Author: Kate

The World Is Being Run By Crazy People

For once I agree with Jack Layton. This is bizarre.

Health Canada has earmarked more than $1.2 million for its summit work. That includes assigning environmental health officers “to supervise food preparation areas and procedures to ensure that proper sanitation and food safety measures are respected,” a department spokesperson said.
[… while ]
Ten officials and tourism executives dialed in by conference call to defend the [fake lake] project.
“The media centre for us is a chance to showcase Muskoka. We’re really excited about it,” said Michael Lawley, executive director of Muskoka Tourism.
The government also provided a breakdown of the costs for the exhibit: $208,187 for the ‘northern oasis;’ $218,000 for a cafeteria area; $$292,000 for the cityscape; $147,000 for audio-visual; $398,000 for labour; and $407,000 for the design and consultation.

Fire them all. And then fire 20 more as a warning to others.

Reader Tips

American actor Jim Backus, perhaps best known for his portrayal of slightly-addled upper-crust gentleman Thurston Howell III in the 1960’s sitcom Gilligan’s Island, had other famous roles as well. He was the voice of the bumbling, good-natured cartoon character Mr. Magoo, and he co-starred in the iconic Academy Award-winning film Rebel Without A Cause in which he played a cursedly ineffectual father whose bourgeois conformity drove his son, played by James Dean, into paroxysms of incoherent, scenery-chewing rage.
Backus also released two novelty singles, one of which is tonight’s musical selection. The humor in the odd little soundtrack-vignette stems from both its lack of context – all you can glean is that an unnamed man and woman are drinking champagne at a cozy table in a restaurant – and, especially, from the over-the-top giddiness of the euphorically tipsy couple, who give the impression that they’ve gotten away with something spectacular, perhaps a cleverly-engineered tryst.
From 1958, here’s Jim Backus and an unidentified actress performing the cartoonishly carefree Delicious.
The comments are open for your Reader Tips.

Oil Drenched Seal

… or spitting llama?

The Obamas will attend the star-studded gala at Ford Theatre featuring singer Kelly Clarkson, comedian George Lopez, actor Dick Van Dyke and others. Ty Burrell of ABC’s “Modern Family” will host.
South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu and South African Constitutional Court Justice Albie Sachs are to receive the Ford’s Theatre Lincoln Medal.
The event will be televised as America Celebrates July 4th at Ford’s Theatre on July 2 by ABC.
For sure Michelle will wear a “stunning” gala gown but this time the gown will stand out against a sickening background of muddy oil covered birds and beaches.
I hope Michelle has selected the worst possible dress for this inappropriate event. They should have canceled Sir Pall and this gala 2 weeks ago.
UPDATE – And the wait was rewarded: Michelle looks like a seal in a silver spandex wetsuit.

Of course, some will be all a-flutter.
Update: Nero Fiddles

Y2Kyoto: Not Partisan Enough!

Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!
Washington Times, March 5thUndaunted by a rash of scandals over the science underpinning climate change, top climate researchers are plotting to respond with what one scientist involved said needs to be “an outlandishly aggressively partisan approach” to gut the credibility of skeptics.
Anthony Watts, June 7thToday my life and my office was disrupted by the unannounced and uninvited presence of a person who seems to be convinced that I’m in the employ of “big oil” (I’m not) and that my opinions and the opinions of others here is so wrong, that this person must take up a crusade against me.

Reader Tips

As a kid I always loved Rolf Harris; I remember listening to his performances on the radio when my parents thought I was asleep. I loved the sound of his Perth-accented voice, so lively and mischievous yet sincere. Tonight’s Reader Tips companion is Harris’ 1969 version of a song about unquestioning, unflagging loyalty to the bitter end. It may be too childish and sentimental for some people, but I’ll always like it. In a time of post-ironic, too-cool-for-school attitudes, it’s remains a pleasant, perhaps rosy-tinted, reminder of what seems in hindsight to have been a more straightforward, upright time.
Here’s Australian entertainer Rolf Harris, performing the touching 1902 song Two Little Boys.
The thread is open for Reader Tips.

Democracy as cults of personality

Food for thought.

Part of the overall problem, as well, Prof. Savoie said, is that political parties “have lost their soul” and politics has been taken over by professional politicians. He said there was once a time when the core values of political parties never changed, but now, all parties are the products of their leaders and not based on public policy ideas and values for which Canadians can vote for.

“They’ve been captured by the election day, the need to organize around elections. They’ve been captured by cronies and lobbyists and in the process they’ve lost their soul,” he said. “If you’ve lost your way, if you’ve lost your soul, you’ve lost what the party’s all about, then personalism takes over. The Liberal Party of today is Michael Ignatieff’s party, tomorrow it will be someone else’s party. The Conservative party today is Stephen Harper’s party. In a few years it will be someone else’s party and the core values will not matter all that much.”

The Love Boat

Debbie Schlussel:

A giant fact about the HAMAS Gaza Flotilla continues to be kept quiet by the mainstream media: Adam Shapiro and Huwaida Arraf – the leaders of the “Free Gaza Movment” and the organizers of the HAMAS Gaza flotilla – and their organization harbored several Islamic terrorists and homicide bombers, including those who blew up a Tel Aviv Bar.

To the ilk who hide their motivations, with the complicity of the news media, behind terms like “peace activist,” such “giant facts” aren’t even motes, they’re utter irrelevancies; to Israel’s most committed opponents, acts of targeted murder like the one at Mike’s Bar in Tel Aviv, where three Israelis were killed and fifty injured, are effectively humanitarian aid bombings.
They don’t use those exact words, of course – at least, the pink ones who aren’t from the region don’t – but you can be sure that in thirty or forty years, western countries will see a senility-induced outbreak of Helen Thomas-style honesty. It will be a relief of sorts.
(h/t SDA commenter The Joel)

Reader Tips

Welcome to SDA Reader Tips. Tonight’s musical accompaniment comes in the form of a song by the late Judee Sill, a remarkably talented but largely unheralded musician whose beautiful voice and spiritual, baroque pop songs are so beautiful, gentle and clear-headed as to be hard to reconcile with her dark and troubled life.
Tim Page, in the Washington Post:

Tom King’s “The Operator,” a 650-page biography of David Geffen, who founded Asylum and signed Sill as the first artist to record on his new label, devotes only one sentence to her, calling her “a former prostitute and reformed junkie.” King might have added “stick-up artist,” “drug dealer” and “street hustler” to his capsule biography, for Sill led a troubled and unsettled life. And yet…she was also an artist of extraordinary gifts, one whose best songs are suffused with a radiant, prayerful and excruciatingly tender innocence, all the more affecting because it must have been so hard-won.

The immediate temptation is to classify her with some of her more famous contemporaries — Joni Mitchell, Laura Nyro and Carole King — and, indeed, the similarities are there. Yet Sill’s body of work is both more limited and more perfect. Virtually all of her songs are intensely devotional; along with J.S. Bach and Mahalia Jackson (two of her acknowledged influences), Sill believed that the purpose of music was the glorification of God. Instead of sharply etched social vignettes or cosmopolitan evocations of modern life and love, she wrote her own sort of hymns — guileless, urgent, naked, absolutely personal.

Here, for your Sunday evening pleasure, is the late Judee Sill’s 1971 release Jesus Was a Cross Maker.
The comments are open for your Reader Tips. Please read on for an important note:

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Adding insult to injury

So, you’re lying there on the roadside…

Researchers at Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute have developed a manufacturing process that injects microcapsules containing malodorous oils into the (bike) helmet itself, causing it to stink when damaged — alerting you that it’s time to replace it…

(h/t The Null Device)

Reader Tips

Welcome to Reader Tips. Tonight’s music is a song about exuberantly reckless driving in the fifties era, back when the typically boat-like and seatbelt-less cars were designed for pleasure and not safety. Even though the singer describes speeding drunkenly down mountainsides at night, in the rain, and passing other cars on blind corners, what sounds like a cautionary tale has little or no effect on his own driving habits: when he requests plasma from his hospital bed he’s just a hip daddy-o asking to be primed up for another bout of driving.
It’s to laugh. Here’s Nervous Norvus’ 1956 novelty song Transfusion.
You are enjoined to provide links to your Reader Tips in the comments.

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