murraysovereign

OH MY GOD PEOPLE MIGHT DO TO US WHAT WE DID TO CANADA!!!!!! NOOOO ANYTHING BUT THAT It's already starting. This sucks - the Alberta eceonomy has taken a serious shit-kicking because of a single cow. The bans on Canadian beef are still largely in place 7 months later, even though no further cases have come to light. This will not be a very Merry Christmas, or a very Happy New Year, for a lot of U.S. cattlemen.

I'll be up Whistler-Blackcomb for Christmas Day. If any cc.com'ers are going to be in the area, drop me a line and maybe we can hook up for some turns? Forecast is looking like freshiez, and there's usually pretty light crowds on the 25th. Last year was EPIC

Your kidding - our brains are made of Plasticine? God, that explains sooo many things...

No, I think he meant to say "for all intensive purposes." That way the casual user isn't affected, just the really hard core guys.

"This incident is not terrorist-related," Veneman said Tuesday. "I cannot stress this point strongly enough." Oh, for Christ's sake

Which is why it probably won't last long. And it's a pretty safe bet that it will be the "single-party" aspect that goes by the wayside, rather than the "capitalism." Especially once that many people - what is it, 3 billion of them? - get a taste, it won't be long before they start demanding more than just economic self-determination.

JoshK said: to which Trask replied: to which the National Post today replies: things change

I think what you'll see under the new legislation is that the authorities will still basically ignore it, unless you're really being flagrant and stupid about it somehow. The biggest problem with the present situation is that a highly visible section of the Criminal Code is being routinely flouted, and everyone knows it, and no-one is going to do anything about it, and everyone knows that no-one is going to do anything about it. If that situation is allowed to continue, it can spill over into other areas, and undermine the legitimacy of the entire justice system. So rather than having police and courts routinely ignoring criminal offenses, it's better to down-grade the offence, so you just have police and courts ignoring minor offences. The consequences for the administration of justice are less serious that way, but you still don't have to take the politically risky step of out-right legalizing anything.

Hah! We did that on my rig. Except we didn't bother pussyin' around with mere lumber. We accidently dropped a double length of drill collars (VERY heavy sections of pipe that are used to put weight on the drill bit) out of the derrick and across the bed of the Tool Push's truck. Folded his truck in half like a wet newspaper

The latest is that a case was before the Supreme Court, in which three people were appealing their convictions on the grounds that the possession laws violated their rights under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (constitutional guarantees similar to your Bill of Rights). The court ruled that the present laws are not unconstitutional, so they still stand. However, the police and lower courts have all but stopped enforcing the law. So we're still in a bit of a legal no-man's land. But the Martin government is apparently going to be introducing legislation early in the New Year that would greatly reduce the penalties for simple possession, effectively decriminalizing it, but not really. To paraphrase a past Prime Minister: "Decriminalization if necessary, but not necessarily decriminalization." Hope that helps to muddify the fuzzification.

I once worked as motorman on a drilling rig around Lloydminster, Saskatchewan. Our rig was used to film - guess what? - a pick-up truck commercial. The whole crew had to leave the rig, 'cause we didn't look enough like rig workers . Instead, they brought in a bunch of guys who looked like, well, like the kind of guys you see in pick-up truck commercials pretending to be rig workers.

It's been a while since I've seen any of them, but there are some great old comedies Alec Guinness made for Ealing Studios that are well worth dusting off. "The Lady Killers," "The Lavender Hill Mob," "The Man in the White Suit" and "Kind Hearts and Coronets" are all classics.

I think the biggest difference in powder is your weight distribution. When I was first learning to tele I spent a full day experimenting with different techniques in the powder, and found I progressed most when I really loaded the weight onto my back ski as I came 'round the turn. I now ski with pretty even pressure on both skis, but deliberately exaggerating the load on the back ski for a while really helped me make sense of things.

because if it is a snowboarder 90% of the time it is an adolescent male. Exactly. The vast majority of the "idiotic snowboarder" behaviour I've witnessed over the years has in fact been "idiotic 15-year-old boy" behaviour. The fact they're all on snowboards now instead of skis is just a red herring. When I was a 15-year-old I was a complete idiot, too, and had all kinds of people cursing my behaviour. But I was being an idiot on skis so they quite rightly muttered "damned kids" instead of "damned snowboarders."

For those with nothin' but money to burn, there's an outfit starting to sell packages that would have you sailing the BC coast inlets (presumably Alaska, too) in a pocket cruise ship, for the purpose of heli-skiing off the ship. Pretty sweet holiday, if you can afford it. Approach? What approach?

Is that the name of Al-Quaeda's press spokesman?

I'm not sure the term "enemy" is all that applicable in the Yugoslavian context. No-one was at war with the U.S., or with Canada, or with Great Britain, or Germany, as the term "enemy" implies. What was happening was a horrific genocidal civil war, and NATO was intervening in an effort to bring a halt to atrocities being committed by all sides in the conflict - Serbs, Bosnians, Croats, all had blood up to their elbows. In the effort to pry their hands off each others' throats, it was necessary to get directly involved with the principal players and try to convince them to back off. Yes, NATO employed force, eventually, but the inital effort at disengaging the factions took the form of a diplomatic offensive, including shaking people's hands and posing genially for the cameras and even - horrors - trading hats. That diplomatic effort continued even as the bombs were falling, because everyone knew there had to be either a diplomatic, negotiated settlement, or NATO was going to have to commit to a full-scale invasion of the Balkans followed by an indefinite military occupation. Nobody - including the U.S. - was willing to undertake anything of the sort. The present "insurgency" in Iraq would look like a pleasant Sunday picnic at the beach by comparison.

You've got it about right, mtnfreak. From past patrolling experience, I can tell you the vast majority of these searches happen after the hill closes for the day, because that's invariably when it's discovered that someone is missing. That means the patrollers who are sent out to search have already worked a full day and thus are being paid over-time; the dispatcher has to stay later, also on overtime; snowmobiles are kept running for additional hours; various other staff have to stay on - all for the sake of bailing out someone who may not have even bought a lift-ticket. If it was profitable, as Beck suggests, they'd be actively encouraging people to duck the ropes so they could make piles of money looking for them. And in my experience, the bill isn't always delivered - it depends a lot on the attitude of the person rescued. One group was found at about 4 AM, after several patrollers and who-knows-how-many SAR volunteers had searched through the night, at considerable expense to the ski hill and local SAR. The father was so relieved he was weeping. He honestly believed he and his two young sons were not going to survive the night, and their deaths would be entirely his fault. His fears were justified, too - conditions were perfect for hypothermia, and they were wet, and hungry, and very cold when they were found, and the weather was rapidly getting worse. He was so grateful, and so apologetic for causing the search, and as they were being bundled into the ambulance he actually asked "how much do I owe you guys?" A few weeks after they returned home (California, I think?) both ski patrol and local SAR received packages in the mail containing very appreciative, very emotional Christmas cards, and new GPS units. In that instance, no bill was sent. But in another case, a couple of snowboarders went o/b at a neighbouring resort, got lost, and prompted a two or three day search involving SAR, ski area patrollers, the RCMP and at least 2 helicopters. When they were finally found, they immediately started giving back "attitude" to the guys who found them, refusing to answer simple questions like "how did you get into this canyon?" and "what are your names?", telling people to fuck off, basically just being complete assholes. They spent the next season or two under a court order working for the ski area, for free, until they'd paid back all the hill's patrol costs. As well, their parents were sent a sizeable bill from all the other agencies involved in the search. Hopefully Mom and Dad are still getting their money back out of the little buggers to this day.

This is definitely one of the more common mistakes - and not just with beginners, either. The inside ski doesn't just trail along behind waiting for the next turn - it should be weighted and working pretty much the whole time. I finally got the hang of it when an instructor friend told me to think of the tele stance more in terms of compressing down, rather than spreading out. The way he described it was to imagine you're trying to open an aspirin bottle under the ball of your rear foot - in other words, push down and twist. If there's no pressure under the ball of your rear foot, that ski is effectively out of control. The simplest way to get a mental picture of a tele turn is to pay attention to your feet while you're walking. When you go to turn a corner, you weight the inside foot and rotate on the ball of that foot while swinging your outside foot into the new direction of travel. Stop yourself in mid-turn a few times, and look at your foot position - perfect tele's. You've been doing it instinctively literally since you were a toddler - now you just have to get the hang of doing it on skis. It's a little more complicated when you're wobbling down the hill at 20 mph, but once it clicks, it's SWEET. Good luck.

Wow, that's quite a leap - equating a 200-year-old western liberal democracy (France) with an oppressive military dictatorship. Who ever said anything about the Iraqis being "free" under Saddam? But that's the beauty of straw men - once you get them set up, it requires no effort at all to knock them back down again. My point was that in France, as in any country, the exercise of one's freedoms will eventually bring you into conflict with someone else's excercising their freedoms. Different countries manage these conflicts differently, according to whatever criteria they chose. In the United States the preference is to leave as much responsibility as possible to the individual, and to constrain the individual only to prevent demonstrable harm to others. That's a perfectly legitimate yardstick, and it's used to varying degrees the world over. In France, there's a greater emphasis on collective rights at the expense of individual rights. There's nothing particularly sinster about this, it's just the way France's social and political structures have evolved over several hundred years of history. In Canada, we tend to split things a bit more in favour of the individual than they do in France, but we also have a strong sense of collective responsibility which manifests itself in things like universal health care, stricter (by US standards) gun-control legislation, and broader social assistance programs than the US. In all three countries, these differing approaches have been arrived at freely, through the broad consent of the populace. Just because the results are different doesn't necessarily mean that any one of these three countries has any greater or lesser love of the freedom that allows them to make these decisions. I'd also like to point out that, so far, the French are simply discussing an idea. They've put it out in the public forum, and they're kicking it around to see how it will fare, and at some point they'll make a decision to adopt this new policy, or they'll modify it somewhat (as is already happening within the space of a single news story), or they'll abandon it and move on to something else. It looks to me a lot like a group of people freely debating an issue in an effort to bring it to some sort of resolution. It's almost...democratic.

I'd say that, yes, the French do love freedom, but they define it differently than Fairweather does. And guess what, part of being a free society lies in defining that freedom according to your own criteria. I have problems with this policy as well, but we here in Canada define and express our freedoms differently than the French, so who am I to say? The British do a lot of things that most Americans - particularly Fairweather - probably wouldn't tolerate (National Health, restrictive gun control, hereditary monarchy, Bangers & Mash). Funny I don't hear Fairweather questioning whether they "love freedom" just because they do things differently than Americans. Why are they allowed to express their freedom however they like, but the French are expected to adhere to the standards of others? Or is Fairweather just Frog-bashing because he's still pissed that France didn't jump obediently into bed with W over Iraq?

"Cookin' with Dr. Pepper!" mm-mm-good. Just like Mom used to make. Boy, that takes me back. (insert puking graemlin) (and another one) (and another one)

OK, hang on a sec. As one of those internationally who doesn't much care for W and his foreign policy, I can say with great certainty that I in no way equate him or his actions with Adolph Hitler. To do so would trivialise Hitler's crimes, and ultimately would be an insult to all who died at the hands of the Nazis, and to all those who died trying to stop them. Hell, even Saddam - as bad as he was - wasn't "another Hitler". He was, as Gwyn Dyer put it: "just your average, run-of-the-mill, Middle-Eastern thug. He's a nasty little man, but he's not Hitler." To suggest that President Bush - as much as I might disagree with some of his decisions and actions - is in any way even remotely comparable to Hitler is itself monstrous.

Sounds too good to be true. Let me know when you get tired of Telluride

Worse: it's been snowing the last couple of days, and looks like it will continue, but I'm stuck in the damned store until after Christmas because all my staff took off for the winter. Bastards!!