Abandoned Stuff by Saskboy

This cartoon is a tiny bit funny. Although it does have an air to it that is a little unfair, like the summation highlighted by Robert here about Democrat mayors (mostly in the Rust Belt) of the USA.

==

And turning to Conservatives in Canada, Peter MacKay stepped into a pile of stupid with some comments the other week.

““Since Atlantic Canadians mostly rely on coal for electricity, oil to heat their homes, and diesel to import food and other items, the permanent new Liberal carbon tax will be devastating for the region,” said Peter Mackay, Minister of National Defence. “It’s no wonder Liberals are spending two days in Digby trying to find ways to fool Atlantic Canadians about it – we won’t let that happen.”

He’s going to make it very easy for voters around Pictou to decide on their next MP. They can go with the Conservative Party who has no plan for the future when those carbon fuels are too expensive to use, or they can go with the country’s leading political expert on carbon tax shifting and environmentally based economic planning — Elizabeth May.

MacKay also lied (bolded for your convenience):

“Mr. MacKay said the timing of the ad campaign has nothing to do with the fact Mr. Thibault’s riding is hosting the Liberals’ Atlantic caucus meetings this week. He said he wasn’t aware the meetings were happening.

The news release, in which Mr. MacKay is quoted twice, was titled Conservatives Launch Ad Campaign Ahead of Liberal Atlantic Caucus.

The ads are paid for by the Conservative Party, not taxpayers, said Mr. MacKay.

That would be a new thing — for the Conservatives. They are used to having tax payers pay for their In-and-Out schemes, and for their MP propaganda mail-outs that don’t go to the correct ridings.

–
Also writing about this was Kady and Big City Lib.

She makes at least as much sense as McCain does, and she’s “hawt” to boot. Too bad her “limited” off shore oil drilling plan won’t work since it won’t produce a DROP of oil for at least 10 years. Al Gore in the mean time says America can be oil-power FREE by the time those same 10 years are up!

I know Gore’s plan can be done - the States built a fleet of the world’s most feared and powerful military planes and military vehicles in less than 5 years (and that was 60 years ago!). They can do the same (minus the fear part) with their existing civilian fleet of cars and planes, and rejuvenate the Rust Belt at the same time. Better still, they don’t have to ship the new fleet over to France, Germany, and Japan because the point is to use them at home instead.

The Roughriders are dealing with more than their share of broken legs and other serious injuries. Rod’s blog has a photo of the new Rider vehicle - an ambulance painted green and white.
The loss on Thursday night wasn’t unbearable, since we actually started scoring touchdowns in the fourth quarter. Before that, our offense was held to an average of 1 point for each of the previous 5 quarters. I was seriously worried that we were going to be beaten worse than Hamilton whipped Toronto the same night.

==

Also injurious to the Riders was TSN’s handling of the blackout on Thursday night’s Rider game. CBC caught widespread condemnation for their failure to broadcast a chunk of last year’s Blackout Bowl at Mosaic Stadium at Taylor Field. On Thursday, many TSN customers were unable to watch the first half of the Rider game (told to me by a couple sources who don’t live in Regina, but live in the province). When will TSN and the CFL admit that blackouts are a disastrous marketing approach to selling football tickets and the league to fans?

==

Ottawa’s football team imploded years ago. And now some of their stadium has too. I’ve sat in the bleachers above the part they knocked down, for the Renegades’ opening game against the Riders. The Riders won that contest :-) much to my delight.

–
Hat tip to PiePalace

This parody of pro sports is pretty funny, especially since I’ve played this non(North American)-traditional sport for fun before.

Last night I was out at Buffalo Days (terrible website for information, as usual) watching Saskatchewan’s own Foxxworthee and then country superstar and actor Randy Travis. I’m headed back again today, and especially on Sunday morning for the free breakfast and admission (morning only). I had to get location of the breakfast (in the Molson stage park) from an information kiosk because the website doesn’t have the details!

Foxxworthee were better than their Canada Day performance, and Randy Travis was fantastic. I was standing center stage, third row. The cigarette smoke was thick. The music was loud, but not too loud with my handy ear plugs I carry in my camera bag for just such an event. The drunks were loud, and one lady was kicked out before the show started. And the music was awesome.

I should mention that I helped Canadian (and Regina based artist) Donjames Leblanc with his website, and Donjames has the number 4 song on the NCM country chart in Europe behind Randy Travis at number 1 this week!

Randy was funny, seemed genuinely pleased by the response of the large crowd, and told a few jokes between songs. He also said that he’s not up to speed with the computer age of music, and things have changed a lot in the music business the last 8 years since he was promoting mainstream country albums. “My Space used to be around here (he said gesturing to a space in front of his body) and people weren’t allowed in it!” When he paused after saying there were new ways to promote albums, I shouted out, “YOUTUBE” but he didn’t hear or respond.

There were people taking photos with cell phones that weren’t responding well to the light variation so Randy’s image was being washed out. One lady who came up to the front for a photo got a poor shot, so I gave her my card so she could check here for images. She said the photo was for her kid who couldn’t make it due to cancer treatment (that’s what I heard over the loud music).

By coincidence again (because it happened last year too) I ran into my old friend Jesse and his wife at the concert. Last year we bumped into each other at the clairvoyant show. They managed to pick up a Randy Travis souvenir guitar pick that was thrown into the crowd at the start of the show!

==

This morning I got up early (10:00 haha) to do laundry, and there was something flying around in the hallway! I thought it was a bird at first, but then noticed it was silent and looked like a bat. It was!

I opened the door for it, but it was too confused to fly through it. I opened another door, and it made the same futile laps as it tried to land on the mostly smooth walls. One time it stuck to the stucco ceiling, but I startled it from its perch trying to chase it out. I went and got my camera and took some photos and video of it flying. Then it landed, and I had my dirty laundry with me, so I picked up my ragged old Riders shirt, put my hands into it making a net, and sneaked up slowly on the bat. When I was about a foot away, with the “net” up to the bat, I lunged and it plopped into the pouch the shirt made as I closed my hands at the top. I walked quickly downstairs and set the shirt onto the sidewalk, opening it up a little so the bat could crawl out. It did, and flew away into the day.

So, call me Batman. It didn’t even take ten years to happen!

Listen to 18-25 seconds on the Black Crowes and then 8-16 seconds on Wilson’s. It’s a blatant rip off. It amazes me that Wilson thought she could get away with it. Still, it’s a bit of a publicity stunt for the Crowes, since they are yesterday’s news compared to Wilson.

The Crowes have a bit of a whiny baby aura to them. I think copyright shouldn’t even apply after this many years (Legally it does at the moment, but that should change). Still, it wasn’t classy to plagiarize the Black Crowes’ song. Though, would we expect class from a self described (in her songs) drunk, redneck woman?

–
Hat tip to Jeff

==

And speaking of Weird Al, he’s coming back to Regina this Sunday. I’m super excited that I will finally get to see the master of comedic tribute singing, in person.

By Saskboy
Associated Mess writer / August 1, 2008

REGINA, Sask. — The American presidential election took a nasty turn on Thursday as African-American Presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama accused Presidential “Sure-thing” Senator John McCain of playing with racing cars. In fact, it was McCain’s wife Cindy who was playing with race cars.

“It was great,” [...] “Oh my God!” the McCain’s wife said, clearly pumped about her first time on the Indy track. What Cindy didn’t know was that Obama had used the car prior to her drive. He had inflated the tires so that there was less friction and better fuel economy. McCain told reporters he was “very disappointed” that Obama had used her race car without asking him first.

This year’s Presidential campaign just happens to fall in an oil crisis year. That has put both candidates on a slippery slope, and ready to have third parties fling mud at each other. Any of their actions could be misinterpreted as a sign of weakness by the terrorists who are out to destroy America. That’s why it’s important for them to pretend everything is fine and use as much oil as normal, but to secretly conserve it when the terrorists aren’t looking and Americans are. When McCain isn’t drift racing with her son on a private track, she’s busy conserving oil in secret. But conservation isn’t everything according to McCain’s husband and the next President of the United States, John McCain who favours drilling insignificant domestic oil wells to win a psychological battle with his anti-Republican demons.

“Yesterday, Obama suggested that we put air in our tires to save on gas. My friends, let’s do that. But do you think that’s enough to break our dependence on Middle Eastern oil? I don’t think so because we need to buy American oil,” he said to chuckles from the crowd of race card rivers. Obama’s suggestion to avoid drilling off the United States shore, to save spotted owls and to prevent an insignificant contribution of domestic oil within a decade, is clearly a non-starter with the majority of Americans, most of whom aspire to drive race cars. The oil issue is likely to be the final nail in Obama’s metaphorical political campaign coffin. It’s a campaign that has struggled and given up nearly one point of its ten point lead since the start of the week when Britney Spears endorsed “Osama” Obama, thus losing the non-crazy vote to the un-crazy-endorsed McCain.

(Additional reporting by I. P. Freely)

I’m having fun playing with the new search engine called Cuil (said “cool”). They show images based on tags, next to each search result. The results are counter-intuitive in only the way that artificial intelligence can deliver. The image shown does not always (or frequently I’ve learned) come from the website that Cuil links it to!

Check out this photo of a search for “abandoned stuff” and also for “small dead blog”:

My blog shows up as the first result, not bad if I say so myself. But that photo I’ve never seen before, and the guy in the second result is not even me or anyone I know (but he must be important and bloggy because he shows up next to the top search result for “stephen taylor” as well). Even more odd are the suggested Explore by Category options where nearly every option is captioned. The captions have spelling errors (like for Progressive Bloggers), and Rick Mercer’s caption says “Richard Vincent”!

“Small Dead blog” on google brings up Small Dead Animals a few searches down from the top. Yet on Cuil, it’s not even in the first four pages of results! I stopped looking after 4. And the first result is a malicious parody/indictment of Kate’s blogging. Cuil (or whoever enters/generates the descriptions for categories) describes Kate McMillian as “a popular Canadian blogger”. Good thing they didn’t pull a quote from Canadian Cynic or MWW’s blogs? Speaking of which CC dominates the front page of Cuil with a search for “canadian cynic”. Why does Cuil hate Small Dead Animals?

–
Why Cuil will fail (besides its terrible name).

==

Blog navel gazing moment:
This is my 2005 blog post on AbandonedStuff.com . I have many more posts on other blogs, some even included in the 2005 count.

==

You can listen to stupid or mentally ill people (it’s not clear) on You Tube, after they’ve been put there by British police.

–
Hat tip to Slashdot.org