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http://www.torontosun.com/news/canada/2010/02/19/12952211.html

via newswatch

the best info is curiously left for the last Two paragraphs:

"While attending an event in June of 2007, Harper rented a day room at the Super 8 motel in New Brunswick for $126.

This comes after QMI Agency revealed spending in the prime minister's own office dropped from $38,440 in 2004-2005 and $39,924 in 2005-2006 under the Liberals to $1,917 in 2006-2007, $1,966 in 2007-2008 and $7,705 in 2008-2009 under the Tories."

do you think this would have been moved to the top if it was iggy not Harper?

Well, it's easier to relax without the horrible things :-)

Yesterday I was driving around - as is my wont - and Comfortably Numb came on the radio. I had no way to identify it for a good minute (I'd heard snatches before, of course, but that's different).

By the time I realized what song it was, I'd decided Pink Floyd was genius. So... go know.

I quite concur, Black Mamba. If one begins circa Pink Floyd's Astronomy Domine at the UFO Club in February, 1967, and follows through to the "giant nodding pigs" show in 1994, I think they are indeed a form of genius in their (and, for many or us: our) space and time.

What happened to Andy?
He is asking for help.
What is the world coming to?
I ask.

http://www.arcamax.com/andycapp

I saw that show at Frank Clair stadium in Ottawa. One of the best (and loudest!) shows I've ever been to! A friend of mine was working that night at the NDMC medical centre some distance away, and he said he could hear it load and clear inside the hospital!

Thanks for the memories.

Never has there been such a mullet.

Yes, well, we did have a discussion about the Mullet here in the studios this afternoon, Black Mamba, and we decided that Scott Page's mullet illustrates an important point: If one is going to undertake an exercise, it behooves one to do it well. Thus, it is not a Mullet that is a problem per se, it is the half-mullet, the semi-mullet, that is problematic. So we decided to go ahead with the show.

Vitruvius - do you behoove? I never have; I've never behooved, and I've never been behooved either. I'm not saying it's never come up, and I'm not being judgmental, either; I just feel like people need to stay within their comfort zones.

But otherwise I agree: If you mullet, you might as well just mullet! Why not? Be vehement!

Clearly there is more to Pink Floyd than The Wall - We don't need etc. (which I like, although too much education is not a huge problem for kids with working-class accents in the U.K. from what I've seen).

Will listen to Floyd.

I always thought that Doctor David Gilmour was one of the best, and yes, genius. His stage work with Pete Townshend is something not to be missed as well. Old Pros...

Aye: old pro's. It's an interesting place to get to.

Allen West may be too honest to be elected, but I admire his candor.

There's also not much to dislike about Giant Inflatable Pigs.

I was watching Tiger do his thing on TV today and I realized that here is the answer to Harry's dilemma!

He's light skinned and has no negro accent and can speak without a TELEPROMPTER on each side of the podium. How can Harry Reid lose? After all Tiger's philandering thing should be no problem since Bubba broke the presidential extramarital sex barrier.

Heavy on the sax, to compensate for the lack of Roger Water's vocals. Pulled it off okay, though.

Kurt Cobain accomplished the same effect, on a David Bowie song, replacing David's high notes with his guitar. Guess which song that was.

SDH @10:39 - Jeebus, I had no idea this was such a... thing!

dp - Man Who Sold the World.

Even worse Mamba, it seems Battersea Power Station is in rough shape.

Someone needs to explain to me how a power-plant built 80 years ago could still look so graceful, yet a recent addition to one of
North America's preeminent museums looks like a stack of Lego blocks fallen on it's side.

SDH - luxury. I took a bus past this all through high-school.

De Architectura Libri Decem

Walking down Memory Lane...my wastrel youth...Pink Floyd, Jefferson Starship, et. al...I attended a 1968 Jefferson Airplane concert in Philadelphia's Sixer's stadium. Grace Slick belting out "White Rabbit" over that fantastic sound system. Wow!

A friend of mine heard Janis Joplin live at an earlier Philly concert. He said it was awesome and she got a wee bit raunchy with her lyrics. (One member of the audience, not my friend, yelled out an offer to come on stage and perform a s*x act on Joplin after she sang, "Down on Me!" The audience briefly started chanting on that. :-)

1973 CSNY concert at the Fillmore West. (Actually Crosby wasn't there. It was supposed to be Stills and Nash but Young showed up unexpectedly and walked out on stage. Great!) You could have rolled up the air in the Fillmore West for secondary use! :-)

1978 Day on the Green in Oakland, Ca. Hot sunny summer day, lots of cold beer and p*t. The Beach Boys reunited, but Brian Wilson had lost his voice by then. But still nice to walk down Memory Lane with their music.

My real claim to fame: I was at the real, original 1969 Woodstock. In fact, I and two friends actually paid the $18 for three day tickets. We arrived Friday afternoon, just before the NY State Police closed the highways leading to Bethel (Woodstock canceled their permit the week before and the organizers had to hussle to get a permit from the nearby community of Bethel.)I actually threw away about a dozen souvenir programs afterwards, as they got muddy. Gaia knows what they'd be worth today. :-(

Sleeping in a wet sleeping bag, having to have my car pulled out of the mud. Some awesome music, beer, p*t, & s*x! Oh, yeah! :-)

(NOT advocating dr*g use! Just narrating some cultural history in which I was a participant back in the day.)

Speaking of Looking Glasses, is Alice here?

Just thought it behooved me to ask.

I'm about halfway through 'Classic Feynman' and the following caught my eye:

There was a sociologist who had written a paper for us all to read-something he had written ahead of time. I started to read the damn thing, and my eyes were coming out: I couldn't make head nor tail of it! I figured it was because I hadn't read any of the books on that list. I had this uneasy feeling of "I'm not adequate," until finally I said to myself, "I'm gonna stop, and read one sentence slowly, so I can figure out what the hell it means. "

So I stopped-at random-and read the next sentence very carefully. I can't remember it precisely, but it was very close to this: "The individual member of the social community often receives his information via visual, symbolic channels." I went back and forth over it, and translated. You know what it means? "People read."

Then I went over the next sentence, and I realized that I could translate that one also. Then it became a kind of empty business: sometimes people read; sometimes people listen to the radio," and so on, but written in such a fancy way that I couldn't understand it at first, and when I finally deciphered it, there was nothing to it.

There was only one thing that happened at that meeting that was pleasant or amusing. At this conference, every word that every guy said at the plenary session was so important that they had a stenotypist there, typing every damn thing. Somewhere on the second day the stenotypist came up to me and said, "What profession are you? Surely not a professor."

"I am a professor," I said.

"Of what?"

"Of physics-science."

"Oh! That must be the reason," he said.

"Reason for what?"

He said, "You see, I'm a stenotypist, and I type everything that is said here. Now, when the other fellas talk, I type what they say, but I don't understand what they're saying. But every time you get up to ask a question or to say something, I understand exactly what you mean-what the question is, and what you're saying-so I thought you can't be a professor!"

[…]

There was a special dinner at some point, and the head of the theology place, a very nice, very Jewish man, gave a speech. It was a good speech, and he was a very good speaker, so while it sounds crazy now, when I'm telling about it, at that time his main idea sounded completely obvious and true. He talked about the big differences in the welfare of various countries, which cause jealousy, which leads to conflict, and now that we have atomic weapons, any war and we're doomed, so therefore the right way out is to strive for peace by making sure there are no great differences from place to place, and since we have so much in the United States, we should give up nearly everything to the other countries until we're all even. Everybody was listening to this, and we were all full of sacrificial feeling, and all thinking we ought to do this. But I came back to my senses on the way home.

The next day one of the guys in our group said, "I think that speech last night was so good that we should all endorse it, and it should be the summary of our conference."

I started to say that the idea of distributing everything evenly is based on a theory that there's only X amount of stuff in the world, that somehow we took it away from the poorer countries in the first place, and therefore we should give it back to them. But this theory doesn't take into account the real reason for the differences between countries -- that is, the development of new techniques for growing food, the development of machinery to grow food and to do other things, and the fact that all this machinery requires the concentration of capital. It isn't the stuff, but the power to make the stuff, that is important. But I realize now that these people were not in science; they didn't understand it. They didn't understand technology; they didn't understand their time.

The conference made me so nervous that a girl I knew in New York had to calm me down. "Look," she said, "you're shaking! You've gone absolutely nuts! Just take it easy, and don't take it so seriously. ..."

My brother attended a Pink Floyd concert at the Big Owe in Montreal on a blazing hot summer day. I still remember his description. He works in construction, and had ingested some sugar cubes earlier in the day. While his friends marvelled at the place, he noticed the construction - the six-inch gaps between some sections, places where the rebar didn't join up, places where the concrete was crumbling in a building only a few years old - and he told his friends, presciently as it were, "Jesus, this place is gonna fall down!". Later, when the concert was in full gear, and people started to stamp their feet, he got so scared, he insisted his friends take him outside.

And it was there, slumped against the building in the hot sun, shaking with fear and loathing and sugar cubes, that his girlfriend of six years, who'd left him some months before, strolled by with her new beau. Perfect.

The grassfire
It has been my habit, over recent years, to ring a little bell at Ash Wednesday, to my readers Christian and non-Christian alike; to remind the former, to explain to the latter.

http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/

You know watching the Olympics for a week now has made me notice something that hockey, basketball and football fans should take notice of. There have been champions crowned some extremely exciting competitions and not a single car has been turned over store window smashed and the store looted in the name of the team winning. I wonder if any of the so inclined might learn from this?

Michaelle Jean or Michelle Obama?
------------------------------------

MONTREAL — Gov. Gen. Michaelle Jean strayed from her regal ceremonial functions to excoriate the excesses of capitalism in a speech that encouraged young people to aim for more than just profits.

http://montreal.ctv.ca/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20100219/mtl_michaelle_jean100219/20100219/?hub=MontrealHome

“Don’t go into corporate America. You know, become teachers. Work for the community. Be social workers. Be a nurse." --Michelle Obama

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OTViZjhhNGI1Y2QxYjE0ZDc0YmMwMjJiNmUyZjQ3MmU=

You can always rely on Conrad Black to say it like it is: "Instead of originality and vision and uplift, or even thoroughness, what was for over a century Canada’s natural party of government is preoccupied with disposing of the foreign unborn, and the regimentation of our own new-born. It won’t do at all."

http://network.nationalpost.com/NP/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2010/02/20/conrad-black-a-poor-policy-flourish.aspx

(I do wonder, however, how he squares his rather liberal views on abortion with his Roman Catholic faith ...)

have a look at Joe Warmington's column
Toronto Sun feb 19/2010

"McGuinty skates around tragedy"
Justice system failed woman hit by fleeing van

* Former Crown Prosecutor & victims advocate Scott Newark summed it up best

" So a guy with 100-plus convictions gets 7months in July 2009 for more Drugs, Break & Enters, Breaching Court Orders, Dangerous Driving, Gets out of jail,(allegedly) does more Break & Enters, (allegedly)Steals another car, Drives while disqualified, Flees from police and (allegedly) Crashes into a car Killing one woman & injuring 4 others & Were Investigating the Police for Chasing Him?"
"Only in Dalton McGuinty's Ontario"
*and just try & find out what judge let him out..

Liberal IffyI-bortion said*:

“Every time Mr. Harper gets within a mile of Canadian military equipment, he takes a swipe at the Liberal Party. It’s like Pavlov’s dog,” Mr. Ignatieff told reporters in Ottawa today.”

…-

“Feds to honour late WWI vet

The federal government has plans to “properly and respectfully” mark a milestone in history — the death of Canada’s last veteran of the Great War.

John “Jack” Babcock — a husband, father, grandfather and great-grandfather — died Thursday at the incredible age of 109.

Veterans Affairs Minister Jean-Pierre Blackburn said Babcock’s passing marks “the sad turning of a page.”

“More than 650,000 brave Canadians and Newfoundlanders served our country in the First World War,” he said in a statement. “Now that their voices have fallen silent, it becomes our duty more than ever to remember them and honour their great sacrifices and their great achievements. We will never forget them.”

Blackburn said details will be released in coming days of the plan, which will give Canadians the opportunity to honour all those who served in the First World War.”

http://www.torontosun.com/news/canada/2010/02/19/12952261.html

What kind of idiot is Jane Taber -- or, rather, Liberal Cheerleader Numero Uno, which becomes apparent every time she opens her big, biased mouth:

"It didn’t take [the CPC] long to use the Games to appeal to supporters."

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/blogs/bureau-blog/tories-put-themselves-atop-olympic-podium/article1475032/

Well, duh.

Any party in power would do the same. Why do Liberal supporters constantly express surprised indignation when the CPC points out to Canadians what their government is accomplishing?

Suck it up, Janey, and move on.

Al Gore's Weather (AGW): Moi is Cock Robin.

"Doorknob dead."
...-

"How Al Gore Wrecked Planet Earth

The Washington Post this morning has a strong story on the collapse of the movement to stop climate change through a binding treaty negotiated under UN auspices. And even the normally taciturn New York Times is admitting that the resignation of the top UN climate change negotiator suggests that no global treaty will be coming this year.

Short summary: the current iteration of the movement–with its particular political project and goals–is dead. This will not be news to readers of this blog where the news was announced on February 1, but never mind."

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2010/02/19/how-al-gore-wrecked-planet-earth/

A great American Patriot has just died.

General Alexander Haig- RIP

Leftist CBC censors comments on behalf of the leftist Separatist Coalition.
…-

CBC: “This story is closed to commenting.”

“Hundreds attend rally for CFB Trenton troops”

“Crowds of supporters marched down the main strip of the base Saturday morning, waving Canadian flags and carrying signs praising the troops. CFB Trenton is one of the busiest air force bases in Canada, serving as a hub for many air transport and search and rescue operations.”

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/ottawa/story/2010/02/20/trenton-military-appreciation-day.html

http://www.bluelikeyou.com/2010/02/20/profs-want-less-public-funding-for-opps/#comment-75378

And if you've never heard Deacon Blues There is great tenor playing by Tom Scott.

The previous tune, AJA features Wayne Shorter on tenor and Steve Gadd on Drums. Doesn't get better than that because it can't.

Canadian commentator, R. Fulford, hasn't met TOTUS? Astonishing!

Fulford: "He [o'totus] performs a sort of dance with the cameras, turning first to the right, then to the left, then back again. It seemed spontaneous for a while but it’s now pure ritual."

Fulford fulminates: Shut up youse big rednecks; shut up, up.

Fulford: "His [o's] most vocal detractors are loudmouthed commentators,"
...-

"Robert Fulford: Why is Obama failing?

Barack Obama has done everything possible to destroy the glowing reputation he brought to the White House after his triumphs in the Democratic primaries and the general election of 2008. The most striking fact about the cloud of failure now surrounding him is that it’s entirely self-generated.

No credible Republican has been harassing him, leaping on his every mistake. Journalists of the liberal persuasion remain admirers. His most vocal detractors are loudmouthed commentators, unlikely to influence the independent voters who made Obama President. He has no one to blame.

This week, when Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana announced that he won’t seek re-election, despite his $13-million war chest and the fact that there’s no strong Republican opposing him, a Washington Post reporter wrote that his decision could suggest to other Democrats that “the energy so far this year is on the right.”

On the right? That’s astonishing."

http://network.nationalpost.com/NP/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2010/02/20/robert-fulford-why-is-obama-failing.aspx

via maz2: "'Every time Mr. Harper gets within a mile of Canadian military equipment, he takes a swipe at the Liberal Party. It’s like Pavlov’s dog,” Mr. Ignatieff told reporters in Ottawa today.'"

Ignatieff's a fine one to talk about Pavlov's Dog. He more than fits the bill: Every time Mr. Ignatieff gets within a mile of a media microphone, he takes a swipe at the Conservative Party and Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

'Guess it takes one to know one.

http://www.vancouversun.com/opinion/Coalition+idea+rises+again/2590807/story.html

via nnw

all I can say is... Bring it on.

UKTimes spins: It was a dark and stormy night, and Choo-Choo was polishing Ruby the Spin Engine, when to his awe, Roxxy appeared in flagrante delicto. He rose and ... "She had become a Mossad spy, although she was not technically Jewish."
...-

"Roxborough said she was a Canadian freelance news photographer."

"Fresh-faced, I fell into the honey trap laid by Israel’s Mata Hari"

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article7034875.ece

Wayne Shorter is definitely excellent, Abe. And I like Steely Dan too. But look, man, you simply can't come waltzing in here to The SDA Late Nite Radio Club spouting profanities about songs you don't like, which, meanwhile, other patrons do enjoy. It's in violation of the "profanity is discouraged" rule clearly stated below, it's rude, and it spoils the atmosphere. De gustibus non disputandum est. So, please, check the gratuitous negatudities at the door, ok. Thanks.