Why do people leave early?

I just don't understand it.
 Why do people leave before a concert or a game is over? Why would they deliberately miss something they paid good money to see?
OK, if the score is 50 to 10, yes, I can see it.
But at the Rider game on Friday, my brother said people were leaving after Montreal pulled ahead with 1:47 to go. Did they forget that anything can happen in the CFL, and often does? The people who left missed the most thrilling moment in sports -- a Riders come-from-behind victory in the last 73 seconds of the game.
And at the McCartney concert last week, the one that people paid $300 or more a ticket to attend, we saw people shuffling up the stairs and out of the stadium even before the first encore. They missed, maybe not the best part of the concert, but certainly one of the better parts -- Daytripper, Get Back, Yesterday, Helter Skelter, the Regina pipe band, and the tattoo girl.
Can anybody explain why people do this?
Remember this one -- I wonder how many left at the middle of the ninth?

Binge-watching The Wire

"

We've been binge-watching The Wire lately -- didn't see it when it first came out, but all the episodes are available on our Shaw box so we've been watching two or three a night. Now we can see why people have said its the greatest TV series ever broadcast.
 Great characters and great plots.
Like Omar.
Season one:

Season four:

It was 49 years ago today....

Back in August, 1964, my sister and I lined up at 6 am at the Trivoli Theatre to see the first showing of A Hard Day's Night.
I'm the dark haired girl second from the right, and my sister is holding the LIFE magazine on the left.
We never ever thought that the Beatles would come to Saskatchewan.
Well, finally, 49 years later, they did -- or one of them at least:

Paul McCartney amazes fans in Regina
Sir Paul put on a terrific show -- his last one in North America on this tour, and he gave it all he had. A remarkably personal concert, too, as he told several stories about John and George and Linda, as he sang songs in tribute to them, and he talked also about his present wife Nancy.  He performed a number of the older songs that hadn't been performed before in concerts.  His voice was pretty good, but even better was his obvious joy in entertaining and interacting with the crowd.
The photo above shows Mull of Kintyre, with the City of Regina Pipe Band -- McCartney made a point of thanking the 10-year-old bagpiper who plays in the band, remarking on how important it was to have young people involved in music.
When he sang Blackbird, he told us that he wrote it in the early 60s for the civil rights movement:


Worth waiting for.

Ottawa entitlement syndrome

Was there ever a truer phrase spoken in Ottawa than when David Dingwall told parliament that he was "entitled to his entitlements"?
Its all of Ottawa in a nutshell -- insular, egotistical, disdainful of petty restrictions and ules (except, of course, for refugee dental bills and EI claimants.)
Today we find out that Pam Wallin billed Canadians for more than half a million dollars in travel expenses over four years, and that almost $400,000 of those expenses were spent within the Senate's rules.
What kind of rules allow an unelected politician this kind of prolificacy with the taxes I pay?
Michael Den Tandt looks at the larger picture:

Wallin’s claim is the political equivalent of a drive-by shooting, suggesting that, far from being an outrider, she was adhering to established practice.
And that gets us to the nub of the broader issues now raised. “Senator Wallin indicated … that discussions with Senator Tkachuk early in her tenure regarding various roles she had (such as Chancellor of the University of Guelph) confirmed that travel expenses to such events would be eligible for reimbursement,” the audit reads. “In this regard, we note that we have not assessed or reviewed any travel expense claims by other Senators, and therefore cannot comment on whether activities such as those undertaken by Senator Wallin were or were not undertaken by other Senators… “
It’s an echo of earlier hints, emerging from the Duffy file, that he’d been led to believe, or allowed to assume, that he had carte blanche with the Senate credit card.

As Montreal Simon points out, Harper said that he had personally reviewed Wallins expenses and didn't find anything amiss.
Think about that for a minute -- he thought half a million dollars in travel expenses for an unelected Senator was hunky-dory.
What planet does Ottawa live on?
A note of disclosure:  I have been friendly with Pam Wallin over the years -- at one time I worked on her CBC radio show -- so when she says she was following the rules as she understood them, I believe her.  But only someone floating inside the Ottawa bubble would think these expenses rules actually made sense.

One day in the city

In a gorgeous flooded city, a scavenger discovers that he isn't alone

Happy happy joy joy

LOL! Loved the remark on tonight's news that Sun News TV generated more letters of complaint to CRTC than it had actual viewers.
— Michelle Simson (@MichelleSimson) August 8, 2013

In spite of claims about how the CRTC's decision on SUN news isn't that bad, really and how SUN news actually got what it wanted, really it gladdened my heart that Canadian cable subscribers won't be forced to subsidize this amateur operation with its childish talking heads. Not just yet, anyway.

Powerful pro-CBC advertisement

I saw this ad on TV tonight, can't remember which channel -- its the ad that CBC itself wouldn't run:



Powerful stuff, with a bit of humour at the end, too.
Friends of Canadian Broadcasting launch anti-Harper ad - YouTube

MTL buses - bureaucracy gone mad

Here's a horrible story about a mother fined $219 by Montreal Transit for not having the exact change for a bus fare -- at ten o'clock at night, with her toddler in tow, after spending five hours in the emergency room, kicked off the bus for trying to give a bus driver a $5 bill for her $3 fare.
So why wouldn't he just accept the $5 bill?  Why did he call the inspectors on her?  Why are Montreal bus inspectors driving around at 10 at night handing out fines and kicking mothers and children off buses?
Why didn't someone else on the bus pay her fare?
What is the matter with these people?
Municipal transit companies are always whining about why people don't take the bus more often -- and then they treat their customers this way. This kind of attitude is EXACTLY why nobody wants to take a bus anywhere anymore. UPDATE: A commenter on the Montreal Gazette story provides more details:

My husband Wayne Larsen, and I were on the bus. I did offer to pay her fare to both the driver and the inspectors. I was told by the inspector "No, no, it's ok, it's free." I assumed that meant they were giving her a warning like they did to the other passenger. I thought they would drive her home. I had no idea that this was how the situation ended or I would have stayed. We told the Gazette about offering to pay her fare.

This makes it even worse -- the bus company decided to "punish" her for the effrontery of trying to pay her fare with a $5 bill -- instead of just accepting the fare from another passenger, they wanted to make her wait with her toddler on a streetcorner in the middle of the night for another bus. That'll show her who is in charge around here!

Photos of Canada

This Sikh motorcycle club is only one of Naomi Harris' unique photos of Canada.  More here:  Naomi Harris: “Oh Canada” is a road trip for a Canadian photographer looking to find home.

Compare and contrast

The contrast could not be greater.
Montreal police spend a full day dealing with a demonstrably-violent mentally ill man who shot at them from a house with 180 guns; they finally subdue him with rubber bullets.
A Toronto police officer spends less than five minutes yelling at a potentially-violent mentally disturbed teenager armed with a paring knife; then shoots him nine times. While the other officers at the scene nonchalantly stroll past the bus door.



CBC has an article posted about police use-of-force training -- likely foreshadowing what will be the police defense:

"We teach what courts have said, when it's appropriate to use force," said Fawcett. "The courts have laid down pretty reasonable rules when it comes to the use of deadly force."
"When it comes to making a decision about the reasonableness of use of force, essentially what the courts have said is you have to be a doppelganger or a ghost in the shoes of the officer and see what they saw, not what the video camera showed, not what another witness saw.
"What was the perception of the officer and was that perception reasonable? And of course what the courts have also said [is that] you can't expect cool reflection in the face of an uplifted knife."

It sounds like the George Zimmerman defense all over again -- that the mere perception of danger, rather than the reality, is sufficient to justify a lethal response.

Adjectives for the Harper Cons

Cloud, meet silver lining.
The Harper Con's cheap partisan dissing of astronaut and Liberal MP Marc Garneau has produced a very useful set of adjectives which we can all use in the future.
Under FOIA, the Canadian Press obtained a batch of emails to then-heritage minister James Moore from the Canadian public relating to the snub of Garneau over Canadarm unveiling in April.  Here's how people described what was done to Garneau:

The list of adjectives and phrases in the more than 60 emails was all negative: childish, despicably partisan, tacky, classless and petty, absolute disgrace, spiteful and mean-spirited, ungracious, nasty, ignorant, sleazy behaviour, loutish behaviour, puerile, boorish discourtesy.

Yep, that pretty well sums it up.

Bring on the BC bud

Kinsella thinks Trudeau's pot legalization proposal is a mistake:

To sum up: a policy that is made on the fly, apparently without much caucus consultation – to curry favour with a segment who mostly don’t vote – and that will (a) place Liberals on the defensive in the 2015 election and (b) would have a debilitating effect on Canadians, and Canadian trade, at the border. Some Liberals may think that’s great. I think it’s dumb.

He may be right, but I hope not.
This summer when we were on the ferry between Vancouver and Victoria, a sardonic announcement came over the PA system asking the the group smoking marijuana on deck six to put it out, with the reminder that though it was legal in Washington state it wasn't legal in BC.  The boat rocked with laughter.  That's how seriously everyone now takes our drug laws.
Of all the "wars" fought in my lifetime, the war on drugs has been the stupidest and the most destructive, ruining young people's lives with criminal records while enriching some of the worst criminal organizations on the continent. If all of the people now addicted to alcohol could switch to cannabis, their families would be a lot better off -- nobody ever got high and started a fight in a bar or beat up on their wife and kids.
And BC growers could make a fortune.

Looks like I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue

So I decided earlier this week to add Salon.com to the new links on my blogroll.
Then they publish this ridiculous piece of Drudge-report link-bait, apparently because they thought they should be contrarian about Obama's fine Trayvon Martin speech.
Then they published this ridiculous piece of tripe about how Ted Cruz could beat Hillary for president, which is stupid on so many levels, not the least because Cruz was born in Calgary and isn't even eligible to run for president anyway so who cares.
Bye-bye, Salon.

Diving into the racist cesspits

At Eschaton, Thers wrote yesterday:

You know, anyone who thinks that we as a nation have Overcome Racism ought to check out the comments section of any local newspaper that has any online story whatsoever to do with race, however tangentially. That comments section is, I guarantee, a fucking racist cesspit.

Canada has its own racist cesspits when it comes to the comments on news stories about our Aboriginal people.  MP Charlie Angus flags some recent horrible comments:

Online commentators responded to the natural disasters in places like Oklahoma, Bracebridge or Alberta with an outpouring of comments that were very heartfelt and moving.
And yet, when two communities in my region -- Attawapiskat and Kashechewan -- were hit by flash flooding earlier this spring, the pages were overwhelmed with vicious glee. . . The idea that government agencies might send aid to help these Canadian citizens sent the online commentators into a rage.

And I'm sorry, I had intended to quote some of the comments that Angus used to illustrate his article but I just can't --  they make me feel tainted even to repeat.  Just go read the link.
What Angus asks is why the rest of us are apparently so willing to tolerate these cesspits, to go along with what is being said, to not push back.

I used to think that trolls wrote this crap because they could post their junk anonymously. But now I seeing people who are not only willing to sign their name but supply an accompanying headshot. Far from feeling marginalized, the purveyors of these false stereotypes -- the "lazy" Indian, the "corrupt" Chief, the "ripped off" taxpayer" -- seems to be hijacking the public conversation away from issues like chronic infrastructure underfunding, third class education and the inability to share in economic development.
Having received such little push back the trolls continue to promote even more dehumanizing caricatures. In a recent comment on Attawapiskat one person wrote, "Europeans have created the modern world, while you people created lice, fleas and more welfare recipients." Such screeds were once found on marginal Neo-Nazi sites. They now find themselves at home on the public spaces provided by reputable media organizations.

In my own case, I usually don't even read these types of news comments.  I'm uncomfortable getting into pissing matches with foul-mouthed, ill-informed and mean-spirited people, and I didn't think I could say anything that would change their minds anyway.
But it never occurred to me to wonder about the effects of my cowardice on Aboriginal people:

. . . I think of the trauma experienced by children in Attawapiskat by online attacks. When the media began reporting on their struggle to have a school built in the community, the online haters overwhelmed the comments pages. A teacher in Attawapiskat told me the children were very shaken up when they read the long string of abusive comments that demeaned them as "lazy Indians," "losers", "gasoline sniffers," etc.
. . . Some Aboriginal friends have asked me if the silence from general society reflects a tacit support for such views? I certainly don't believe this is the case, but clearly Canadians and the media need to do better.

This brought me up short.  It never occurred to me that my silence implied consent with what the racists are saying.
So once more into the breach, dear friends.  As I wrote a long time ago, we cannot always choose the battle. Sometimes all we can do is choose our side.  
My side is with Charlie Angus and the children of Attawapiskat.  And if this means I have to dive into the cesspits of news comment sections from now on, then so be it.

Baby's first year

A Second a Day from Birth. - YouTube: ""

You won't be able to stop smiling.
Thanks to Daily Kos.