The University of Western Ontario Alumni and Friends are protesting plans to grant Henry Morgentaler an honourary Doctor of Laws. They have an online petition if you’re interested in checking it out.

Yeah, you might be a redneck.

Does anyone out there know how to code one of these with a different photo?
I have such a k3wl idea….

Does anyone know of a “forum communication” or the name “simard” in connection with the Brault or other sponsorship testimony?
Just checking out something that probably means nothing at all, but I’d be interested in feedback, if any.

Tarantino:

Apparently, 15,000 people rallied in Ottawa yesterday to voice their opposition to same-sex marriage. As of 7:46pm on Sunday evening, as near as I can tell, neither the Toronto Star nor the Globe and Mail have reported one. single. word. about them. In fifty words or less, compare and contrast with the breathless, drooling coverage afforded by both outlets to protests involving equal or smaller numbers of people when the subject of the protest is, oh, to pick one random example, opposition to the war to liberate Iraq.

Emulating the New York Times. May their circulation figures be equally rewarded.

American Thinker reports the “EU official who whitewashed Palestinain funding report” is on the shortlist for new UN auditor.

The Auditor General Reports on National Security in Canada. It’s long – grab a coffee. You’ll be hearing brief versions of her criticisms via mainstream media soon enough (if not already).
Update
A reader who wishes to remain anonymous writes:

More important to keep Canadians in the dark than protect them. Top experienced investigators got canned when they finally went public because nothing was done. They did it for the public good […] whistleblowers who were trying to protect Canadians and lost their careers.
How many have been hired with that $8 billion in security?
link to hearing evidence)
The Auditor General highlighted in the 2001 report that, “A weak immigration service is putting Canada in danger because it isn’t weeding out applicants presenting criminal, security, or health risks”. Last year, a high-ranking Canadian diplomat based in China left his post suddenly after he was suspected of accepting bribes to help Chinese nationals enter Canada illegally. He is thought to have made well over $1 million before he bolted a few days before his posting expired.
The government continues to play down the problems and serious security implications. It destroys and sees as a threat anyone who tells the truth. Both RCMP Corporal Read and I have experienced this. So too have two CSIS officers whose careers were also destroyed working on the Sidewinder project, which examined Chinese espionage activities in Canada in alliance with the triads….

Type “Sidewinder” into the Insightmag search engine.

Listening to it on the TV upstairs, the tedious wreck that was the Juno Awards has just been redeemed by kd lang singing “Hallellujah”.
The bathrobe and barefeet.. oh well. She’s who she is. Good job.

With Reagan and Solzhenitsyn, John Paul II represents the three forces of opposition to communism that shattered the evil empire, the Soviet Union –the American-led West, the Eastern European resistance, and the Russian dissident movement. They also represented the three spheres of opposition: political, artistic and spiritual. Each man came into the field of his greatness later in life, and each has endured hard circumstances in their later years. I hope Solzhenitisyn is able to and inclined to write about his colleagues in the struggle that triumphed. – Hugh Hewitt

April 2, 2005: I’ve moved this earlier post to the top for the remainder of today, in memory of John Paul II and his service to humanity.

If you have several extra minutes of life to waste on useless stuff. Like I do

Via Lewis

Benjamin Moore has a nifty website that allows you to paint a room digitally.
Via Just West Of The Nile.

This is sad. And what a situation for police to be faced with – a man soaked in gasoline inside a van (curiously, it was rented), threatening to set himself alight – and then following through. No word yet on his condition. Pulse24 TV has the video available. For the life of me, I don’t know why.

Looks like Helen is a touch steamed at the moment…

The brittle shell.
Via MUSC Tiger

Jeff Jarvis continues a Terry Teachout post on “Vanishing America” – everyday things that are disappearing from our lives. Among them;

Fax machines. I have one, but I rarely use it more than twice a month, both ways.

Typewriters. I disposed of my last one ten years ago.

Newspapers and magazines on paper.

Local hardware stores.

Christmas cards

I really noticed a drop off in Christmas cards this year. Though, I shouldn’t admit this, most of the things they list I do still use. Going to the post office to mail packages, corded phones, knobs on public washroom sinks, bar soap, aerosol cans, bank tellers, cassette tapes, ice cube trays, modems..
That’s probably not surprising, considering my rural lifestyle. I will add one thing I no longer use, that I didn’t see on any lists;

Well, the dog show turned out to be a waste of time and effort. I don’t get shut out very often, but it happens. I should be more reasonable in my expectations – I do more than my fair share of winning, certainly more than most owner-handlers. However, it does suck to lose. I hate losing, I really hate losing to entries I know are inferior, and I utterly despise driving halfway across a continent to discover the judge has a few “favorites” and favours to hand out.
Yeah, I’m a bad loser. A really, really bad loser. I don’t make scenes or get in people’s faces, but I bitch and complain with the best of them. I don’t apologize for it, either. An aversion to losing is a fundamental ingredient to competitive success.
“Show me a good loser, and I’ll show you a loser”.
It’s true.
Back to regular blogging shortly. I’ve been out of the loop and have some catching up to do myself.
In the meantime, if you haven’t read the updated link on my brief Hunter S. Thompson memorial post below, here it is again. Song of the Sausage Creature is a classic.

I’m sitting here after dinner, a glass of wine at my side, in a home with automatic gates, servants, and wonderful hospitality, somewhere in Englewood, Colorado. There’s a chocolate dish with Tahitian vanilla ice cream on the dessert menu shortly.
It’s shirtsleeve weather (at least for a Saskatchewanian). You can be jealous.
Listened to Hugh Hewitt on radio for the first time and it reminded me of how far behind the curve Canadian conservative talk radio is in this aspect. I’ve been reading him pretty regularly for a year or so, and it reminded me of one of the frustrations of being a Canadian “amateur” blogger. Why isn’t Canadian talk radio moving into the world of blogging? Ignorance? Station policy? Laziness?
On his Monday show Rawlco radio’s John Gormley mentioned – I believe for the first time – the Eason Jordan affair. That’s all well and good – he certainly beat the news department on the “scoop” – but when a medium as immediate as talk radio is two weeks behind the curve, it’s pretty stale stuff.
On the other side of the fence, bloggers here dig, work to get reader tips due exposure, and swarm as best we can on stories we believe deserve attention. But there’s little chance for momentum to build in a country where television and print media is a virtual house organ of the Liberal party and talk radio has not yet produced a Rush Limbaugh. If they continue to plod along in their insular little regional am wave world, they’re pretty damned unlikely to, either.
The blogosphere in Canada will continue to lag behind the US in our ability to coalesce around a story and move it forward, so long as Canadian talk radio plods along in a 90’s mindset about the internet as little more than a convenient, but largely unreliable source for out-of-the mainstream show fodder.
C’mon you guys. Get on board. Get your blogs up – and by blogs, I mean the real deal, with trackbacks and a blogroll. See Hugh Hewitt. Hell. he has an email address – ask Hugh Hewitt.
Here’s another suggestion – local talk radio has weekly features with regular guests – contests, movie reviews, dvd release shows, “mornings with the mayor” etc. Why not try this – a weekly round-up of the stories perculating in the Canadian political blogosphere?
Stop playing catch up. Get in front of a story for a change.

The bike I painted last week is finally finished, but the client didn’t want to put it back together as there was other work planned. When it is, it’ll look vaguely like this original (computer drawn) draft, though some of the actual design details were altered along the way.
It was originally a bright green, with taped flames, etc. There was a considerable amount of refinishing involved – a couple of parts in progress:

The finished fuel tank.

I’ll post a pic of the completed bike when I get one.

Still spending much of my time at the shop, on the bike-that-never-ends…. the first five pieces are now basecoated, though, so there’s light at the end of the tunnel. (When painters tell you that automotive painting is 90% prepwork, it is not exaggeration.)
QOTD from a radio dj this morning, in a discussion about the latest round of NHL talks, and the impending season cancellation;

“Gary Bettman is the Jack Kavorkian of the NHL”

Better yet, he managed to segue into that from a report on the health of the pope.
This guy should get into blogging.
Carry on in the comments sections, kiddies. I’m too busy to watch what’s going on at the moment, but if I come down there and finding someone’s being writing on the walls in crayon, theres going to be hell to pay.
(I really ought to start a category on “solvent blogging”. Heh.)
Back to the booth.

Well, if you’d just left a flaming bag of cow shit like normal kids, none of this would’ve happened.