Gomery is in

The Gomery Report is in, and Paul Martin has a copy in his hot little hands.

Tomorrow should be a very enlightening day, and is almost certain to be not a good one for the current Liberal government.

With November 1st as the official release date, this puts us square in the middle of a Christmas election according to the Prime Minister Martin’s commitment in his address to the nation.

GST on Food? Why not just pay a fair price instead?

According to the CBC, farmers want the government to start charging GST on food and have the money remitted directly to farmers.

A brief excerpt:

Add GST to food, farm group says
The Goods and Services Tax should be applied to food, with the revenue given to farmers to help save the struggling industry, a farm group says.

The Agricultural Institute of Canada – a group dedicated to farming research and education – believes adding the seven per cent tax to what we eat will help farmers.

“Farmers produce way more than they used to … and yet they still can’t stay in business,” said Hugh Maynard, who has written a report on the issue.

Continue reading "GST on Food? Why not just pay a fair price instead?"

President Gilles?

This should come as no shock to anyone:

The Globe and Mail: Duceppe gets massive support in confidence vote

In a followup leadership review to an election which tied the Bloc Quebecois’ best showing ever, there was little doubt that Gilles Ducepped would continue on as leader.

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Scooter Libby

With the resignation of Scooter Libby, I will resume my quest to become the World’s Most Famous Scooter (or Skooter, as the case may be.)

Quebec’s Special Place

It may be a coincidence, but it’s not a surprising one that these two articles appear in the same edition of the Globe and Mail

The Globe and Mail: Ex-separatist to run as Liberal

Quebec gets special child care deal

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Harriet Miers Goes Down for the Count

You know, I was listening to a podcast this morning from KCRW World News and they pointed out that Harriet Miers told the LA Times that she thought that George Bush was a genius.

So, thank god for small favours as she withdraws her nomination:
Answered Prayers - How Bush lost the Miers fight. By John Dickerson

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Zombie copy

A great article from the editor of A List Apart about writing copy on the web. Simple, straightforward and to the point - exactly as your copy should be.

Facts

In North America, the average family has gotten 1.8 times smaller.
The average North American home has gotten 1.8 times larger.

There are 1.9 cars in the Average North American household.
There are 1.8 drivers in the Average North American household.

Here We Go Again

That most famous of Canadian shows, Da Vinci’s Inquest is no more. It is now Da Vinci’s City Hall

I loved this show. For a while, when I lived in Charlottetown, it was a bit of a lifeline back to Vancouver. I watched an entire episode that was shot within a kilometre of the place I was living. It’s fun when dead bodies wash up near your house.

That was before it started to wear thing on me.

Da Vinci’s Inquest was set in the downtown east side, known to some as Canada’s poorest neighbourhood (and to others as its most entertaining.) Week after week, it broadcasts an image of Vancouver to the world as home to the homeless, the lost, the drug addicted.

It also, by association, portrays an image of now Senator Larry Campbell as its saviour.

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Rosa Parks

Rosa Parks passed away last night. Rosa is best known as a woman who wouldn’t give up here seat on the bus.

I’m sure, to her family, she was more than this - a mother and grandmother…in short, a woman.

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Teachers Go Back to School

B.C. Teachers have apparently voted to go back to school to which I can only say one thing.

Yay.

Powered by Textile

This site is also now powered, fairly substantially, by Brad Choate’s Textile plugin which creates an abstraction layer for the site’s HTML, allowing interesting things to happen much more easily.

The Da Vinci Code

Reading The Da Vinci Code is interesting - this was, I gather, a pretty popular little book a while ago. I got to it slowly.

I’ve been accused of being an elitist reader, and a snob. Both of these things are true, and I’ll take them as complements in a world where Time Magazine is increasingly considered literature and the 30 second attention span is considered long. Reading is the best way I know to stretch your mind, and most people don’t do it.

I don’t read a lot of “popular” fiction. I read a lot of fiction, but it tends to be of the literary popular variety. I’ll read John Irving but not Stephen King.

So what does all this have to do with The Da Vinci Code?

Continue reading "The Da Vinci Code"

Pictures

A lot more pictures, yet another new stylesheet and hopefully the fun stops here. We shall see.

And again with the let me know if there’s a problem with the stylesheet

Quebec Separatism’s First Lady

Rene Levesque’s widow has passed away from throat cancer.

Parade of Lost Souls 2005

According to Beyond Robson this year’s Parade of Lost Souls has been called off, in part in order to give the folks that organize it a brief break.

This disappoints me on many levels.

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Move to 100% CSS

This site is moving to 100% CSS. I can easily test in both Safari for Mac and Mozilla, but if you notice any anomalies let me know.

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Smurfaggedon

Smurfs™ are being bombed

Unicef bombs the Smurfs in fund-raising campaign for ex-child soldiers

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Radio Moscow: Broadcasting Again

With some, although not much, fanfare Canada’s own Radio Moscow returned to the airwaves last Tuesday.

While many were ambivalent, my own personal sigh of relief could be heard for miles around. Nothing crystalized this more than waking up on Sunday morning.

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Tax Cuts do not equal an election win

According to today’s Globe and Mail the

Tories think they’ve got it

Let’s look at this for a minute.

Continue reading "Tax Cuts do not equal an election win"

Urban Mountain Biking

This this is happening in Seattle, and not on Vancouver’s North Shore speaks to both the lack of availalble land here in Vancouver, as well as the rampant NIMBY-ism that characterizes our local political environment.

Barn, Birch Bay, Washington

I would like to salute
The ashes of American flags
And all the fallen leaves
Filling up shopping bags

Nikhita

They say you’re always supposed to clean kids up before you take their picture. I ignored that rule.

Taken October 6, 2005.

Coffee at Alki Beach

!/washingtonState/coffee.jpg (Coffee at Alki Beach) 424x281!

Scarborough, Rouge Valley

I grew up in Scarborough, and the forests of the Rouge Valley were my playground for a quite a few years. It’s where I started to mountain bike off road, where I started to turn my lenses in the direction of nature, and where I went when I just wanted to touch the earth.

In Vancouver, I’m surrounded by an astonishing amount of natural beauty every day of my life, but sometimes there’s no place like home.

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T-Dot

Nothing quite evokes Toronto like being on the Subway, underground. Here they call it The Better Way but it’s a dubious nickname.

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