murraysovereign

"Shamu" is just an alias. Real name is Tillicum, and this whale has already killed once before. So "Shamu" better watch it, 'cause under three-strikes rules, if "Shamu" kills again, it would mean life in captivity with no chance of parole, ever. That would suck. Hopefully "Shamu" can straighten out before it's too late.

Can I put in a request? More Kelly VanderBeek, please. Closeups wherever possible. Thanks

If by "evidence" you mean selective use of anecdotes regarding atypical individuals that happen to be mentioned in the news then I guess you've got me there - I had no clue that sort of thing constituted "evidence". I was thinking more along the lines of meaningful comparisons of data drawn from the broader populations of Canada and the US over longer periods of time than last week. If you want to get into a battle of individual anecdotes then we could continue to beat each other over the head pretty much indefinitely. It wouldn't settle anything, but it would provide the sort of mindless entertainment that appeals to fans of Rush Limbaugh and the O'Reilly Factor and their ilk. Or we could discuss things like actual health outcomes among the two population groups. We could look at areas where the US outperforms Canada, and see if we can identify possible causes for those differences. And we could also look at areas where Canada outperforms the US, and see if we can identify possible causes for those differences. Or we can just switch on FOX to find out what the TeaPartiers want us to think...

unless you base your conclusions on things like evidence, actual data, stuff like that. But then all your favourite FOX opinion-makers would be out of work, wouldn't they?

I remember '72. That was waayy too close. I'd rather tonight's game not come down to scrambling after rebounds in the dying minutes of the 3rd period.

I think the only thing NBC is airing live is figure skating - everything else gets taped and shuffled around to fit the remaining airtime. While I still think I prefer CBC's coverage of Olympics, the current CTV broadcast has done a good job of airing events live. It helps they're airing different events on CTV, TSN, and even CPAC, so most everything is live if you don't mind channel-hopping a little. Or you can go to APTN and listen to hockey games in Inuktitut, or biathlon in Ojibway... The biggest reason for NBC's revenue problem is the games are airing at a time when all the big $$$ advertisers are broke, or at the very least hurting, so ad revenues are way down from what was projected back when the rights were being sold. Ad spending will be back up again for London and Sochi, maybe not as high as it was a few years ago, but way better than right now. Even by Beijing, companies were tightening up the marketing budgets.

Well, sure, but what they don't tell you is that none of those hospitals in Vancouver, Montreal, Ottawa or Toronto perform the procedure in Florida. It's February, for crissakes. Who wants to go to Montreal or Ottawa in bloody February?

This evening's newscasts will all give prominent coverage to the training accident that occurred at the Luge track in Whistler this morning, and they're going to replay the video. My personal advice is to not watch it. Close your eyes, look at the floor, go into the kitchen and rattle around in the cutlery drawer for a minute... When the story was first being reported this morning I saw the video of the crash, and I wish I hadn't.

yeah, Vonnegut, smoking is slow suicide for people who don't have the courage to use a gun, or something to that effect.

That's perhaps just a wee bit over the top. This wasn't one of Petzl's engineers talking: it was a sales rep. He's not a metallurgist, nor is he an engineer of any stripe. He was answering my question with whatever information had been passed on to him at a meeting who knows how long ago. He may or may not have been given a detailed engineering explanation for every aspect of every carabiner, every ice tool, every LED in every headlamp, but I rather doubt it. I suspect they'd been given brief summaries of a whole pile of different technical matters, all of which left them vaguely confused. What he told me (or at least, what I have recalled from a 15-second portion of a 1/2-hour meeting that was one of more than a dozen similar meetings strung together one after another through the entire day) was by no means meant to be received with biblical certainty. He's not an idiot, he's not deserving of public ridicule, and his remark should in no way be interpreted as representing "Petzl's engineering expertise", or warranting a panicked boycotting of their products.

The nice thing about traditional wire-gates is that the gate itself is the spring... nothing to fail except the main structure of the carabiner itself. With this, I'm pretty sure they need a coil or leaf spring to make it work so I don't see the benefit over a normal gated biner. What did their marketing materials claim with respect to this piece? Wire gates have a shorter lifespan because each time you open the gate you're stressing it in such a way that, over time, weakens the spring effect until it loses much of its strength - how many times can you bend a paperclip back and forth before it stops being useful as a paperclip? At least, that's the rationale I got from the Petzl rep when I asked about it. The other advantages of wire gates (lighter weight, larger gate opening than the same size biner with solid gate, and reduced gate flutter under stress due to lower mass) are retained in this design, but with longer useful gate life due to a "conventional" spring mechanism. I'll step back now and let the metallurgists and structural engineers tear the s#*t out of everything I just said. But for the record, at first glance I prefer the wire-gate design we're all accustomed to. It's intuitive and elegantly simple - the "Ocham's Razor" committee would approve. That's not to say there's anything wrong with this newfangled thing, I'm just not convinced it's solving a problem that really needed solving.

"Symptoms: Vomiting and nausea, diarrhea Headaches Difficulty breathing Pallor Sweating Palpitations Lisps Stomach pains/cramps Seizures Weakness Drooling" Stop! You had me at "vomiting and nausea, diarrhea"

I start each morning by steeping a couple of scoops of pipe tobacco in boiling water, then drinking the broth. Mmm-mmm - that's refreshment...

That's close to the mark, I'd say, although I would argue that the type of snow we tend to get on the west coast is challenging to drive on for even experienced drivers. Growing up in the interior, where the snow persisted all winter, I used to laugh at the news from Vancouver when it snowed and all those stupid idiots can't drive and what a bunch of morons and... and then I moved to Vancouver and found my self driving on coastal snow. What an idiot. What a moron. I'd been driving on snow all my life - hell, I took my driver's exam during a snow storm - and I even had winter tires on my vehicle, so that wasn't an excuse either. But this wasn't like any snow I'd ever driven on. This stuff was greased wax compared to the nice cold dry powdery snow I'd grown up with. This stuff was hard to stand up on, never mind drive on. I ended up parking my car and walking, and it wasn't because I didn't know how to drive on snow. I knew how to drive on snow just fine. This wasn't snow - it was some bizarre fourth state of matter, not quite solid, not quite liquid, with a coefficient of friction so low it wouldn't register on any instrument known to science. So I think that's part of the problem - coastal snow is just harder to maintain control on. And as for the infrequency, I had a funny experience with a bunch of guys from Saskatchewan. We were all working on a construction job in Kelowna, and were enjoying a couple of beers after work one day at the local pub. On the TV was a news report showing the chaos caused by a mild snowfall that the drivers were obviously not dealing with very well. One little montage showed car after car after car all sliding off the same turn, piling up at the bottom of the embankment like cordwood. The prairie boys were all having a good time laughing at all those idiots in Vancouver who don't know how to drive on snow, what a bunch of morons... the usual. And then it became apparent the news story wasn't from Vancouver after all. Seems this was the first snowfall of the year in Regina, and it was causing chaos. Not because people in Regina can't drive on snow, but because it was the first snow of the season, and they were having to re-learn how to drive on snow after a nice long summer of bare dry roads. Over the years I've seen the same thing while living in Calgary, Edmonton, Banff, Vernon, and now at the coast. The first snowfall of the season causes chaos, no matter where it is. Drivers everywhere forget how to drive on snow over the summer, and have to learn all over again with the first snowfall or two. After that, they're fine for the rest of the winter. But here at the coast, because of the milder climate, any time it snows it's pretty much always the first (and only) snow of the season. At the coast we don't often get to see the second and third and fourth and fifth snows of the season, so we never get the opportunity to demonstrate that, just like those people in Regina, once we get past the first chaotic day or two we can drive on snow just fine. Last winter was the exception that proved the rule - after a few days of snow-covered roads, everyone adapted and managed without any difficulty. And it's further complicated by the fact so few people at the coast are running anything better than 3-year-old all-season tires on their vehicles. It is really hard to cough up the bucks for proper snow tires when you know damned well they're only going to be needed for a couple of days around Christmas, and the rest of the winter they'll just be wearing down on bare pavement. And if I really think about it, I've been involved in a half-dozen vehicle collisions and ditchings and roll-overs and such over the years, sometimes as driver, sometimes as passenger, sometimes I was out of control, sometimes the other guy was. They've all happened on snow, and they all happened when I was living in the interior, where I and everyone else "knew how to drive on snow". In all the time I've lived at the coast (about 15 years all told), not so much as a scratched bumper, despite the fact that we apparently are all so much worse drivers around here.

Ahem..., she's Canadian, actually, and is one of those upstanding citizens any country would be proud of, in spite of the fact that she lives in Ontario.

Just looked a little closer - amazon.ca is showing those prices coming from a Florida company (anybook-ca), or another in Japan. If people are actually willing to pay more than $95 for your book, I'd like to order 500 copies for my store, please

It comes up as $24.95 on createspace, but I can't tell if that's $US or $CDN. Regardless, the exchange rate is in the range of 7% lately, so even after conversion the price isn't out of line. Amazon.ca, by contrast, has it at $98.52 (new) and even a used copy is listed at $96.55. Ouch!

I don't blame the "druggies" nearly as much as I blame the idiotic legislation that makes the drug trade so lucrative that people are willing to kill in order to maintain or extend their control over small parts of that trade. Blaming the drug consumer for the gang murders in Mexico is like blaming the drinkers for all the mob murders that occurred under prohibition. The problem then wasn't the drinking: it was the criminalization of drinking. The problem now isn't the smoking: it's the criminalization of smoking. As happened with Prohibition, eliminate the criminalization, and most of the problems would be eliminated, too.

Nice! Congrats!

One of the in-bounds avalanches at Whistler last year involved a similar "POV" video, but the victim didn't survive. The coroner, RCMP officers and a few others had to watch it as part of their investigation. Apparently the last couple of minutes were pretty hard to sit through. Don't expect to see it on you-tube anytime soon, although it would probably make for a really powerful avi awareness message...

he's racist against his own racist.... Obama called kanye a jackass. That doesnt make him a racist... No, he's a jackassist, and his remark has removed any doubt of that. Now he's gonna catch Hell from the National Association for the Advancement of Jackasses. Of course, the more moderate jackasses will be trying to distance themselves from Kanye ("If this is Jackassness, then I am not a Jackass") so their criticism of the President will be somewhat muted. But no doubt the really militant, more conservative jackasses will be calling for his head.

Why would anyone want to get to Glasgow sooner? Unless you were just in a hurry to get out of Manchester, I suppose - then it might make sense.

Damn - you beat me to it. I was going to post this link earlier today, but work intervened. I love that website - a much-needed daily dose of wonder. Well, most days, anyhow. Some of the "X-Ray Diffusion Patterns from Cygna LR3 as viewed through variably opaque plasma screen blah blah blah" stuff is a bit dry. But most days :tup:

I agree. And I've read this entire thread a couple of times now, trying to find where, exactly, Gary engaged in "shit talking a 1 year old with a mental deficit" so I could share in everyone's indignation. But I can't find it. Can someone please show me the instance of Gary "shit talking" Palin's child that has everyone so worked up? I can see where he "shit talked" Trig's mother, but not a word against Trig.

OMG!! Can you imagine? I see Bill O'Reilly hosting a Sarah Palin / Ann Coulter cage match for neo-con airhead supremacy. No holds barred, winner-take-all, champeenship of the whole world. One of those great big belt-buckle trophy things (who the Hell dreamt those up, by the way?) for the winner... it'll be awesome. Pay-per-view rights will be worth a fortune. Personally I think Palin could kick Coulter's scrawny little ass.