kimmy

Maybe if this was "NAFTAboard" or "Can-Am Forum" instead of Mapleleaf Web"... -k

Really? I had not pictured you as an East African woman. For some reason I pictured you as a tubby white dude. -k

Gee, I'm surprised that none of you home-owners felt compelled to defend the largesse you've received at my expense. -k

The difference between an athlete who's put in the time to do the training, and some guy off the street, is immense. It's indescribable. Even if that guy off the street has a genetic predisposition that would make him awesome at some sport... he's not going to be awesome until he's done the training. But when you get to an elite level of competition, *everybody* there has done the training and put in the work. And at *that* point, other factors weigh in. Longer legs, better weight distribution, genetic predisposition to build more muscle, at some point... when everybody has worked hard to get the most out of their bodies, the guy whose body is just genetically more suited has an advantage that the other guy won't be able to overcome. Steroids mimic a genetic advantage (high levels of male hormone.) It doesn't do the training for you. It doesn't do the work that actually lets you build muscle using all of this extra male hormone. I think we're basically on the same page to that point. All I'm getting at is this: at some point, the hand that nature dealt you enters into it. Longer arms are an advantage in boxing or basketball. Shorter arms are an advantage in weightlifting. And, while it might sound like crazy-talk to say something like this, somebody with ancestry that has centuries upon centuries of natural selection geared to high-altitude life probably has an inherent advantage when it comes to their *potential* to excel in distance running. But if that was the whole story, Paula Radcliffe wouldn't be the world record holder. -k

I've also always liked that one. I appreciated it even more once somebody old enough explained to me what "I saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac" symbolizes. Now living in a community with busy summer beaches, and seeing the deserted beaches after Labour Day, the imagery of abandoned beaches now means more to me. -k

What a retarded turn this thread has taken. I assume that Lictor is concerned that each AIDS-infected African tourist will seduce dozens of American women during his visit to the United States. Kwon is perhaps still bitter that Toronto has not yet opened a Sino-centric school to go along with their Afro-centric one. Get your homies to shoot some people in broad daylight, Thomas. It'll happen. -k

Nonsense. Anabolic steroids on their own can't turn anyone into anything (other than, possibly, a eunuch or a corpse.) They can provide an elite athlete with a competitive advantage over other elite athletes (or, if you have a more cynical outlook, allow an elite athlete to compete on a level playing field against all the other elite athletes who are using that stuff.) And I doubt PCP is a performance enhancing drug, unless you're competing at "withstanding tasers and baton-strikes". -k

I'm sure it was likewise of little comfort to the victims of swine flu either. However, I don't see what any of that has to do with responding to Xul's (inane) theory that forced military service was to blame for this tragedy. -k

Dobbins, if you'd provided a link to a story from Dr Butler-Jones instead of posting ridiculous non-sequiturs like you could have saved us all a great deal of nuisance. Incidentally, is there a link? The material you've posted appears to literally be taken from the Liberal Party talking-points page. Is that why you were reluctant to provide a link to it? -k

Well, to quote a wise man... People who drop by their local pub to chat with the regulars aren't the sort of people who'd find the comments section at the bottom of a G&M story to their liking. -k

You said that, but none of the cites you've provided support the claim. Indeed, they seem to indicate that the H1N1 vaccine was indeed part of GSK's exclusive 10-year contract. -k

He's got a point, though. Canada has never had a gun problem. Certain communities in Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal have a gun problem. Badgering farmers and hunters because Vancouver drug-gangsters keep assassinating each other doesn't make much sense. Law enforcement officials love the long gun registry, but not for the reasons advertised. They access it frequently, but not for purposes of solving crimes. They're accessing it so that they know if there are guns on site when they get called to routine calls. Register your rifle or shotgun, and you're basically asking the police to assume you're "armed and dangerous" if they're ever called to your home. -k

That's a bit of a non-sequitur, Dick. Lepine wasn't about to be deployed. In fact, he'd tried to join the army and been rejected because they thought he was a fruitcake. Xul is equally out to lunch, however. Military service in the United States is no less voluntary than in Canada. -k

No, hard training doesn't get you from 10.5 to 10.4 (I assume we're talking about a 100m sprint?) Hard training gets you from the 14 seconds a non-athlete could run to the 10.5 seconds a superb athlete might run. From there, you've probably gotten as far as hard work can take you. Not unless you've been gifted with the right physical attributes will you ever improve above 10.5 seconds regardless of how much hard work you put in. (and even 10.5 seconds is probably a generous estimate of how much someone with an average body type could achieve regardless of how much work they put into it.) And at this point we're just talking about things like height and bone structure (those things are genetic too!) But if you're able to run a 10.5 second 100m, you've beaten almost everyone in the world, by a lot. Hard work alone can't take you to the point where you're able to beat physically gifted people who've done as much hard work as you have. But if you've done the hard work, you're able to beat anybody who hasn't done the hard work to get to that level. -k

Last time I looked at a cable brochure, it seems to me that all the packages consisted of adding one channel I wanted, combined with a whole bunch I didn't. Somehow they'd arranged everything so that to get the handful of extra-service channels I wanted, I'd have had to buy all of their channel packages. huh. Surely in the new digital age we have the technology to allow consumers to buy the channels they want? I bet that if everything on cable was subscriber choice, local TV channels would get a lot more buyers than a lot of the ridiculous channels in these packages. But if one guy wants to watch Car Crash TV, and somebody wants to watch Crap From The Seventies TV, and somebody wants to watch Garden Snail TV, and somebody wants to watch Celebrity Worship TV, and somebody wants to watch Crimesploitation TV... well, all 5 of those people have to buy all 5 of those channels (and several more of them.) As a result, each one of those bullshit channels has 5 times the subscriber base they actually deserve. Or more likely, almost nobody wants to watch any of those stupid channels, and all 5 of them are coat-tailing on a more popular channel that's been put in that package to boost sales. -k

For a guy who says he hasn't watched TV since Barney Miller went off the air, you seem to have a strong opinion on the subject... You don't see local news as being of any value? That's my feeling as well. I actually do watch the local news sometimes. The only local privately owned TV station (operated by Global) is hanging on by a thread and was already scheduled to be killed off once. I'd be pretty disappointed if my only source of local news was CBC radio and the local newspaper (which is itself hanging on by a thread.) -k

I dunno, it sounds like it worked out ok for those of you who own property, at least. Readily available mortgages for deadbeats means demand for property continues to outstrip supply, which ensures that prices stay high. Seems to me that the bailouts may have saved the middle and higher income folks from losing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in equity that would have vanished if a real-estate "market correction" had been allowed to happen. -k

is full of valuable life lessons. And undoubtedly foremost among those lessons is: do NOT mess around with Gypsies. Nowhere is the wisdom of this rule more strongly illustrated than in the 2009 Sam Raimi horror "Drag Me To Hell." If Christine Brown had watched "Snatch", she might have spared herself a whole world of trouble.Christine is a young banker vying for a big promotion. Her boss is a chauvinist, and appears to be favoring the new guy because he doesn't think Christine can make "tough decisions". Adding to Christine's stress, she overhears her college-professor boyfriend's class-conscious mother dismiss her as "the girl from the farm" and saying she has "higher expectations" of who her son ought to be dating. So when a gruesome old woman comes to her desk and pleads for an extension on her mortgage, Christine has the opportunity to show her boss she can make one of those "tough decisions". When we first meet Christine, she's listening to a voice lesson CD in her car, learning to erase the last traces of a southern accent from her voice. Later, as she's leafing through a cook-book, a picture of her falls out revealing her to have been "Pork Fair Queen, 1995" (and rather tubby at the time.) She grabs the picture and crumples it. She doesn't like her roots... she hates that she used to be fat... she wants to be accepted by Clay's snobby parents. I think that somebody who's embarrassed of their own roots is, themselves, a snob. Anyway, Christine decides that if a chance to take a step up that ladder means foreclosing on a poor Mrs Ganoosh's home, so be it. Mrs Ganoosh reacts badly to the news, and has to be dragged out of the bank by security. Later, Mrs Ganoosh ambushes Christine in the parking lot, and a violent encounter ensues. Christine is unharmed in the attack, but feels strange afterward. On a whim, she visits a psychic and asks to have her fortune told. The psychic becomes so shaken that he stops the reading and gives her money back. Frightening things begin to happen to Christine, and she returns to the psychic to ask what he really knows. After she explains the encounter with Mrs Ganoosh, he reveals his theory: she has become the victim of a terrible gypsy curse. An evil spirit, he explains, has been bound to her. It will torment her for 3 days, and if she can not find a way to end the curse within 3 days, the spirit will (wait for it...) Drag Her To HELL! Perhaps I'm just much too sensitive for this sort of movie. Or perhaps my gigantic new plasma TV is just too immersive. Whatever the case... this movie scared me half to death. It serves up real fear. Sometimes it comes in the form of well-placed shocks and startles, and sometimes it is scenes where it builds and builds (the demon takes forever to walk up those stairs!) but it comes, and comes. It's merciless and relentless-- for Christine, and for the viewer. Usual horror-movie advice, like "don't be in the dark" and "don't be alone" is of no use to Christine, because she's not safe even in broad daylight surrounded by her co-workers. About the only thing that dials down the tension a little is that some of the stuff that happens to Christine is so gross that it's darkly amusing. It's almost like a message from the director to say "we're just having fun here." I think Raimi's instincts are spot on in knowing how much to show and how much to hide and how to pace it... it's just plain scary. I think that the pulpy title, and the title graphic, and the "Ghost House Pictures" logo, and some of the suspense music, are intended as homage to horror movies and horror comic books of the '50s and '60s. Alison Lohman is on the screen just about every moment of the film, and she's entirely up to it. Lorna Raver is great as the hideous Mrs Ganoosh. Justin "I'm a Mac" Long is on hand as Christine's boyfriend, but does not sell any computer products. She already owns a Mac. -k

It took me a while to get used to the current visual look. I think it is great that we now have a Multiquote feature, because it will allow me to Multiquote. I've been doing "manual" multiquotes since day one, using cut-and-paste... the automated Multiquote will save a lot of work. I encourage everybody to use Multiquote when responding to multiple messages. It makes you look sophisticated. As well, I think it is great that there is now a picture of Kimmy at the top of each page. I anticipate that this will really add to everyone's enjoyment of the message board. -k

This was covered earlier... US contractors operating in Iraq had legal immunity from Iraqi law, and at the time were also not deemed to be under the jurisdiction of American law either. -k

I thought property prices on Saltspring Island were so high that the only way hippies could live there would be as slave-laborers. Regardless, there seems to be a lot of wishful thinking going on in this opinion piece. The first seems to be the fanciful notion that only in the past 4 years has cynicism and partisanship taken over Canadian politics. This guy seems to have a very short memory, or at least a conveniently short memory. Secondly, and more importantly to his proposal, the assumption that votes from the dropped candidate would flow to the remaining Liberal or New Democrat candidate is iffy at best. A lot of Liberals would probably vote Conservative before they'd vote NDP. And a lot of NDP supporters apparently don't see much difference between Harper and Ignatieff or their parties, and if it's strictly a popularity contest between the two, Harper might well win (which is more a statement about Ignatieff than about Harper, at this point in time.) As well, I think the Conservatives would have tremendous success campaigning against this; they certainly had no trouble selling Canadians on *their* view of the Liberal-NDP-Bloc alliance last year, and this would likely end up no different. Michael Byers can argue that it's not, but he doesn't decide how people view it. People will view it as they wish, but the non-coalition side is going to have a hard case to make. Don't believe me? Look at the headline of Byers' own op-ed: "Liberals and New Democrats together could unseat Harper" ... kind of lends itself to being interpreted as teamwork, doesn't it? I think something like this would help the Conservatives rally their supporters to the polls... while NDP and Liberal voters could wind up decidedly "meh" on the idea of getting out to the polls if their favorite party wasn't running a candidate in their riding. -k

It's "spring ahead, fall back", guys. -k

Now that BJRE has provided us with factual and indisputable proof that our "democracy" is just a sham perpetuated by the Illuminati, I don't think it's fair to make fun of him anymore. We should be kind to BJRE, because he probably only has a few hours left among us. Now that he has exposed this shocking truth, they're going to make him disappear. -k

A while back Wild Bill expressed interest in what the kidz are listening to these days, so I thought I'd give him an update. The new(ish) Kasabian record, "West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum" has been more or less grafted to my CD player for about a month. The record spans from punchy pop/rock tracks: Where did all the love go? ... to some intriguingly odd songs: I'm On Fire Their earlier records had some standout material and some forgettable material, but I enjoyed West Ryder from start to finish. Just about everything on the record has something unique and interesting about it. And, I recall you like Pearl Jam, so you might enjoy as well. It's from the soundtrack of the movie "Into the Wild", which I have not seen. -k

Well if that's the case than this "oppression" is hardly a Muslim phenomenon at all, and not a female phenomenon either. Do you feel oppressed by the expectation of wearing a suit and tie to a job interview or to formal occasions? Do you worry that your co-workers might make fun of you if you wear your short-shorts to work? Congratulations, Jerry, you MAY ALREADY BE oppressed! Perhaps you are now eligible for some sort of Government program for victims of oppression. If you're so concerned that Hilary's choice of apparel was dictated by external expectations... did you speak up for her during the Democratic primaries, when everything she wore was criticized as "too feminine", "not feminine enough", "looks like grandma's leisure suit," "a ridiculous attempt to look hip", and so on? If being told that wearing a scarf to a shrine in Pakistan was oppressive to her, it must have been even more oppressive being told day in day out by Americans that whatever she was wearing was the wrong thing. Never suggested she was. I was disputing the notion that the garment in itself is oppressive. It's not the garment that's oppressive, it's a symbolism attached to it that's argued to be oppressive, and in this case I don't think it's a good argument. -k