Category: Good Stuff

Seeing as how I seem to have a bad case of bloggers’ block up the wazoo lately, I’m getting a little hard up for stuff to write about.

So, for lack of anything better, I guess I’ll just smack up whatever it is that I trip over that either tickles my funnybone, leaves me going “what the hell…?” or both.  Today’s entry is under the “both” heading.

And, I promise, just as soon as I can jar something loose from this rickety damned skull of mine, I’ll be right back to howling my lungs out about things that actually matter.  Until then, I’m afraid you’ll just have to sit through stuff like this… Sorry. 🙁

British man puts out kitchen fire with aunt’s oversized underwear

LONDON – They went from baggy knickers to the ultimate hotpants.

A fire department official in Britain says Jenny Marsey’s miraculous underwear saved the day by doubling as an emergency fire blanket during a kitchen blaze.

Marsey’s nephew, John, was frying bread in her kitchen in Hartlepool, northeast England, on Sunday when the fire broke out.

He grabbed the nearest thing from a pile of washing to smother the fire – a wet pair of his aunt’s size 18 underwear.

The nephew’s quick thinking saved the kitchen but left Marsey’s underpants slightly scorched.

“It could have been a lot worse,” said Marsey. “My family could have been in hospital but the knickers saved the day.”

A fire brigade spokesman said that the general principle – using a large, wet cloth to cover a grease fire – was a sound one.

As for using underwear: “Clearly it depends on what size you are,” he said, “but I don’t want to go there.”

Dear gawd… I really do need something to set a fire under me…

… just too damned funny not to share.

I know that I haven’t been posting worth a crap lately. Call it writer’s block, blogger burnout or whatever the hell else it might be but lately, it just hasn’t been coming out for some reason. It’s not that there hasn’t been anything pissing me off or that I haven’t had anything on my mind; it just doesn’t seem to want to get from my brain to the keyboard…

This, though, was just too damned good not to pass along. A big ol’ tip o’ the tuque to Damian for bringing this to my attention in the first place…

Alright, everybody, pay attention.  This is important.

It seems like all the quibbling of “is there one or isn’t there one,” is over when it comes to the question of whether or not southwest Ontario has itself a resident cougar.  And I’m talking about the kind that doesn’t wear lipstick.

The Freeps carrried the story today, telling how the big cat — that all the “experts” told us couldn’t possibly be here — made such a mess out of some poor fella’s standardbred trotter out on Elliott Drive near Parkhill that the horse had to be put down…

Parkhill residents have been warned to be on the lookout for a cougar after a horse was viciously mauled by an animal with sharp claws and had to be put down.

Since the attack, which left the horse torn up and bleeding on an Elliott Drive farm last week, there has been at least one cougar sighting, Middlesex OPP Const. Doug Graham said.

In response to the attack and the sighting, police and North Middlesex council issued a public safety notice yesterday, warning residents to avoid walking alone at night in the bush and to secure barns.

“The risk is low, but we know (the animal) is not as fearful of humans as it normally would be,” Graham said. “Normally we see losses of pets, dogs and cats, but this is the first attack of a horse.”

The attack on the horse has not been confirmed as a cougar attack, but the injuries are consistent with that of a cougar hunting prey, police said.

[…]

“It was traumatic,” Graham said. “The wounds (were made by) one animal as opposed to a pack. It wouldn’t be consistent with a coyote or wolf — they hunt in packs.”

He said the wounds were made by “sharp claws. This (horse) was attacked by a large predator that knew how to attack a large animal.”

Cougar sightings have become almost legendary in the region.

Last summer, a wildlife specialist with the Natural Resources Ministry investigated 32 sightings in London, but found no hard evidence of a cougar in London.

The expert did find proof of deer, coyotes, raccoons, wild turkeys and possibly a bobcat.  [gee, he was thorough, wasn’t he? 🙄 -D]

Cougars, also known as pumas, mountain lions and panthers, roam remote areas across the country, mostly Western Canada. Their presence has been confirmed in New Brunswick and Quebec and provinces west of Ontario. Wildlife experts concede they likely roam remote regions of northwestern Ontario. Most of the past Ontario sightings have been at night and in the early fall.

For the most part, the community is not overly concerned, Graham said.

“People realize there has never been an attack on a human. The cats are normally out at dusk and dawn (and) young children tend not to be out at that time of day.”

Apparently Graham doesn’t know too many small town and country kids.  When I was growing up, depending on the time of the year, we could be damned near anyplace around dusk, so make sure that you know where your kids are and when.  And make sure they know what to watch for and not to mess with it.  I’ve seen what one of these things can do to a grown man and don’t even want to imagine what could happen to a kid.

And, as cool as that guy was to hear about, I don’t exactly feel like writing any posts about a local Marc Patterson anytime soon.

CKNX is also reporting that the OPP are warning folks that the critter is still around:

Middlesex OPP are advising area residents that there has been a cougar sighting along a creek in the Parkhill area.

This sighting follows a mauling of a horse last week.

The mauling of the horse has not been confirmed as a cougar attack, however, the injuries are consist with that of a cougar hunting prey.

A cougar expert says they prefer forested or bush areas, usually follow a water course and try to avoid human contact.

Most of the Ontario sightings are in the early Fall.

So for the time being, keep the kids close and your eyes open because this thing’s getting a little too ballsy for my liking.  And while it might not be a bad idea to keep the ammo near the old 12 gague for a few days, don’t go hunting the thing just yet, because a) deer season’s just around the corner so this critter might come to an unlucky end anyway and b) you likely don’t need the hassle of explaining why it is that you shot something that there isn’t even a season for in this province.

But if you see it going after your livestock — or even worse, somebody’s kids — that’s another matter.  Just be observant, keep your head, and for God’s sake, make sure what you aim at.

You know the drill.

UPDATE

The Freeps has a follow-up today from Cheryl Penny’s farm:

When Penny and partner Bob Rundle went across the pasture to collect Rainbow, they were shocked.

“Her head was all smashed in, she was bleeding from a nostril and there was this long gash, right to the bone,” Penny said.

A veterinarian examined Rainbow’s injuries and recommended the horse be put down.

“I agreed because I hate to see an animal in distress,” Penny said.

Rundle said he’s convinced Rainbow was spooked.

“There’s no way she’d jump three fences and that cut from shoulder to knee,” he said.

“I didn’t see a cougar and I can’t prove it, but one was spotted not far from here and it was either that or some other wild animal that spooked her.”

An absolutely huge tip o’ the old toque to Dr. Roy for putting this where I could see it so that I can, in turn, pass it along to the rest of you (couldn’t have done it without ya, mate).

I wasn’t going to post anything at all today due to my temp hitting 102 — that’s 38.8, for those of you that have been fully metricwashed — and generally feeling like a can of smashed arseholes.

Thanks again, Doc. Just when I thought the day was a wash… 😀 The original townhall.com article is here (along with plenty of other good stuff, so take the time to check it out).

How to Shut Up an Atheist if You Must
By Doug Giles
Saturday, October 20, 2007

The atheist’s days of running circles around the Christian with their darling questions are drawing to a close. Yes, the fat lady just wrenched herself off her humongous backside, has cleared her throat and now is fixin’ to sing the finale on the atheist’s ability to have fun with their specious little fairy tales at the Christians’ expense.

That is if the Christian will buy, devour, commit to memory and stand up and challenge the pouty anti-God cabal with the atheist-slaying facts found in two new books from Regnery namely, What’s So Great about Christianity and The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Bible.

Authors Dinesh D’Souza and Robert Hutchinson skillfully answer, once again, the atheist’s pet questions about the existence (or non-existence) of God and how Christianity has allegedly made the world suck. Suck, for you thick atheists, is a slang word which means to make or to be really, really crappy (kind of like how our culture becomes anytime you guys mess with it).

These books will be especially beneficial for high school and college students to draw upon when their secular anti-God fuming delirious instructors start railing against God and Christianity.

For instance:

1. When the prissy anti-Christs tell you the Bible stands in the way of science, inform them that the greatest scientific geniuses in history were devout Christians – and scientists from Newton to Einstein insisted that biblical religion provided the key ideas from which experimental science could develop.
2. When the pissy God haters tell you the Bible condones slavery, you can remind them that slavery was abolished only when devout Christians, inspired by the Bible, launched a campaign in the early 1800s to abolish the slave trade.
3. When the screechin’ teachers tell you the Bible has been proven false by archaeology, hark back and show them that each year a new archaeological discovery substantiates the existence of people, places and events we once knew solely from biblical sources, including the discovery of the Moabite stone in 1868, which mentions numerous places in the Bible, and the discovery of an inscription in 1961 that proves the existence of the biblical figure Pontius Pilate, just to name a few.
4. When they get sweaty and tell you that the Bible breeds intolerance, refresh their memory with the fact that only those societies influenced by biblical teachings (in North and South America, Europe, and Australia) today guarantee freedom of speech and religion. Period.
5. When one of them queues up and quips that the Bible opposes freedom, smack ’em with the fact that the Bible’s insistence that no one is above the law and all must answer to divine justice led to theories of universal human rights and… uh… limited government.
6. When they tell you that Christianity and the Bible justify war and genocide, unsympathetically remind them that societies which rejected biblical morality in favor of a more rational and scientific approach to politics murdered millions upon millions more than the Crusades or the Inquisition ever did. Hello. Atheist regimes have caused the greatest mass murders in history, says D’Souza. Inside D’Souza’s book you’ll find little gems like, The Crusades, the Inquisition, the Galileo affair, and witch hunts together make up less than 1% of the murders that have occurred during modern atheist regimes like Stalin, Hitler, and Mao.

This is just a smattering of the various 411 fun the Christian is going to get as they plow through What’s So Great about Christianity and The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Bible.

Senior pastor, college pastor and youth pastor: do yourself and your congregants a favor and teach this stuff to your church. Equip Christians to stand against the BS (belief system) of the atheists. The culture war is heating up, therefore make sure your people don’t stand intellectually naked and neutered before these no-God numb nuts.

Lastly, comfortable and cocky atheists, you had better brace yourselves. Hundreds of thousands of Christians and authors are about to read these books and, as stated, systematically dismember your old and haggard arguments.

In addition, everywhere I go and speak – be it in conferences, on the radio, on television or in print – I’m going to encourage the tens of thousands of Christians I address that every time and everywhere they get crapped on by an atheist with unfounded arguments to open their mouths and slam dance them with facts found in these two new brilliant books from Regnery.

Doug Giles’ new book 10 Habits of Decidedly Defective People: The Successful Loser’s Guide to Life is now available. Doug’s award winning talk show and video blog can be seen and heard at www.ClashRadio.com.

Yeah, there’s been plenty of cutlery broken out for poor li’l Steffie Deedles lately, some Liebral and some not, but the sharpest fork stuck in his flip-flopping backside seems to have come from, of all palces… Owen Sound, Ontario.

Owen Sound Sun Times edotor Michael Den Tandt managed to sum up, in no uncertain terms, exactly what pretty much the whole damned country is thinking about Citoyen Dion these days. While I normally tend to shy away from kicking someone when they’re down, this bugger really did ask for it, and Den Tandt delivers with both barrels:

Stick a fork in Dion – he’s done

Posted By michael den tandt

Stephane Dion, welcome to Hell. You will be a resident of Hell for several months, perhaps six. During that time Prime Minister Stephen Harper will take you apart in little pieces, like a mean boy pulling the wings off a fly. When it’s over there will be an election, which you will lose.

Far from appreciating your effort and sacrifice, the Liberal Party will drag you kicking and screaming into a scrubby field. There it will dispatch you cleanly and quickly – with Michael Ignatieff standing by, murmuring messages of encouragement and condolence. Ignatieff will take your job. You will retire to a modest pension in the south of France, where you will sit in a patch of sunlight, a blanket over your knees, dreaming of what might have been.

Farfetched? Not so much.

In the aftermath of the Liberal leader’s decision to prop up the Harper government for another few months, there’s been much talk in party circles of how very clever it all was. “He is a very capable individual, who maneuvered through deep waters,” was how Huron-Bruce Liberal MP Paul Steckle phrased it.

To hear them talk, it’s almost as though Harper fell into Dion’s trap. On one side we have the wicked Stephen Harper, scheming to engineer an election that “Canadians don’t want.” On the other we have a newly savvy Stephane Dion, who has a few tricks up his sleeve, thank you very much. It’s as though the Liberals are saying: See, we can be sneaky and opportunistic too, just like Harper. What’s so special about him?

Only in dreamland can anyone suggest this episode connotes anything but desperation on Dion’s part. According to multiple reports from within the Liberal Party, he wanted to go to the polls. How could he not? In recent weeks he’d laid down a string of unshakable conditions for keeping this government alive. The most important of these was a hard date of February, 2009 for an end to Canada’s military mission in Afghanistan. Harper stared at that line, eyeballed Dion, eyeballed the line, then hopped right across it with a big smirk on his face.

Dion’s first instinct was to fight. But he couldn’t. His caucus wouldn’t let him. They know that if they go to the voters this fall, many of them will lose their $178,000-a-year jobs. In Quebec the Liberals are imploding. In Ontario, where you’d think Dion would have had a little more currency because of his national unity credentials, he’s gained none. Out West he had none to begin with.

Here’s the poison: The decision to pan the throne speech virtually in its entirety, then concoct a grab-bag of exquisitely nuanced excuses for passing it, feeds directly into Dion’s greatest political liability – the perception that he’s weak. In chess they call this a fork. Move one way, you lose your rook. Move the other way, you lose your queen. Either way you lose. Dion is well and truly forked.

In Quebec, some voters dislike him because of a perception that he is arrogant, aloof and out of touch with ordinary folk. He speaks like a Frenchman – a testament to his French mother. But that doesn’t play well in the Saguenay. Other Quebecers tar him, unfairly, as a traitor, because of his authorship of the Clarity Act. Still others continue to mistrust the Liberals because of the sponsorship scandal.

In Ontario Dion began with a reputation as a smart, honest and hardworking minister. Despite his gawkiness and heavily accented English, he was known as a man of conviction. Journalists who remembered his fight with Quebec separatists in the 1990s referred to him as having a “spine of steel.”

Then came the Harper strategy, taken directly from the Brian Mulroney play book, of seeking a majority through Quebec. First Harper learned to speak French better than any other recent prime minister, including the francophone Jean Chretien. Then he declared Quebec a “nation.” Then he struck a back-room alliance with Mario Dumont’s soft-nationalist, centre-right Action Democratique. Taken together, it worked.

This put the Liberals in severe need of a wedge issue for Quebec. They seized on the most obvious one, the Afghan mission. Polls showed Quebecers overwhelmingly opposed the deployment. Overnight the Liberals, who conceived and launched the mission, transformed themselves into its harshest critics. Trouble is, that hasn’t worked. Liberal fortunes in Quebec have only worsened. Has anyone in the Liberal brain trust considered that some Quebecers’ interest in and support for the mission may actually increase because the Valcartier, Que.-based Vandoos are over there now? It doesn’t seem so.

Meantime the various Liberal flip-flops on Afghanistan have sewn confusion in Ontario and in the West. Dion says one thing, Foreign affairs critic Bob Rae says another, Defence Critic Denis Coderre says something else. Do they want our troops to stay and finish what they began or do they want to pull them out? Nobody knows. In Dion’s speech to Parliament Wednesday he came up with yet another nuance: An extended mission focused on training Afghan security forces would be “acceptable.” Um, Stephane, that’s what the mission is focused on now. Does this mean you support it again?

Dion has made his choice. He now faces an endless succession of confidence votes. In each case Harper will press legislation inimical to Liberal principles and dare Dion to call him out. With each new concession Harper will look stronger and Dion weaker. If Dion pulls the trigger, he loses. If he waits, he loses. In effect Stephen Harper has just maneuvered himself into a majority in all but name.

That makes Dion many things. Unlucky? Doomed? You be the judge. Savvy, in my view, doesn’t make the list.

Michael Den Tandt is editor of the Sun Times in Owen Sound and a national affairs columnist for Osprey Media. Contact mdentandt@thesuntimes.ca

…is that there might be someone around willing to stick up for him.

This guy is getting excoriated in the media lately. Naturally. Nothing pisses the media off more than getting called on the carpet for their bullying misdeeds. Yeah, that’s right: I’m talking about Oklahoma State University’s head football coach, Mike “screw with my kids and I’ll rip ya a new one” Gundy.

What did he do? Well, it’s simple: he had the gall to take the media to task for the cheap shots that they were taking at one of his players. The media, naturally, are calling it a “meltdown.” Of biblical proportions, no less.

But what should we expect? The media have always been bullies, eager to dish out the most vicious criticism of anyone and anything and then squealing like stuck pigs whenever someone so much as looks sideways at them.

So… did Gundy, nave a “meltdown?” Pete Schrager doesn’t think so, and neither do I. All I see is a coach sticking up for one of his players who’s been kicked when he’s down. But hey, why take my word for it? See for yourself and make up your own mind…