Abandoned Stuff by Saskboy

On CKOM.com’s John Gormley Live, the topic was blogs, and how an author from Calgary slammed blogs as being a detriment to political activism. Well Saskatchewan bloggers phoned and corrected that silly notion.

You need to sign up to be a Newstalk Insider to download the podcast of the radio show. It’s from 10:30 AM to 11:30 AM that you need to download.

I phoned up, then Kate from SmallDeadAnimals.com, and the hour ended with Lance of Catprint in the Mash/Saskblogs Aggregator. Several other bloggers from around the province called in, and were mentioned by the callers and John Gormley as recommended reading.

One blogger, Wild Doug, I wrote about quickly about last week I think. They are raising money in the method of One Red Paperclip.

==

Now doing what I like to do, and that’s journalize my blog, even though it makes it one of those banal blogs that Gormley moaned about today, here’s what I did today…

I drove through blowing snow to LeRoy, stopping at Sheho for a couple pictures, and of course pulling to the side while on the cell phone to the radio show.

-Sheho’s memorial elevator

I wondered how best to reply to the accusation that I was dragging down the progressive blogosphere in a Michelle Malkin-esque way. Should I start a flame war? Should I take it on the chin and ignore it? Should I engage in a reasonable debate with a blogger who I consider pretty intelligent most of the time? Last time I tried talking with NDP bloggers (who just happened to post at Rabble.ca by coincidence) I wound up taking a verbal beating for backing what I thought was a pretty reasonable attempt from Elizabeth May to convince nuns that Canada needed to provide women with access to abortions.

Now it seems I’ve touched on another area where I’m not allowed to tread without partisan blowback, and that’s in speculating as to the demise of NDP power in the House. Because I played out my conclusion of the hypothesis that Jack Layton is going to lose a lot of votes (as will other parties) to the Greens next general election, I’m suddenly akin to a blowhard, anti-Islamofascist blogger popular in the right-wing spin-o-sphere in America. I don’t think my blog is the tipping point for the destruction of free speech and good sense in the ProgBlogs.

[Saskboy’s] type of mangling of logical structure in the name of partisanship is indeed a rarity in Canada’s progressive blogosphere. And I only hope that by pointing out such problems when they do appear, we can keep from falling into the same fact-free black hole which the American right so happily occupies.

I do believe I’ve been zinged. But maybe I’m taking The Jurist’s words too hard, and he really means that I’ve just veered off course, and not meaning that I’m all the way to a Vert-ified Level 5 Islamofaschist-phobe Spin PhD. Am I without hope of recovering my progressive forthright nature, or am I terminally conservative, give it to my straight doc?

So remember - Don’t do what Donny Don’t does. And don’t pretend I’m not Donny Don’t.

Danke (”Thank you”, for those that don’t know the German at all).

==

As a bit of a note to myself: There’s also a lot of speculation from people like Jack Layton when it comes to hypothetical election outcomes. Jack doesn’t want Elizabeth May in the televised leaders debate, despite the facts laid out here for even himself to read. He’s using his crystal ball to determine that the Green Party is not going to win any seats in the coming election, so why bother including them in the debate that helps determine the outcome of the election?

After seeing Raymi’s blistering rant on the topic of “no women bloggers”, I had to put in my two cents. Raymi covered the topic well, although I’d have used fewer cuss words, but she was playing to her audience, not my straight laced crowd.

Warren Kinsella for those who don’t know, is a Liberal with a lot of baggage, and writes for the National Post. He has a moderately lame blog. Still, many people read it because he has a newspaper for backing. I poke fun at him occasionally, which some say is risky because he’s been known to sue.

He made a top 10 list of best bloggers, and they were mostly all guys, and he lamented that he can’t find women online… who blog, that is.

Some bloggers took up his list as a challenge to identify the “smartest” female bloggers. Liberal Catnip collected blogger’s submissions on the subject. “Smart” is a pretty unclear definition, since some people consider Kate of Small Dead Animals smart, while others [Edited Jan. 31, because I presumed too much. That should teach me to rant late into the night.] like her about as much as Cindy Sheehan likes George W. Bush. I’ll give Kate more credit than that, she knows how to market (to a base of idiots, mind you), and that alone makes her smarter than average, if we count marketing skill as smarts.

The blogosphere is all about circles of friends/lists, and if you find yourself trapped in a circle where there are only guys, and you want women, you have to go where you haven’t been before. Some web surfers just don’t know how to do that.

That’s what was cool about Blog Awards, and also that 2000 Bloggers meme that’s taking over right now. They are both easy ways to find yourself where you wouldn’t go normally.

RelapseTV (The title of this entry is in parody of it.)

I must admit, that it’s my job as the leader of the Teleban to be Repulsed by TV, but my job is easy when there are stations such as CTS-TV, and programs like the one featuring Relapsed Catholic Kathie Shaidle.

I taped another episode of “Behind the Story” yesterday. It airs this Sunday at 7PM EST. This time, I was feeling more energized and prepared; went quite well, I thought. Meaning: I lost my temper, and will generate lots of CRTC complaints.
…
“Trudeau said the State had no business in the bedrooms of the nation. Apparently this doesn’t apply to toboggan hills. First we need to nuke the Amazon rainforest so I don’t have to hear about it anymore. Then we need to train all the endangered species to fight terrorists because clearly, our helmet wearing, peanut-allergic wimpy children won’t be prepared to do so.”

That’s the spirit. Kids with serious allergies are wimps. They should man-up, and accept the edema. Do their own tracheotomies, or at least stab their Epi-pen deep into their leg without hesitation. To do less would invite bullying from 8 year old Kathie Shaidles. Who’s next Kathie, do we pick on those fattie diabetic pigs for not eating like the rest of us, since you’ve covered safety conscious vehicle riding wusses, and histamine challenged wimps?

What I find more shocking than the terrible attitude she has, is the pride Kathie takes in her repugnant, bullying views. Kate from Small Dead Animals seems to share this pride by highlighting the ranting to begin with, as if Kathie just told the naked emperor he didn’t have clothes on (instead of the reality, which is telling kids that it’s OK to pick on people who wear common safety gear, or who have to avoid allergens that kill them).

I hadn’t heard of CTS TV before.

We celebrate people who believe that strong relationships with family and friends and moral values are still important in life and important in the television programs they watch.
CTS TV is committed to offering our community “Television You Can Believe In!”

…
Tuesday’s lineup includes:
3:00 PM Touched by an Angel
4:00 PM 7th Heaven
5:00 PM Happy Days
5:30 PM Most Requested Music You Can Believe In
6:00 PM The Fresh Prince of Bel Air
6:30 PM Step by Step
7:00 PM Full House
7:30 PM The Facts of Life

And in the Alberta Application page:

CTS believes in the importance of the local church and local faiths, reflecting the Alberta religious communities and will schedule time for local churches to reach the needs of their community through television.

Thank you for adding your voice for these wholesome, values-based television services for Calgary and Edmonton.

I had assumed before seeing the show lineup that it was going to be a white-Christian-only TV station, but I see they do cater to other religions as well, and have even thrown in Fresh Prince and Touched by an Angel in to get people of different skin colours on the channel too.

Anyway, there are times I consider myself lucky I don’t have cable TV or a Dish. This time would be one of them. Instead of encouraging people to watch less violent TV by watching less TV, CTS is for asking people to form the insipid TV (Full House) watching habit. It isn’t going to get them away from violent shows like Lost, Dr. Who, and Desperate Housewives - they’ll flip to them when they get bored of the Olsen twins.

==

While I’m linking SDA, I may as well include an article with an exclamation point worth highlighting. Give me a break, Saskatchewan Government. Enough people can’t spell our province’s name to begin with, but now they’re going to think it ends with the letter ‘l’ when they get a grainy fax on provincial letterhead. I’m so glad we spent so much money to rebrand our name. Why don’t we just rename the province to Fort Mac East, and be done with it?

Saskatchewanl Boy, signing off.
Saskboy!, signing off.
You get the picture.

This whole Conservative “attack Dion” ad campaign smells like it came from the basement of a Blogging Tory who lives with their Mom. And not an old disabled Mom they care for either.

Check out the editorial cartoon on Olaf’s blog. And BPOC takes a swipe at the copyright-infringing ad too.

I just have to sit back and chuckle at how ridiculous it is at this point to say Dion would be a greater champion of the environmental issues, when his Liberal government did the disservice that chased me away from the party in part, in the 1990s and ’00s. The Liberals and Conservatives aren’t getting my vote on the environment no matter what spin they sow.

- A sign seen in my apartment building.
It reads, “A heater is not a shelf for junk mail. Kindly, stop trying to burn our apartment down please.

(more…)

Bad news for the cause of science - the Hubble Space Telescope has lost some functionality over last weekend. It went into a special Safe Mode, and needs servicing to be a full capacity again.

Slashdot users’ reactions were mixed:

User 956 (568564) on Monday January 29, @04:55PM (#17806264)
“Space.com is reporting that the aging observatory’s primary camera, the ACS, has been in safe mode since the weekend.”

No wonder they can’t contact it. Safe Mode doesn’t support networking by default.

I guess if you’ve ever used Windows 95, you’ll get the joke. Naturally, HST doesn’t use Windows 95, thank goodness.

Alp73: “Gee, if it’s fried, then they can’t do a normal maintenance and can save $100M on a launch….”

I think keeping the world’s most famous and in my opinion best space telescope [not counting the Mars Global Surveyor type cameras] in operation, is vital to maintaining public awareness of space research and discovery.

Oh e-voting, is there any system it can’t corrupt?

I did a double take when I saw they were considering Internet voting for Parliamentary elections. Good God, are they idiots, or do they want ruined elections? E-voting is unsuitable for anything more serious than who people think will supplant Britney Spears as the next queen of teen pop.

(Diebold) Electronic touch screen voting machines are part of a system of fraud. The fraud happens right in front of the voter/user, on a dedicated voting machine. The voter can’t even see their marked ballot go into a container for verification in the event of computer fraud! It’s a sham. Even if the system is created in good faith, there are too many points of untraceable data corruption, for an event that is darn near perfected in Canada using paper and pencils.

To suggest that Internet voting machines would be any better is a crock. The voter can’t confirm that their ballot is correct, and it’s not like they can print their own confirmation page like it’s some kind of e-commerce transaction. People could just forge their confirmation slips.

After stories like this, is there anyone who stands by electronic voting?

Fraud was reported in Brazil’s 2006 e-voting election by an
article just published in Brazil this week by Veja

The Veja text (in Portuguese) says that:

* more than 1/3 of the DREs used in the state of Alagoas show signs of criminal manipulation. …

If anyone tells you that electronic voting will make your election easier and more democratic… run, run from them like the wind, and cover your ears to keep out the lies. If you think that’s being overly dramatic, maybe, but is the point made yet? E-voting is fine for blogs, but when lives depend on it, don’t you dare use it.

Blogging is not hard. It’s about finding things that don’t matter, and writing about them anyway.

Take for example some of my evening spent talking with my cousin BRex. I now have a blog entry. Observe:

Canadian Military Submarine? Thats got bacon right? says:
also i heard that the canadian government
sold a sub to a museum for 4 dollars

Saskboy {In Yorkton says:
$4 eh?

Canadian Military Submarine? Thats got bacon right? says:
yea
i could afford that

Saskboy {In Yorkton says:
I’d take it
&
live in it

Canadian Military Submarine? Thats got bacon right? says:
paint it yellow?

Saskboy {In Yorkton says:
now that you mention it yes
and change my name to Wii All

Saskboy{In Yorkton says:
Can I post this short exchange on my blog?
Canadian Military Submarine? Thats got bacon right? says:
sure why not

No wonder Raymitheminx [NSFW] makes a ton of her blog posts just pointless MSN conversations…