Because someone's bound to ask at some point.

Yes, I've heard about the mail received by our New Conservative Party-affiliated Overlords. At some length.

I am displeased. Greatly.

While I have many reasons to wish that party as presently managed no small degree of discomfort, that sort of mail delivery is certain to backfire on too many innocent and not so innocent fellow citizens down the line. And we will not even get into the matter of what I suspect was the supreme discomfort of the person whose demise made the packages possible. The unkindness of inflicting that sort of an exit upon anyone is just Wrong.

I wish the responsible parties a swift arrest and prosecution, and an effective program of therapy prescribed and delivery immediately thereafter.

I already have Kate Ascher's The Works, so small surprise that I'd like to have this new book of hers to go with it. Useful for both illustration and writing reference, I suspect.

Maybe someday. One more reason to keep looking at the job boards...

More on other topics later in the day.

...but we're getting closer.

Here's where we were at the start of the month, by comparison. Keeping an eye on things, and I hope the help keeps coming to these guys.

My thanks to the author for granting permission to share this. Nota bene: I am not at present owned by cats myself, but the analogy was too good to pass up.

Originally posted by ms_danson at About this Blog

Today, in the States, it's Memorial Day.

Here, in Canada, it's a normal day. And yet it's not.

Out of concern over a large number of provisions in Bill C-38, affecting everything from environmental law to free speech protection, from preserving police forensic investigation capabilities to the reach and scope of the CBC; from fairness in Unemployment Insurance rules to the health of our national archives...I plan to "black out" my home page on June 4th as a participant in the Black Out Speak Out campaign.

I'm not quite sure how I can extend that to this Livejournal yet, but I hope to find a way.

And now back to your regularly scheduled blogging.

Today, I cancelled my subscription to that venerable newspaper.

To be honest, it's as much me as them. Neither of us are what we were when I started my subscription years ago. I can't even remember when I started, but it seems like at least a decade.

Time was, they had columnists like Naomi Klein and Spider Robinson back then. And they weren't owned by the phone company back then, either. So a certain amount of freedom from promoting corporate thought as gospel was there to be had. Hence Klein and Robinson.

No more.

Finances aside, the last straw was their Op-Ed stance on the new changes to the Unemployment Insurance rules planned via C-38. They're not as strident as columnists like Quebecor/Sun Media's Brian Lilley or the Citizen's Michael Taube. But they're marching in the same general direction. Problematic, that is.

So. We're done for the time being. I'm not ruling out resurrecting my subscription anymore than I am the idea of resuming full regular business with DC Comics. If I draw that line in the sand, and they cross it in any of several ways to my liking, that could be a different sort of problem.

We'll see. Finances permitting.

I just finished and sent off a new poster design for CAN-CON 2012.

Now it's off to the day job.

More after work on other stuff...

Thanks to alasdair for this linkage: 25 Handy Words That Simply Don't Exist in English.

I particularly like item # 21 on that list. And I wish that I had a better handle on # 16 in my life.    

One of the things that really got my attention, and that of more than a few others' as well, was the movie version of the Helicarrier. When I got that coffee-table book on the movie's production artwork, I was hoping for a large chunk of page-count devoted to that vessel. I was not let down.

Over at Facebook, box_in_the_box and I started out discussing the way Black Widow was depicted as out-conning a Trickster-god figure - sorry if that spoils any plot points at this juncture - and segued into discussing the 'Carrier. "Box" is of the mind that the movie provided the best depiction to date in any medium - including the original comics - for such a vessel as this.

I'm not sure that I can make any counter-argument. I have no expertise sufficient to that challenge, assuming it needed to be made.

There's been a couple of things about the specific comics version as shown in the Marvel Universe Handbook that caught my eye, though...both cobbled together from Marvel Universe Handbook imagery and line art from the Federation of American Scientists' website(or perhaps the USN's own public-access archives?).

Assuming that the Nimitz-class CVNs are the same length as the Helicarrier design given us by Eliot Brown...
Honestly, I usually get this techno-nerdy with Star Trek's fictional spacecraft... 

Well, the diasp0ra.ca issue seems to disappear when I use Safari rather than Firefox 11, and Firefox has been acting oddly over the last day or two. Maybe the next time I'm prompted to update to Firefox 12, I should do so?

Right.

So...Victoria Day. The third Monday of May is a federal statutory holiday to honour the memory of the monarch who signed off on promoting Canada from colony to Dominion back in 1867. Therefore, this is a long weekend. Considering the weather in Ottawa the city at the moment, perhaps we might all consider retiring to our basements, cellars, Diefenbunkers and other assorted underground hangouts to evade discomfortable levels of temperature without humidity.

Tomorrow I go back to the day-job, after three days' paid time off and a week's unpaid leave(that last subject to amendment, I hope). And I'm bracing for the next job hunt.

Heather Mallick's latest words echoing in my brain...

Well, it seems that for the past month, I can respond to other people's posts on diasp0ra.ca but not post any comments directly on my own. Not sure what's going on there.

Any theories?

Details here:

http://www.sfwa.org/2012/05/2011-nebula-awards-announced/

Congrats to papersky on her win!

(Also pleased as a Whovian to see "The Doctor's Wife" win as well!)

Interesting. I went digging for the Ottawa Citizen article in this morning's hardcopy edition on Unemployment Insurance only to find that the link to that article on the front page of the Citizen website was badly coded as of 7:40 AM and leads to a "Bad Request" page.</p>

There's a reference in that article to comments in favour of the proposed changes to our UI system by spokespeople from a group called the Canadian Federation of Independent Business. Here's their Wikipedia page, FWIW.

The page alleges that its founder back in 1971 was one John Bulloch...whose own Wiki page claims him to be a current member of the Georgia State Senate, a claim apparently confirmed by that legislative body's own web service. No direct link And that's all that's present on that Wiki page, again as of 7:40 AM this morning. No direct confirmation that he ever lived in Canada on the Georgia State Senate page, mind you.

He claims Republican affiliation, representing Georgia's 11th District.

If it's indeed the same guy, I'd be interested to know more about the linkages.

I've just had my lack of research made clear to me elsewhere on the net. Definitely not the same guy.

The American guy:
http://votesmart.org/candidate/biography/17680

The Canadian guy:
http://www.cfib-fcei.ca/english/article/1089-john-f-bulloch.html

...because I expect to be avoiding sleep if I can tonight. Not to mention the next few weeks.

Why?

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/ei-changes-to-target-repeat-claimants/article2436512/

(Note: I expect this article to be moved behind a paywall eventually, so I'll need an alternative covering the same ground that doesn't sit behind such a thing.)

Hoping you've had a good one today!

You might want to check in on this one:

http://www.cbc.ca/ontariotoday/2012/05/16/thursday-is-no-job-a-bad-job/

Diane, I think I'm a day or two early, but the best wishes for the day are well-earned in any case!