Wow.

I just seem to be posting farther and farther apart, don't I.

What-all's happened since I last wrote you?

First, we had an election in my home province. The same old bastards got in (the ones who insisted that $1.8 billion in cuts to schools, hospitals and social programs was utterly necessary and are this year parcelling out[PDF file] a $2 bn dollar surplus), but they no longer have the 77-seat (out of 79) majority they did last time around.

I was hoping for a minority government and the election of a Green Party member or two. But our current voting system lends itself to strategic voting, and no-one wanted the clowns to own the Legislature as previously. So many potential Green voters chose the safer option of pooling their votes with New Democratic Party voters in order to put up a united block.

However, 58% of the voters (2% shy of the required majority) also voted for the single transferrable vote system. Which proves people can occasionally be smart in large numbers, though perhaps that's an exclusively Canadian phenomenon? Basically, STV ridings elect multiple members, rather than the one-riding-one-seat system currently in place. People choose a number of candidates from their riding, and rate 'em in order of preference.

Elsewhere, Karla Homolka is being released after serving twelve years. Clearly not enough, in light of what she did, but that's the deal that was made, back when they didn't have her former husband on video. Nonetheless, a campaign to have her freedom restricted upon release has apparently succeeded. The scary part is that by the conditions all regular parolees face on release, Homolka will have to end a multi-year relationship with a totally different murderer[Sorry--it's the T.O. Sun].

Maher Arar's inquiry grinds slowly towards what will never quite be justice. Justice, I think, might require that the people who (a) handed him over to the US and (b) allowed the US to ship him to Syria for outsourced torture be handed over to Syria and allowed to experience Canadian-American Justice for themselves.

Sorry--that comment wasn't very fair or balanced. Neither apparently is NPR. The Bush League has decided that they won't stop until all news coverage is as Fair as Fox, Balanced as Limbaugh, and as critical of the Administration as Crazy Annie.

[Note, though that Coulter was, for once, actually in posession of a partially-true nugget. The Royal Canadian Engineers sent a very few "advisers" to Viet Nam. I've met a couple. But Canada did not commit troops for combat. And Coulter's still irrelevant.]

In my own life: I've been learning to fence, courtesy of my sister who bought us both lessons as part of my birthday present. This is sibling rivalry at a new level. In a recent match between us, she kicked my butt 5-1. It was noted by other participants that our bout was much more ferocious than the others between classmates.

Otherwise, I've been working fifty-hour weeks at my regular job; Along with posting to my commercial blog, fencing lessons, and trying to reassemble my Nash before the end of July . . . I'm busy!

Tomorrow, I'm going to a motorcycle show 'n shine with Thirty-Something. I confess a degree of surprise that it's 30's scene. Hoping to get a few pix on the SO's new digital camera.



Here's one of the recent pix from said camera.






Anonymous Dude in Black and White