Abandoned Stuff by Saskboy

I’d laugh, if it wasn’t so distressing to so many people. AOL apparently closed its “Hometown” homepage service suddenly on Halloween 2008 after only a month’s (passive) notice. Considering how infrequently many of the webpages there would be maintained, a lot of people must have missed a chance to back up their webpages.

Since AOL has probably long since deleted the sites, the only shot to get them back is to effectively lobby AOL to restore a site from backups (this would be a long shot), or to find the site in the Internet Wayback Machine at archive.org.

AOL is known for its customer service disasters, and this is just another in the long list of them. I’m surprised that Kelly’s blog is what AOL forwards people to when they attempt to find a Hometown page with AOL’s own, still functioning and live, Hometown People search page!

And if you can’t recover your site, you can always play Minesweeper to drown your sorrows.

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The Canadian Blog Awards are over, but 2008 isn’t, and I thought it would be fun to borrow a page from Jon Swift’s blog book, and open up nominations for the best blog post of 2008. Yes, Mike won the CBA, but you (or your favourite blogger) could win the first annual Abandoned Stuff Super Post Of The Year (A.S.S.P.O.T.Y.) Award.

It doesn’t have to be a Canadian blog, and it doesn’t have to be your blog (but you should probably suggest one from your own blog anyway). The important rule is that you must nominate at most only one blog post from yourself, and/or at most one from some other blog. That means two nominations total from each person reading this. Leave your nomination(s) in the comments, and after 2 weeks I’ll pick my favourite(s), and we’ll have a poll too, to determine my blog readers’ favourite.

You only nominate a post once for it to be considered, no seconding allowed.

The winner who I pick gets a link on my homepage for 2009.

Post Thanksgiving, lots of Canadians were thinking about what to do with their leftovers. And at the same time the government was working with scraps left over from the failed election. It was a failure because nothing of note happened, and no mandate was changed for any party.

I wrote most of this post in the fallout after the election. It usually takes a year for past blogging to become this interesting again. It only took months for this to attain that status in my mind. And it’s all the New York Times fault???
I guess it makes sense that an American (dispassionate, bird’s eye) view of our political problems can be as insightful as a Canadian peering into the American catastrophe that they call a political system.

saskboy
on Oct 16th, 2008 at 4:10 pm

I’d prefer a better electoral system, since the call to unite parties is a symptom of the poor system we have. Failing an unwillingness to reform, a merger is required to reform the system, at which points the independent parties would reemerge from the conglomerate.

Paul
on Oct 16th, 2008 at 5:49 pm

While I would have supported a centre-left coalition government as a stop-gap measure, merging the parties is not the answer. We need to reform the electoral system if Parliament is ever going to be representative of the diversity of political thinking in the country.

saskboy
on Oct 16th, 2008 at 6:52 pm

What Paul said is good. We need a way for the Greens, NDP, and Liberals to form a pre-electoral coalition so they don’t get punished by voters who are made ignorant (by Conservative spin money) of the benefits of a coalition, and can divvy up the seats in a way to ensure a majority so electoral reform can go through without opposition.

“The harsh reality is that the Liberals are going to have to adapt more than any other political party,” Professor Whitehorn said.

No kidding?

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I went to a movie on Monday with my Dad. We saw the latest Bond flick “Quantum of Solace” [8/10], which would have been better if we’d seen the previous Bond film. The Silver City at Polo Park has a NY Fries and Burger King inside it, and the two tickets cost nearly $20 for the 3:55PM showing. For the first 18 minutes of previews, the projectionist had the wrong aspect ratio set, so everyone on the screen looked about 7lbs, and not just during the 7 Pounds movie trailer. Another 4 minutes of the wrong ratio [when it would have started to seriously matter], and I was going to go fetch an usher to complain about the quality of their projectionist’s work. If I’m going to pay $20 to get screen aspect ratio problems, (when I can do that quite well for free from Internet bootlegs) why go to Silver City?

This morning I read a hostile interview between the WFPress and the city’s mayor. I don’t think they get along very well, that’s my impression.

Academy Road had gas on sale for 76.4cents/L but everywhere else in Winnipeg is 79.9, what’s up with that 3.5cent discount?

For supper the family ate at the Star Grill on Portage in St. James. Most of the entrees were $23, but I got by with a fantastic quesadilla for $14 with fries and soup $3.50 and couldn’t imagine having room for a $23 meal. (Firefox spell check didn’t know “quesadilla”, but I did. I almost impressed myself.)

And in other useless, personal trivia, I killed my iPod shuffle’s battery this evening, for the first time ever in my ~year of owning it. I think it must have been about 7 hours since its last proper charge, so it’s not surprising I suppose.

I heard about this on the radio the other day. The Saskatoon police messed up, and charged an eager university student with conducting evil experiments at home. Who knows what kind of discoveries they are suppressing? Imagine if only government authorized scientific experiments are to be conducted? If you mix baking soda and vinegar at home, expect to be fined.

Imagine if the Bloc and NDP formed a coalition with the support of Iggy’s Liberals who are numerically weaker than those two parties combined. Iggy would never support it, of that I’m sure, although it’s an interesting idea regardless.

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Skip to the last two minutes of this video, and you’ll see that Harper doesn’t get it. He isn’t sorry about not working with other parties, he still thinks he can ‘win’ and shut some of them down for good. And he still plays with words in a sleazy way, accusing the opposition of “overturning the results of the last election”. You don’t overturn the results when you throw out a government that has lost the confidence of the House!

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Hat tip to RT

The Conservatives have again shown their true stripe to Canadians, when they work toward making First Nations people pay for the education guaranteed in Treaties that ensured a peaceful welcome to European (and other) immigrants to Canada. Their latest outrage is an attempt to have loans rather than grants given to young First Nations people who attend university or colleges.

Reading in the Winnipeg Free Press this morning, I learned that more than 10,000 Aboriginal people (since 1996) have been turned down for post-secondary education grants, on the basis that there is not enough funding. The federal government’s absurd position is that the money given to bands for distribution have been spent on other items. The bands don’t deny this, because they spent the money on emergency housing expenses! Given the lack of clean water (a human right), and decent housing on many First Nation reservations, I think it’s criminal that the federal government denies its responsibility (in black and white in the Treaties) to provide education and housing as requested to do so.

The government also claims, when people get tired of its first excuses, that “post secondary” education is not what was bargained for in the Treaties. They think their obligation is over after secondary school education. Perhaps a legal expert, who has studied historic treaties would be able to say if that’s the case or not. I think it’s obvious that if it’s so easy to get out of responsibility to provide “education” by claiming so called “post-secondary education” is no longer “education”, then the government could save MILLIONS (maybe billions) of dollars by renaming “education” to “learning” which isn’t covered by the Treaties. Then stop paying for high school for Aboriginal children.

Seriously though, if the governments across Canada were serious about engaging First Nations people in the workforce, they would be jumping at the chance to get more people through university. Brad Wall in Saskatchewan mentions he wants to see a lot of jobs created for Aboriginals, but I haven’t heard him get specific. It’s as if he wants simply to say something that sounds positive, while he intends to do nothing to make it happen. In one respect you can hardly blame him, since while education is a provincial responsibility, Treaties are an agreement with the federal government. Usually premiers are eager to use legal means to pry money from Ottawa, but so far Wall has balked.

The following is a portion from a UofS report that explains why the Conservatives’ plan is a continuation of Canadian failed, and illegal policy.
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I would put the surprise formation of a coalition as one of the top political stories in Canada for the year. Globally, the Obama election probably easily takes the cake.

What do you think is the top Canadian Political story of 2008?

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Media pundits today on CTV’s Question Period predictably picked Dion as a top political flop of the year, but also among the picks were Harper’s failure to capture a majority government through his disastrous arts cut announcement. Fife figured that if the election campaign had been about the Afghanistan War, then Harper would have lost. What was absurd about their picks though were many pundits seemed to think that the coalition was headed by “clowns”, while at the same time Gloria Galloway was pining for mature politicians like in … the USA??! Mature, like Chicago’s Blagojugovich mature, perhaps?

The coalitions’ detractors seem to have as their primary complaint, that the coalition’s parties didn’t simply roll over and accept financial strangulation. Regardless of the ability of any party to raise funds directly from Canadian individuals, there is not a party who would gladly lose their proportional funding based on the number of votes received. The only reasons the Conservatives were willing to accept the paltry-sized cut, was because they were the only major party able to survive it.

The obvious joke that comes to mind is;
A man named Harper rubs a lamp, and a genie named Jean comes out. She says, you may have two wishes, but in the wishes, whatever you get, the opposition parties get double. Harper thought for a moment, and said, “I want another national convention next year, and cut my party’s funding by 50% immediately.”

The main complaint about the coalition is that the Liberals didn’t continue to roll over and play dead like a dog. If the coalition stays together or not, it’s already achieved part of what it was created to do; it forces Harper to realize that his minority government can fall at any time he chooses to be partisan rather than cooperative.