Running gibberish through a gibberish generator creates...gibberish

A few times before on this blog, I've used the Babelfish translator to turn normal passages into gibberish.

Last time I even used it on a review of Mark Steyn's book America Alone.

Now, with a hattip to Steyn himself, take a look at what happens when the Obama story in this blog entry are run through Babelfish into French... then into English.

The original:

Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.

The double-translated:

Barack Obama will require you to work. It will require that you throw your cynicism. That you deposited your divisions. That you leave your insulation, that you out of your zones of comfort move. That you push yourselves to be better. And that that you engage. Barack will never enable you to go again to your lives as usual, uninvolved, noninformed.

It's almost exactly the same. Why? Because the original passage is pretty much written at a Grade 2 level already? That's surely part of it.

I remain convinced, however, that almost any defense of President-Elect Barak Obama will sound about the same no matter how many times you thrash it through: its going to be senseless prose translated into senseless prose. Just messing up the words isn't going to cause it much harm, since the words don't actually matter anyways.

The 2008 Alberta Leader's Debate

I didn't watch it: only a couple minutes at the end. Two things of note.

Firstly, I noticed that only Paul Hinman and Brian Mason seemed interested in talking about their own parties. Taft and Stelmach ended up talking about the other 3 parties' platforms and never got around to discussing their own until the final statement (which is the one time you CAN discuss your opponents).

Secondly, Kevin Taft is a really whiny and annoying son of a bitch. I liked his bit at the end asking people who see him to come up and say "hi". As regular readers might know, I had my chance to do more than just say hello to that worthless bugger in August.

Bonus Leaders Debate Review: A buddy of mine watched the whole debate, and said hands down that Paul Hinman won: as he put it, he was the only one who had bold innovative and new ideas. So naturally the Wildrose Alliance is the only party whose slogan isn't obsessed with change...

Okay, I guess he wasn't leading the Greens

Global TV just did a little video clip of Joe Anglin, the enviro-activist from Rimbey who's only the candidate in Lacombe-Ponoka for the Greens. I'd received imperfect information I suppose.

Anyways, the big story is how he apparently has secured a few votes from the AltaLink fight, and is supposedly taking some votes away from the Tories in what in the last election was a PC rout. The Alberta Alliance beat the Liberals to be the 2nd choice in the riding, and the NDP barely beat the Socreds.

This is unlikely to change when Anglin makes comments like this:

Lots of people here vote Conservative and don't even know why.

Yes, that's right. Insult your constituents. That's always a hit!

Headlines

Now I am not a slow person. I'm not unaware of world events. I am well versed in politics both provincial and international.

Still, the Google News headline for this story confused me. "Bush sending Rice to Kenya" it said, and I swear to all that is holy [that would be your Anne Murray CD collection? -ed] that when I first saw it my initial thought was...I didn't know there was a famine in Kenya.

Jane Fonda is a pretty big C*** herself

NBC apologizes for Jane Fonda's use of the word "cunt" in a discussion about The Vagina Monologues, probably the crappiest play in the history of theatre.

Shouldn't the offensive statement NBC is forced to apologize for be "and now we go to our interview with Jane Fonda."?

"Its like discovering plutonium, entirely by accident!"

The old-school McDLT, featuring Jason "Can't Stand Ya" Alexander:

Another Notley in the Legislature?

It's university-left-filled Strathcona, so she'll probably win. But Rachel Notley? We thought we were done with this back in the 80s.

In other political news, the Wild Rose Alliance party has begun its YouTube campaign.

Despicable actions by the Alberta Green Party

'Nuff said.

Racial Profiling

I'm sorry, but how could anybody read this Edmonton SUN story...

At 1:30 p.m. Sunday, police were called by workers at a shipping company near 117 Avenue and 231 Street.

They'd arrived at work to find a trailer packed with $400,000 of liquor was gone.

About 2 hours later, cops got another call about a missing trailer.

A unit containing over $50,000 of frozen chicken had gone missing from a business at 124 Avenue and 153 Street.

...and not instantly appreciate that the theives had to have been black?

Tales from the Street

Driving around the north side this afternoon, I kept noticing the signs up. Liberal, Liberal, Tory, Liberal, Tory, Tory, Tory, Liberal. Huh, I figured to myself, this must be a pretty NDP-deprived riding. [Ahhh! Good news for once... -ed]

Then I looked a little more closely. No, wait, those are Sutton Realty and ReMax signs. Nevermind then.

Update, February 13 2008 11:10pm: Er, that would be Coldwell Banker real estate and ReMax, not Remax and Sutton. Coldwell are the ones that are solid red.

Who won the Hollywood Writers Strike?

The LA Times asks the question.

The answer? We lost. The Oscars will likely go on now. That's bad.

Stupid shows will continue to be made and aired. That's bad.

Michael Moore feels like a winner. Duh, bad.

And we never got to see if Trey Parker and Matt Stone continued to make new South Parks in spite of a writer's strike.

Rumour has it there's some sort of Alberta election

I just can't get excited, mostly because any election where the Liberals look to post gains makes me horridly depressed. Even a strong PC majority with a mere increase in Liberal seats is bad news in my books.

So anyways, lets talk instead about Obama v. McCain:

McCain v. Hilary always looked like bad news for Hill-Dawg. McCain would get the moderates who don't like Clinton, conservatives with no other choice, and the people who realize that if the Yanks have to have a broad as President, they should start off on a stronger foot than Clinton (cf. Kim Campbell).

Now it seems that for all his faults, McCain has some strong electability on his side: McCain is currently 3.2% behind Obama in the polls. At first, this doesn't seem like good news, but I believe it is. All you have to do is remember a critical fact.

Barak Obama has no substance.

He probably has a few substance abuses, but actual substance? None. Nada. Zilch. He's a hollow shell, a black man who white liberals get excited about for no other reason. He believes in nothing, has no plans, and won't have a clue how to administrate a nation of 300 million. Once it comes time to actually pick a President, this sort of thing will come out, and people who aren't partisan will have to make a decision.

Plus there's at least a 60% chance that Obama would be assassinated in October if it looked like he was poised to win anyways.

Not that we mean to imply enviro-weenies are stupid or anything

The Toronto Star tells the story of a college dropout who claims to have invented a perpetual motion machine machine which isn't called a perpetual motion machine but supposedly has quasi-perpetual motionistic qualities.

The highlight for me? Particularly applicable during a provincial election where again a few nutjobs seem to think a Green vote is a good vote, is this passage:

In 1999 he ran unsuccessfully as a candidate for the Green Party of Ontario, deciding a year later to run as an independent in the federal election.

Today, Heins is focused on showing his invention to anybody willing to see it, in hopes that somebody smarter than him will give it credibility.

Sound awfully familiar? Like the secret agenda of every Green Party supporter known to exist?

(h/t: Colby Cosh)

Absolutely nothing to do with the Alberta Election

Watch Kirk stealing the Enterprise:

Cry havoc, and let slip the Dogs of War!

It's official: Ed Stelmach has called a provincial election for March 3rd.

I assume its of absolutely no surprise to anybody that I'm calling for the Wildrose Alliance Party to win the election: Stelmach has been less than wonderful as a premier, though not as bad as his detractors claim.

But, as they said at work today, who the hell else would you want in charge? Kevin Taft? Why is this dude even still in politics? He was hired on by the Liberals because of his brilliant work in spending his time as a paid academic coming up with almost fifteen pages of anti-Ralph Klein material which he turned into a book.

Brian Mason, anybody? He's on your side. Well, unless you work in the oilsands. Or work in an industry who's boomed because of the oilsands. Or own a car. But other than those narrow interest groups, he's on your side, oh public servant feeding off the government teet.

Or there's the Alberta Greens. Did that Joe Anglin guy who opposed the power lines get elected leader as I was told was in the cards? I'm too lazy to look it up.

I do like how, as the election ramps up, the Alberta Alliance (now Wildrose Alliance) gets shafted in the media coverage. The real question will be if the Alliance is again shut out of the Leader's Debate on Global. After all, they have an MLA now, don't they? This was enough to get Raj Pannu on back in the 90s when they only had 2 seats. That issue alone might be the most exciting of the entire campaign.

Grey Cup's pathetic younger brother is on today

In something called the "Super Bowl", a team called New England who's really in Boston faces off against a team called New York who's really in New Jersey. If you think this is normal, please go away.

I'm not a Superbowl watcher. I didn't even know which free TV station it was on (CTV, it turns out: I had it on Global for an hour). I think I've mentioned this before, but about a year ago a fellow NFL-ignorer and I spent the better part of an hour trying to name all the NFL teams -- we stopped at 23, unsure whether we were done with the next one or to keep going). One NFL-crazed friend was aghast in late '07 when I admitted I could only name two members of the Patriots: Moss and Brady. Two weeks ago he recanted this to somebody, and I had to admit I could no longer remember the receivers' name. When he reminded me it was Randy Moss, I suddenly realized I had also forgotten Tom Brady's name. Good times, good times.

So with that, I bring you this handy YouTube video showing how the NY Giants made it to the big game (and revealing once and for all that if you support the Dallas Cowboys, you are a Nazi):

Stupid Premiers, bad timing, and the truth about the weather

On Monday, several provincial premiers got together to gang up on Alberta for not doing more to stop global warming. [as Jim Hacker would say, you know they really did gang up on Stelmach because they have officially denied it. -ed]

They had an awfully ironic sense of timing to tell Albertans to shut down their economy on the holy alter of "climate change" and the heating of the global average temperature. This on the day that Edmonton's high was -25C (recorded at midnight: it dropped throughout the day), -22C the midnight high for Calgary.

On Tuesday, while the Premiers were claiming not to be demanding Alberta do more, Edmonton got up to -27, with a low of -36.

I've said it before, they should have these climate change conferences in Edmonton in mid January to mid February. Even late February. Odds are this "global warming" nonsense would be over and done with before the first session even wrapped up.

Groundhog Day Buy Nothing Day

This morning I went to check out that Super-Hughes on the southeast side of town to get my car washed. Closed. I went down to the one along 91st and 34th, and their car wash was closed too. Not wishing to waste a morning I hit Wal-Mart where my credit card was declined (twice). Then I call the 1-800 number to find their system is down and they can't tell me why my card has been denied.

Basically, so far this morning nobody has been interested in taking any of my money. Here I am, trying to give it out, and no takers.