…were shown off during his testimony at the Sponsorship Inquiry today in Ottawa. Golf Balls, that is.
Many of you have heard of the “adscam” but may be oblivious as to what it’s actually about. Well the heart of the scandal is about $100 million out of total of about $250 million worth of “sponsorship” funds that were purportedly paid out to Liberal-friendly (read: they donate to the Liberal party or are run/owned by ex-Liberal politicians) ad firms for doing little or no work.

What the heck were the “sponsorship” funds you ask? Remember back in 1995 when they had that referendum in Quebec to determine whether or not they would separate from Canada? Well, it was a damn close call, being barely defeated by a 50.58% to 49.42% vote. Anyway, it scared the hell out of the federal government and they decided to put together a fund to “sponsor” the idea of Canadian nationality in Quebec by funding billboards and all sorts of Yay-Canada events.

Anyway, there’s been an inquiry (headed by Mr. Justice John Gomery) going on looking into exactly what happened and what sorta shady deals went down behind closed doors. This naturally rocked the Liberal party, and was one of the main reasons the other bastards managed to steal a number of seats from the Liberals in the last federal election. The inquiry centres around a bunch of higher-ups in the government who were running the program at the time of the scandal and most notable, Jean Chrétien himself.

Chrétien was on stand today in court telling his side of the story. His story was that he had no choice but to do what he had to do in order to keep the country united. He did what any Canadian would have done when faced with the possibility that the country could be torn apart. I’ll give him props for that. Besides, everyone loves Chrétien. He’s the man.

Check this out here for more in-depth information.

Is the inquiry worth the $60-million dollar pricetag (as it stands thus far) to get down to the bottom of this? Maybe, but I say we just cut our losses…as it’s getting close to how much money was lost in the first place.

Peace in the Middle East hopefully, as today marked an official ceasefire between Israel and the state of Palestine. For those of you who’ve been living under a rock, it’s been over 4 years of shit hitting the fan in the holy land. How long will this peace last? Who knows…but it ain’t totally over yet.

Google Maps was just recently released into beta(meaning you can try it out, but it’s not finished quite yet).
To quote Nana: “GG Mapquest” (if you didn’t get the joke, GG means good game. It’s also what people say to other players in computer games after they’ve slaughtered them to rub it in).
It’s absolutely AWESOME. The mapwars(oh it’s a fierce one alright! no really, it is!) are over. Even if you’re not even looking for directions or a place on a map, you can give yourself hours(ok maybe a few minutes) of high-quality entertainment just playing around with it.
Seriously, go check it out here: http://maps.google.com

I’m feeling linky today. If you visit them all, I will give you a cookie.

d20s can be used in lesss-nerdy pursuits, such as drinking games. I know from experience, since I roll 20s like a pimped out SUV, yo. Critical hit indeed.

I feel like I should warn you. The rest of this post actually WILL waste your time. It is only for those who haven’t yet reached the end of the internet (and who want to), and for those who love reading about punctuation, typographic errors, and the like.

I thought of this problem as I was writing a paper for a class. How many spaces should one put after a period? These sites try and tackle the issue. Most people either put two spaces after a period, or just one (I say most cause some people put MORE SPACES. Yes, I have seen it with my own two eyes). Apparently the period-space-space comes from the poor legibility of period-space when using a typewriter. Since most computer fonts are proportional (meaning, that they have different widths for each character, and consequently, for the space), the single space is wide enough to counter any legibility problems that typewriters had.

Here’s a quote from Webword.com!

In the days of typewriter manuscripts the extra space was necessary to separate the ends and beginnings of sentences. The space character never changed. With the advent of electronic typesetting, the software attempts to ‘fit’ the type to specific line lengths, it both expands or contracts the available space to make the type fit. Word spacing is where most of this space ‘play’ takes place.

So is it anachronistic to put two spaces? Or nostalgic even? I’m a two space man myself, but I’m trying switch to one after reading all of this. If you leave three spaces (superfluous!), then you must have some sort of typographic fetish.

The video in the first link talks about other archaic typewriter practices, such as underlining, and the modern alternatives for emphasis that I lovingly overuse whenever I damn well please (subtlety). The rest of this post is in bold. Just kidding. Oh God, I’ve been living an underlining lie!

So what does all of this mean? If you didn’t stop by at leat one of those sites, or if you’re just confused by all of my links, I’ll lay it out for you. Two Spaces = Get into the 21st Century. Still not convinced? Perhaps this article has the best answer for you (the bottom of the page):

I liked the website with the info below:

Should sentences be separated by one space or two spaces?
Yes.

On Saturday I woke up pretty late (I won’t say when). This was after a night of semi-quasi-partying, so I decided that something productive should follow, by default. So, I read a chapter from one of my books and began to write up a summary of it. This was a pretty big accomplishment, as anyone who knows me well will say, because I am a procrastinator. Most people you talk to regularly will say at least once in their life that they are probably “the biggest procrastinator[s] in the world.” However, they have not met yours truly, for I am, in fact, the very root of the word as it is used today, and as such, the reason that the word exists. I am the necessary component for procrastination to exist, and everyone measures themself against me. I am the rule that measures the length and breadth of the kingdom of procrastination. Now that I’m done being verbose, and not all too self-absorbed, I’ll get to the meat of this post. Also, sorry about all the commas. There’s something about nesting comments in commas and parentheses that gets me going.

It’s hard for me to get things done (which is apparent in that gargantuan paragraph). I stumbled upon this link from the website which controls my life, Lifehacker. It’s about a program that was invented by David Allen, called Getting Things Done, or GTD for those in the know.

It’s kind of interesting in it’s approach. You first fashion yourself a Hipster PDA (set of index cards and a binder clip), or some other method of getting all the pending tasks or ideas out of your head (the site lists a few). Then you make categorized inboxes called buckets organized by the urgency of whatever it is that you need to get done. So, if there’s something you can do easily (like right now), you do it and scratch that off your list. After this you continually review each box and move the different tasks between them. So, for example, if you were thinking of picking up guitar and you saw an ad for cheap lessons, you would move that idea from the “someday” box to the “next action” or “project” box.

The whole thing sounds sort of convoluted (and if not, confusing), but if you’re like me and you have trouble keeping yourself on task, this might be a cool thing to try. I’m going to make a PDA and get some boxes this week, and I’ll keep you all posted on my progress. For those interested, the link I mentioned above has a few extra links to David Allen’s website and some GTD related stuff.

Winterlude started on Friday and it goes for a couple of weeks here in Ottawa. Apparently there’s some cool stuff that’s supposed to happen. Last night Nana, Tony and I walked down to Confederation Park across the street from city hall to check out some ice sculptures. Overall experience rating: cool. Here are some of them:

Nana’s comment for the bottom right sculpture was “she’s got back.”

On our way out of the park, we crossed an intersection that employs that loud chirping sound to signal a walk.
I joked: “Haha, imagine if you recorded that sound and then played it through a megaphone while a blind person was waiting at the lights…when the lights were red. Man, that’d be so cruel.”
Nana’s response: “Don’t you mean cool?”
And so the three of us laughed and continued walking.

Also, in case you haven’t noticed, I spent some time today adding in a really cool feature. If you look on the sidebar to the right, you’ll see a “Recent Comments” section. It will list the latest comments people have posted. No longer shall comments be made only to be ignored by everyone else.

Some people got together and threw around an oval shaped ball made of leather. There was also some scoring system involved indicating that the “White team” beat the “Green team” by a score of 24-21.

Cleaning chemicals somehow made its way into cartons of 1% chocolate milk produced by the company Natrel. The company immediately recalled them all on Wednesday when it found out about the mishap. Now some loser is launching an $11 million class-action lawsuit against the company. Ok first off, if the Canadian Food Inspection Agency or some government body wants to slap them with a fine to teach them a lesson, then that’s cool. But if this guy thinks he deserves millions because he vomitted for an afternoon, he needs a slap upside the head. (Scientists have say the chemical would cause such stomach upset but nothing longterm). He apparently also “suffered psychologically and experienced economic losses.” Right, losses of the $1.50 he paid for his carton of milk. I bet that guy isn’t even worth $500 if he was out of work for 2 months. Now this isn’t the most extreme case of stupid lawsuits (and fine, you can even argue that it’s not stupid), but you know what, I’m just getting really sick and tired of all this shit in the court systems.

You can either vote, or starve. Takes the term “Vote or Die” to a new level: Democracy and food!

The United States financed Saddam Hussein and his regime to counter the Iranian threat during the late 70’s and early 80’s. Even with complete knowledge that Iraq possessed biological and chemical weapons. The reason why the United States put Saddam in power, was because the original dictator of Iraq was Pro-Soviet, and any ability for the Soviet Union to aquire the oil from the area, would have kept the Soviet Union alive for longer, so the United States did what they always did, remove the regime sympathetic to the communist cause, and place an oppressive anti-communist into power. All this occured in the 1960’s, before the Iran and Iraq crisis.
American backed coup

The US helped Iraq go to war with Iran, because of their hostilities towards the United States, and in particular, Israel. Another reason was because of the American embassy hostage crisis which occured in late 1979. BUT during the 1980’s, with Lebanon going through a civil war, and many westerners being kidnapped (mainly Americans), the Regan administration brokered a covert deal with Iran (Congress passed a law which Banned any weapsons sales to Iran, because they aided and funded terrorism) in order to quell the kidnappings by an Iranian funded militant group in Lebanon called “Hezbollah“. The Iran-Iraq war ended in a stalemate.
Terrorism against Americans

The Iranian government is led predominantly by Shiites (A sect of the Islamic religion, something like how Catholicism and Protestantism, are sects of Christianity.)
And this group isn’t very friendly to the American presence in Iraq, so with the ousting of the Sunni (the other sect) leader Saddam, and turning a SECULAR (non-religiously based government) Iraq, into another Iran, the United States is bound to fall into another pit like it did back in the 1970’s and 80’s with Iran. If you don’t believe that Iraq was secular, then you should read up about the Ba’ath party, to understand that it was, and also Tariq Aziz who is a Christian and was one of Husseins closest advisors.
From Secular to Shia

Remember though, in the 80’s the Iraqi government used biological weapons against the minority Kurds in the north, becuase they were suspected of siding with the Iranians during the Iran-Iraq conflict. Not from what many believe was some kind of anger by Hussein’s government towards the Kurds, in fact, the Kurds were given limited autonomy, and were even allowed to hold some high-level offices, but because of their suspected ties with the Iranians during the conflict, they fell out of favour with the government, and became a threat to the country, so they were almost exterminated by biological weapons. Weapons which the United States knew that Iraq possessed, and even funded Iraqi war efforts, so basically, the United States funded for Iraq to have WMD, and biological weapons.

So this threat was created by the United States themselves, because of their meddling with Middle Eastern countries over the past 30-40 years. There are a lot of other connections as well, which all amount to the greater picture of containing the Soviet threat during the cold war.
American foreign policy during the Cold War years is largely responsible for why the Middle East is so unstable today.

Other factors include:

1. The Suez Canal crisis of 1956.
2. The wars involving Israel (and even the formation of Israel):
• 1948 Arab-Israeli War “The Independence War” (see also: 1949 Armistice Agreements)
• 1956 Suez War “Operation Kadesh” מבצע קדש או מלחמת סיני
• 1967 Six Day War מלחמת ששת הימים
• 1970 War of Attrition מלחמת ההתשה
• 1973 Yom Kippur War מלחמת יום כיפור
• 1982 Lebanon War “Operation Peace For Galilee” מבצע שלום הגליל
• 1990/1 Gulf Warמלחמת המפרץ
3. The Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in the 1970’s, which the United States funded a group called the Mujahideen.
   The group eventually became a more world renowned group which we all know called Al-Qaeda. Remember now, these people used to be friendly to the United States, but after the US turned their back on them and the people, which then hostilities came out of it. (This is for another time though.)

These are just some of the conflicts that aided in destablizing the Middle East, and turning it into the problem which it is today.
This is not a partisan rant, this is written by facts, based upon historical events which occured in the past 50+ years.
It is to show people who don’t understand why these events are happening in the world today, and give them an idea.
This is only a small chunk of it, because there is a lot more behind what is happening in the Middle East than any government wants their people to know.

What you reap, is what you sow.

So a couple of nights ago Nana and I went to On Tap for a….um I’m not quite sure what it was. A frat (Tom, a friend of ours is in it) was trying to get people together or something on a Wednesday night (at a bar that’s not-so-popular on a Wednesday night) under the guise of a big event. Right. Well, we went to support anyway. Anyway, I think there were like 80 people total. Er wait, 40 if I don’t count the drunken double vision. HOWEVER!!! (triple exclamation for dramatic effect) the three of us were sitting at a booth and a really hot chick comes up to us telling she’s some Bavaria promotionalist or something and there’s some free stuff to be had if we went and started drinking Bavaria (instead of our non-Bavarian beers we were drinking). So yeah we get a round of Bavaria (thanks Tom) and we each got free t-shirts. And then we ask Tom how much the Bavarias were. 6 bucks…each. Compared to the 3 bucks for other beers. Initial evaluation of the situation: “Shit that’s expensive!”

The moral of the story? We each got t-shirts for 6 bucks and got a FREE BEER. True story.

The Oil-for-Food Program scandal is something you may have heard recently in the news. To put it simply, the program itself was designed as a way for Iraq to sell its ridiculous amounts of oil to the world market so it could buy goods for its citizens like food and medicine while preventing them from using that money to buy weapons. When oil was sold, the buyer would pay the money to an escrow account (a middleman to hold money) and then Iraq could spend money from that account to buy…well, food. What ended up happening was Iraq would buy goods, using money from that escrow account, from bribed companies that would overcharge Iraq by, say 10%, and they would keep a part of it while giving back the other half to Iraq in cold hard cash. Saddam might’ve been a whacko, but you gotta give him credit for knowing how to run shit haha. Now a bunch of U.N. people are getting caught up in this scandal but we don’t really give a shit about them anyway.

Rogers Communications bought the SkyDome for 25 million bones….quite the bargain compared to the 580 million pricetag it came with when it was first built. Fine, I’d buy it too just to say I own the SkyDome. But the bastard (Ted Rogers, owner of Rogers Communications) goes and changes it to the Rogers Centre. Seriously, what the hell is he thinking. I hate old people with lots of money.

Google recently released its Google Local feature. You can access it by clicking on the Local link right above the search box. Anyway, I think it’s really awesome. Not only does it make searching for businesses easy, it gives you a map! True story. Check it out! (Wo)Man, Google’s gonna take over the world.

Cell Phones make you drive just as bad as a senile, useless, boring, senior citizen according to some recent studies. And I bet you’ll go impotent like them as well if you hold a cell phone too close to the goods for long periods of time. In any case, we have enough old people on the damn roads. Stop using cell phones while driving ok? Thank you.

Yesterday was a big day in Canadian politics. In case you haven’t heard, they introduced the bill(C-38) that would officially allow same-sex marriage all across Canada.

And in case you haven’t heard, we’re made up of all types of people, we abolished slavery a few years ago, and (holy shit, you’re kidding me!) we’re now allowed to shop on Sundays!

See, when a society grows up and realizes that some things are just plain stupid, it will change its views regarding those issues. Not allowing same-sex marriage is exactly one of those things. Let’s not even go near the fact that religious institutions simple don’t belong in politics. Let’s hope that there is some truth behind the words “separation of church and state.”

Now, it’s kind of odd that a concept so utterly logical would have so many people in opposition. Apparently, some 40% of the population are against it. Now just to be fair, most of them don’t mind “civil-unions” (and are in fact supportive of giving them the same legal benefits), they just don’t want their cherished word “marriage” perverted to the point of being associated with something “evil”. Right.

So for those of you who are sitting on the fence, let me break this down for you. I won’t even waste my time telling you why you should support it, since mere simple reasoning should explain that quite clearly. Let me address the “concerns” that the naysayers have with the issue at hand:

Gay or Lesbian couples will be able to adopt children! The aliens are invading! Warning, warning, danger, danger! Rally the troops! First off, just because 2 parents are heterosexual doesn’t make them good parents. Just the same, 2 homosexual parents don’t make them bad parents either. Also, regarding the “just think of the children!” argument, get a life. I think a kid having 2 gay parents is the least of his/her worries if they’ve been living in a foster home or wait a minute, (could this be the reason WHY they’re being adopted in the first place?) if their real parents don’t give a shit about them or are dead?

My religious hall/building/shack could be forced to be rented for same-sex marriages! Well, if it’s being rented out to the public as a business, then of COURSE you can’t discriminate against same-sex marriages. Just like you can’t discriminate based on race. Hmmm could there be a connection?

It’s against my religion! Your religious bigotry will be allowed to continue because the bill specifically states that religious institutions do not have to perform, or even recognize same-sex marriages.

My religious leader told me it was evil! Learn to think for yourself. Stop being a puppet. Religions aren’t perfect(just as anything else in this world), and sometimes they just might be wrong.

You will turn my children gay. Better gay than discriminating bigots.

You will turn me gay. Just admit it.

Evil!!!!! No, no, you’ve got it all mixed up. Here is evil.

(Just to clarify, I am not against religions or religious groups. I am against religious institutions trying to impose their values upon the rest of society who, heaven forbid, aren’t part of said religious institution. In fact, I don’t even care if a religious institution is against same-sex marriage or worse yet, homosexuals entirely. Just so long as they can recognize that it’s their opinion and should not be imposed on the whole country.)

To summarize, I think it just makes sense. We’re Canada. We pride ourselves in being the “nicest” country and we like to think that as Canadians, we are friendly, respecting and tolerant. Gays and lesbians have had enough hard times and they’re finally getting some room to breathe. Why be total assholes and treat them like they’re less than the rest of us? They aren’t imposing their beliefs onto us.

When was the last time you had a gay or lesbian knock on your door at home or approach you on the street with a pamphlet telling you how you need to be saved from heterosexuality and that their lifestyle is the way to salvation?

Have you ever heard of a gay missionary?

I rest my case.

i just did a mid term in my witchcraft/neo-paganism class, and i think i did pretty good
but knowing me, it could go either way

i have Evil by Interpol stuck in my head
and Smallville is on tonight

the news is terrible as usual, people dying, and nobody giving a damn, typical