Category: News

Yeah, I know; I dread this crap too. But the current version of the software that I power this site with is getting a little clunky for my liking and so…

It’s upgrade time.

And before anybody even starts… yes, I know this has gone over craptastically before but I’m pretty sure I can avoid that this time. Pretty sure. This time.

The upgrade will occur sometime tomorrow afternoon after I’ve had the chance to back EVERYthing up first. If I can’t get it working right off the hop… well, then, screw it; I’ll just reload from backup and figure something out from there.

Wish me luck. 🙄

I guess this just goes to show you that getting your paper online is still no substitute for actually grabbing a good old-fashioned stack of newsprint. Commentor VF posted yesterday that Right Crazy seems to have found its way into one of the TO Sun’s regular print features (not available online, apparently) called “The Best of the Blogs.” Seeing as how I only check out the TO Sun online, I had no idea about this but VF seems a little more on the ball:

1. Comment by vf January 25, 2007 @ 6:06 pm |Edit This

   Congrats for being mentioned in the TO Sun, Best of the Blogs! You make a good point…and if Tory doesn’t start looking different than Mcguinty I won’t be voting in the provincials.

Wow, “mentioned in the TO Sun, Best of the Blogs!” How the hell did that happen? 😯 And here I thought I was just some guy with a cheap computer shooting his mouth off. I’m gonna end up with a swelled head or something if I’m not careful.

Now I gotta round up a bunch o’ old copies of the Sun… 🙄

Well, that’s finally done; just not the way I figured it would be. It seems that my attempt to automate the migration of the remaining 60 or so posts from the old blog have met with something of a SNAFU, resulting in all the posts being lost. On the bright side, most of the old posts made it over in one peice, although I had to migrate them over by hand 🙄 and I was NOT in the mood to do that another 60 times…

And yes, I’m going to put an online community there as soon as I can figure out how to migrate it over. Wish me luck…

If you’re anything like me, you probably have quite a few fond memories of playing hockey with friends, or even just skating around in the waning light, on a frozen pond somewhere.  I think most of us — or at least those of us that grew up in the country or small towns — have such recollections.  For us it was a pond in the middle of a farmer’s field on the northeast edge of town.

Most folks my age will tell you that the winters were quite a bit colder back then, and they were.  I can remember a time in my life when storms like the one that dumped about 3 feet of white stuff on London recently were expected at least once or twice a year.  So, to make a long story short, skating on frozen ponds was just something that we did, every chance we got.

But along with all that fun came constant warnings from the grownups, delivered with the kind of tone that made it damn clear that any screwing around would be dealt with immediately, and harshly:

• Stay away from ponds if there had been any kind of a thaw, no matter how brief, within the last week.
• “Thick and blue is tried and true; thin or crispy, way too risky.”
• Don’t trust ice that has a milky colour to it.
• Don’t go out on any ice until somebody — or, more likely, somebody’s dad — has augered it to make sure exactly how thick it is.
• Don’t trust ice that’s covered in a layer of snow.  Snow doesn’t just obscure ice, it also has an insulating effect and inhibits good ice formation.
• Never trust the ice on a river or a stream; it can be a foot thick in one spot but paper thin just a few yards away.
• Always have a lifeline nearby, just in case the worst happens.
• Finally, no matter how well you think you know the ice: never, never, EVER go out on the ice alone.

I was reminded of all this today as I heard the news of the tragic death of 11-year Brunthan Nadarajah in Scarborough, who died trying to rescue a friend who had fallen through the ice on a drainage pond.  The other kid, a 15-year old, is currently in critical condition at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children.

Winter in Canada is a wonderful time, and peppered with innumerable traditions but, for God’s sake, make sure your children know what to do, and what not to do, to keep themselves safe.  No parent ever wants to read something like this about their own children:

The older boy plunged through the thin ice that covered the pond. The younger boy tried to pull his friend from the water, only to break through himself.

“He was the only person who went and tried to rescue him,” Nadarah said of his son, adding that the sixth-grade student was trying to save a high-school student.

“I miss him so much. We miss him so much.”

Rescue attempts

One man rushed to the scene with a long electrical cord and tried to throw it to the boys. His rescue attempt was almost successful.

“I threw it out again (and) he finally got a hold of it,” Phil Hall said.

“I tried pulling him up and he couldn’t hold on to it. I guess his hands were freezing, he couldn’t hold on to it.”

Hall then crawled out on the thin ice, inching his way towards the boys in an effort to get closer.

“As I got close towards them, the ice gave way,” he said.

Hall, who cannot swim, and a police officer still had the extension cord and were able to get back to safety.

Four police officers in total attempted to rescue the boys, but were not successful.

[It seems worth noting that this post took two days to write. I wanted to think about it first -Dennis]

I like Steve; really, I do. Everybody who comes by here knows that. But sometimes, just sometimes, he leaves me shaking my head, wondering “just what the [bleep] is he thinking??” This is one of those times.

As most of you already know already, HMPM Harper basically put Ping and Pong on either side of the third rail of Canadian politics yesterday when he rose in the Commons to take what could well be the biggest political risk that we have seen any politician gamble on since… well, I can’t think of when. Just what did he have to say that could be so risky? Well, amongst other things:

“Mr. Speaker, tomorrow the Bloc Quebecois will present the House with an unusual request that we here at the federal Parliament define the Quebecois nation.

“As a consequence, with the support of the government and with the support of our party, I will be putting on the Notice Paper later today the following motion:

“That this House recognize that the Quebecois form a nation within a united Canada.

“Once again, the leader of the Bloc and his separatist friends are not concerned with defining who Quebecers are but rather what they want them to become, a separate country.

“The separatists do not need the Parliament of Canada to define what is meant by the sociological termination. My preference has been well known. I believe that this is not the job of the federal Parliament. It is the job of the legislature of Quebec, but the Bloc Quebecois has asked us to define this and perhaps that is a good thing, because it reminds us that all Canadians have a say in the future of this country.

“Having been asked by the Bloc to define the Quebecois, we must take a position. Our position is clear. Do the Quebecois form a nation within Canada? The answer is yes. Do the Quebecois form an independent nation? The answer is no and the answer will always be no, because Quebecers of all political persuasions, from Cartier and Laurier to Mulroney and Trudeau, have led this country and millions like them of all political persuasions have helped to build it.

“With their English- and French-speaking fellow citizens and people drawn from all nationalities of this earth, they have been part of making this country what it is, the greatest country in the world.

“To millions more who live in a dangerous and dividing world, this country is a shining example of the harmony and unity to which all peoples are capable and to which all humanity should aspire.

“I say to my federalist colleagues and I also say to the separatist side that we here will do what we must, what our forefathers have always done to preserve this country, Canada, strong, united, independent and free.”

Call me whatever you like (and I’m sure some of you can think of plenty), but this whole idea gives me nebulous but implacable sense of unease. It’s like hearing the sound of a distant siren and finding yourself wondering, for no good reason, if your house is on fire.

Sound silly? Fine. It feels silly; but it still isn’t going away. That’s why I’m trying to take as much time as I can to try to digest this before shooting my mouth off, instead of just shooting from the lip as usual.

On the one hand, such a declaration smacks of capitulation to the PQ, Blocheads and the other motley assortments that would gladly rip my country apart. But if that’s so, then why is Gilles Duceppe in such a piss-up-a-rope mood over it? See what I mean:

The glum look on Bloc leader Gilles Duceppe’s red face was also worth the price of a Commons admission. His chance to boost Quebec resentment against the Liberals and put Harper in a deadly python squeeze over the Quebec nation question in the next election evaporated minutes after the prime minister started speaking.

Could it have anything to do with the fact that this won’t actually change anything, legally or constitutionally speaking? After taking a day to step back and get a good, long sniff of this, I’m more and more coming to the same conclusion that many other observers have already come to. The emerging consensus is that this is a move worthy of a master chessplayer. In one stroke, Harper has taken some wind out of the Bloc’s sails:

Bloc Leader Gilles Duceppe says his party will vote in favour of the motion, which calls the Quebecois a nation within a united Canada.

…beaten the Librano$ to the punch:

The grim face of interim leader Bill Graham and sagging shoulders among Liberals even as they struggled to their feet to give Harper a standing ovation told the story of a party beaten to the punch and whacked in the head.

…and shown the Dippers to be incapable of taking a stand on just about anything:

NDP Leader Jack Layton said Wednesday his caucus would support both the Tory and BQ motions.

All in all, not a bad day. Some people have suggested one possibly huge fly in the ointment, however:

Good for a snicker, but not likely to happen. Yes, this may piss off a few people in the West but, with all three federalist parties on board, any protest vote has no place to go.

All in all, I still haven’t made up my mind about this yet. But at least I feel a little better about it than I did 48hrs ago. One thing is for certain: this is either a political master stroke worthy of some of history’s greats, or Ping and Pong are toast. There will be no middle ground on this one.

Okay, I know I’ve been babbling about this for a while now, but this time I really mean it. Here’s the first draft for the first shirt design:

I’ll keep at it till it finally looks right to me.  When it does, I’ll make ’em available.  So, in the meantime, what does everybody think?

PS – Yes, I KNOW that I’m not worth a damn at image editing… 🙄