November 2004 Archives

Rick Mercer is a supercilious prick, but he can be very funny. (Or should I say he is funny and can be a prick?) I wonder if he writes his own lines.

Tonight in the opening segment of his self-named CBC show he commented on George W. Bush's visit to Ottawa, which includes a visit to the Canadian Museum of Civilization, "it must be irony week in Ottawa."

Indeed, with the looting of the museums of the cradle of civilization during the American invasion of Iraq ... Perhaps not the point Mercer was making but heh...

It's Sunday night, November 28. The CBC is playing the last episode of its Greatest Canadian series. There are 10 candidates, all in the process by popular nomination and previous rounds of voting. The concept was taken from a BBC series, and like the BBC series, it is an entertainment with a populist subtext.

My sentiments - I don't think this program pretends to have any clear criteria for judging greatness - are with Tommy Douglas, Pierre Trudeau, Lester Pearson.

In the course of making a crockpot jambalaya, I wondered if I should add file powder. I searched gumbo file and jambalaya and found the basic definitions and several recipe sites. Both dishes are classified as cajun or creole recipes within Southern US and Caribbean recipe classifications.

No dogs are harmed in making this chili. It uses pork, and it's based on a recipe in one of Mable Hoffman's books, called Black and White chili because it uses black and white beans. The basic recipe is kind of bland and I have adapted it. Claire asked about Dalmations when I mentioned it. It has a bit of heat, but is basically mild. Very tasty though.

It's a crockpot recipe and would have to be adapted for stovetop cooking. It uses canned beans, which is simpler than soaking and cooking dried beans. There is some processing at the beginning, and then it cooks at the low heat setting for 6 hours.

I have changed the appearance of this blog by importing a stylesheet called Tiny Green from Movable Styles. I also got around to upgrading to the latest version of Movable Type.

More on soccer fans acting like dumb monkeys.

I have been trying to see which browser functions are slower in Firefox than in Windows IE. Some of the interface with MT seems to be as fast as when I use IE, but some pages are slower in Firefox. Some of the administrative pages that build a list - the comment approval/editing list, or the Blacklist item list - seem to take a long time compared to the same page in IE. But Firefox seems to build an entry list very quickly. WTF?

Steve has simplified his blog by writing his own basic CMS. No trackbacks, comments submitted by php mail, no spam. Just content. He makes writing his own CMS sound as easy as installing MT. He could market his CMS to engineers as Nano-blogging. The word minimalism may not register with engineers. His choice to blog lite is appealing when I look at the grief Randy is having with his blogs after he upgraded to MT 3.121. Imperfect CSS, pages not displaying in any browser ...

Yesterday Mike and I rode through Assiniboine Park and St. Charles. The ground was dry, except for a few places where condensation had formed ice on the road. The temperature was around zero (C) and the wind was about 20, gusting to 30 kph. Not too cold. We had numb toes by the end, but otherwise our gear held up to the conditions.

My RSS feed to BBC World news today has two stories which mention England, Spain, racism, football (soccer), monkeys, apes, and paleontology.

It was the ads. I became furious at the ads cluttering the pages I was reading. In the early versions of Netscape, I could turn off images to speed up page loads, which was handy when I was using a 14.4 K modem, and even a 56 K modem, on a dial-up account. That capability has disappeared in modern browsers, and setting a browser to ignore images would ignore content. There are hosts of pop-blockers but no effective ad blockers for IE. Ad blocking in IE is generally limited to blocking new windows (pop ups) and banners - images of specific size at the top of a page. There is a product called Webwasher which tries build a blacklist of banned sites which was promising but configuring it was a problem. There is a free classic version, with no help files and the full version is not cheap. Finding a real IE ad blocker on Tucows or the Web is just a nightmare. Lots of cookie-cutter pop-up blockers, lots of shareware from little.wannabe.dot.com ventures.

After a few days of using IE again, I am missing features of Firefox. Tabbed browsing was good. I miss the Adblocker which showed the feeds connected to a web page and allowed very fine control. I could block a feed to one ad, or block all feeds from a source by wildcard. I had a problem using it on sites (eg the NY Times) which had several feeds because I had to reopen the tool for each block.

I started to write this as an update on Dave's struggle to come home now, and my struggle to trust him enough to assess his progress, but not to be pressured or conned. He is disappointed that I won't let him come home right now. He is reacting by withdrawing and threatening to live on the street again.

As I thought about the last few days, I began to think about how his girlfriend may see him, and I thought of the fairy tale of the girl who finds a frog, trust him, kisses him and finds a handsome prince. The full story is of course more complex as folklore web sites here and here will show.

Another few weeks have passed since Dave came home sick. He didn't stay, but he has made some changes and wants to come home. We are talking a lot, and he is being more mature and less angry.

I began to see bloggers identifying themselves as part of the Reality-Based Community in the last couple of days. It's an ironic response to a remark by a White House staff member who dismissed the the Reality-based community when he was talking to a journalist in 2002. Most of the proud members of the Reality-Based community are using it as evidence that the Bush team is wrapped up in its own rhetoric - its own separate reality, if you please. Some are using it as evidence that the Bush team is being run by religious zealots who reject science and reason.

I think this remark tells us that the people in the White House like being positive and pro-active and optimistic and supportive and team players, and that they have their own private code for talking about people on the outside.

After trying it for a few weeks, I have given up on the Mozilla Firefox browser. I have kept the Mozilla Thunderbird email program.

I read a short religious book called "Discernment" ("Discernment, The Art of Choosing Well" by Pierre Wolff, 2003, Liguiri/Triumph, Liguiri Publications, ISBN 0-7648-0989-X) this summer. It tries to present the methods of decision-making taught by St. Ignatius in 1533 in a modern context. The issue St. Ignatius faced was how to make decisions that favour salvation when God is not actually personally talking to you or to anyone you know. His answer was to avoid hasty and impulsive decisions, to follow a systematic process of discernment, to understand your beliefs, emotionally and intellectually, and to base decisions on fundamental principles.

A few days after 2004 American elections, I am tired of the commentary coming from the propaganists and leaders of both of the dominant factions. Republicans, barely restraining their glee at winning, talk insincerely about reaching out to liberals and healing. Liberals talk about how illiterate and stupid fundamentalists were tricked by propaganda, funded by corporate interests, into electing a hollow and stupid person to the most powerful position in the world. Some liberal leaders and propagandists are trying to distance themselves and the Democrats from the Sorry Everybody (Sorry, slow link) project and other distasteful expressions of the disappointment of Senator Kerry's supporters, although they share the sentiment.

There is a meadowlark on the Beaudry Park sign, and I made this chili after deciding not to paddle in the early winter ice floes on the Assiniboine River on sunny, windy day in November. I started with someone else's recipe, but I changed so much that I can report this as my own experiment that turned out well. I would change a few things so don't follow each step unless you have read through to the end. On the question of spices, you may want it hotter or less spicy.

I made it in a 5 quart dutch oven, and the recipe calls for some early saute and browning, followed by simmering to reduce liquid. It is heavy on the tomatoes, light on the beans, spiced for flavour rather than for raw burning power.

The quantities filled the pot. I was cooking with a view to freezing some for quick meals later. I served Claire and myself and had enough leftovers to fill 4 25 oz (750 ml) plastic containers. I would say this should be enough, with chips and bread on the side, to make 8-10 hearty servings or perhaps a dozen smaller servings.

The short story is that I didn't put my boat in the water.

Earlier in the week, the river was open. Ice was forming on ponds and potholes, but the river had been open. The days had been warm, with temperatures well above freezing. I thought I would take my kayak to Beaudry Park, west of Headingley and paddle on the Assiniboine.

I crossed the Assiniboine on Maryland, and glimpsed the river as I drove towards Assiniboine Park on Wellington Crescent. I saw a lot of floating ice. It appeared to be a couple inches thick, in flows from three to six or seven feet across. It seems to have formed along the shoreline at night, and broken up in the current. I thought it was collecting on shallow outside bends, I hoped that it might be more clear where the river ran straigher although I knew the prevailing overnight weather had been much the same across south-central Manitoba.

The ice was being swept close to shore at Beaudry Park. There is a little put-in in Headingley, but it was on a shaded shore and there was ice standing out from the shore. There was a lot of ice moving in the river. I decided that I did not want to try this. Most of my paddling has been on a lake in the summer. I have paddled in strong wind and waves, but I have not paddled in a current, or in ice, and I thought this was not a day to learn alone. Those flows weighed as much as my boat, and they were travelling with the current and wind.

I went home, checked recipes, and cooked a pot of chili.

Self-Help books on psychology, personal growth, and spirituality must be profitable for publishers and booksellers, because there are thousands of them. They vary in quality, and they don't come with any consumer warnings or ratings.

I spent the last couple of days with my brother in the woods, hunting deer. We used to go with our dad, but he decided his time had passed a couple of years ago.

We drive to Russell, a small community on the Yellowhead highway near the border of Manitoba and Saskatchewan. We stay in a hotel, get up about 3 hours before sunrise, and drive to a PFRA community pasture, on the west bank of the Assiniboine River. The terrain is a mixture of sand hills and prairies, with large areas of poplar scrub and some swamps where the water is trapped by ridges. The colours are largely brown, dun, grey. There are a few faded green leaves.

The leaves are down, there are frequent frosty nights, sunset is about 5:00 PM and it's dark by 5:30 PM as we have rolled the clocks back from Daylight Savings time. The weather turned cool, with many rainy days after Thanksgiving, which restricted our evening rides. We have managed to keep up one good ride on the weekends, until today. Mike, Steve and I rode to Bird's Hill last Sunday morning (Halloween), and returned into a stiff cold breeze. Mike and I rode through Woodhaven and St. Charles on Friday afternoon (Nov. 5), so we have managed to ride in every month from March through November this year. Mike had not posted the most recent rides on Bike with Mike when I composed this post due to technical problems with his server but I think he will fix that.

We had planned a ride yesterday afternoon (Nov. 6), but cancelled under the threat of showers and flurries. It's a cold sunny day today. I would ride, but I am packing for a hunting trip. If it doesn't snow too much and the temperatures don't fall too far below the freezing mark, we should manage a few more rides this fall.

The rape trial of a large portion of the adult male population of the Pitcairn Islands has finished with guilty verdicts against 6 of 7 defendants on some charges.

There were serious legal issues in the case, which have attracted learned commentary in the inaugural issue of the New Zealand Journal of Public and International Law (2003)1 NZJPIL 229 (this links to PDF version of the article) and general media commentary. One of the issues was whether British laws of statutory rape (sex with a girl under a certain age is automaticly rape because the girl is deemed to be unable to make a valid decision to have consensual sex) applied and were known to be in force. As the trials progressed and as the case was reported in the media, the issue in the cases seemed to be more basic - did these men coerce young girls, did the girls report it, and why nobody else in the community seemed to care what was going on. There is also a lingering question of whether the cascade of allegations was simply uncovered by the investigation, or whether some allegations were collusive, imitative or vindictive. The sensational allegations made in some child sex abuse cases in Canada have turned out to have been largely the product of imaginative kids and zealous investigators. The Courts will continue to sort that out.