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Women's hockey, that joke of a sport (what was wrong with ringette? when I was a kid, girls had ringette and that was enough) is in trouble for running up the scores. There are a couple points I've heard that are perhaps valid: nobody ever gets upset when some Norwegian adonis does the cross country skiing 45 minutes before his 10 rivals all within 40 seconds of each other for 2nd place, even though he could slow down a little and make it an interesting contest. Likewise, goal differential does count in the final game which is 99 44/100 likely to be Canada-U.S. If the Canadian team decided not to run up the score and the Americans did then the Canadians would have fair-played themselves out of last shift change rights. Of course, there's a worry the IOC could pull the sport. They already pulled real sports last year so I wouldn't lose much sleep over it.
"Global warming may shorten cold season" reads one headline. Uh...duh! Of course, they are talking about the common cold. But somewhere in Edmonton a lazy copywriter took an extra coffee break he didn't deserve.
Venezuala has kicked out a bunch of foreign aid workers on the pretense that they're "spying for the CIA". One of them is a 67-year old Christian activist (read: labour activist) who has been living with a remote jungle tribe since 1962. Where are all the North American liberals who were sticking up for Hugo Chavez just last month? They can't all be busy being hypocrites over offensive religious materials and over MPs crossing the floor...so where the hell are they?
The no-fault divorce days may be over. Sort of. Slightly. Not really. It's always good to see the feminists squirm a little, but its too much to ask that the days of divorce being granted only due to some sort of fault be brought back. Geesh, why would we consider the marriage contract to be binding?
The New York snowfall is another nail in the global warming coffin, right? Nope, its "climate change" now, which means anything that happens at all ever is fair game. On the other hand, the Journal includes a colour version of this picture. I've walked down that subway station (in real life, not in True Crime NYC, though I might go to that one tonight). I see snow, which Edmonton has missed out on. And a cute girl. What else can one ask for?
There's a horribly offensive and stupid article by Aliyah Shivji, an Edmontonian working in Denmark, talking about how bad the Danes were for printing the cartoons (though thankfully "not condoning any use of violence"). It's offensive because it holds up lip service for free speech whilst trashing it, upset over people in Denmark mad at him because Muslims refuse to integrate into peaceful western society, and paints North America and Europe as "racially intolerant" [as opposed to those racially sensitive Muslim mobs -ed]. It's stupid primarily due to this phrase: "Islam does not permit artistic renderings of our Prophet." It's a quick catch-all to explain the actions of Muslim thugs, but it doesn't explain the violent thuggery at world in the Middle East. Only the violence inherent in the false Islamic religion does that.
Finally, Claire Martin is going national. I met her once at Heritage Days: she's exceedingly short, and not nearly as attractive in real life under the hot sun as she is in the Global/CBC studios under heavy makeup and sympathetic lighting. Well, in the Journal's usual style, Martin already has been national since the start of the new year. It is as Ted Byfield wrote in 1981, "two hundred years is a long time for a paper to take getting on a story, even the Edmonton Journal." (He wrote another quib about "it took them that long to discover the National Energy Program" but I can't find that one).
