murraysovereign

I think it would be fun to name a dog "Stella". That way, just in case she ever got loose from the yard, I could spend the night wandering the streets, drunk, in the rain, yelling "Stella!!... STELLAAAA!!!... Come back, Stella!!"

I was up to Echo Lake, overlooking Squamish from the Tantalus side, about 2 weeks ago. Clear most of the way, until about 50m below the lake, then post-holing for the last 10-15 minutes. Much of that will have melted or flushed away in the rain in the interim, but there's still probably close to a metre at the lake. Great hike, lots of waterfalls low down, nice view back to the Chief from the lake. You need to get across the Squamish River, from the dyke road on the way to the Spit - easy crossing if you have access to a canoe or some other form of boat. But yeah, around here pretty much anything over 1000m is still ski terrain.

I was in Vernon, working my high school job at the Vernon Lodge Hotel. I had finished my shift in the early afternoon, and hopped on my bike to ride home. I hadn't even gone a block before this wicked strong wind came up from the south that basically stopped me in my tracks. I decided there's no way I was going to ride 10 miles into so strong a headwind, so I went back into the hotel to have a coffee and read the paper and wait for it to ease up a little. By the time I got my coffee and sat down, maybe a few minutes, the wind had stopped. I thought that was a pretty strange "storm", but finished my coffee and then got back on my bike and headed for home. As I rode past the beach at the north end of Kalamalka Lake, I looked down the lake and saw this big, weird cloud, probably 1500 - 2000 feet deep, right down on the water, literally "rolling" up the valley from the south. I got to the house and went inside, wanting to tell Mom and Dad about this really bizarre weather that was coming our way. Found them in the living room, watching the tv news reports about MSH. Didn't take long to figure out the headwind that blew up as I was leaving work must have been the residual "blast" - I can't think of any other explanation for a wind so brief and intense - followed closely behind by the ash and smoke cloud rolling up the valley. So while I didn't see it go off, I'm pretty sure I felt a bit of it, from hundreds of miles away. Has it really been 30 years? God, I'm getting old fast...

Fucking the rule of law in the ass? How so? If you, say, kidnap teenaged girls and keep them locked up in your house, using them as sex slaves for weeks or months before torturing them to death, and then cutting them up with Skil saws in order to dispose of the remains, well, that's against the law. And if we catch you breaking the law in that way, like Paul Bernardo, we're going to put you away - indefinitely. That's how the law is written. That's the "rule". In the past, we used to just hang people like Bernardo and Olson and Pickton, until we decided the practice was a) wrong b) ineffective and c) resulting in way too many innocent people being hanged. So we came up with this "dangerous offender" notion to deal with those people we secretly really, really want to hang, but can't because it's against the law. The "dangerous offender" designation is reserved for those who, let's face it, are probably more appropriately confined - indefinitely - in a psychiatric facility, rather than in a prison. As far as I know, the dangerous offender designation has to be determined at the time of your trial, and in fact is treated as a sub-trial. You're entitled to all the normal legal protections of an accused on trial, including all the usual rules of evidence and testimony, right to representation, right to appeal, etc. It's not just some arbitrary edict sent down by an anonymous tribunal somewhere. It's not applied retroactively. It's part of your sentencing at the time of your trial. It's part of how our rules of law are applied, not a violation of them.

Clear and convincing evidence? Convincing to who? Another jury? Do they even find out for how long they will be indefinitely held for? WTF? Due process???? We've been doing that up here for quite a while now. They're called "Dangerous Offenders" and can be held after their original sentence is served, up to and including "indefinitely". The "D.O." status has to be reviewed after 5 or 7(?) years, and then every 2 years after that. But if you're a Paul Bernardo, or a Clifford Olson, or a Robert Pickton, chances are the review panel is going to find that, well, you're still kinda "dangerous", you know? But then, we're a bunch of soft-on-crime, limp-wristed liberal pussies up here, so what else would you expect?

Hilarious! Reminds me of a few years ago when this FOX TV guy tried to orchestrate a boycott of France, and his pea-brained followers took that to include French's Mustard.

Yeah, sorry about that. I wasn't linking for the photo, just the story.

Boob-quake!!!

They're used in bar fights - the bolt tightens down onto your thumb so your opponent can't pull it off and use it against you.

Try watching "Darwin's Nightmare" before ordering perch from the seafood shop.

My new desktop background

Plenty of Canadian war history to be found, as that area was our assignment. Check out the Scheldt Estuary, and try to comprehend how difficult it must have been to fight through there. Dieppe is not far, Vimy Ridge, Passchendaele, the Somme, Arras, Cambrai, Mons... hell, the entire Canadian sector during WW1 is an easy drive from Amsterdam. Also a place called Waterloo is nearby, as is Agincourt. And despite your reluctance, I command you to visit the Rijksmuseum. It's for your own good. If all else fails, just stagger back and forth between the Heineken and Amstel brewery tours. That kept me happily entertained for a couple of days...

If that's the reason for anodizing, then you're better to use a brighter colour - yellow or bright blue or lime green or something. As ambient light levels decrease, I think your eye loses the ability to distinguish colours at the red end of the spectrum first. So while red shows up well in daylight, it's among the first colours to disappear in the gloom. That's only about a half or even a quarter of two-bits worth, if that even, but it's all I've got right now.

Yeah, I liken it to living next to a trailer park. You can spend endless hours sitting on the sundeck with a cold drink watching the goings-on, and it never gets old. "Honey, go get the kids and come out here. You won't believe what they're trying to do now." Sometimes it threatens to spill over the fence into our yard, and that can be a bit alarming, but all in all it's just good fun.

That would have made it even easier for us to win. All we'd have to do is send out a line made up of David Suzuki, Paul Watson, Svend Robinson, Stephen Lewis, and maybe some guy wearing a Tommy Douglas mask. FW's head would have exploded before they even crossed the blueline, allowing us to shoot into an empty net.

Actually, curling and beer are made for one another. See, if you're playing baseball, and you have to put your beer down to, I dunno, catch a ball, or throw one, or run or something, then your beer is sitting there in the sun, getting warm. But when you're curling, the entire playing surface is a sheet of ice. Put your beer down, and when you pick it up again it's colder than it was before you put it down. It's like the whole game takes place in a giant cooler. So you actually got it backwards - curling is like baseball, only with cold beer. And curling without beer is kinda like, well, just baseball.

We didn't win until Salt Lake. We totally SUCKED in Nagano. The US and Canada have shared the same problem with the Olympic hockey tournament, which was that our best players were all professionals and ineligible for the Games. Meanwhile the Soviets had teams of hockey players who were paid as "soldiers", not hockey players, and they kicked ass every year. When they started allowing pros to play, we North Americans finally had a chance again.

How else would your guys ever get to see one?

Indeed, as my father would have said - "that was a barn-burner". One of those games where it's really a shame someone had to lose, 'cause frankly neither side really deserved to. The reason I always look forward so much to Canada / USA games (men's or women's) is precisely because the two sides are so evenly matched, it's pretty much guaranteed to be great hockey, and on any given day it could go either way. Today was no different. Now, because that last GOLD!!! was won in overtime, it's worth 1.5, right?

USA has 9 Ahem... make that 14

Some of the hype surrounding the program turned out to be (gasp) hype. But if you step back from the Olympic microscope and look at the broader picture, the program is working. OTP athletes have been producing increasingly solid results over the past couple of years, and the optimism going into these games was fully justified. But as with life in general, shit happens. I find it interesting that so many people are calling OTP a failure because our Olympic results haven't been up to their expectations. But if it hadn't been for OTP, they wouldn't have had any expectations because our athletes wouldn't have been coming in as serious contenders. In the past, we've sent a bunch of athletes off to the Olympics and if any of them actually won anything we were all, frankly, astonished. Now we're providing them with support and resources, and as a result they're producing some of the strongest results we've ever seen, and everyone's pissed of because we expected nothing but gold? Those high expectations are a reflection of the strength of the team, which in turn is the best evidence that OTP is succeeding.

Nah - they're actually smoking those cigars. This "beer and cigars on the rink" has become a post-victory tradition for the women's team. They did the same thing in Salt Lake City, and I imagine in Torino as well, but no-one bothered to report it, much less raise a fuss about it. For some reason it's "controversial" this time.

Good job on the nordic combined - gold and silver must be a North American first. The Scandinavians will be in shock.

But 12 Bronze! You Yanks absolutely own third place!

That's right - I'd forgotten about the naked guy. So that's it, then. Three strikes and you're out, mister "Shamu" or "Tillicum" or whatever your real name is. Lock him up and throw away the key. That'll send a message to all the other Orcas not to mess with us.