"Down by the river...."

No, I didn't shoot anyone. I did do a bit of bird watching however. There were a pair of ducks floating around on the river, presumably a mated pair. There were also about a dozen Canada Geese in the water or on the shore line. The geese seem to be fairly tame towards humans, as I got within a couple of feet of one without any negative reaction on its part. (Interestingly he was missing part of the webbing on one foot.) The same can't be said about their fellow geese. Several times I saw them behave aggressively towards each other, presumably expressing territorial behaviour.

Besides birds there was a canoe and a couple of City of Saskatoon operated boats. One pass by the boats going at some speed created a mini tsunami on the river, with the waves lapping rather strongly on the back. Soon after their swift pass the boats came back down the river very slowly, one towing a line of floating objects. I don't know what they intended to do with them.

Where I was, the boat dock near the Bessborough Hotel, there was some scum, for lack of a better term, floating on the water. I don't want to think what it might have been, but a reasonable guess comes to mind.

Tag, You're Not It.

A quick note for the young fellows who might be encouraged to buy Tag Body Shots because of those ads. Kids, despite what the dumber of you may think spraying that crap on you will not make girls jump all over you. That's just a silly ad campaign. In fact its entirely possible that stuff will actually repell women. I've never knowingly smelt the stuff, but I've seen claims that Tag and its competitor Axe are pretty dire smelling. I get the impression they're the 21st Century version of Hai Karate and other gimmicky male colognes of the past.

These days you're likely to find more and more places where you're not welcome smelling of cologne and perfume no matter how nice the scent might be. Many places are pushing for a "scent free" environment due to the allergy and chemical sensitivity problems many seem to suffer from. The University of Saskatchewan main library is an example locally.

Me and Chinese Google.

Having read an article in the New York Times Magazine on the internet in China I got curious about what happens if you search for me via Google's Chinese searchpage. You can find me, including using a possibly "naughty" keyword like vote. The results don't come through identically, but I won't hazard a guess as to why. I have had a couple of Chinese hits on here, but I'm not really expecting many. This is an English language blog, it covers a random range of subjects, and I've written little about China on it, so I wouldn't expect large numbers of Chinese to come looking for it. Of course the really interesting test would be to try the same search from an Internet terminal in the PRC, but that's not likely to happen anytime soon. It should be noted that its not just the Chinese that can interfere with search engine activity. Apparently the German government restricts access to pro Holocaust denial sites, which in the opinion of many, including me, just allows the people behind those sites to use such censorship to support their claims.

Bad Scheduling Amplified.

I already mentioned my annoyance with today's Blue Jays-Devil Rays matchup not being televised or broadcast on radio. Now I find it even more annoying after reading that the Jays won 8-1 behind an 89 pitch complete game by Roy Halladay. The Doc must have been damn hot today, and I didn't get to see it. The scedulers at Rogers Sportsnet, or whoever it is who left this game off the broadcast schedule, couldn't have known this would happen, but still it rankles.

As I was sitting down to write this I was thinking about Tampa Bay's current bad luck, being at the bottom of the American League East seven and a half games back from the lead. It made me wonder if a professional sports team could actually go through a season without winning a game. There have been some football teams that I know the season records for that have come close, but its a lot harder to imagine this happening in a sport like hockey or baseball where they play more than 100 games a year.

The Tampa Bay team may not be the Devil Rays next season. There have been recent reports that the current ownership may change the name, perhaps dropping the Devil part. It has been claimed in the past that some folks of a conservative religious bent have been unwilling to see the team because it has Devil in its name, and they have no desire to have anything to do with an "evil" name like that. However the current reasoning seems to be as much about giving the team a clean start given its lackluster history as anything else. One supposed suggestion has been the Tampa Bay Tarpons, but as a number of folks elsewhere have commented tarpon is probably too close to tampon for it to be chosen.

Preston Crossing Wal Mart On A Saturday Afternoon.

A bad idea. Trust me on that.

Don't Take Me Out To The Ball Game.

I sure would love to know what's behind the Rogers Sportsnet schedule for the Toronto Blue Jays this year. They have exclusive TV rights(not surprising since they own the team), and there are some games they aren't airing. This evening's matchup with Tampa Bay is an example. Instead we get a NASCAR race, and this applies across the network. Is NASCAR really a better ratings generator in Canada than the Blue Jays? I have no idea. Unfortunately the Saskatchewan radio broadcaster for the Jays, CJYM/CFYM, isn't broadcasting the game either. Bummer. On the other hand TSN is boxing crazy today. They'll be playing a several hour continuous block of boxing programming tonight, including the De La Hoya-Mayorga matchup from HBO. I guess I'll have to watch people beat on each other instead.

Go Read...

...Respectful Insolence immediately. After all Orac deserves the traffic from here after giving me some free promotion today. Then go read the other blogs linked here. That's an order!

Preset.

I'm currently listening to the album Miniature by Hank Roberts, Tim Berne, and Joey Baron. I got a chuckle listening to the cut "Abeetah" when a very familiar sound came out of the cans. Baron used a Casio CZ101 synth on the album, and it seems that one of its presets was the basis for the "Brass" preset on the Casio SK1 keyboard. The pitch bending and so forth make me assume its from a '101 and not from an SK1. I own a Realistic Concertmate 500, which was the rebadged SK1 sold by Radio Shack. SK1s are very popular with the circuitbending crowd, circuitbending being the altering of cheap keyboards and other electronics to make them produce sounds they weren't intended to. As I've said elsewhere I can't help but wonder if I might not end up with the only unbent one left at some point, as I intend to keep mine untouched.

Severed Heads on YouTube.

This time it isn't a case of someone posting vids on the site without permission, although that has been done as well. Instead we have Tom Ellard himself posting things. Too bad more folks aren't doing that.

Too Bad The Inside Didn't Match The Outside.

Today I received more spam from those wastes of oxygen calling themselves The New Order. The subject line was "We Fought on the Wrong Side!" Of course this wasn't an indication that they finally shed their ignorance and realised the vileness of Nazism. Of course the article enclosed was the usual nonsense about the wonders of Hitler and the horrors of the EVIIIIIIIL JOOOOOS, who started WW2 to defeat "the great man." Of course as with many issues these fools demonstrate their ignorance of history with such talk. After all it was Hitler who attacked Poland in 1939 despite warnings from the French and British not to, that doing so would cause them to declare war on Germany. It was Hitler who attacked Norway, France and the Low Countries in 1940, turning what had been a low level conflict that might very well have petered out, to Germany's benefit, into an all out conflict. It was Hitler who attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, ignoring the historical example of Napoleon's failed invasion of Imperial Russia more than a century before. And it was Hitler who declared war on the United States after Pearl Harbor. Only in the fantasies of the utterly ignorant or the crazed was Hitler some innocent bystander beset by evil forces. Rather it was the greed of Hitler and his cronies that brought Germany into conflict with other states, and the arrogance and racism of the Nazis that convinced them they could fight wars against several major powers at once.

Hello Fruitvale, BC.

You're the site for my latest Where's Willy hit. That's one of the fun things about the bill tracking hobby, finding out about places you've never heard of before.

Future Darwin Award Winner?

This morning I saw someone skateboarding on Saskatoon's Broadway Bridge. No, not on the sidewalk, but on the traffic surface. Biking on a busy roadway like that is bad enough, but skateboarding? If he got into trouble that fool had no place to go, since there's a 3 foot tall concrete barrier between the traffic and the pedestrian walkway.

An Important Reminder.

If you don't have antivirus software installed on your computer, do so immediately. If you do and don't have it configured to automatically update do so. I ran across a virus on a website I wasn't expecting tonight, and fortunately my antivirus software caught it before any harm resulted.

Gimpy Would Approve.

If you're an ultra Star Wars geek like our dear Mr. Taylor here you may be wearing a similar expression after you read this. The original versions of the Star Wars trilogy are coming to DVD. Why Lucas didn't do this when the "new and improved" versions came out is beyond me. Some of course will suggest simple greed, since many people will be buying yet another set of DVDs to get the old versions.

From the Law and Order Files.

I was glad to hear yesterday's verdict in the Zacarias Moussaoui case that he will serve life in prison instead of being executed. This is the right verdict, as the last thing we need is another Islamist "martyr." I suspect a lot of his behaviour in the last stages of the trial was intended to get himself executed. He will be serving his life sentence in the "supermax" ADX complex in Florence, Colorado. I suspect this has as much to do with his potential life expectancy in a "normal" prison as anything else.

Mexican president Vicente Fox has apparently done a 180 on legislation intended to legalise the possession of small amounts of various drugs. The Mexican government is denying its the result of American pressure, but that's going to be hard for many to believe given the near apocolyptic rhetoric coming out of certain quarters in the US. Ironically the bill would have toughened efforts against drug pushers, who are a major problem in Mexico. I personally lean towards considering the legalisation of some drugs such as marijuana and heroin, but am more leery about considering doing so with things like cocaine and PCP. The Mexican law would have allowed possession of small amounts of pretty much every major illegal drug.

A court case in Saskatoon saw some peculiar behaviour yesterday. Karen Ponto was dragged from provincial court after being charged with contempt. Ponto, in court on a charge of child abduction after she took her 11 and 13 year old children from Saskatoon in violation of a custody order, refused to acknowledge the jurisdiction of the court. Ponto claims to be a minister of Church of the Ecumenical Redemption International, a fringe Christian group that does not recognise the legitimacy of the current Canadian government and wants to use the King James Version of the Bible as the rule of law. Ponto claimed the proceedings violated her freedom of religion. I guess Ponto and her fellows have never heard of rendering unto Caesar. This group reminds me of similar groups that have operated in the United States in the past, who tried to use a religious justification to avoid paying taxes and obeying any law they didn't like. This "detaxing document" I came across via Google would seem to indicate that is the case here as well. Unfortunately clear information on this so-called church is rather lacking online at the moment.

Two and Counting.

Its past midnite here in Toontown, which means I've officially reached the second anniversary of this blog. What started on a whim has turned into an ongoing operation. I had no real ambitions when I started this thing, and I still don't, other than seeing who and where what is written here will reach. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to visit, especially those who have been foolish enough to come back.

Moneymaker

As part of my ongoing effort to learn a bit more about poker this week I read Moneymaker by Chris Moneymaker and Daniel Paisner. Its a first hand account of how Moneymaker went from being an unknown amateur no one would have considered even a minor threat to winning the 2003 World Series of Poker. Its a pleasant and quick read. What's interesting is that Moneymaker had been gambling in one form or another since he was a little kid, and that his college and after college gambling had left him in debt. Whether one could call Moneymaker an addict is debateable, but his gambling debts were such that only the promise of money from a friend lead him to win a free seat to the World Series via an online poker tournament instead of in effect throwing the tournament so he would win the second prize of $8000. A free seat at the pinnacle of US poker events was far less valuable than actual money that could go a long way to paying off debts a young accountant with a wife and baby couldn't afford. Equally ironic was that winning the 2.5 millon dollar grand prize ended Moneymaker's financial problems, yet introduced a whole new set of tensions that proved equally as hard on his personal life as being in debt had been. Definitely an interesting case to consider when you see the jubilation of the winner of such an event.

Borbetomagus Interview.

I've mentioned the online "new music" magazine Paris Transatlantic before. The May edition has another piece of interest for noisy music fans, an interview with the infamous(?) New York extreme music trio Borbetomagus. Its hard to imagine these guys have been at it off and on for 27 years.

Appropriately enough I'm sitting here listening to the new Joseph Holbrooke Trio, The Moat Recordings double album. I'll probably be writing a review on here of this one sometime in the next week or two.

Broken.

There sure seem to be a lot of my favourite webpages having problems these days. One had a complete harddrive crash, and their tech support company actually managed to lose the harddisk, so they'll have to start over completely. Another one works intermittently because their current server can't handle the level of traffic. Livejournal is currently offline. And another one had problems on the weekend and didn't seem to realise it. Maybe I'm a jinx. Nah, I don't think so.

Of course given some of the companies involved in the background of such things maybe its not a surprise. I've been working on a printer installation job as an assistant, doing things like unpacking equipment and so on. So far we've had the wrong equipment sent to us twice. Our actual work instructions are too often vague. I spent a lot of today standing around when we could have been getting something done because other players in the project were being rather lackadaisical. And we're doing it during the daytime, so the IT people involved are also busy doing their normal work. I'd hate to think of how much worse things might have been if the job was more complicated than it is.

Foiled Again!

I made several attempts at posting here tonight. But they didn't come off. One would have involved critiquing someone for something a bit more research showed wasn't exactly their idea. Another was a commentary about a rally that took place last week, but I decided it wasn't current enough. Why waste time on old news? So here's Lush's video for "Hypocrite" via YouTube. Miki Berenyi's sexy pigtailed dyejob and legs are probably far more interesting than anything I'd blather about anyways.