Hillbilly fantasyland

Speaking from hillbilly fantasyland, Peter MacKay says the Canadian government is going to order 50 ships over the next 30 years. Dave calls them Harper's hillbilly Conservatives and he's right.
And rather than awarding these billions of public dollars in shipbuilding contracts through old-fashioned competitive bidding, the Cons have developed great new system which will allow them to decide which shipyards to support:

...a new process that theoretically will allow the government to pick and choose in a more direct way which Canadian shipyards will build which ships.

I just hope none of those shipyards have any gay employees -- Charles McVety will complain and Tony Clements will have to take over deciding which shipyards can be trusted!
Ya know, at some point Canadians are going to realize that the Harper Conservatives don't actually know how to run a government.

Henry Louis Gates is a ni....

The Boston policeman now says:

... he didn't mean to use words like 'banana eating jungle monkey' "in a racist way."
"It was a poor choice of words," Barrett said. I didn't mean it in a racist way. I treat everyone with dignity and respect.".

If he HAD meant to be disrespectful, undignified and racist, what would he have said?

Oh, sure

In a comment to Dawg's excellent coverage of the Suaad Hagi Mohamud scandal, Zia writes:

there could be a logical explanation for everything

Why yes, that's true.
But given the pattern of how our own government appears to give both irresponsible authority and unwarranted credibility to anonymous secret allegations against Canadian citizens who run into trouble overseas, I doubt it.

The stupid, it burns!

H.L. Mencken once said that nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
Case in point.

Miracles for sale, just $58

From Effect Measures, here is an hilarious video from Australian TV, especially the last 30 seconds:



I don't think American or Canadian TV could get away with this type of critique any more.
Also, check out this one, reminds me of the Daily Show in skewering journanimalism. Again, don't miss the last 30 seconds:

Progress

Better dying through technology.

Great line of the day

Melissa McEwan writes about the post-racist country sibboleth:

I noted, once again, the irony how it's never white people doing racist things, or other white people subsequently denying even the possibility of racism inherent to those things, that are called the race-baiters, but instead the people of color who call that shit out. It's always people of color and their gosh darn insistence on talking about racism who are accused of preventing racial unity, not the white people who engage in racism.
Thus, the narrative becomes that Obama, by talking about the history of police racism, is a bigger threat to racial unity than the actual police who practice and perpetuate institutional racism.
KBlogz, always with the devastatingly witty insight, suggested wryly: "The media should go burn a cross on the White House lawn to remind Obama that racism is over."

Vancouver lightning

On Saturday night, a lightning storm hit Vancouver and a fireworks show was going on at English Bay during the same time. Below are some spectacular photos from Vancouver Sun readers:

So WTF was that all about?

The Via engineers, after two years without a contract, finally go on strike Friday.
Two days later, after disrupting the holiday plans of thousands of people and costing their company hundreds of thousands of dollars, they announce they are going back to work.
Now, I'm a union supporter, but this is ridiculous -- why did they go on strike at all? What was the matter with either the company or the union or both, that they couldn't have worked this out three days earlier?
And here I thought the Toronto strikers had set a new low in Canadian labour stupidity ...

Saturday Morning Cartoon

None of our hotels were like this one...

Another gay festival denied by Cons

I almost missed this story because of traveling, but Dawg sums it up:

Egg, meet face.

It doesn't surprise me in the least that Diverse-Cite's funding was denied regardless of how well they met the program's funding criteria. Why would Tony Clement have been placed in charge of this file anyway, if not to find some excuse for injecting Con politics into government funding decisions? Diane Ablonczy actually seemed to have some respect for the government program rules about how to spend taxpayer money. Can't have that! Clement knows what Conservative Cabinet ministers are supposed to do -- subvert the rules to do whatever Dear Leader wants.
What was most amusing, in a rueful sort of way, was how the media coverage tried to make this into a regional thing, East vs West, or a language thing, Quebec vs Everybody Else, when the actual basis of the story was always a homophobia thing, Teh Gay vs Religious Right. Like I said two weeks ago:

I think Canadian arts organizers can say bye bye to all those other grants which had been given to gay organizations across the country, now that these are also going to be on the Religious Right target list.

Police Entitlement Syndrome

We're not supposed to yell at the police, it hurts their widdle feelings and entitles them to throw their weight around and abuse people and make up charges to arrest them. They've all got PES (Police Entitlement Syndrome)
Is anyone surprised that the RCMP don't want to follow Braidwood's recommendations about taser use? What's the matter with these people? Who do they think they are working for?
PES (Police Entitlement Syndrome) strikes again. And this was obviously also a factor in the Gates case -- the police got Gates to step out onto his front porch, so they could arrest him for causing a "public" disturbance.
They've obviously done this before.
Obama was kind when he described this police behaviour as "acting stupidly".

Toronto experience part deux

Here's a few more Toronto photos -- I loved the juxtaposition of old and new around downtown Toronto. Coming from a city where the oldest buildings are little more than a century old, it was so interesting to see how Toronto has melded their old and new buildings.


We got to the St. Lawrence Market -- everybody and their dog was there.


We saw the Doctor defeat Boston and I got this shot of the last strike out, the one the crowd was so excited about according to the news coverage -- though actually the reason for the excitement was that if Halliday struck out seven batters, Pizza Pizza would give away a free slice for the tickets. so everybody was cheering for this seventh strikeout. It's a great experience to be in the ball park watching the game.


Then we went off to Niagara Falls for a couple of days -- I had never seen the Falls before and it was great even though it was raining much of the time we were there.


And we got a chuckle out of what must be the tackiest tourist street in all of Canada -- here is Frankenstein chomping down on a Big Whopper (don't ask!)

Toronto experience

We're visiting in Toronto and enjoying the Just for Laughs festival -- I haven't been here for 20 years, and then it was for work, so this is the first time I've really seen a bit of the city. What a fascinating, cosmopolitan, interesting city this is, even with some garbage lying about -- though actually its not very bad in the areas we have been in. and we drove past the infamous Christie Pits park, and maybe we were on the wrong side but you really can hardly see where the garbage is piled up, and there were lots of people still using the other end of the park.
Sorry, I wanted to upload some photos, but can't seem to get them to load on the wireless connection here at the hotel, so I may have to wait until next week when I'm back at home.
Update:
Ha! Got it! --
Toronto is full of churches, and between all the downtown highrises and the Eaton Centre we found the Church of the Holy Trinity, where they have their doors open and maintain a Homeless Memorial listing the names of the homeless people who have died on the streets:




And what is it with stairwell kitsch in stores? Last summer we saw Mohamed Al-Fayed's memorials at Harrods in London, and this summer we see Ed Mirvish's moose clock in Honest Eds in Toronto:


I hadn't realized there was a flatiron building in Toronto -- it's beautiful.

Too much fun

We've been traveling and generally having too much fun for a lot of blogging -- I'll post some photos as soon as I can -- but in the meantime here's Stand By Me