It’s on days like today, with the mercury dropping and a blizzard blowing in, that an urge comes over me to visit the garage and spend a little time with a sleeping Aretha.

(From better times).
After all, we share a few secrets.
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Man loitering in boys’ washroom with camera phone is startled by swastikas;

” I found it in the boys’ washroom, in smallish letters, but at about a kid’s eye level.”

Discovered while crawling after a lost contact, one hopes.
“By Almost Any Means Possible” – a trip back in time to visit Richard Warman and friends;

Bob MacDonald of the Toronto Sun wrote the following on February 5, 1995: “Now we’ve come to the sorry point in Metro Toronto where a so-called anti-racist gang goes on the prowl armed with knives, iron pipes and machetes – looking for ‘neo-Nazis’ to attack”. Sadly, the three people who were stabbed and slashed in a subway attack were not even ‘neo-Nazis’, they were “just some guys on their way home from a party”.

Read the whole thing. Some kid with a felt pen should thank his lucky stars they weren’t hanging around his hockey rink.

Be spread!

The CBC will announce shortly the firing of most middle and top-level management personnel, replacement of their entire editorial staff, and retirement of all television anchors and international reporters currently delivering the news;

Our very mandate is to provide Canadians with a view of their political life unobstructed by bias. To do that, we must be detached from partisan interest, and professional and dispassionate in all aspects of our reporting. We must be seen to be all these things as well.

More…

Far from restoring the credibility of CBC News, the Corporation’s handling of the Erickson affair has managed to shred that credibility to tatters.
For starters, it confirmed the cozy relationship between the CBC and the Liberal Party, something everybody in the news business knew, but which the CBC always denied until now.
But, but. but…wasn’t Krista acting on her own without CBC approval?
Well, that’s what Cruickshank says—without an iota of evidence provided to Canadians to back up that contention. We’re supposed to take his word for it.
Well here’s a word — NO.
[…]
Maybe Pablo isn’t Erickson’s boy after all and Cruickshank is laughing up his sleeve as reporters make an incorrect assumption. Or maybe Pablo is the Liberal that Krista Erickson was dating, according to one of our sources. Does pillow talk count as Principles, Section 3’s ” association or contact which could reasonably give rise to perceptions of partiality”?

“Oh, Sh…”

Who to believe – the CBC, or my own lyin’ eyes? Stephen Taylor shreds John Cruikshank’s response to Doug Finley;

I understand that a private association like the Conservative party does not have the sort of transparent and reliable complaints process that we have at the CBC. That is regrettable.”

You say “private” like it’s a bad thing. Besides, it is not the transparency and accountability of the Conservative Party that is in the spotlight here. Again, it is that of the CBC.

Read the whole thing. As commentor “BB” notes, Cruikshank’s “transparency” stops short of naming the reporter.

Until someone loses an E70 X5.
Advice from the comments;
“Note to the EU: Running the German economy into the ground has a nasty habit of snowballing into bigger problems.

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Sean’s argument for quintupling the bag limit next year.

Guilty of 6 counts of second-degree murder.
Keep discussion and links on topic, please. (And thanks for the heads up on my spelling error.)

Best served with an eviction notice.

CTV;

A Toronto art student charged in connection with a bomb hoax at the Royal Ontario Museum that triggered an evacuation and cancelled a prestigious AIDS fundraiser has been granted bail.

Thorarinn Ingi Jonsson’s Ontario College of Art and Design profile is a little less entertaining than it used to be…

(Google cache)
(h/t reader Dana.)
Update – OCAD-Linked Videos surface.

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We’ve bagged our limit. Photos to follow. A travel day tomorrow, and things should be back to normal by Friday.
Next year, I’m inviting Kathy Shaidle. It’s so much funner when they let you kill stuff.

“… what is the nature of your emergency?”
(More.)

Police say cause of death awaits autopsy results, but stupidity has not been ruled out.

Via Slashdot;

About 1,800 brand new 300-GB or 500-GB external hard drives made for Maxtor in Thailand were found to have trojan horse malwares pre-installed (autorun.inf and ghost.pif). When the HD is in use, these forward information on the disk to two websites in Beijing, China: www.nice8.org or www.we168.org. The article implies that authorities believe the Chinese government is behind the trojans. A later article pins down the point of infection to a subcontractor company in China. A couple of months back the Register was reporting on pre-installed malware detected on Maxtor disks sold in the Netherlands. This earlier report was downplayed by a Seagate spokesman.”

Via G&M;

CBC Television abruptly cancelled a featured documentary just hours before it was to air on Tuesday night, prompting complaints that the network bowed to pressure from American government officials.
“I was actually contacted myself by a gentleman who is a cultural consultant with the Bush Whitehouse,” Mr. Keay said. “He was very polite.” CBC will run a new version of the documentary “sooner rather than later,” the spokesman added, but couldn’t say precisely when.
[…]
The American director says he has no intention of re-editing a piece that he spent three years working on. “We have to quote-unquote give balance,” veteran filmmaker Michael Moore said in an interview.

More here and here.

Calling Captain Understatement…

British marine biologists have found what may be the oldest living animal — that is, until they killed it.
[…]
Only after researchers cut through its shell, which made it more of an ex-clam, and counted its growth rings did they realize how old it had been — between 405 and 410 years old.
Another clam of the same species had been verified at 220 years old, and a third may have lived 374 years. But this most recent clam was the oldest yet.
“Its death is an unfortunate aspect of this work, but we hope to derive lots of information from it,” postdoctoral scientist Al Wanamaker told London’s Guardian newspaper. “For our work, it’s a bonus, but it wasn’t good for this particular animal.”