Blessed by the Potato

Well, I have some ambiguous news for a change. Talked with my supervisor, and he says that the grant he applied for was trimmed back a fair bit from the budget they asked for, but that’s to be expected usually. It’s still approved, so there’s money there for experiments when I go on to my PhD. I still haven’t heard from the rest of my committee about my thesis drafts, but he says that’s to be expected: they want me & my supervisors to do all the nitty gritty million draft revisions work, and won’t even look at it until my supervisors sign off on it as being done.

I’ve been walking for days, and I can still hear the commotion raised from the stinking pit behind me. I cast a fearful glance behind me, and still faintly see the orange glow diffused through the ever present fog. It’s the one source of direction I have, as the cloud roil so thick that it’s difficult to tell night from day, let alone which side of the sky the sun rises in.

Time for a break I decide. The dirt is less parched, almost like soil now, rather than gravelly sand. But still nothing grows for me to forrage. I check my stomach, and decide that I can do without a meal at this time. No sense using up what few consumables I carry, since breakfast might be growing just a few hours walk further forward.

An ambiguous high-pitched noise pierces the dull throbbing that fills the air. My hands reach for my knife, only to find that it’s already held tightly. I look down at my left arm, while my right holds the knife just above the skin. I slide it gently towards me, but don’t even leave a mark.

It’s amazing how many cuts and bruises I’ve accumulated all over my body, how easy it seems to tear the skin accidentally. Yet, when the morose mood takes me and I reflect on how I’ve left behind the constant tooth-and-nail struggle for survival of the pit for this slow, choking, wasting death on the plains, I can’t help but take out my best knife and just test the skin. It never breaks, even when the knife is freshly sharpened.

There’s a tradition, of sorts, amongst my people to perform such unsavory last rites on the wrists. Yet for me, there’s a spot on my left arm just below the elbow that practically cries out for the knife. Just a taste, just to see how sharp it really is.

How quickly the elation of the climb left me, here in this no-place. The slower pace and lack of conflict simply served to give me time to reflect, to regret, to despair. It’s at this moment that she returns to me, and whispers in my ear. I’m so overjoyed just to hear her voice that I almost miss what she says. More signs and portents: destined for good things, important part of the plan and all that. I dare not turn to face her, fearing and somehow knowing that I won’t see a thing.

I mumble “but I’ve done nothing of importance, and in this state seem ill-suited to perform any in the future.”

Softly, she whispers in my ear “Good deeds are not necessarily great; great works are not necessarily Good.” I think her lips brushed my ear. I know they did, it tingles.

“Do not despair, you’re doing so well. Be brave.” And with that, she’s gone.

I lie there a while longer, listening to my heartbeat and the indistinct thrums of the distant pit. I reach up to touch my ear, and the movement wakes me. I try to think about how long I managed to sleep. I can’t be sure, but there’s a wet pool of drool on my shoulder. Gross.

Did I dream her, or did she whisper sweet nothings in my ear until I fell asleep?

That high pitched noise again, closer this time. I snap to attention: time to move on again. No rest for the weary. I think I’m being followed.

I’ve been a busy little beaver this weekend. I’ve extended my thesis by 4 1.5-spaced pages, and written nearly 17 pages of blog posts, stories, and light-hearted emails. I went into my archives and pulled out three choice stories/rants from the old website. There’s still lots of gold to be mined there, but I’ll do it slowly so that it all seems like new content to you all. I’m going to have to reorganize it very soon (similar to how the recipes page is set up now), I’ll probably get to that later tonight.

For now, I really need to sleep. I’m feeling a lot better after my death flu/sore throat, but the last few days (weeks, really) I haven’t slept much at all. I got 3 hours yesterday, and haven’t managed to sleep at all tonight. I was planning on going in to the lab and doing some more work on calibrating my heat stress setup for my thesis (I don’t think it’s necessary, but it is a question that could be raised, so I was going to do it), but now I think that if I don’t sleep I’m going to go completely bananas. Enjoy the stories, leave feedback, keep reading.

And never lose faith.

Sorry about the outage there (almost 20 hours before I got it back up and running).

I don’t quite know what the problem was, as while the server was running slow as molassas when I got back, it was still functional and reset on its own. Anyway, we’re back.

I just got back from the L-dot and there’s a nice package of homemade peanut brittle on the counter. I didn’t know peanut brittle was the sort of thing a mom could make. It’s like hard candies or fudge: you know that it is possible to make them “homemade”, but that it is in fact usually only done for small “homemade” stores. It’s not the sort of thing you find your mom actually making in your kitchen. To be perfectly literal, I still haven’t found my mom making it in the kitchen, just strong evidence of it. But it’s so good, she very well could have just bought a batch from Maple Leaf Fudge and put it in tupperware for me.

I really like peanut brittle. As I write this I’ve eaten almost half of what she left me, and I think I broke a tooth in the process. It was worth it. Anyhow, despite my obvious love for all that is sweet and nutty (hi Wayfare!) I hardly ever buy peanut brittle, because the best peanut brittle is only found in small confectionary shoppes or at tiny booths in town fairs. And those places without exception always have fudge available as well (usually peanut butter chocolate fudge at that), and for some reason peanut brittle costs as much or more than fudge, pound-for-pound, so I usually end up going with the fudge.

Yes, it is hard on the teeth. It’s hard, so you have to chew (it might dissolve upon prolonged sucking, but I don’t have that kind of patience, and from what patience I do have, it’s obvious that it takes more than 3 licks to get to the tootsie pop centre… er… I mean, it disolves slower than comparable “sucking” sweets, such as life savers), and once you bite into it, there’s a good chance that it will form some kind of peanut brittle concrete in the cusp of your molars.

My teeth are in terrible shape to begin with. I’ve liked my dentist a fair bit since she took over the practice from my old dentist, but there’s one thing that’s got me a little concerned. You see, due to a number of factors including diet (lots of sugar, acidity, and a terrible tendancy to graze rather than eat a small number of larger meals), behaviour (apparently there’s a period after eating where the most damage is done to the teeth, and that the damage over time goes down drastically about a half hour to an hour after eating, so eating non-stop never gives your teeth that minor break, and on top of that, my dentist says that I have a very strong bite, which is just doing mechanical injury to my teeth), the side-effects of my depression medication (chocolate) and genetics (my dad maybe has 6 natural teeth left in his mouth, having had dentures since his 20’s [gulp] and my mom’s had at least 4 root canals, 2 crowns, and a filling in every other tooth except her 4 front ones; I often joke about whether I’m not sure if I’ll end up with my dad’s teeth or my mom’s, but that it can’t be good either way), my teeth aquire cavities at prodigious rates. A new spot has formed since my last visit that is now large enough to poke with my tongue and see in the mirror. My dentist will wait until they get a bit bigger (the first sign of pain) and fill them then. The issue is that I’d like to see if there were some way to prevent these cavities from forming in the first place (aside from you know, brushing my teeth more than 2x a day, since I’m really only a morning & evenings kind of brusher, and, er… flossing, since I’m just really bad at it). Wayfare claims her dentist gives her teeth some sort of plastic film every year or so to seal out the worst of the damage. I remember getting this as a kid, and figured that they must have found out it caused cancer or something, since they stopped giving it to me. I asked my dentist about it recently, and she said she wouldn’t bother scheduling me to get it since with my “ferocious” bite, I’d wear through it in about a month, so there was no point. Now, it’s good that she’s always dealt honestly with me (AFAIK), but Wayfare thinks I should get a new dentist who will let me pay to get a much-needed protective coating on my teeth, and I think she has a point.

As for the coke that I drink, Wayfare’s been looking into buying 2L bottles instead of cans. I like the idea, since I know it takes less material to package a single bottle than a handful of cans, though I don’t know about the downstream recycling efficiency (apparently they make money recycling aluminum?). The big benefit she sees is that you can adjust the amount you want from a bottle, taking less than a full 355 mL if that’s all you want (though I’m not sure she’s counting the extra load of dishes in her figuring). The cost is comparable: cans are on sale for $3.33 for a 12-pack every other week (though the regular price is a painful $8 for 24, or $4.50 for 12, but unless I’m desperate I never pay that much), which is about 0.078 cents/mL, while bottles go for between $1-$2 (depending on sales, again), which works out to 0.05-0.1 cents/mL. However, I find cans to be much more convenient since there’s a nice spot on the door for them (whereas bottles would take up room on the already crowded shelf used for juice and milk), they’re more portable for taking in the car and to work, and since they’re small, it’s easy to keep a number of different flavours in the fridge (typically I have 2 7-up, 4 Coke, 2 diet mountain dew, 1 ginger ale, and 1 orange pop or root beer), and most importantly, you can finish a can of coke before it goes flat.

To help with that problem Wayfare recently got a pop bottle pump, a little device that replaces the bottle cap with a small bulb pump. The idea is that you use the pump to keep the pressure inside the bottle high so that the carbonation doesn’t come out of solution. It seemed to work well enough at first, as I was able to use the pump to make the pressure inside the bottle high enough that I was barely able to dent it with my fingers. However, the seal on it was very poor, and after about an hour, it was actually worse than simply screwing the cap back on in the first place (which might seem impossible, until you realize that with the old fashioned cap-only method you get atmospheric plus the pressure of some of the lost carbonation over an hour, whereas with a leaky pump seal you’ll always bleed back to atmospheric as the pop degasses). So it looks like the best method is still my uncle Al’s (yes, I have an uncle Al and an uncle Bob, it’s very stereotypical :) method of simply crushing the bottle until the liquid is near the top, then screw on the top. I haven’t had as much luck with that, since I’m as the Gungans say “… er… clumsy”, so in the process of trying to squeeze the bottle, I usually get a bit flying out the top if it’s more than half full, and if it’s less than half full then it gets really hard to squeeze enough of the air out of the bottle. It remains a handy method for crushing bottles and having them keep their small size for recycling, however.

Well, it’s been a slow week in the blogosphere (I can’t believe I’m using the blog jargon now… ugh).

Most of my Canadian friends/regular reads still seem to be reeling from the election (Conservatives? Balance of power in the Bloc’s hands? Seriously? What’s wrong with kids these days). I, myself had almost a week off from the web page, following having something very uncomfortable shoved in a place where things do not go back in, which was itself followed by the flu. I smell sick now, and I hate that (it also usually means I’m in for a big nasty week-long flu). That is what’s keeping me up at the moment, writing truly uninspired blog posts that will haunt my archives, forever wishing that I could expunge their uselessness. DJ_Paradise has been putting up a few entries, but still hasn’t added my live journal account to his friends list, so I still can’t post comments (though I’m not even sure live journal sent it out; I got so many errors registering and all that there). I don’t know what exactly he’s up to, but he’s talking about government forms and storing his stuff, so I’m thinking he unwittingly signed up for a military tour of Afghanistan, or he’s getting a job in another country. Netbug’s been dead silent, and we’re still waiting on Baum’s update (with pictures!) after his trip out West.

Thanks to Michael Giest (whose blog I’ve been checking weekly since I was sent there by the CBC to learn more about the Sam Bulte scandal) I found out that a Canadian record company has stood up to the RIAA prosecuting teens for downloading music in the states, offering to pay the legal fees of the hapless teenager in his fight against the RIAA. Makes me want to go out and buy that BNL Christmas album after all. In a similar vein, here’s a funny parody of the MPAA warnings prior to watching a movie on DVD. Interestingly, the RIAA is demanding that the boy, who has 600 “suspect” songs on his computer pay $9000 in damages ($4500 if he pays by a certain date, without fighting it in court). That works out to $7.50 (US) per song. I know that they like to charge more as a penalty than they would to sell legally in the first place, but that’s pretty ridiuclous. I completely disagree with their insane crackdown and abuse of the American legal system to begin with, but this is just going over the top. If they made the fees more reasonable they might actually get people to pay the royalties. IIRC, a song from iTunes runs about $1. A fine of $1-2 would not be too unreasonable, and it would have the added bonus of not requiring them to serve up the bandwidth to provide it. All they have to do is surf the user’s shared folder on Kazaa or whatever filesharing program they’re using and send them a bill. Then instead of being total dicks and suing a few kids at a time for a few thousand each, they could hit thousands of people with bills for a few hundred. At those prices, people might be more willing to pay, and they could even make the whole thing fire-and-forget (let the users decide which songs they need to pay for — after all, they might have ripped an MP3 in their shared directories from a CD they already own and shouldn’t pay twice).

Back to the topic of blogs: I’m really abusing the “uncategorized” category for my posts. I didn’t really know what I’d be talking about with this website when I was setting WordPress up, and even after having 40-some posts up now (yowzah!) I still don’t know what sort of categories I should set up. I had planned on making Rants a separate section (similar to how Recipes are handled now), but most of them have fitted neatly into “insanity”. School & Gaming are obvious, but that still leaves a lot of other uncategorized posts, and as Wayfare told me she learned in library school “everything has a classification, if you use a ‘miscellaneous’ or ‘uncategorized’ folder, you fail.” If anyone sees a pattern or three to reorganize my posts (I can resort them post hoc) feel free to let me know.

He walked down the corridor, listening to what his coworkers were saying. As he walked by Naomi’s door, she heard her talking about him. “Oh, have you seen the car he drives? He must be literally rolling in money to afford that!” He thought that they must be talking about the wrong guy, until her friend said “I don’t think he’s all that rich: he’s had that scrape on the bumper for years without getting it painted!”

That was his car, all right. He pictured it in his head. Sure, it was a very nice car for a grad student to drive, a solid piece of sensible Japanese engineering; but it was bought used and had earned nearly 100 000 kilometers since then (on top of the 90 000 it came with). Was Naomi jealous? Possible: she did drive a Jetta. Or was this some sarcastic usage that he didn’t understand due to the part of the conversation he had missed? The puzzle would have to remain unsolved, as he couldn’t get past how much he hated the way she habitually abused the word “literally.”

Nevertheless, the idea intrigued him. The next day he went down to the bank and withdrew one quarter of his savings in 5 and 10 dollar bills (the smallest practical denomination the bank had on hand since the introduction of the $2 coin). He went home, and pulled the top sheet off his bed and carefully laid out the 21 $5 bills and the 32 $10 bills and proceeded to frolic and roll merrily, creating a great disorder and a bevy of colour. The noise of crinkling paper aroused the curiosity of the cat, who came to investigate. She jumped on the bed and was immediately put off by the shaking and rolling, and despite appearing to be perfectly happy with her lot in life, had no desire to frolic.

He also thought that the whole adventure was not nearly as satisfying as he had hoped — certainly not to the point where it deserved its own figure of speech. “Ah, I know what’s missing” he said aloud (he would say it was to the cat if anyone caught him at it), “there’s only blue and purple here. I should throw in a nice green twenty.” So he went to his wallet and pulled out the only twenty dollar bill in there, and neatly laid the crisp green bill right in the centre. Then, with great gusto and joyous intentions, he “steam-rolled” right from one end of the bed to the other, falling right off the other side.

Still, the experience left much to be desired. He briefly tried jumping on the bed, but found he was too worried about his great bulk damaging the bed frame, or jumping on a bill funny and ripping it, or losing money between the bed and the wall. He got down and collected the money making sure to keep all the heads facing towards him (there’s just something reassuring about the look Prime Minister Laurier gives you… and the geek in him always likes to picture him with pointy ears and a new haircut… and a tricorder, but you can’t really see that in the portrait on the bill).

After counting it three times to make sure the cat hadn’t run off with any, he tried to think of what to do with all that cash. Spending it frivulously was out of the question: it was too large a portion of his savings. But he didn’t want to go right back to the bank with a bunch of cash. He briefly considered using the money to pay his landlord, but it wasn’t quite enough for a month’s rent, and more importantly, didn’t want to give his landlord the wrong impression (who pays rent in cash these days anyway?). Which left the only reasonable alternative: put the money away in a safe place, and simply use the cache to refill the small amount he carried around in his wallet every day. It made a lot of sense, and required the least amount of effort: it even absolved him of the need to ever visit an ATM for the next few months.

As he opened his “safe” (really just a cardboard file box with something heavy on it to make it hard to open), and was rifling through the backup CDs of his master’s thesis to squirrel the money away, he had a fun idea. Taking out 12 of the $5 bills, he quickly stashed the rest away between the May 12 and June 3 backup CDs, and closed up the box. Running to the kitchen, he put a $5 bill in the Christmas coffee mug, and put it back on the shelf. Another bill he taped to the bottom of the fancy wine glasses that hadn’t been used in a year. He put one in the pockets of each of his two light rain jackets (this being parka weather, brrr). One was tightly folded and placed into the battery compartment of the remote control for the TV. He thought hard for a minute, and then raced to his bedroom, where he carefully placed two bills on the toner cartridge for the laser printer (ensuring that in that position they wouldn’t cause a paper jam): that would make a nice surprise the next time the toner ran low and he had to give it a shake and get black stuff all over his hands. He put a bill under the teddy bear his girlfriend gave him (the one he picked up and hugged tightly whenever she acted dumb and made him sad; it was very dusty, which in his mind was a good sign). Two went into drawer where the cold medicines were kept, one into the box with the tiny bottles of paint for his models, and the last one he put on top of his shorts, in anticipation of summer.

Then he trusted his memory to forget each and every one of those places, since there are few feelings better than finding money you didn’t even know you had lost.

I’m even sicker today, and really sick of being sick.

A few days ago I manged to get out and try a Quiznos sub. I had a 2 for 1 coupon that came in the mail, so Wayfare came and got one too. They were really good, almost enough to bump me up into another sandwich bracket. Tomatoes do taste a lot better toasted than raw (plus they’re probably higher quality to start with, if the price is any indicator), and I can only imagine what it does for meat.

But it was significantly more expensive than Subway. Even with our 2-for-1 coupon, it was only a dollar cheaper than our two subs would have been at Subway; about $2.50 (50%!) more for just my veggie sub. It was also sort of weird, since they had metal sneezeguards, so we couldn’t watch them make the sub. They were also even more stingy on the lettuce than Subway was, and didn’t have cucumbers at all. But it was still quite good. I’ve got a few more coupons, so I’ll probably go back one or two more times before February to give it a real shake-down.

I suppose I should say something now that the election is over. It’s been a few days since my last post, but I just haven’t felt up to writing the last few days, first because I was terrified of my… “procedure” and then because I was recuperating by playing lots of video games — and it wasn’t as bad as I feared. After about 8 hours all the pain went away and I could pee again. And last night I could feel the exploratory tendrils of illness infiltrating my body, and sure enough this morning I’m fairly sick. I woke up and had all sorts of weird hallucinations and scared the cat. My throat is killing me (my tonsils are so swollen it’s hard to burp even!). The one saving grace is that my nose isn’t running.

Anyway, the election.

Obviously I’m not a fan of the Refoooooorm/Conservative party. I just simply don’t think that many of their ideas are good for Canada. We’re a great country that stands on records of strong social programs that provide a minimum acceptable quality of life and level of care for everyone, with welfare, health care, government pensions, and even a profit-sharing system for artists with a copyright levy on blank media. The cost of all this is of course, high taxes. It’s a price that for the most part, we seem willing to pay (though our tax burden would be lower if we hadn’t inherited so much debt). The Conservatives, however, seem to hate the idea of taxes; or perhaps they just want to buy votes with promises of tax cuts. Either way, they seem to possess great potential to rip out the very heart of our country for minor reductions in their tax bill.

Consider the day care issue that came up during the election. The Liberals and the NDP were both promising to work towards some sort of national day care program (setting aside the fact that the Liberals had already promised that in previous elections), but the Conservatives were instead promising to scrap the program and “give the money to you, to spend as you see fit.” Pretty much everyone I’ve talked to has seen that as a poor idea, yet people without kids, or who could already afford day care loved it (vote buying, after all). Others seemed oddly afraid that the government would be setting up creches to indoctrinate/brainwash their children behind their backs and from a very young age. While it’s a possibility, I think it’s more likely you’d see that sort of thing in a low-cost religious-based day care, or (if there is such a thing), a private day care covertly owned by neonazis. I’m not sure if the parties had settled on the form of subsidized day care yet: I know one proposal involved having the government simply pay for facilities, and getting parents to run it as a co-op (so a few parents would take 1-3 days off work each month to man the day care). In a situation like that, I doubt government indoctrination would take place (but who knows what the parents of the other kids might be teaching!).

At this point, I’d like to quote Rick Mercer:

Like so many Canadians I was appalled by Scott Reid’s comment about the proposed Conservative child care plan. In case you have been living under a rock and missed it, Scott recently quipped that under the plan parents could choose to spend their 25 dollar a week child care allowance on beer instead of child care. Clearly Scott is wrong. We all know that in this country it would be impossible to find a parent who would spend 25 bucks a week on beer. For starters a case of beer costs more than 25 bucks. A case of domestic is about 35 bucks and the trendier imports cost even more. I happen to know this because I drink beer. I don’t have kids so I have no idea what child care costs. I admit I’m surprised that 25 bucks a week will pay for daycare but what do I know

I know around election time people jump down politician’s throats for the most minor of tongue slips or blog posts, but I still don’t see what was so bad about his criticism of the Conservative plan. Their planned child subsidy is simply not sufficient: the amount of money is “beer & pizza money”, that’s the order of magnitude it’s on. I didn’t hear his whole speech so he possibly didn’t say it as I understand it, but I don’t think anyone would suggest a (good) parent would spend government money on beer instead of on their kids, but the fact is that $25/wk is not enough for day care. If you can already afford day care, then you already have money allocated there, and the government money is just a bonus in your budget that you will, in all likelihood, spend on beer & pizza (or equivalently, something frivolous for your child, like a video game every two weeks). If you can’t afford child care, then this money is not enough to make the difference between getting daycare or not. It doesn’t really give anyone “options” — it just doesn’t “discriminate” against families that can afford to let parents stay home with their kids (that is, it buys the votes of those stay-at-home mom/dads who are too selfish to pay into helping single parents get daycare).

Sure, government day care does encourage families to send both parents back into the work force to make money without having to pay for child care, but I seriously doubt that minor factor is going to tip the balance in a parent’s decision to go back to work. Odds are a dual-income family will be able to afford day care anyway, and will send their kids to a private day care (since I doubt government day care will make much of a dent in private ones — there’s always a way to improve over the free government version and get people to pay).

Anyway, back to the election as a whole.

I really didn’t want the Conservatives to win. Note that I don’t call them the tories (when I can help it). While that is the accepted short form for the conservative parties of the world, these simply aren’t your grandpappy’s progressive conservatives. They’re scary. I was really hoping for an NDP minority in this election, counting on a protest vote similar to what happened in the Ontario provincial race of 1990(?). The Liberals really did need a kick in the pants, too many of them have developed manifest destiny complexes after being in power for so long. I have no illusions of the other two parties being any less corrupt than the Liberals, though in different ways: while the grits siphon money to their friends, the NDP would doubtlessly throw good money after bad propping up companies that employ CAW members, while the Conservatives will certainly be giving big business, rich people, and americans as many concessions as they care to ask for… the greens might be different, simply because no one has given them enough of a chance to bother trying to corrupt them just yet. I’m sure we could get one good term out of them. But the NDP/Green vote I was hoping for really wasn’t there this time around, and it’s because so many people are just so damned afraid of the conservatives.

They got a minority government anyway. Hopefully they won’t screw things up too much before we get another shot at getting someone else in power. I also hope that they see this slim minority as a signal that they are not free to be goddamn fascists, and to hold off on most of their controversial promises. My delusional mind continues to hold out hope that the Liberals, NDP, and Bloc can form a workable coalition to keep the worst of the legislation out (and maybe even push through some of their own, such as the child care issue). Though we’ve fallen a long, long way if we’re depending on the Bloc Quebecois to save the federal government. However, if we can convince the rat bastard separatists to just abstain on everything (or equivalently, instruct half their party’s members to vote one way, the other half the other), that’ll actually put the power in the hands of Liberals/NDP, leaving Harper as an ineffectual talking head. I kind of like that plan. In fact, I’m going to write some letters to Gilles Ducepp and all the other BQ members this weekend. Hopefully they won’t throw them out just because they’re written in my heathen language.

Bloc Quebecois + Conservatives. Damn. We’re so fucked.

Anyhow, I’ve been supporting Fair Vote Canada (linkage on the right) hoping for some sort of electoral reform that will make it easier to deal with the 4 national parties we have on the go. Strategic voting is rampant, and it’s extremely difficult for new parties to move up over the years. First-past-the-post really encourages a two-party system, and while that’s what it’s boiled down to in many people’s minds in many ridings, that just doesn’t work for me. In two-party systems, it almost always comes down to who the lesser of two evils is, you hardly ever get to vote for someone you believe in, even a little. On that note, I’ve got to get me one of those “Why pick the lesser of two evils? Vote Chuluthu!” bumper stickers.

Anyhow, there are a number of better systems to chose out there. I think pretty much any of them would be better than what we have now, however, I’m not a big fan of some of the proportional representation systems. I prefer something like a single transferrable vote, because I think we should maintain the tradition of voting for people rather than parties. This is important both to punish individual members who do not represent you well, despite being in a party you believe in (or can at least live with), and because it encourages independents.

Look at the Sam Bulte issue. She was corrupt as all get-out, one of the worst Liberal offerings out there. She didn’t move to her riding, she accepted dubious donations from copyright lobbyists while she was working on copyright reform, and when she was found out and asked about it in the candidates’ debate, she flipped out and called her constituents “zealots” interested in downloading music, and later threatened to sue when evidence against her began to pile up (at one point, she quoted the CRIA verbatim, using its wrong & misleading statistics, further indicating how deep in their pockets she was). Thankfully, in this election she was tossed out in favour of NDP Peggy Nash. With a multi-member district using party lists, you might not be able to vote for the other Liberal MPs without also supporting her.

I’ve been getting into fan edits of movies lately. The Star Wars ones in particular have been fantastic; partly due to the fact that I am predestined to love any version of them no matter what editing takes place, and partly because Lucas did such a sloppy job on the prequel trilogy that there’s lots of room for improvement. The Phantom Menace (renamed “A Vergence in the Force”) is a great movie when you take out the few lines of dialogue relating to midichlorians (keep the mystic Force mystic, thanks… or at least don’t make it quite so lame), and some of the extraneous slapstick with Jar-Jar and other minor characters. Putting some deleted scenes back in helps too (such as the planning for the counterattack on Naboo, where we learn that taking out the droid control ship might just incapacitate the army… rather than having it blow up and the droids shut down. It’s still a pretty lame way to wrap the movie up quickly, and if I had the CGI abilities, I’d prefer to have the Naboo fighters do strafing runs to support the Gungans and defeat the droids legit). Even the opening crawl was cleaned up a bit.

Anyway, I just saw this trailer for “Shining” and while it’s only a minute long, it’s absolutely brilliant. I strongly encourage you all to give it a look (and while you’re at it, imagine what the audience reaction would be like if they went to watch the movie based on this trailer. Sort of reminds me of the misdirection with trailers from the Village).