lower than in smaller provinces, and she also lionizes some idiot who actually took to writing letters to Timmy's to complain about how unfair it was that, in two years of coffee drinking, she never won anything.

It's a frigging contest you airhead, of course you aren't supposed to win! What's next, gambling addicts complaining that they never won on a slot machine? That Grandma played 6/49 tickets for 20 years and never won? Where does this sense of entitlement come from? Shelley goes on to say that she wouldn't want the freebies that Tim Horton's gave to this other woman as it would be embarrassing/meaningless/blabla and all she wants is just a free cup of coffee every now and then.

Well, just swell, as soon as regular subscribers start getting free newspapers every year as a thank you for putting up with her narcissistic drivel.

Oy!

Light pollution

I read an interesting article about how as many as 90% of North Americans will never see the night sky clearly due to the amount of light pollution we have here (for example http://www.darksky.org/products/p-nam-night.jpg). The irony of this is that the light bulb was only invented a little over a century ago.

Humans simply don't evolve that fast.

Agoraphobia on the Road

Another driving rant, one which I may have commented earlier, but that bears repeating. I've noticed that people seem to have developed an allergy to space between cars in the last few years. When I learned to drive, it was normal to have a car length or two between cars while driving and often times more by a good number of drivers.

Lately, however, it seems that three or more car lengths is an invitation to fill that space because it just drives some people bonkers. These are the people who change lanes right in front of you because, well, their car just fits in, doesn't it?

People, we need at least three car lengths of space in order to avoid rear-ending you, or getting rear-ended. You gain a few metres at best, but increase the risk of an accident exponentially. The space isn't a waste of valuable real estate, but a useful safety measure. Is it really that upsetting to see such space between cars?

Affirming the obvious

The Ethics Commish stated what everyone else knew already, in that the forming of a cabinet is indeed the prerogative of the Prime Minister, therefore the Commissioner has no business looking into the hows and whys of Emerson changing parties. Shapiro, however, remained silent as to why he didn't do any such investigation into Belinda "Ambition exceeding Talent" Stronach, so we're left to believe it's because "nobody complained about it".

Awfully convenient that it allowed the whole Emerson thing to stay in the news for an additional month, eh? But then, it wasn't very convenient when the RCMP announced it was investigating the income trust leak midway through an election campaign.

You start to politicize one thing and soon everything is political, including a hunting accident. Is this what Canadians want?

Rise of India

I'm noticing that a lot more attention is being paid to India in the mainstream press lately. The big issue is Bush saying that nukes are fine with people we like, which pretty much guarantees that people we don't like are now going to rush to get their own nukes (and it works well as a deterrent, since Iran, with no nukes, is viewed as a greater threat to the world than North Korea, which has nukes and a half).

Still, I think this is a good thing overall if only that we can stop hearing about China this and China that. I personally think that, in the long-run, India will do better, mainly due to the fact that its democracy and civil institutions have done an admirable job in the face of hardship and adversity, and should be well placed to continue to do so in the future.

Anything can happen though....

Three years later

...and Bush still has no clue why the US is in Iraq or when the troops will come home. But Cheney predicts success and Rumself says it's not a civil war, thereby proving that you can fool some of the people, all of the time.

Happy Days

So I was told that March 16th is St. Urho Day, while we all know that St. Patrick's Day is March 17th. So does that make a long week-end in multicultural socieities?

Quelle surprise....

....so opinion polls on the week-end now show that Canadians are supportive of the mission in Afghanistan. Turns out that when people stop worrying about stupidities like Britney and Brangelina, they can actually learn something useful about their country.

Kudos to Harper for making the trip and staying for a while, Afghanistan is grateful to have us there, and we should be grateful to have the opportunity to help a country in need.

Even if they will fight themselves as soon as everyone leaves.

In debating health care in this country...

...I think people who have never been to an emergency room should really just keep their mouths shut. The gap between how Canadians imagine their health care system and how it really is getting larger and larger, but through the good fortune of being healthy, many Canadians are blissfully unaware.

So weak and powerless

To hear her crying over the phone, and to know that you can't do anything to help her, to end her suffering, to finally end the nightmare so that you can finally be together and share the joy and happiness of your love....

...is the worst feeling in the world.

I don't know what I'm going to do...I just want it to stop, so that her heart will no longer be broken.

And nor will mine.

The Ethics of it all

The conventional wisdom is that, while Stephen Harper is being petulant towards the Ethics Commissioner, Bernard Shapiro brought some of it on himself by treating a political decision as an ethical one.

The fact is, Harper is right to be pissed off about this decision, but it smacks of partisanship at worst, at best, stupidity. The idea is that Harper "induced" Emerson to switch and since Emerson got a car, staff, and other associated perks of being a Minister, it was done for personal gain.

Which immediately begs the question of where Shapiro was in May 2005 when Belinda Stronach did exactly the same thing. Her move is even more of an ethical mess because, not only was she getting all the same perks (or inducements, if you prefer) that Emerson got, she did so with the agreement that she change her vote to support the government, thereby ensuring that Paul Martin could keep all his perks and rewards of being Prime Minister. Martin essentially bribed Stronach to keep his government alive, but that didn't trigger any ethical curiousity on the part of the Ethics Commissioner?

While I think Harper should be less petulant and more professional in his dealings with Shapiro, the fact remains that the Ethics Commissioner stepped into this mess on his own, with an indefensible inquiry.

Hockey Pool Mania

So I'm now in third place in the hockey pool I mentioned last fall. My picks were not all that wonderful (Dany Heatley, Paul Kariya and, surprisingly, Sergei Zubov being standout draft picks), but my trades have been pretty good, although I only have one left now. I'm still 25 points out of second place and almost 70 points back of the leader, so I don't think I'm going to win it this year, but since this was my first pool in 20 years, I think I'm doing ok.

The boss for whom I had to pick for owing to his absence, however, is in 8th place, so I don't see any promotions in my near future.

Cancel the night shift

Thanks sucker, indeed....

Clueless Canadian whining

So the major story on the week-end is an opinion poll that shows Canadians are of a mixed opinion regarding their troops in Afghanistan. If my earlier celebrity rant didn't make the point, then this story certainly does: Canadians are so oblivious to what their troops are doing that they should either a) learn more about what kind of conditions our soldiers are facing or b) shut the hell up.

Quote of the day goes to the leader of the left, who apparently hasn't read a newspaper in over 15 years:

"We certainly don't want to become involved in a protracted war," (NDP Leader Jack) Layton said. "The goal of Canadians being in Afghanistan was in our more traditional role of peacekeeping, peacemaking."

Uh...right, peacekeeping where? Croatia? Rwanda? Somalia? The DRC? These are all places where there was no peace at all, so it was much more peace-making, which seems to have eluded way too many Canadians. Canadian troops haven't done a lot of peace-keeping lately because they are continually being sent into places where there is no peace to keep.

Think back to the original peace-keeping mission in the Suez region 50 years ago. Both sides were ready for peace but wanted neutral observers to maintain the peace. That is peace-keeping, where both sides have agreed to stop fighting, but don't trust each other to do it. Other examples include Cyprus or the Golan Heights.

What our troops have been doing for the last 15 years is peace-making, where one side wants peace but the other one is looking for cover. Hence our troops being attacked, held hostage, and killed in Croatia as Serbian death squads continued their killing spree with impunity (think Srebrenica). Canadians were never sent to Afghanistan to maintain an existing peace, but rather to enforce a peace against warlords who profit much more from war than from peace, and a Taliban that, although wounded, was never defeated (owing mainly to Dubya's idiotic decision to invade Iraq under false pretenses).

The peanut gallery allowed itself to think that the relative calm of Kabul was a good representation of the country as a whole, which only proves how stupid you can become by watching Entertainment Tonight on a daily basis. While international troops ensured that Kabul could remain calm, the rest of the country was more or less pure anarchy.

So now Canadians are saying we should bring our troops home. In essence, they are saying that it's ok to do easy stuff, but if any real effort or sacrifice is required, then we should leave it to other people. This same ignorance allows them to believe that Canada's opinion on world issues still matters like it did 50 years ago.

How exactly is Afghanistan supposed to find peace and end its role as a terrorist training ground if the central government's reach extends about 10 kms outside of the capital? What's the point of even being in Afghanistan if we're going to allow warlords and the Taliban to control 90% of the country? Our country made a commitment to the Afghan people that we would help them find peace and security and allow them to reclaim and rebuild their country. Now that we have dead Canadian soldiers, we're going to just walk away from that, even though the government and the military clearly told Canadians there would be casualties? Now do you realize just how irrelevant Keira Knightley's wardrobe really is?

Some people are saying we should have had a debate about sending our troops to Afghanistan before they were sent over, but based on how many clueless Canadians there are out there, who would have paid attention to such a debate in the first place?

The night shift

Working late night, not that we hate light
Just feels right, that's when tracks come out tight
Thoughts start creeping, people are sleeping
Pull words out of the dreams, it's the deep end

Yes, I am, so don't call during the day!

A Soldier's Tribute

This came to my attention and I think the link is worthwhile at this moment. Canadians are a pretty complacent bunch and the angst of the chattering classes about our troops in Afghanistan is unnecessary for those who actually pay attention to the state of the world.

http://media.putfile.com/a-soldiers-tribute