Canada’s Debate

I know that a lot of people have made up their mind to vote for Stephen Harper, and I know their reasons. There is no disputing that Paul Martin’s leadership of this country has been ineffective and in cases downright incompetent. There is also no disputing the fact that the Liberal Party has suffered tremendously under his watch. What amazes me though is that people are marching straight into the Conservative groupthink so eagerly, as if they will be some sort of panacea for our good-government crisis.

I read a lot of boards, blogs, forums and emails (not to mention newspapers) and one thing that amazes is that nobody wants or cares enough to defend Harper’s policies: policies which I know for a fact some people who are voting for him reject outright. (Continue reading…)

There are generally three things that cause me to think about death, and in the past couple of days I’ve done all three. So naturally yesterday that is where my thoughts turned. In order they are:

1. Attending funerals
2. Watching the movie Frequency
3. Protracted battles with Mr. Toilet

Between the funeral yesterday (for my deceased grandfather’s brother in law) and the horrible illness brought on by a half-spoiled baby carrot, and my having watched Frequency two days ago, it is only natural that my thoughts turned to the moribund. Unlike my earlier grapplings with mortality and death however, yesterday’s introspection didn’t depress or sadden me. I’ve come to accept the fact that death is a singularly inescapable event, and that in all likelihood it happens in much the same way that someone loses consciousness any other way; with the proviso that you don’t get up again. (Continue reading…)

Ok, unless someone can figure out why Firefox won’t let me continue my session from Trent’s library database so I can access the Cambridge Scientific Abstracts (or EBSCO host, or Canadian Scholar’s Portal for that matter), my post on mandatory minimum sentences will have to wait. I’ll take another stab at it tomorrow.

Ok, so it’s debate time. I skipped the opening statements because they’re boring beyond compare. So lets watch shall we. I’ll be sticking with the same format as before.

8:07 Good question from the moderator. “Do you have any evidence?”

8:08 Toronto Waterfront? What’s Harper getting at here. I should be fair and say that he effectively went after Martin however.

8:10 Duceppe once again has the best (at least in terms of honesty and practicality) response: there should be appearance of controversy.

8:12 I like the idea of direct confrontation… but it only took 30 seconds for Martin to turn on it and attack Layton directly. (Continue reading…)

I have to admit, when I said on friday that I was trying to redesign the site using a three column format, even I thought I was crazy. Truth be told, I almost drove myself such. But I didn’t, and you get to enjoy the results. You will notice that the site now has three columns (obviously), but there are also several other changes that I’ve made for various reasons.

• Redesigned the banner. It has been “suggested” to me that my old one was a bit amateurish. So I thought I’d take a slightly different approach. That is in fact me. By slicing and dicing I was able to integrate the banner graphics into the page content, giving everything a less blocky feel.
• The radio app is gone. I was sorry to write this one off, but it became necessary. I could not get that sucker to work in Internet Explorer. It just wouldn’t hold in one of the side columns, and it would be out of place in the post content. Nobody was really using it anyways.
• I added a theme switcher. (Bottom right) If you like the old one, feel free to go back.
• The order of my links and menus has been redone. On the left you will find the static content: links, meta, blogroll, etc. On the right is the internal dynamic stuff: calendar, recent posts display and categories. And the theme switcher.
• I have also added a “sticky” post option. Posts that I want to stick around will now stay at the top: the date is a dead giveaway.

Anyways, I hope you enjoy my site for both its content and its shiny new theme. Please feel free to comment. I haven’t made up my mind if the category-images are too intrusive or not, so let me know.

Well we’re rapidly approaching crunch time as far as the election is concerned, if the Liberal blogger emails I’m getting for some reason are any indication:

This week has looked bad in the polls. However, I hope you have all noticed that the Conservatives have been gradually losing their lead in the past few days. The election is far from over and I expect that each and every one of you will continue to support the Liberal cause on your personal blogs and Progressive Bloggers.

(Continue reading…)

Don’t be alarmed if you come around here and it looks different, or broken, or shitty for that matter. I’m playing around with the possibility of implementing a three column layout and it’ll be easier for me to do that if I have the theme active as I edit it.

I will update this thread ocassionally. Stay tuned for my next post for my regularly scheduled programming.

Sunday update:

Well, I’ve made some definite progress here. Unfortunately Internet Explorer is margin-retarded and it loads this page all wrong. What I am thinking of doing, since I don’t know CSS well enough to make everything crossbrowser friendly, is figuring out a way to run the two scripts simultaneously. IE users will see my page using the old theme, and Firefox/Opera/Mac users will see the new one. If anyone knows *how* to do this, I am kind of stuck here.

So, what’s more depressing than a 24 year old unemployed pseod-student? A 24 year old unemployed pseudo-student who has to vote in the upcoming election.

Ok, I admit it, I’m not actually depressed, or depressing. I’m actually feeling quite good after buying some nice clothing today. Normally I wouldn’t be completely enthralled by the trappings of material purchases, but the fact is that I look good in a red shirt and sports jacket. Regardless, I’m faced with a tough dilemma, as is everyone with an ounce of political insight. (Continue reading…)