Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Post 100!


I say no to drugs as much as the next guy but if Ryan Gosling asked me if I wanted to hang out with him in a motel room freebasing cocaine and listening to Broken Social Scene I would have to think about it a little before politely declining. There are worse things in the world than drugs (e.g. personal injury lawyers that drive Hummer H3s while drinking Mike's Hard Lemonade and viewing child porn), and movie stars as superlative as Gosling can make doing drugs look cool even if that is not at all the filmmaker's intention. It doesn't hurt to have models in bikinis lying around in the background either, tbh.

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Something to do with Kaleta's hands

"I spend a lot of my free time playing with Lego. I broke my hand three times last year and I read something about David Beckham doing them during the World Cup and I’ve been doing them ever since. I’ve done the Taj Mahal, I’ve done all kinds of things. I can’t normally sit down for long periods of time and concentrate on one thing. I don’t really have the patience for that, but I started doing Lego when I was injured and it’s really the only thing I can just sit down and do for hours"
-Patrick Kaleta, Buffalo Sabres Right Winger
I like this quote (from here) because it inadvertently makes out Patrick Kaleta to be someone who is basically an overgrown kid with ADHD. Here is a guy raised in Erie County right outside of Buffalo who gets paid about a million dollars a year to play hockey in his hometown and he spends his free time in Legoland. If Kaleta also owns a monster truck then he is living the real-life version of what a lot of eight year-old WNY kids would say they wanted to do when they grow up.

He also says in the article, "I was pretty active as a youngster" and, in reference to hockey, "I guess it was just a thing I tried out when I was really young for a way to burn off some energy,"* which adds credibility to my ADHD diagnosis.When you put all that together with his hit-everything, headbutting, trash-talking playing style and his multiple suspensions, I definitely don't think he will be roommates with his new teammate Cody Hodgson a.k.a. the chess-loving 2009 OHL most sportsmanlike player of the year.


*: Joe Sakic also had a lot of energy to burn as a youngster so his parents put him in the basement with a puck, a stick, and a laundry machine to shoot at and that's how he developed his amazing wrist shot.

Friday, February 24, 2012

Big Country, Bad Nickname

I was playing indoor soccer Wednesday night and, being as I am an unwieldy, large yacht of a man, someone on the other team referred to me as "Big Country" to identify who they were covering. I didn't let on but secretly this bothered me because I don't want to be associated with that terrible moniker. It makes you sound like a gargantuan country bumpkin and it has been the nickname for some embarrassing athletes. Seriously, check out how much the three professional sportsmen with the nickname "Big Country" suck/sucked:
  • Exhibit A: Bryant Reeves

    Trying to find a goofy picture of Bryant Reeves is like trying to hit fish in a barrel where the fish have been fattened and sedated, the barrel is fish-sized, and the gun you're using is a Davy Crockett.
    A mouth-breathing hippopotamus of a man, Bryant Reeves probably did more to kill professional basketball in Vancouver than anyone not named Steve Francis. No one ever went to the barber shop and said, "Give me the Bryant Reeves."
    BMI: 28.9

  • Exhibit B: Brad Eldred

    Your first clue Eldred sucks is he played for the Pittsburgh Pirates
    Brad Eldred had a marginal career split between the majors and the minors. He has a lifetime batting average almost right on the "Mendoza Line"* which Wikipedia defines very nicely as the line dividing acceptable mediocrity from unacceptable mediocrity. Not exactly something I want to be associated with, natch.
    BMI: 32.0

  • Exhibit C: Roy Nelson

    Yes, this man is a professional athlete, why ever do you ask?
    At least this UFC fighter has the cajones to embrace who he is; he has used Weird Al's "I'm Fat" as his entrance music. He competes in the heavyweight division but at six feet even, he should really be fighting at least two weight classes lower. The problem is that he would have to lose 40 pounds just to have a shot at doing so since that would only bring him into the range where a pre-fight water-weight cut would be feasible.
    BMI: 33.4

Now, I recognize that these three individuals are all still remarkably successful in that they are/were paid handsomely to play sports. I would even go so far as to say they fall into the 99th percentile for their specific skill (basketball player/baseball player/mixed martial artist). But that doesn't change the fact that they each incite an instinctive scorn with their shape, gait, and performance. Big Country? No thanks.

*: I would be remiss if I didn't point out that The Mendoza Line and Big Country are both the names of shitty bands with forgettable songs. It is fitting to end this post with Big Country's biggest hit, "In a Big Country"! The single reached number 3 on the US Billboard Hot Mainstream Rock charts and epitomizes why eighties music was so forgettable.

Thursday, February 23, 2012

Organic website design

Here's my summary of the Ontario organ donation website:
"Organ donation is super important and can save lots of lives; that's why we lead you to believe the donor card you filled out earlier was valid by itself when really you still need to fill out an online form that is a series of hyperlinks away from our homepage with each link hidden amongst dozens of others."
You need to click on this gif to see the animation
I would give my left kidney if it meant that government websites did not have to be discombobulating.

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Truth in Tourism

Just once I'd like to hear someone come back from a vacation to another country and, instead of talking about how great it was, admit, "Yeah, [Country X] sucks."

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Holiday Blunder Wonder

I can't believe that Dalton McGuinty managed to pick a Monday in February for Family Day that is a) not the Monday after the Super Bowl, b) not the Monday that the NHL trade deadline is most likely to fall on, and c) not the Monday that most closely corresponds to Valentine's Day. Instead he picks the Monday that falls on reading week. What a dick.

It almost makes me believe that there is a powerful post-secondary education lobby made up of evil university administrators that want students to suffer as much boredom in classes as possible. These are the same administrators that prefer to hire professors that blather and pontificate on inane student questions instead of actually teaching something.


To make matters worse, employers can reinstate work on any non-statutory holidays that employees may have already been enjoying to keep the number of annual statutory holidays at nine, which usually means workers lose the "Civic Holiday" at the start of August. When McGunity made a 2007 campaign promise to put a statutory holiday in February, I don't think the average voter interpreted that to mean that they were giving up a prime August long weekend for one of the shittiest Mondays of the year.

And you would think that McGuinty would at least put a holiday called "Family Day" during "National Family Week" in October, but no, that would make too much sense. Instead he decided to copy Alberta and Saskatchewan which is the inter-provincial equivalent to seeing a country bumpkin humping his cousin on the back of a rumbling snowmobile leaking oil and thinking, "Gee, that looks like fun."

Thursday, February 9, 2012

Oversight


Wow, the Japanese are ready for anything (except nuclear meltdowns).

Sunday, February 5, 2012

Every Year

Every year a big-name musical group performs at the Super Bowl half-time show. Every year I scream out, "THE BAND IS OUT ON THE FIELD!" And every year no one laughs.


Saturday, February 4, 2012

Missing Out

I just feel like, as a society, we don't talk enough about how the richest person in the world is a Mexican dude named Carlos Slim.

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Deficit Confusion

I am so confused about the deficit and I don't think I am the only one.

Less than five years ago, in September 2007, the Conservative Party of Canada ("CPC") announced Canada had just run a $13.8 billion surplus for the government's 2006-2007 fiscal year, inherited from the Liberals.

A year later, in October 2008, Stephen Harper said, "We'll never go back into deficit." He criticized Stephane Dion for "enormous spending promises that we can't afford," and said, "[Dion] would put Canada into deficit again."

Three months later, in January 2009, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty's federal budget stated that, "Canada needs to run a temporary deficit." After an "explicit adjustment for the risks to the private sector," Flaherty projected deficits of $33.7 billion in 2009–10 and a surplus of $0.7 billion in 2013–14.

Instead of the projected figure of $33.7 billion, the 2009-2010 federal deficit run by the CPC ended up being $55.6 billion, a difference of $21.9 billion. It looked like the 2015-2016 fiscal year was the earliest date by which the deficit could be eliminated and Flaherty's March 2011 update said as much.

But then, a month later during the 2011 federal election, the CPC promised to eliminate the deficit by 2014-2015. By an amazing coincidence, the CPC's outlook on balancing the budget became much rosier at the same time that an election campaign was taking place. Stephen Harper said, "Our platform is realistic, accurately costed and looks four years down the road." The CPC not only forecasted that the deficit would be gone by 2014-2015, but that Canada would run a $3.7 billion surplus that year.

Seven months later, the platform was not realistic any more. The November 2011 budget update from Flaherty said he would not balance the budget until 2015-2016. The projected surplus of $3.7 billion for 2014-2015 had turned into a projected deficit of $0.3 billion (and if history is any guide that might be off by tens of billions of dollars).


The CPC platform in 2011 was to eliminate the deficit by "controlling spending and cutting waste." In terms of controlling spending, we're told the CPC is ahead of schedule when it comes to making cuts and Tony Clement has told Canadians that cuts may be twice as deep as originally stated ($8 billion instead of $4 billion), yet the CPC is still going to fall short on the promise it made just 9 months ago during the election.

The CPC's excuse is that the economy is underperforming but: (A) they said they were going to "adjust" for the risk of poor performances; (B) the economy grew by an unexpectedly strong 3.5% in the third quarter; (C) government revenues for the first eight months of 2011 were up $5.7 billion, mostly thanks to income tax; and (D) the CPC prides itself on its effective management the economy. The party's "steady hand on the tiller" supposedly makes Canada's economy better than all other G-7 nations, yet they consistently miss the target they are aiming at.

The other confusing part about all this is that half of the CPC's plan to eliminate the deficit was to control spending but that has not really happened. For example, the party's failure to get deficit reduction on track did not dissuade the CPC from moving ahead with its omnibus amendments to the criminal law in Canada despite the costs associated with those amendments.


For a party that prides itself on its nuanced understanding of the Canadian economy and its fiscal conservatism, it seems like the CPC has no idea what is going on with the economy or how to meet its budgetary objectives.