HisSelf

Fargo. Yeah. Superb acting. Developed the territory Capote created with "In Cold Blood". An absolutely brilliant movie. Nice choice. Gladiator. Another good one. For me, the best Roman epic was the series "Rome" developed by the Brits... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome_(TV_series) Really brings home what it would have been like to live in Rome. Historical drama at its best. Or at least the best we've had to date. Truly a brilliant piece of historical fiction. Exceptional.

Ha ha. That's good. Zealotry. Nice observation.

That's right. God is in the mathematics. Mathematics is our best bet for undertanding the universe and our best teachers are physicist, chemists and biologists. Certainly not Bible/Koran/Talmud thumping behavioural psychologists... oops preachers.... Hey! Doctor Phil! The last thing you want to do is let some bible thumper tell you about god. They don't know god from a bag of elbows. The matehmeticians will lead us to god, and no, they will not create a black hole in the middle of Europe, LOL.

Best post so far!

http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=5758376 Rafi Eitan, who helped bring Holocaust murderer Adolph Eichmann to justice, says that Ahmadinejad is no better and that it would be OK to kidnap him and bring him to Israel for a trial. Hey Rafi! Can you help get Dick Cheney to the Hague? Seriously though... Watch for more news stories featuring Ahmadinejad denying the Holocaust. Of course CNN and Fox will feature the Ahmadinejad statements without a preamble mentioning Eitan's lunatic ravings. Insert migraine smiley here....

I disagree. I think the number 12 is arbitrary and it discounts that part of the electorate that elected the 'less than twelve'. If Eleven core ridings in Toronto, Montreal or Vancouver elected a bunch of elves, what do you think would happen? We'd have televised debate with stools at the ready for the 'vertically challenged'. If a party has an MP, than it has status in the House. I think that entitles it to participate fully in the public debate and to at least some basic level of funding. The Green Party would not exist in Canada if there was not some level of support for its platforms - about a half a million as I understand it. I think Dion is right. We can either lead or follow. Now is the time to lead. It is time to exhibit a little husbandry with respect to old mother earth instead of just going on crapping in her front yard. We have tremendous resources other than those that are traditional. T. Boone Pickens has been talking about wind. Well you wanna see wind? Right here baby. We probably could not compete in terms of solar power with countries like the Phillipines (well maybe we could because they are run by half-wits) but wind and geothermal, we are there. And we are definitely there with respect to the technological smarts to make it all happen.

Thank heavens nobody mentioned the Joe Canadian rant. While Molson's was pushing that crap on us they were selling the Montreal Canadiens to a businessman from Washington. A new low for cynicism in advertising - if that's possible. The Montreal Canadiens were the New York Yankees and Manchester Uniteds of hockey. When I was a kid, my hockey skates were Boom Boom Geoffrion signatures! The Montreal Canadiens were a hockey machine! For me, being Canadian is never drinking another bloody bottle of Molsons beer.

LOL. Truly one of the most dumb-assed posts I have seen here yet. Some people will do anything to drag the Middle East into everything. So which are we? Syria or Israel? We're Syria because Harper is an autocrat or we're Israel because our politicians are corrupt? Or is it the other way around. Oh wait. It's because we have no water. Wait... wait... IT'S IN THE BATHROOM. LOL.

Ha ha. Exactamundo. There was no time for training. I'll bet one bleary-eyed morning some eight o'clock genius in the GOP shouted out "How about Sarah Palin? She looks good on tv." Bingo bango. Write her a speech. Whadda we got for imagery? Hockey mom. Check. Family issues. Check. Religious right. Check. Write her a speech.... Meet the press. Yikes! Back to Alaska. Family issues. Gubernatorial issues. O my.... Ha ha. Off to Alaska with a planeload of political hacks for a little indoctrination... But the question that sort of lingers on the air like a beer fart in a quiet room... Do you want this woman running the most powerful national in the world? And just as importantly. Washington is an insiders' game. Jimmy Carter suffered greatly because he was not an insider. What do you think is going to happen when a President McCain starts trying to manoeuvre a bill through and he's gotta rely on his entire team to squeeze some heads. What heads will Sarah Palin squeeze? Hockey dads in Nome? Maybe if she had of had a decade or so under her belt as governor. But she doesn't. Maybe her most important credential is that she served as Ethics Supervisor of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission from 2003 to 2004. Funny how the Republicans always end up somehow in the greasy old pocket of big oil. Oh right. She's a woman. Shame on me. I must hate women. LOL.

I agree. They have an MP. I am more disappointed in Layton than Harper, who has shown himself time and again to be control freak. So we are splitting hairs on whether the member was elected as a Green candidate. Gee. Isn't this the pot calling the kettle black? No need to mention any names for fear of hurting his mother, Mrs. Emerson, LOL. The Green party has an MP. Let the woman speak.

Danny Williams has an ABC campaign on in Newfoundland. ABC stands for Anybody But Conservative. Anyways, the Puffin is a bird native to Newfoundland, and Williams was incensed that it was used in another dumb-ass Conservative attack ad - a puffin flying past a shoulder-shrugging Dion and dropping a load on his shoulder (remember the ad that made fun of Chretien's facial features?). Of course the Conservatives, who told us all about accountability before the last election, blamed it all on an over-enthusiastic junior staffer/web designer/janitor hrrumph hrrumph.... Williams got up on stage and had someone in a puffin costume come marching across carrying an ABC sign. He spoke about the green shift being better than the blue shaft. I thought it was hilarious.

When an election is called in Canada, the major political party politicians tend to hide behind a wall of deniability while a flock of political hacks come out and bafflegab the electorate. Well OK, Just for the Conservatives and the Liberals. How did we let this happen? Do we really want to hear from these unaccountable flunkies? Why? Lose the hacks! Really! Let's hear from the politicians!

How did visible minorities get to be all about blacks? Was a time when this would mean wops and pollacks.

I've seen some disparaging comments here about Thomas Pynchon, so I would like to put some sort of perspective on his writings. Americans in general tend to revere Vonnegut. His career was launched by his novel on the fire-bombing of Dresden (Slaughterhouse-five). His survival of this extraordinary event was a special gift of fate to the American electorate. Pynchon, an engineer, understood the technological underpinnings of disasters like Dresden, which is why he focussed so much on Pennemunde in Gravity's Rainbow.

So you are at some sort of gathering. You bring up the subject of politics. Do the people in your 'circle'... try to change the subject leave the room roll their eyes shuffle their feet engage you in an intelligent discussion What's your experience?

The GG is an envoy who does what the PM dictates. I think there is a purpose there, but the question is whether that purpose could not be better served by the diplomatic community. The GG is a pretty expensive piece of kit. Has anybody ever seen Rideau Hall? Hoo boy. Now that's expensive real estate. I do not believe that the GG serves any really useful purpose. The GG is an anachronism. But then so is the Srgeant at Arms and a whole lot of other gew-gaw vestiges left from the days when we were a colony.

I can't say that I know because whenI was a boy (cue the reverb) we didn't have hockey moms. We had hockey dads. Hockey dads would show up for every game with parts of the team and referee equipment in the trunks of their cars. If one of them didn't show, weird things would happen. The referee would stand at centre ice instead of following the game. Nobody would clean the ice between periods. It was a lot like a church supper except there was nothing to eat. They would referee games even though we called them names. They would coach games. They would pile us like sardines into their cars and drive us hundreds of miles to play in regional championships. They would be there on the sidelines hollering their lungs out and banging us on the back when we did well. They would show up suddenly with some piece of equipment they thought we needed and they would make us wear it. They had some sort of special influence over the coach: if we didn't wear it, we'd find ourselves missing shifts. And they would pay for it themselves. We were only twelve years old and we couldn't believe that these guys... these engineers, businessmen, broke hustlers and print setters gave a damn about us. It was the first indication that we had that we belonged in the world and that somebody cared about how well we did. And then we would get back home and in the paper the next day, there would be, in a very small column, on a back page, a recounting of our goals, assists and goals against record. The first time I saw my name in print for scoring two goals in a town hundreds of miles away was magic.

Gee. Are you talking about Louise Arbour? Bora Laskin? What an amazing statement.

Yeah. I have a buddy who knows a thing or two about airplanes and he has a huge picture of a Spitfire in his basement rec room (the little lady would not let him put it in the living room). Maybe he's biased because he served in the RAF, but he's such a cynical git, I doubt loyalty has anything to do with his admiration for the Spitfire. As for my fav aircraft... Business Class on the Upper deck of a 747 trans-Atlantic or Trans-Pacific. Newer planes might have better amenities but the flight crew treated you differently. I used to love Air France. So insouciant. On one flight I woke up to hear we were about to arrive in Paris, and could we please fasten our seatbelts. I caught the attention of the flight attendant, and I asked, "M'mselle, pas de petit dejeuner?" "Oh m'sieur. On a vole trop vite pour le p'tit dejeuner." I had slept through the breakfast service and she didn't want to wake me. 'We flew too fast for breakfast'. I love it.

The guy you want to thank is a man named Frank Stronach. Stronach arrived in Canada from Austria at the end of WWII with a couple of bucks in his pocket and started a parts machining company that he built into a major world enterpise called Magna. Magna builds parts for every major auto manufacturer in the world and in plants all over the world. Stronach is a business genious and he has become wealthy beyond anybody's wildest dreams. When Stronach saw what a mess the Bush government had made during Katrina (and without his naming any names), he pitched in and put up big bucks to build a trailer park community that Katrina victims could live in. They weren't exactly split level ranch style homes but they were a hell of a lot more than FEMA was offering. Frank Stronach is a hard nosed businessman, and I have no doubt there are many who curse his name, but Frank Stronach knows what it means to be dealt a disaster and he stepped up when everybody else was runniong around clucking and flapping their wings like chickens with their heads cut off.

I thought it was interesting that a bunch of Toronto Drug cops got off on major charges because the Crown dragged its feet on prosecution. Harper is naive about the justice system. This is a guy who has a law degree but never practised. Now he's making decisions about Supreme Court appointments. Yikes.

I disagree. There are minorities that the GOP ignores and there are others that it listens to. Aside from my comments about Jews, consider Evangelistic Christians. Aren't they a minority? YOu can watch Jimmy Swaggart on Sunday morning and yes it looks like a lot of people, but really they are not that big in terms of voter fractions. They are just very, very, loud. Something hsa happened in western politics - loud has come to replace rep by pop. Reagan knew this and that is what gave birth to his "Silent Majority" campaign. Now there is just a whole cacophony of very very loud minorities. It's like Italian democracy except the two main parties have found some way to harness the entropy. How long they can keep that up is another question.

YOu have two choices: talk to a lawyer or walk away and write it off as a lesson. Don't try to fight it yourself. You should not have given this guy any money.

This is my experience. I don't have any experience with landlords in BC.

I can't say what these two are going on about because I've got them both on my ignore list for their repeated use of personal attacks, but American Jews have been Democrat for many years, but swung right with the Bush Administration. Ohmert anounced at the most recent Bush visit to Israel that George W Bush was the best friend that Israel has ever had. I think this is a significant shift in American politics, whatever you two might have to say.