Archive for the ‘Snark!’ Category
June 22nd, 2010 | 
Author: In case you’ve been hiding under a rock, the 2010 FIFA World Cup is under way. The time zone difference is great for me, too. Three matches a day are being televised and two of them are during the day, when I can run the live stream in anther window on my computer and check the action as necessary.
It’s been a long time since I watched this much football in such a short period of time. The 2006 World Cup, I think. 
But, I’d forgotten what a bunch of whining, pampered babies professional footballers have become. Look at this:
- The US freaked out about bad call costing them a goal and the match. It happens.
- An Ivorian (Côte d’Ivoire) forward managed to get a Brazilian yellow-carded out of the match after making an elbow bump look like a face smash.
- The entire French team boycotted workouts because their striker was booted by their Federation for publicly berating their coach.
Posted in 
And why it truly sucked.
I can’t say it any better than cowmix, who submitted this to Slashdot this afternoon:
“When TPM came out ten years ago, its utter crappiness shocked me to the core and wounded a entire generation of geeks. My inner child had been abused and betrayed. I moped around, talking to no one, for almost two weeks. I couldn’t bring myself to see #2 or #3, whatever they were called. Now, a decade later, comes Star Wars: The Phantom Menace Review, the ultimate, seven-part, seventy minute analysis of this mother of all train wrecks. Not only does it nail how the film blows, but tells us why. Time, apparently, does not heal all wounds.”
No, no it doesn’t.
When I refer to the Star Wars films, I make a hard distinction between the “good ones” (nominally Eps IV – VI) and the crap that Lucas appears to have released solely to abuse his fan base. After suffering through TPM, I didn’t bother with “Attack of the Clones” and I don’t even recall noticing the release of the third one (I don’t know the name of it and I can’t be bothered looking it up.) I’ve introduced Phil to the good ones and he’s eaten them right up. I have no interest in watching the crappy ones and certainly won’t spend perfectly good money on them.
FutureShop is Canada’s rough equivalent of Circuit City and they’re not a bad store as far as having commission-based sales people goes.
This morning I got an email advertising an online-only sale that starts tonight after the physics stores close and I thought I’d have a peek. Oh, look! They’re finally selling Sigma camera lenses! I’ve been keeping my eyes open for a decent macro lens for my DSLR that didn’t cost the moon, so I had a peek. Unfortunately, whomever is doing the item descriptions does NOT understand photographic terminology:
Sigh. I’m afraid to click on ‘Expert Advice’.
If you eat, you need to see this movie. The food production reality in North America is nothing close to the myth that the industry spends so much time, effort and money to maintain. It’s all about the allmighty dollar and almost no thought whatsoever is given to nutrition any more.
Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma) and Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) provide much of the commentary to this look at industrial food production in the US. I’d like to claim that things are different in Canada, but I’d be lying. Factory farms are far more factory than farm and you can imagine the quality of “food” that comes out of them.
It’s an eye opener, to be sure. The solution: vote with your food dollars and support your local farmer. They’re out there, you just have to look. More on that later.
OK, enough’s enough:
- Vancouver police purchase a sound weapon, claiming that they only want to use it as a “loudspeaker”
- Assorted Vancouver-area municipalities pass by-laws allowing the cops to barge into private homes and remove protest signs from windows
- Now, Canada Customs is screening visitors to the country on their views of the Owelympics:
(CBC’s) As It Happens radio show covers the story of Amy Goodman’s recent’ border crossing into Canada. Goodman — host of the US public radio show Democracy Now! — was coming to Canada to give a speech at a library, and Canadian border guards questioned her intensely about the subject of her talk, even reading her notes for her speech. They were fishing for something, but Goodman couldn’t figure out what, until the guards asked her outright whether she was planning on talking about the upcoming Canadian Olympic Games. When she assured them that she hadn’t been, they eventually released her (it had been a 75 minute detention) but stamped a control-order in her passport giving her only 24 hours’ stay in Canada.
This is un-fucking-acceptable, people! Canadians have long prided ourselves on living in a free and open democracy. But now, the border guards have been tasked with keeping out those dangerous people that talk?
Just when I think that the minority-rule Conservative government has hit the bottom, they dig the hole a bit deeper:
The Harper government is training its guns on a diplomat whistleblower who says Canada was complicit in the torture of captured Afghan prisoners, trying to undermine Richard Colvin’s credibility as pressure builds to hold a public inquiry into the matter.
Now, these are very different allegations from what the US has been accused of doing. Believe it or not, “extraordinary rendition” (scooping a suspect and delivering them to some other country for interrogation (usually also involving torture)) isn’t as serious as what it appears that our government has done.
Transferring a prisoner to another entity when you know or even suspect that they may be subject to torture is a war crime. Mr. Colvin, number 2 man at the embassy in Kandahar at the time, alleges that he repeatedly warned his superiors (all the way to the Prime Minister’s national security advisor) that there was very credible evidence that the Afghan army was torturing prisoners that our military had handed over to them. The problem was the response that he and another diplomat received. they were told to stop writing things down and, effectively, shut the hell up.