Fortunately I had enough change to purchase a slice of pizza (Pizza to the third power actually). It’ll have to do.

Dear Cary,

I have many right-wing relatives and friends. And I belong to a colonial reenacting group where we regularly dress up and handle guns, march in parades and reenact history. Here’s the problem: the opinions of right-wing assholes (RWAs). Now, when socializing with family or in our little club, the rule to observe is “Don’t talk about sex, religion or politics.” RWAs would be the first to assert these family values, but of course can’t help getting in little digs. Or big digs. No matter what activity you pursue, RWAs must express their opinions. “That’s one for Hillary.” “‘They’ don’t like us handling guns.” “There’s this one guy at work who’s a Muslim, but he won’t be around long if I can help it.” And “the liberals did this, did that, did this other thing.” Gay marriage, women’s rights, gun control, our eternal wars — you name it, a right-wing asshole can sneak it into any conversation and slam it. And, oh man, can they talk! Many RWAs are blue-collar and listen to Hate Radio for eight hours a day, and can (and will) gladly blather for eight hours at the drop of a hat. None of their opinions are their own, of course. They’re just parroting the talk-show hosts. And because they’re “talking sense” they assume everyone listening agrees with them. Which leads to my problem. Politically, I’m a radical. I never agree with talk-show dittoheads. But I’m also one of these rare individuals who actually listens when people talk to me. (Even talk at me, which is more common.) And as these RWAs go on (and on and on) I occasionally grunt “Uh-huh” to show I’m still listening. But muttering “Uh-huh” during these verbal barrages seems like a betrayal of my beliefs. It’s simply the wrong response. Because in English, “Uh-huh” has two meanings. One is “I’m still listening.” The other is “I agree.” How can I talk to people I disagree with politically? I do not agree with these bigoted, hateful, reactionary, simplistic, unthinking morons, but I can’t think of any other response to make. The Japanese have a word, “hai,” which only indicates, “I’m listening.” Further, I do not want to spark an argument with fools because it’s a waste of time. I believe in the old adage, “If you’re going to engage in a battle of wits, first make sure your opponent is armed.” What word can we Westerners adopt that indicates, “I’m listening, but may or may not agree”? Listening Dear Listening, Unfortunately, we don’t have a single word that says “I’m listening but I may or may not agree.” But we do have several ways of saying “Kindly take your head out of your ass,” and it seems to me we ought to start saying it. America is in political crisis. This is no time to sit quietly by. You simply have to register your dissent. We are living in one of those historic moments where you either respond authentically or you lose your soul. If your friends and relatives do not realize the depth of our peril, you owe it to them to try to make them aware of it. So how do you register your disagreement in a way that is principled, respectful and historically conscious? Maybe you start by saying something simple and straightforward such as “I respectfully disagree.” What happens next? Maybe somebody says, “You respectfully disagree with what?” Then maybe you say, “I respectfully disagree with what was just said.” “And what was that?” someone might ask, having noticed an interesting change in the noise level. Try to avoid repeating what you disagree with. Instead, ask the person who said it to please repeat it, so you can make sure you heard it correctly. If he repeats it, just the repetition may make it obvious how stupid it was. But it might be a sentiment the whole room agrees with except you. Very quickly, before things go any further, you need to lighten up a little; make it clear that you don’t want to ruin the convivial atmosphere but you genuinely believe that America is facing a political crisis, that urgent matters of history are at stake, and that it is our duty as citizens to debate the issues and be well informed. Don’t try to win them over. Just stand your ground and say you’re a liberal and you don’t agree and that’s how you see it. If you’re challenged to rebut what was said, offer instead to do some research and present your case to the group at a later date, saying that even if you don’t persuade anyone, that way you’ll all end up a little better informed. Then go home and study. Go over every detail. Learn the history of the subject. Listen to all the pundits you can stand and get to know what their arguments are. Find the factual holes in their arguments. Then, next time you meet, present your case, and ask for campaign contributions.

Sage advice I think. Now I need to get back to getting more informed.

I have to admit that at first I thought the video was not real because the cars colliding and hurtling through the air looked computer-generated. But if you read the news story (from Dayton, Ohio), it appears to corroborate what I saw in the video.

It’s a difficult video to watch because I know now that the pedestrian is in critical condition at the hospital. I’m surprised they survived at all.

I guess the lesson to take from this is to be extremely careful when crossing the street.

President Bush accidentally allowed to be interviewed by a real journalist

The President’s handlers foolishly granted a Presidential interview (requires RealPlayer, interview starts about 20:40 into the stream) to a non-White House Press Corps journalist, Carole Coleman, the Washington correspondent for RTE, the Irish public national television network. When she asked him pointed, pertinent questions, he became upset when his stock answers failed to satisfy her. An aide to the President later complained that Coleman had “overstepped the bounds of politeness.”

Coleman is a mainstream European journalist who has conducted interviews with top officials from a number of countries – her January interview with Secretary of State Colin Powell was apparently solid enough to merit posting on the State Department’s Web site. Unfortunately, it appears that Coleman failed to receive the memo informing reporters that they are supposed to treat this president with kid gloves. Instead, she confronted him as any serious journalist would a world leader. She asked tough questions about the mounting death toll in Iraq, the failure of U.S. planning, and European opposition to the invasion and occupation. And when the president offered the sort of empty and listless “answers” that satisfy the White House press corps – at one point, he mumbled, “My job is to do my job” – she tried to get him focused by asking precise follow-up questions. The president complained five times during the course of the interview about the pointed nature of Coleman’s questions and follow-ups – “Please, please, please, for a minute, OK?” the hapless Bush pleaded at one point, as he demanded his questioner go easy on him.

I just finished watching the video and I have to say that the reporter is pretty tough on Bush (as she should be). It’s kind of funny to see how frustrated Bush gets when the reporter tries to ask follow-up questions before he’s finished speaking. Reading the transcript does not do the interview justice. You really have to see (or hear for that matter) the flow of the interview to truly appreciate it. I doubt that the White House will be allowing an personal interview with that television station again.

I’ve hosted the video here if you wanted to see it for yourself (people have had troubles with the streaming link above).

At 5:27 am GMT on Wednesday, June 30th, A LiveJournal admin writes :

Many users are experiencing difficulty accessing the site right now, due to a flood of malicious traffic. Please note: it’s not “hackers” taking us down. If hackers were people who hotwired cars to steal them, these people are just punks slashing tires with shiny knives they didn’t even make. We’re working with a number of people to get this stopped, including the FBI. We’re very sorry for the inconvenience.

It’s beyond me why anyone would bother wasting their time doing this kind of tomfoolery.

In other unrelated items, my eyes are really feeling strained today. I didn’t get a nice sleep last night and that’s probably the cause of it. Today is Marcy’s birthday and we’re having ribs and salad for dinner. I think Sally is making a cake. We might go to Baskin Robbins for dessert as well (Marcy loves the peanut butter and banana ice cream they have there). I bought Marcy a new bottle of Burberry Weekend perfume. I think she’ll be surprised.

It smells like Swiss Chalet in the office right now. It’s making me desperately crave some rotisserie chicken.

I was caught off-guard by this statement:

I think we will see that the women vote killed the Tories. They were scared by the Grits’ fearmongering.

To me that’s very reminiscent of Jacques Parizeau’s comment after the 1995 referendum that sovereignty was lost because of “money and the ethnic vote“. Perhaps Adam thinks that “womenfolk” shouldn’t be voting because they get in the way of the “man’s” party. What an idiot.

Though I’m pleased with the election results (my local candidate won), I’m still hesitant about what is going to happen in the next couple of years. Minority governments don’t last (the average is 1.5 years) and it seems the sovereignty issue has returned to Quebec (judging by Duceppe’s speech last night). The people who voted Conservative out west won’t be pleased with the results. National unity, bridging gaps and general cooperation are going to be incredibly important over the next little while.

I think the best result has been the vote count of the Green Party. They’ve qualified for federal funding and hopefully in the next election (which will be sooner rather than later), they might even get a seat.

This was one of the first elections where I didn’t watch much television coverage at all. I saw Darren Barefoot’s post early after the polls closed and checked out the live results on the Web. The CBC’s results page required manual refreshing but offered more up-to-date results. CTV and The Toronto Star’s results were built by the same company but I found that they either didn’t update (The Star) or offered incorrect results (CTV – they showed the Green Party candidate in Kitchener-Conestoga winning the seat). I remember the insanity at the returning office in 1997, fielding calls from the different polling stations and reporting the results to the national returning office in Ottawa. It’s amazing the elections run so smoothly in Canada.

The front stairs leading into the building have become in quite the state of disrepair. They looked horrible – the tiles were falling apart, the paint had chipped off completely and it really wasn’t an attractive entrance (it shouldn’t be a surprise then that we’re not exactly “proud” of where we work).

Last week the building manager started painting the staircase. He was painting it a nice cranberry-rust colour that matched so well with the exterior of the building (tan and pink – yes we think we’re in Florida). They finished two-thirds of the staircase and then let it dry before going back the next day and completing the other part. Only they didn’t do the last part.

Today I went out for a coffee (shh!) and noticed that they had repainted the cranberry-rust part. They painted it silver. I’m not sure what kind of mistake the original colour was but silver does look a lot better.

Five more months and we should be out of here.

It’s not the comment so much as the identity of the commentor that intrigues me. I’m wondering how they found this space. I haven’t advertised this blog anywhere and even though I can’t possibly imagine that it’ll be possible to keep this space private, I’m still interested in hearing how my cover was so-called “blown” so-called “this” so-called “quickly“.

Tomorrow is the one-month anniversary of this space of mine and so far I’ve managed to write almost 20,000 words and have more than 80 posts. To me that’s impressive. I’m extremely happy with the Wordpress software and I hope to continue to diversify between this blog and my other one. It never hurts to write more and if people want to read what you write then that’s pure gravy on your chicken-fried steak.

Your account mdclemen on the following host(s) will expire on 07-25-2004:

engmail www.eng engage If you will require use of these computer accounts(s) beyond 07-25-2004 in accordance with http://www.adm.uwaterloo.ca/infocist/use98.htm please contact the computer consulting office in your faculty or department. This is an automated message – Please do not respond

My university email address has given me a lot over the years – a way to keep in touch with others, a non-web-based email address that I could safely give out, an air of legitimacy to my online persona with email coming from a university (if they only knew), a place to subscribe to mailing lists and last summer a source of a lot of pain (from one email address). Lots of emails were sent to and from this address over the 6 years that I’ve had it. I lost most of the emails in several hard drive crashes but the shared experiences are still there.

As varied as the experiences has been the software used. From Pine to Outlook to KMail to Horde to Thunderbird, I’ve used a lot of mail applications. Thunderbird is my current favourite (as I’ve mentioned before) but each of the above applications has its own benefits.

I’ll miss my old email address but it wasn’t something that I could hold onto forever. I have my alumni email address from the university and that can forward to any email address I’ll ever have.

Yet another item in the “you’re really done university” checklist can be crossed off.

I read this morning that a former roommate of this person is getting married in a month. When I read that I laughed and laughed and laughed.

To think that when this roommate started dating her (now) fiancee, the person was convinced (convinced!) that their relationship was progressing too quickly and that they would fall into a destructive spiral ending their romance. In essence, the same label that they put upon my relationship with Marcy. Now, as you might know, Marcy and I are married (happily at that) and this other relationship appears to be moving in the same direction while this person’s relationships remains stagnant (though still existent).

Perhaps it’s mean of me to laugh at the situation but I did honestly find it funny. The final disintegration began in earnest on this day and I can’t imagine what life would have been like with this person in my life today. I doubt I’d be as happy as I am. Or free.

I read James’ post this morning about the polling hours in Ontario being from 9:30 AM to 9:30 PM. That’s a change from the last election (even the recent provincial election) where the polls closed at 8 PM.

I then read an article on CBC News regarding polling hours across the country. Due to a recent clarification in the rules, it is now allowed to report election results from other parts of the country when the polls in your region are still open. Previously it was thought that you might be less willing to vote if the results had already been announced in other regions of the country. This applied mainly to those in the Western provinces as the polls would be open for a few hours after the ones here closed.

The CBC article says:

Elections Canada staggered the hours so that the majority of results from polls across the country are available within a few of hours of each other.

This makes sense from a logistical standpoint, particularly for the media as there won’t be long periods with no new results being reported.

Here are the polling hours across the country:

• Newfoundland and Atlantic time zones – 8:30 AM to 8:30 PM


• Eastern time zone – 9:30 AM to 9:30 PM


• Central time zone – 8:30 AM to 8:30 PM


• Mountain time zone – 7:30 AM to 7:30 PM


• Pacific time zone – 7 AM to 7 PM

The exception is of course Saskatchewan – those residents living in the Central time zone can vote between 8:30 AM and 8:30 PM while those in the Mountain time zone vote between 7:30 AM and 7:30 PM.

For us in Ontario it’s great because the polls open after most people get to work (except for me this morning) and they’re open for 4.5 hours after the normal work day (if it stops at 5 and 3.5 if it stops at 6). That’s plenty of time to vote and if you factor in the time you’re legally allowed to take off from work to vote, there’s even more opportunity. There should be no excuse for those of us in the Eastern time zone not to vote.

If you’re living in Vancouver though, polls open most likely before you even get out of bed and they’re only open at most a couple of hours after work. That doesn’t seem fair to me. Sure I get the same amount of time as someone in Vancouver, but which interval do you think is more convenient to citizens?

I guess the result of all of this is that we won’t know any good results about the election until after 10 o’clock EDT. It’s going to be interesting to follow how things shape up for our next government.

Please remember to vote though. It’s incredibly important to exercise your rights as a Canadian citizen.

My power supply fan had stopped working.

Fortunately since we’ve had so many power supply problems here, we always have one or two in stock as a backup. I switched power supplies and was back on my way. Now I have to retype a draft I had been writing and remake my changes to a design document I was working on.

I had trouble sleeping; there were too many thoughts racing around my head. I felt just absolutely numb driving home. Every personal review that I’ve read has said something to the effect that “there wasn’t anything new to me discussed in the film” and to tell you the truth I find that difficult to believe.

Sure you might have known about the Bush-Saudi connection (after all, the major points discussed in the film were broadcast on CBC’s The Fifth Estate last year). Sure you probably read about Bush’s military service suspicions. Sure you knew about the Saudi flights on September 13th. Do you want a medal? This movie is not about testing how much you know and if you go around preening about how “educated” you are then you’ve missed the point.

Note: the above does not apply to any of my friends (real or Internet-based); I’ve just read some other reviews that have irked me.

This movie is certainly controversial and it’s not going to do much for uniting the general populace of the United States together on the issues. I think James has made some excellent points to that effect.

Here we are, just over 4 months away from Election Day in the U.S.. Will this movie change people’s minds? I really don’t think so. How important is this next election? Incredibly important and once I put my pictures online I’ll show you how far the Bush-Cheney campaign has gone to court voters in so-called “swing” states (my parents home state of Ohio being a very big example).

Now I said above that this movie probably won’t change your mind about the issues addressed. That’s not to say that the images shown in the film won’t affect you deeply. I’m doubtful that there would be a lot of people not moved to tears listening to the mother in Flint reading her son’s last letter home before he was shot down in his helicopter. Well ok, a lot of people besides the two thirteen year-old girls sitting behind us. The people in New York City watching the events of September 11th still haunt me. Seeing footage from Iraq haunts me. Looking at the smug expressions of the Bush Administration officials haunts me. By using archived footage almost exclusively, it lends some measure of authenticity to the facts presented though I don’t pretend to believe that the movie is entirely factual.

The next few months are going to be ugly. Shawn talks about the most recent problems with the Bush ad campaign here. The latest Bush ad is truly despicable. Make no mistake: it will be almost impossible for there to be an open and honest debate about the issues, foreign and domestic, before Election Day in November. It’s up to everyone to get as informed as possible on the issues. Don’t just read your current selection of media releases – expand your horizons and read something with the opposite viewpoint of yours. I read conservative news, blogs and writers on a daily basis because I want to know the issues and knowing the issues is more than just reading one side and making up your mind.

I’m terribly afraid of what’s going to happen over the next 5-10 years here in Canada, in the United States and around the world. What consequences will be visited upon our children and grandchildren because of our foolishness today? How could anyone possibly comprehend the complexity of our world? The people in power aren’t that much smarter than I am and that’s quite scary because even with the collective intelligence of all the people reporting to me (were I a world leader), I would find it incredibly difficult to form any kind of broad vision for the future.

In some ways this movie has made me disenchanted with politics. I’m hoping that by casting my ballot today in our own federal election, my democratic spirit can be stoked once again.

If you want to get a regular update of the situation on the ground in Iraq, I highly recommend Just Another Soldier. There used to be a blog there but the military forced the man to take it down and now updates go via a mailing list (I know, how old-fashioned). It’s worth signing up.

Eurobad ‘74

How would you like to have that as your eating space? Yes that is a horse stable leading directly off of the kitchen.

The only possible runner-up in the kitchen category would have to be this one. Enjoy the beautiful fragrances of your automobile as you dine!

Kent State

For some reason it really haunts me. This picture was taken last summer at Kent State University. I was there with my parents and Marcy and we were doing a tour of where my brother was intending on going in the fall (he’ll be at the University of Waterloo this fall).

I’m not sure how old the chalk markings on the statue were but the whole are was pretty solemn. My parents were probably affected more than I was since it was in their time that the shootings took place.

It’s hard to tell, but in this picture:

Kent State

you can see a bullet hole right where the lines of the peace symbol intersect. That’s kind of scary to think that this was the place where 4 people died and was the centre of 3 days of madness and violence. It seems to peaceful today.

Aside: did you know that the girl screaming in this picture was only 14 at the time? My mom told me that last year. She was a runaway staying on the campus at the time.

Next year is the 25th anniversary of the shootings. Perhaps I might try and journey to Kent State and watch the celebrations that are bound to occur.

Edit: I should probably link to the rest of the pictures in that particular photo album.

The campaign office of Kitchener-Conestoga Liberal candidate Lynn Myers has been vandalized. A window was smashed and a hate message was spray painted on the front of the building. Myers is clearly upset. He says he will continue to fight same sex marriage rights. Conservative candidate Frank Luella has said he does not support gay marriage and claims homosexuals can change their lifestyle. Despite the views, Luella’s campaign manager says no one should be the victim of hate messages.

It amazes me that someone would be that stupid. I was very close to that same location last night when we picked up Elle from the veterinarian’s office.

The Don Quixote film (which was tentatively titled “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote”) suffers from Murphy’s Law. Things that couldn’t possibly have been forseen happen and slow production down to the point where the film has to be shelved for an indefinite period of time (it is still waiting to be resumed). Insanely strong storms, back troubles, contract issues and other things plague things from the start.

If anything the film should serve as a warning for directors that making a film cannot possibly go as you plan it.

I couldn’t help but think yesterday if I’m doing the right thing with my career. I guess it’s inevitable when you hear about people acquiring new opportunities and the appeal of “something new”, “something different” from what you’re currently experiencing is very enticing.

For now I’ll stay the course because I think we’re in for some good times ahead.

Funki Porcini has a very interesting sound. He can be very sweet and soft and he can also be rambunctious and loud. Each has its place but I definitely prefer the softer music. This is one of those songs and combines a solitary trumpet (muted), a drum machine, keyboards and a cat purring.

It was this kind of music that first got me interested in music from Ninjatune. Somewhere along the line they lost me.