Missing bones: not only in the back, but in the right hand

Babble on.

Steffi introduced himself to me last night.

Remember how your dad told you early on in your life to look people in the eye and shake hands firmly? Someone still needs to learn that lesson.

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Wells, nail, head

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Paul Wells has hit a particularly irksome nail squarely on the head, and I suspect Joe Clark is taking an Advil:

"There's not a lot of reconciliation in Mr. Harper's makeup," Clark says. "...By and large, instead of being a leader who has tried to find common ground among Canadians, he has too often followed policies that can be divisive."

Well. It's just a fact that Harper managed to reconcile the Progressive Conservative and Canadian Alliance memberships where Clark had been trying, with exceedingly modest results, for years. It's just a fact that Harper could have done so earlier and that the main obstacle to his success was Joe Clark. It's just a fact that when the two parties did replace themselves with a new unified party, the only ones who didn't join the spirit of reconciliation were the Clark faction of the Progressive Conservatives: Clark, Scott Brison, John Herron. And that only Clark was unwilling to reconcile with... the Liberals by joining them. The great conciliator of High River spent his last months in Parliament sitting alone as an independent. He did not wish it so and it's sad that it happened, but it did.

And he's just warming up with that passage. You should really read the whole thing. It's about time somebody said it, and I'm glad it was Wells, since he said it so very well.

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If you're not going to shoot the bear, you'd better have a damned good plan

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This guy almost had a Darwin Award nomination captured on film. Follow the sequence of events in the pictorial.



This line from the comments quite literally had me choking on my coffee:

The Idaho Fish and Game Department has more pickup trucks than employees. And the pickup trucks are smarter, too.

Tip of the toque to Darcey.

Babble off.

Six unimportant things

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Taylor's tagged me with this meme, and I figured better to post about it here than at The Torch. Ruin my serious blogging cred and all. Stop laughing.

Okeydokey, here goes:

1. I absolutely cannot handle watching people embarrass themselves. It's like getting hit in the funny-bone, or nails on blackboard for me. Drives my lovely wife batty. I leave the room when she's watching the auditions for American Idol. If I had to pick one single character on television that has made my flesh crawl more than any other, it would be Ross on Friends. I squirmed in my seat through entire scenes of There's Something About Mary. And my discomfort is getting more pronounced with age, not less.


2. If I'm eating coloured candies like Smarties or Skittles, I'll often arrange them in repeating patterns, or bar graphs by colour. Then I'll deplete them according to another pattern, like keeping each colour in equal supply, or eating two colours at a time, alternating between them, or any one of a number of other options. I try not to do it too much at work, as it's always awkward explaining to a co-worker why you're arranging your M&M's into lines on your desk.


3. I love meat, but dislike eating it off the bone. I used to think it was just that a quarter-chicken dinner at Swiss Chalet was just too much work - why de-bone your own meal when you can pay to have it done before it hits the table? - but my mom thinks it goes deeper than that. She remembers me being horrified as a wee boy when I found out how hamburger was made, and thinks it may have affected my meat-eating habits into adulthood. The thing is, I love meat - chicken breasts, steaks, roast beef, turkey dinner, ham, bacon, and hamburgers. Just don't give me wings or ribs.


4. I'm one of the few men alive who doesn't have to be forced at gunpoint to watch figure skating on TV.


5. If a genie popped out of a lamp and told me I could be world-class at one sport, I'd pick basketball. Which, if you've met me and seen my short arms, stocky body, and inability to jump much, is kind of funny. To this day, I have dreams in which I'm playing pickup hoops with my brothers or friends, and all of a sudden in the middle of a layup I'm high enough to dunk the ball. Love those dreams.


6. I pride myself on a fairly decent vocabulary, but I get my clock cleaned by my wife in word-games like Scrabble or Boggle. Consistently. By, like, a hundred points. On a positive note, it's great for keeping the old ego in check.

Now, who can I tag who hasn't already been nailed with this one?

• Nicholas at Quotulatiousness


• Bruce at Flit


• Mark at Daimnation


• Chris at Tart Cider


• Paul at Celestial Junk


• John Piedmont at OPFOR

Who will trump my weirdness?

Babble off.

Fifteen Days

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I'm a big fan of Christie Blatchford, so it wasn't surprising to me that I enjoyed her new book about soldiers in Afghanistan, Fifteen Days, so very much.

I've posted a review at The Torch for those who would like a glimpse into the character of the book before laying down their hard-earned money for a copy.

Babble off.

The Wheel of Time creaks to a halt for a moment

Babble on.

Decorated U.S. military veteran James Oliver Rigney Jr., better known as bestselling author Robert Jordan, has died at the age of 58.

His works have brought me hours upon hours of fascinated immersion in a fantastic world, and so never having met the man, I will miss him.

The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose.... The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time.

But it was a beginning.

Rest in peace, sir.

Babble off.

Update: What an interesting quote this man gave in an interview:

There are things I am saying, things I am talking about, but I try not to make them obtrusive. The necessity to struggle against evil, the difficulty of identifying evil, how easy it is to go astray, are very simple questions. In modern mainstream fiction, if you discuss good and evil, you're castigated for being judgmental or for being old-fashioned. Originally this was a way of deciding which was the greater wrong - 'It is wrong to steal, but my child is starving to death. Obviously, in that situation it is better to steal than to let my child die of hunger.' But today that has been transmogrified into a belief that anything goes, it's what you can get by with, and there is no real morality, no right, no wrong� It's simply what produces the Platonic definition of evil: 'a temporary disadvantage for the one perceiving evil.'

In fantasy, we can talk about right and wrong, and good and evil, and do it with a straight face. We can discuss morality or ethics, and believe that these things are important, where you cannot in mainstream fiction. It's part of the reason why I believe fantasy is perhaps the oldest form of literature in the world, at least in the western canon. You go back not simply to Beowulf but The Epic of Gilgamesh. [Babbler's highlight]

By the way, if anyone can help me track down the citations for his Distinguished Flying Cross awards (two of them, if I've got it right), won as a helicopter gunner in Vietnam, I'd like to read it.

Steyn gets it wrong

Babble on.

I was involved in a comments-section argument over at John Donovan's place, regarding a Mark Steyn post at The Corner:

Canada's ghastly human rights commissions are an an ersatz-judicial abomination to enforce PC bullying. In recent years, they've ordered a Catholic school in Alberta to employ a practising homosexual, fined a Christian printer in Toronto for refusing to print a gay activist group's publicity material, used their powers to support the suspension without pay of a evangelical Christian school teacher who had written to his local paper expressing concern over pro-gay education programs. In all case, the human rights commissions operated on the more or less consistent principle that "religious belief" was fine as long as you kept it furtive and walled up inside your private home but it did not have the right to impact on who you employed, what clients you accepted*, or even what views you expressed in the newspaper.

Apparently, it's different for Islam.

Steyn may well be right, but the case he's chosen to highlight doesn't make his point.

Why? Because it was a settlement, not a ruling. That's right: the B.C. Human Rights Commission didn't rule on the case, the parties involved settled it before the tribunal could hear the arguments.

The tribunal was to hear Mr. Gilmour's case on Monday; however, a settlement was reached last week with Mr. Saidy and his taxi company. "The parties have agreed ? to resolve Mr. Gilmour's complaint by balancing the rights of persons with seeing-eye dogs to obtain taxi service with the rights of Muslims to follow their religion," the settlement reads.

If you don't like the way this particular human rights complaint worked out, don't blame the Commission, blame the parties who agreed to the settlement.

My thanks to the confusing, but entertaining Alan of Gen X at 40 for pointing that out to me...eventually...after making me dig through his convoluted rhetoric at length.

Babble off.

Update: Blazing Cat Fur seems to want to twist the discussion around without proper deference to the realities of this particular case.

Scrolling through BCF's comments to his own post, you'll discover a gross misrepresentation of the case and its scope. It was a settlement, not a decision, and so set no legal precedent. It is binding upon no-one but the parties to the agreement, and restricts no other person's right to file a discrimination complaint.

I have that perspective separately from two different Canadian lawyer friends.

That is to say, if another blind patron is refused service by a Muslim driver because of a guide-dog, the blind patron can file a discrimination complaint with the BCHRC - even if the driver abides by the rules laid out in the Gilmour settlement by ordering another cab and waiting with the blind patron until that other cab arrives. This settlement doesn't restrict any future complaint in the slightest, or reliably predict its outcome.

I'd love to see the BCHRC forced to actually make a decision in a case like that, because I think this settlement stinks. I have little confidence the BCHRC would make the right decision.

But, unlike Steyn and BCF, I'm not willing to condemn the BCHRC for a decision they haven't yet made.

Don't worry about those long-term plans

Babble on.

It's in the Book of Revelations, if you know where to look: when I agree with something Rick Salutin wrote, the end is nigh. Can you hear the hoofbeats of the Four Horsemen?

Babble off.