BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Floyd inflatable pig is recovered: “Floyd inflatable pig is recovered”
Seems Roger’s pig got the urge to fly off, but it’s been returned. Not quite intact, however.
At last: a chance to re-use my photo of Roger’s inflatable pig from Calgary in June…
Get out of the road if you want to grow old.
Accelerometer-based Cycling jacket wins design award: this very-cool idea will save more lives than bicycle helmets…
.)
VIDEO: Are Plastic Water Bottles Safe? : DivineCaroline: “Are Plastic Water Bottles Safe?”
I threw out three expensive water bottles late last year — models which the manufacturer has since replaced with bottles featuring a different plastic — and switched to metal bottles by SIGG.
The thing that annoys me most about this sort of threat — however small it may be — is that manufacturers are automatically given a pass until something is proven, at someone else’s great expense, to be harmful.
Don’t look for this to change soon. And kudos to NBC for showing some of their sponsors’ products in this piece: I’ll bet someone took some heat for that.
Bay of Fundy Blog: “Fundy fossil takes a walk….”
Terri has a story about Dr. Laing Ferguson’s Arthropleura fossil — whose tracks adorned the walls of what was then called PEG when I worked there in the mid-1990s — going home to Joggins.
Evangelist takes credit for film crackdown: “A well-known evangelical crusader is claiming credit for the federal government’s move to deny tax credits to TV and film productions that contain graphic sex and violence or other offensive content.”
Televangelists like Charles McVety qualify as offensive content, don’t they? I wouldn’t dream of censoring them, though: they have every right to be offensive.
This is more nonsense from the people that brought us moral indignation and outrage as their best response to jazz in the 1930s, Elvis’ pelvic gyrations in the 1950s, and purple Teletubbies in the 1990s.
McVety goes on to say:
It’s fitting with conservative values, and I think that’s why Canadians voted for a Conservative government.
Please. If Canadians had voted for a Conservative government, Liberals, NDP and Bloq members wouldn’t out-number Tories in Parliament, would they? In fact, more than 63% of Canadians didn’t vote for the Conservatives in 2006, so it might be more accurate to say that most Canadians don’t value Conservatives…
What the federal election results from 2006 showed was that Canadians didn’t want a repeat of the Chrétien government’s Québec-referendum advertising scandal (and, by extension, Paul Martin).
If McVety’s radical evangelical agenda actually reflected Canadians’ wishes we wouldn’t have Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day and Justice Minister Rob Nicholson going to such lengths to distance themselves from McVety, who represents exactly what so many Canadians expected from the Reform Alliance Progressive Conservative Party of Canada.
Parents are more than smart enough decide for themselves when to turn off their TVs, or whether to bring their children to see films like Young People Fucking. They certainly don’t need self-appointed moral authorities like McVety and their delicate sensibilities to tell them what they should — and what they shouldn’t be allowed — to think.
Update: March 4, 2008
As a follow-up, this appeared on Canada.com today:
No censorship threat in Bill C-10: Verner: “‘We are far from censorship here. We are just putting forward an intention from our government and (from) the former Liberal government just to make sure that we will take fiscal measure to make sure that the Canadian taxpayers’ money won’t fund extreme violence, child pornography or something like that,’ Verner said at a press conference.”
Of course, there’s no need to address these issues with Bill C-10; there’s existing legislation for that. So why do we need the changes to the tax rebate structure introduced by C-10?
Further, when asked if C-10 was influenced by McVety, Minister Verner issued the following non-denial:
I never met with that guy and there’s no meeting scheduled in my agenda…
which says precisely nothing about McVety’s influence.
Hand-wringing About American Culture - Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?: —New York Times
…she first got the idea for this book back in 2001, on 9/11.
Walking home to her Upper East Side apartment, she said, overwhelmed and confused, she stopped at a bar. As she sipped her bloody mary, she quietly listened to two men, neatly dressed in suits. For a second she thought they were going to compare that day’s horrifying attack to the Japanese bombing in 1941 that blew America into World War II:
‘This is just like Pearl Harbor,’ one of the men said.
The other asked, ‘What is Pearl Harbor?’
‘That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War,’ the first man replied.”
That’s chilling.
(Via Digg.)
Muslim leader fears conflict of rights in new B.C. taxi policy:
The new taxi bill of rights for Metro Vancouver ensures that Muslim taxi drivers cannot refuse to take passengers with guide dogs.
You cannot say, just because they refuse it, he should be fined. You should respect the belief of a person. Whether right or wrong, it is his interpretation.
—Aziz Khaki, the vice-chair of the Muslim Canadian Federations
Oh, really? I guess I agree with Khaki, then; to the extent that those drivers refusing to accept passengers should not be fined. I believe they should be fired for refusing to do their jobs; that’s my interpretation.
And according to Khaki, I should be respected (for believing that there should be no special treatment for people who believe ridiculous things).
So Microsoft’s going to buy Yahoo! Good for Yahoo!; not so good for Yahoo! users.
The cultures of these companies will not mix. It makes me thing of the joke doing the rounds of the auto industry a few years back:
Q: How do you pronounce ‘DaimlerChrysler’?
A: The ‘Chrsyler’ is silent.
Anything good that Yahoo! brings to the equation (Widgets, Flickr, search) will be obliterated almost immediately or allowed to wither slowly.
But this is really all about Google:
It is a shotgun marriage, but the person holding the shotgun is Google…
—Tim Weber, business editor, BBC News website
Microsoft is finally admitting that Live.com is no threat to Google, and it really needs to be a player in the online advertising space that Google owns.
Microsoft will spend the next three years rebuilding everything Yahoo! has from the ground-up with their own tools, just because they need to prove they eat their own dogfood; that’s a lot of money just to buy a brand.
Banning screeching children I could understand, but banning pets from cargo? Bizarre.
Gwynne Dyer (channelling Prof. Boris Worm of Dalhousie University):
A major human food source — the principal source of protein for one-fifth of the human race — is going to collapse in the next generation unless drastic measures are taken. The world’s fishing fleet needs to be reduced by at least two-thirds, bottom-trawling must be banned outright, and widespread fishing moratoriums for endangered species and even for whole areas need to be imposed for periods of five or even ten years.
Unfortunately, the minimum measures needed to prevent ecocide in the oceans would cause major short-term disruption and throw millions out of work, so they probably won’t be taken. It will be much easier politically to ignore what is happening now and let the collapse happen later, on somebody else’s watch.
And governments worry about terrorism.
