It's a tad windy in Edmonton today

Well, seeing how every sandwich board in the city has blown over this afternoon...

Colin Powell endorses Democratic Presidential Candidate

Every good story needs a soundbite, and in this case could you really go wrong with:

"He's like a brother to me."

Oh, the Jamaica Observer says blame the neo-cons! The Indiana Star agrees. In the meantime, neo-con doesn't mean what people claim it means.

What's wrong with the Florida sports scene?

No, seriously. First the Tampa Bay Lightning win the Stanley Cup and nobody other than Hulk Hogan cared.

Now last week came the revelation (h/t Tom Benjamin) that the Florida Panthers are giving away free tickets to everyone in the entire state.

Now this:

The second overall pick in the 2002 draft, Upton solidified his status as one of baseball's bright young stars last year. The converted shortstop hit .300 with 24 homers and 82 RBIs but Tampa Bay went 66-96 and finished last in the division.

Before this season, Tampa Bay dropped the word 'Devil' from its nickname.

"I used to tell people I played for the Devil Rays and they'd ask, 'Who are the Devil Rays?' Now I think they know who we are," Upton said.

What? How can Florida fans either not know the name of the baseball team in Tampa Bay or else not remember what they were called just last year? Yikes.

Anyways, Tampa v. Philadelphia... should be amazin'. And by amazin', I mean "any minute now we'll get 400 articles from the MSM about how it is a shame that "small market teams" [doesn't Philadelphia have 6 million people or something? -ed] are facing off instead of another Yankees-Mets series, or Chicago-Angels.

Middle Aged Whitey is the beneficiary of Edmonton-Strathcona's "Anybody but the Darkie" Campaign

Meanwhile, liberal Can-West Global's Calgary Herald (famous for Catherine Ford) concentrates on "all the kudos" Linda Duncan is receiving.

Now its time for the conservative denizens of Edmonton-Strathcona to start making Duncan live up to her self-proclaimed "voice of the underdog" status:

"This is a victory for all kinds of people who want a voice for change and a voice for different perspectives on where we should be going in Canada," said Duncan, a veteran environmental lawyer.

Well Linda, its time to test that theory. Voters in her riding should instantly start organizing a letter-writing campaign. Get a few hundred Conservative voters and church groups and libertarians together to start making some demands on the rookie MP. For instance...

1. Alberta Separation is a change, in fact the biggest change to hit Canada since Trudeau was elected. No, scratch that, the biggest change since B.C. was added to Confederation in 1871. Duncan should show some support for such a glorious change.
2. There is currently not a single federal party devoted to private healthcare. Those people with such a "different perspective" have been ostracized, shunned, and ignored. Voters should demand that Duncan end that injustice.
3. Sodomite Marriage is supported by various European backwaters, a dangerous U.S. Presidential Candidate, and all the major parties. It is opposed by principled religious opposition in the Third World, a constituency that Duncan and her ilk claim to be acting on the behalf of in this country. Therefore, its time that Edmonton took a bold and moral stance against the tide of faggotry worldwide. Will Duncan take her bold leadership role?
4. Hell, since she's already gone and put one Muslim immigrant out of a job, will she back stronger rights for employers and insuring that principled opposition to "protected groups" is now a legitimate rationale for termination?

This is just the beginning! Any other suggestions should be made in the comments.

Hats off to (Stephen) Harper

I'm just going to go ahead and congradulate our Prime Minister on winning a majority government and clean-sweeping Alberta.

Which of course I know happened, even though I haven't been watching election results. Hey, but I got Linux working on my desktop!

Oh, shit, I was supposed to fix my Windows installation...

You think you have problems

They say that a month in an election is an eternity. Well with less than a month until the big day in the U.S., Barack Obama's eternity is about to begin.

Too little, too late?

If only the federal election were held tomorrow, Harper might have got that majority.

It's election day!

For previous elections, I have spent the night doing anything other than observing the results. Like in 2006, anything less than a Harper majority is a disappointment and bad news for the country.

Like in 2006, anybody who votes Liberal or NDP or Green has a problem in their half-filled fucking skulls.



And I'll be spending Tuesday night doing something fun: re-installing Windows! Why? Because these steps don't work!

1.	Insert the Windows XP startup disk into the floppy disk drive, or insert the Windows XP CD-ROM into the CD-ROM drive, and then restart the computer. Click to select any options that are required to start the computer from the CD-ROM drive if you are prompted to do so.
2.	When the "Welcome to Setup" screen appears, press R to start the Recovery Console.
3.	If you have a dual-boot or multiple-boot computer, select the installation that you want to access from the Recovery Console.
4.	When you are prompted to do so, type the Administrator password. If the administrator password is blank, just press ENTER.
5.	At the Recovery Console command prompt, type the following lines, pressing ENTER after you type each line: md tmp copy c:\windows\system32\config\system c:\windows\tmp\system.bak copy c:\windows\system32\config\software c:\windows\tmp\software.bak copy c:\windows\system32\config\sam c:\windows\tmp\sam.bak copy c:\windows\system32\config\security c:\windows\tmp\security.bak copy c:\windows\system32\config\default c:\windows\tmp\default.bak delete c:\windows\system32\config\system delete c:\windows\system32\config\software delete c:\windows\system32\config\sam delete c:\windows\system32\config\security delete c:\windows\system32\config\default copy c:\windows\repair\system c:\windows\system32\config\system copy c:\windows\repair\software c:\windows\system32\config\software copy c:\windows\repair\sam c:\windows\system32\config\sam copy c:\windows\repair\security c:\windows\system32\config\security copy c:\windows\repair\default c:\windows\system32\config\default
6.	Type exit to quit Recovery Console. Your computer will restart

If it looks like a duck, and walks like a duck...

Last night at the Walkabout Pub on Whyte Avenue, I partook in a little Ostrich Burger. I have to say I was more than a little shocked. After all, I was sort of in the mood for a chicken burger. But if you click the link, you'll see that Ostrich meat is in fact very similar to beef.

Whoa there, hold the phone! That doesn't make any sense.

Wikipedia assures me that the Ostrich is a bird of the family Struthionidae. If you want to go a little farther back you can go to its zoological class, which is Aves. Aves are birds. Also a member of the bird class is the humble Gallus gallus, commonly known as... wait for it... chicken!

Beef is Bos taurus, a member of the Bovidae family and of class Mammalia. They don't link up with Ostriches until Phylum level. So why the hell isn't Ostrich meat more like chicken?

This concerns me because I've always been curious as to what Dolphin meat tastes like. Now dolphins are also of the class Mammalia, but I've heard tell that they taste more like seafood than like salty beef, which was always my dolphin-eating fantasy.

The photos on this page certainly make it seem like dolphin meat can be a straight-up substitution for bifsteak, but with the ostrich thing I'm now a little wary.

Was Doug Collins onto something?

The recent Mark Steyn ruling by the BC Inhuman Rights Tribunal has sent famed liberal blogger Dr. Dawg rabidly foaming at the mouth because, as he and almost everyone else predicted, the Tribunal just happened to acquit Steyn and Canada's oldest newspaper.

Well Dawg now insists that the right-wing blogosphere was in error, and laughs at how the fantasies of a totalitarian speech-restricting government agency turns out not to pass. Of this, two things may be noted: firstly, as I'm sure Dawg has read before the issue is not that the government might not prosecute a specific person is irrelevent to the fact that they still find the need to investigate said person. Defending yourself, even when you're innocent, is a long and costly and arduous process. By Dawg's logic we can even eliminate the category of "wrongful arrest", as in the end only the guilty will be convicted after a harmless little trial just to establish the facts.

The second thing was noted in my comment to his blogpost:

And just so, the mob of sadistic kangaroos at the BC Human Rights Tribunal have failed to deliver the sweet lash of tyranny. They refused to hop all over our basic rights and freedoms with their big hind feet

Great news! So are you going to call Doug Collins and let him know he can get back to writing newspaper columns about Spielburg movies, and should be getting his money refunded?

Will Guy Earle get to go on with telling lousy jokes and not have to attend any hearings?

(I confess I haven't gone through all the BCIRT decisions yet to find other speech-specific ones, as I'm engrossed in reading how false claims don't preclude getting a judgement in your favour in this sham of a "proceedings")

So far the comment has gone uninjured, posssibly because the claim was already made by Dawg that "the guilty hate speech" and "the guilty not hate speech" is clearly defined, with Doug Collins and Stephen Boisson in the former with Steyn in the latter.

For unfamiliar readers, Doug Collins writes articles about how Jew-run Hollywood promote a Jewish agenda. Seeing how the liberals in Hollywood are clearly setting a liberal agenda [pace Steyn, the only movie so far showing American forces decidedly defeating terrorists is Team America: World Police -ed], this claim may spook people but Collins makes his case. He's wrong, of course, but he makes his case.

One of the things Collins has said (and specifically was prosecuted for) was that the Holocaust was exaggerated roughly tenfold. Well, with last night's Dawg comment bouncing in my brain, imagine my surprise when watching my Star Trek: The Next Generation DVDs I come across more Hollywood math. The episode Remember Me, penned by (it should be noted non-Jewish) Lee Sheldon, features the lovely Dr. Crusher trapped in an alternate universe where everybody except for her starts disappearing. Near the climax of the episode, she's left alone on the Enterprise whilst the universe starts closing around her: at one point the computer establishes that the universe is 705 metres in diameter. Later, the universe contracts further, taking the starship with it.

Cut away to the real Enterprise, where they are tracking the pseudo-universe. LaForge comments that the warp bubble is "contracting at a rate of fifteen metres per second: we're going to lose it in about four minutes". Of course, the trouble is that with 60 seconds in a minute, the warp bubble is contracting 900 metres per minute, requiring at least a 3600m bubble in the first place. But the warp bubble turns out to be Dr. Crusher's universe, and moments earlier she had that same four minutes long after the 705m bubble started to contract. An actual bubble of, say, 700 metres taking four minutes to collapse would contact at less than 3 m/s. Its a small victory for Collins, but Hollywood has gotten its numbers wrong before...

"I promise never to run afoul of government speech police again!"

Well, there's always next year

Photo reveals double curse in '86

The black cat adds to the power of the goat

Which television battle did I watch last night?

So last night was the much-hyped evening featuring the Palin-Biden debate (shock headline of the day: pro-Obama mainstream media conducts polls showing Biden won the debate) and the English-language leaders debate (though describing a debate including Stephane Dion as such might be a bit unreasonable).

Daveberta reported that the commie-filled Black Dog pub on Whyte Avenue was going to host a telvised showing of the leadership debate. Well, last night found me at the Black Dog. What did I think of the debate? Er, I didn't watch it.

Specifically I didn't get to the bar until after the debacle which was the Chicago Cubs hosting the Los Angeles Dodgers for the last home game of the 2008 season. Well, 101 years has a nice ring to it to...

A guaranteed strong stock

In these days of market uncertainty and "catestrophic" decreases in the Dow Jones (not as catestrophic as 1987, but certain to spell certain doom far beyond what happened after 1987 even though 1987 was promised the same doom we are promised today), its important to find strong market players.

I am not a financial analyst, but I can say that a portfolio strong on these particular manufactuers will do very well for at least the next 10 months.

Why? here's why...

Political Campaigning 101: They have staff too

In response to the Harper plagurism charge, the NDP of all people have come to Harper's rescue: the Liberal website apparently cribs the Dippers.

Now here's the lesson this post title alludes to. When you are running a major political party's warroom, and you are told that rumour has it an opposing party is guilty of something, you do two things.

1. Pick a team of people to verify if its true and seek out additional examples of the enemy doing wrong.
2. Pick another team of people to seek out examples of your own party doing the same wrong.

If team #1 reports back positive and #2 reports back negative than you let the accusations fly as Bob Rae did earlier this week. If team #1 reports negative (and especially if team #2 finds positive) you quietly forget you ever heard a rumour (and defend the opposing party in the press while you're at it since you know its not true). However, if you find yourself in the Liberals' shoes, where both team #1 and team #2 report back positive, you sit on the story and keep it in reserve in case the opposing party decides to make a stink on the issue.

What the Liberals did was just sloppy.