Wayne D's Blog

It's amazing how time flies. Two weekends ago it was canoeing near Parry Sound, last weekend was Canada Day long weekend at the cottage.  This weekend is chock full of stuff too, football game on Saturday, helping with church on Sunday.

Surprise, surprise, people do read my blog. I got a nice email from the people at the The Lutheran Magazine thanking me for linking to their site in my  Davinci Code article.   They also pointed me at the ELCA's page called Culture Comments.  This is where the ELCA Communication staff and networks review, evaluate, and comment on films, books and other media events  in our culture with religious implications (their words, not mine).

I'm beginning to wonder whether courtesy is over-rated.  Twice in the past couple of weeks I have been shocked when a courteous gesture has been met with, well I'm not sure how to describe it.  In the first instance I was heading off to my regular Tuesday night out a Jakes.  Jakes has a parking lot behind the restaurant and a long single driveway beside the building from the road to the parking lot.   As I pulled in the I saw the lights of a car at the other end of the driveway.  I thought I'd be nice and let them pull out before I pulled in.  The other car came half way down the driveway. The driver got out and started to chat with someone who was waiting at the curb.  Just as I was getting ready to honk my horn in righteous indication I saw an older gentleman approaching the car in a walker.  By the time all were safely ensconced in the car and all the chatting was done five minutes had passed.  I think if I was planning on blocking the driveway for five minutes I would have flashed my lights and let the Good Samaritan at the other end of the driveway in first.  In case number two I stopped to let an older lady cross in front of me in the supermarket parking lot.  She was moving pretty slowly and I could have gotten by her before she got in front of the car but instead I stopped.  She walked across in front of me, stopped in the centre of the , turned around and began to converse with another younger woman who was probably her younger daughter.  Sigh, sometimes being courteous taxes one's patience.

I had a few more rants that were rolling around in my head but they all disappeared between the time I thought of them and now.  Maybe next time I should write them down.

I don't actually live in the city but I love summer in the city.  Wandering around downtown on a summer evening is great.  My secret plan is to buy a boat to live on during the summer at one of the Toronto Island marina's or at Harbourfront.  Winters will be spent in a  concrete box nearby.   Of course first I have to get all the kids to move out.


After the Argo's home opener Jason and I walked up University Ave. to look at the new Toronto opera house.  As we walked across Richmond St. we could see a number of large trucks parked on the street so we continued across to see what was going on.  It turned out to be a free outdoor concert called Blockstorm sponsored by GM Canada.   While waiting between concerts you could check out GM cars, play Playstation games.  The only thing missing was a beer garden which is not really that surprising considering the target audience and the negative associations between drinking and driving.  As we were walking both to and away from Blockstorm we saw women completely covered with silver body makeup. At least I think they were completely covered because they also wore a few strips of strategically placed green fabric which preserved their modesty. They were standing outside a motor home parked closeby the concert site.  I suspect that they were dancers, but didn't stick around the event long enough to find out.  I'd already been downtown all afternoon at the football game. I was also the only one there wearing an Argonotes jersey, which I think slightly embarassed Jason. We would have had to wait 1.5 hours until the next band came one and other than the police who were there I was probably the only person over 30 on the site.


Speaking about drinking and driving, I read an article in the paper about a woman who decided to drive for her fiance who had been drinking.  She had never had a license and had never taken any driver training.  She managed to crash the car and kill her fiance.  Driving is not as easy as it looks.


Though I complain about the lack of a spell checker in Yahoo 360 and in the Yahoo mail beta,  one feature that I do like is the ability to recover you last blog entry.  I have managed to crash Firefox twice while writing this entry because of things I have done in other tabs.  See, my blog isn't always a rant.


My favorite Google video right now is magic sand.

I know it won't make any difference but I must rant about gas prices.  When I was driving home a week ago Thursday I needed some gas.  Unfortunately the price of gas was about 82 cents a litre and the cars were lined up at every gas station I drove by.  The next morning the price was $1.02. 20 cents a litre in one night, give me a break.

Having written recently about my travails with getting sound working on Linux I thought I should give equal time to a recent Windows XP problem I encountered.  We decided to convert one of out Linux machines to a dual boot system so I went out and bought a Windows XP CD, made the proper incantations and installed it.  The machine was a plain vanilla Dell computer that had worked flawlessly with Linux for over year.  Everything went fine until I tried to get the onboard networking going.  Windows XP didn't have a driver so I dug up a CD of Dell drivers from the proper vintage of machine. No luck, XP couldn't find a driver it liked.  I rebooted in Linux so I could find out what type of card Linux thought it was. Linux thought it was a card that was listed on the Dell CD I had tried.  The most irritating thing throughout the process is that every time XP rejected the drivers I offered it asked me if it should connect to the Internet to find them.  Would it be too much to ask Microsoft to add a snippet of code to the Windows setup that would check to see if the machine had Internet connectivity before offereing to connect to the Internet to find a driver that I needed to connect to the Internet? Talk about rubbing salt into the wound.

I gave up, the next morning I bought a generic $20 network card at the local computer store and booted the PC.  Windows XP found the card, loaded a driver that it had already and happily connected to the network.  Sigh.

The picture at the top of this entry was taken as I was driving up to the cottage last weekend to open it up for the year.  It's a picture of some of the turbines of the Melancthon Grey Wind Project located near Shelburne, Ontario.

It was my first visit to the cottage this year, not counting the time my brother and I went up to clear off the roof after a particularly large snow storm.  Two solid days of work, two leaks found, one repaired.  Want to buy a cottage?  It's for sale, the MLS listing is here .  If you are looking for a nice 4 bedroom cottage in Sauble Beach this is the cottage for you.  It's a 50 yard walk from the front door to the beach access, I'd love to keep it myself but I don't get enough time off to make having a cottage worthwhile.

P.S.  As I was driving to a picnic today I saw a sign on a vacant corner announcing the construction of a new Home Depot.  This location will be about 3 km. from my house.  Double sigh.

I have noticed that a number of words have entered common usage recently that I had never heard before.  These words obscure the grittier reality of what people are talking about and I am intensely displeased that the media has fallen into using these words instead of calling a spade a spade. Most of these words have come into usage when governments have used them to refer to particularly unsavory practices.


Redact means to edit or prepare for publication. When someone on TV or radio talks about a redacted document what they really mean is censored. Someone has went through the document and blacked out the bits that they don't want us to see. I don't mean to suggest that this is a nefarious practice, some things need to be kept secret but lets say censored so everyone really understands what we are talking about.


Renditon means to hand over. When someone on TV or radio uses the term extraordinary rendition what they mean is kidnapped and turned over to a foreign power for interrogation.


When does a "stress position" become a "torture technique"?  Doesn't the American government realize that it's usage of these techniques only reinforce the perception that they are an evil empire? Slate calls a spade a spade in their article The Torture Feature which details approved U.S. government interrogation techniques.


Why say ethnic cleansing when what you really mean is forced population transfer? Ethnic cleansing is not nice, lets not make it sound that way.


The reason an undocumented worker is undocumented is because they are in the country illegally and can't get documents. Why does the media not call them illegal immigrants when that's what they really are?  In Canada we treat illegal immigrants terribly. When they are apprehended the judical process is so slow that there cases may drag on for up to 8 years leaving them with a sense of false hope. Spending 8 years in judicial limbo is unconscionable, either the status determination process needs to be streamlined or they should be allowed to stay.


There is nothing happy about "Happy Slapping".   Filming someone getting assaulted with your cell phone camera is stupid and pathetic.  This is another case of where the behavior of a few makes everyone feel less secure.  Is that group of kids in hooded swearshirts hanging around outside the mall going to attack you as your walk in?

Must blog now, otherwise will never do it.


What a terrible 24th of May weekend weatherwise. ( I originally said crappy but someone called me out tonight for saying crappy three times in less than five minutes, he accused me of being a character from the King of Queens)  Rainy, cold, windy, what I really want to know is what braniac in our government decided to give $400K to Regis and Kelly to come to Niagara Falls yesterday.  Millions of Americans saw Regis wearing gloves and a coat with Kelly huddled under a blanket. I'm sure that's really going to help tourism. Anyone who has lived here more than a year knows that the weather on the 24th of May weekend is a crapshoot.  Last year I spent the May long weekend at a scout jamboree in Montreal. It rained all weekend.


Even though the weather was terrible no one decided to head home early so we managed to get stuck in a 7 km. long traffic jam that resulted from the closing of one lane of the westbound 401 for bridge repair. The section of bridge that was closed was no more than 20 metres long.  It took us about 45 minutes to cover the 7 km.  I wonder how much greenhouse gases that traffic jam contributed to the environment.


I finally got around to watching two movies I have been meaning to see for a long time, Ararat and Scooby Doo. Ararat is a very serious movie about the Armenian genocide but I still enjoyed it alot. Christopher Plummer take on the customs agent was very good and I've been a fan of Arsinée Khanjian ever since she hosted something or other on CBC Newsworld a number of years ago. Scooby Doo is a  movie about a talking dog.  The one major flaw is Scooby Doo is that the monsters were real. As any Scooby Doo afficianado knows, the monsters in Scooby Doo are never real. It wasn't until I got home and had a chance to look it up on IMDB that I realized Velma was played by Linda Cardellini, who is a regular on ER. She brings a whole new dimension to the character of Velma.  I found that Daphne, as portrayed by Sarah Michelle Gellar, was just a tad too cynical for my tastes. Ain't I profound? I also managed to catch Enemy at the Gate, a war movie about the siege of Leningrad. It wasn't too bad but the love story they shoehorned in was unnecessary.


I thought I should add some pictures in case you got boreddo you know which one is Velma and which one is  Arsinée? (Hey Yahoo, when is this thing getting a spell checker?)
 

My favorite Goggle video for this week.