Ken

Well, tonight the Habs will retire Ken's #29. It would have been neat for him to be leader of the party when he got his number retired, but Ken's definitely had a good run so far. His political career doesn't seem to be shaping up quite as good as his playing career was, but that would truly be a remarkable feat. While I am way too young to ever watch Dryden play live, his stats are just unbelieveable. You would almost guessed he retired since he just got bored of winning. He had almost as many shutouts as losses!

He was a great player, and it's very nice to have the Habs honour him this year. Ken's a great guy, and hopefully the Habs can come out strong tonight and beat the Sens, for Ken's sake.

New Session

Well, parliament resumes tomorrow, and the Conservatives have decided to go on the attack. Basically, since the Conservatives actually have a war chest, they're going to try to hammer home on Dion. This has to mark the earliest that a party has gone on the attack, maybe even a year before the election.

Now, we knew the Cons had to go negative at some point, since they haven't had nearly enough positive to run on. I can definitely see their logic: they try to define the fact that Dion hasn't had a good record on the environment now, so that when Dion tries to run on it later, he won't have the credibility. It's not a terrible plan, but I think we'll see it backfire.

Going negative early doesn't make people like the conservatives more, and it keeps stuff in the news. By releasing these now, the Liberals have lots of time to respond, and while it's going on, it just reminds people that conservatives have been even worse. I would have thought that they would wait until Dion is even more committed to the environment as his #1 priority in an election campaign, and then tear it down, without leaving the Liberals enough time to recover.

And it's an interesting note to have it go right before we start this session. With the chance of an election at any moment, hard to say what will go down. Should be interesting to watch.

Dis-Mayed

Well, there's been some recent buzz about Colin Mayes' reaction to the native joke. Now, it's definitely wrong to call natives names like "Tonto" or "Chief" (unless if they happen to be a real chief, or their name is Tonto), and had he done that, he would definitely deserverve to be punished. But he didn't say that, he just didn't overly react when someone else did. I mean, he probably never even realized the comments made in the joke (which may say more about society's views and perceptions on stuff than his personal viewpoints). I wouldn't rake a guy over the fire for it, at least.

But then, that would be if he at least apologized for his responce. Step down as chair of the committee, say you're sorry for praising the joke, and be done with it. 5 minute story, nobody makes anything about it.

But then, he goes and tries to avoid it. In Scott's blog linked above, he points out that Mayes seemed indifferent to the terms, and only when asked if he thought himself saying them was offensive, he brought out the "Geez, yeah, I guess it could be" line. For that, I think it's fair to point it out, and to try to get him to realize what he did was wrong. The better thing would be to try to get those type of stereotypes and comments out of the jokes, but his apologizing for his comments would be a start.

Banning

Well, everyone seems to have their own opinions about Dion letting AdScammers back into the party.

Now, for some of them, the ban was probably a little harsh, or just a stupid symbolic manoeuvre, since it really doesn't matter if they can be a member of the party. And in all facts, I don't think it really matters if we let them in or not.

But we should try to do as much as a party as we can to avoid bringing back the sponsorship scandal. We've avoided it for a long time, and no point in possibly trying to bring it back up. And as meaningless as it was to kick them all out, it's just as meaningless to bring them back in.

nofollow

Wikipedia is a great ressource. We all use it. It's become as much a verb as Google has. Do any search, and it's always right up there near the top. For example, I just searched for "George Bush". whitehouse.gov is #1, Wikipedia is #2 (GOP is #3 and bushorchimp.com is #4, but I digress). Why is it so high? Well, everyone and their mother link to it. Search engines work based on link. My writing this has just helped Calgary Grit's search engine results (not by very much, since my page is one small page, but if 1000000 people did, it can make a big difference).

So why am I writing this? Well, in something that most people don't know, you can also tag a link as a "nofollow" link. In that case, you're not saying to the search engines that that counts as a "real" link. To the user, it works the exact same way. To the search engine, it's as if it was never there in the first place.

Now both of those previous paragraphs seem pretty separate, but the reason I write this is that recently, Wikipedia has decided to make all external links nofollow. This means that Wikipedia has effectively stopped allowing their pages to "vote" for others. So on the Wikipedia article about George Bush, the link at the bottom of the page to the official White House biography now no longer counts as a vote from Wikipedia that that is a good article.

So why does this matter? Well, by making all their external links as "nofollow", Wikipedia has effectively secluded themselves from the rest of the internet. They take links from everybody, thus helping out their rankings, but now they no longer share that wealth. I find this to be wrong, since I believe that one of the main purposes for Wikipedia is to freely give out information. By discounting outward links from wikipedia, which are mostly the references for the wikipedia articles, they have made it so that the secondary reference becomes almost more valuable than the first.

Now, there are valid reasons to put the nofollow on, since there are lots of links on wikipedia that shouldn't count towards search engine results, but by putting it everywhere, it could lower the results for lots of truly valid ressources. Hopefully Wikipedia decides to go back on this plan, and maybe implement a system where they can verify a link, so that a good link will actually count, and they can continue to contribute to the overall knowledge of society.

TVB had too much ethanol...

...when they tried to censor a Canadian Renewable Fuels Association ad. As Stepen Taylor eloquently presents the whole situation, it seems fairly obvious that the Television Bureau of Canada is overstepping their bounds here. So because biofuels are a "hot topic", that makes any ad associated with them as an "opinion" piece? Does that make any sense whatsoever to anybody?

Now, I'm not totally against any sort of censoring whatsoever. There are lots of stuff that we shouldn't allow, and for some stuff, I do think it is fair to require advertisers to clearly state who is behind the ad. And while the logo at the end of the ads may not be on for the full 6 seconds required (which seems like an inordinatly large amount of time for a commercial), I think the ads are pretty clear in who's expressing this viewpoint.

So TVB, keep on regulating ads that spew hateful messages, or blatant lies, but don't knock down people for trying to remind the public to think green.

In shadows

Well, Dion has announced his new shadow cabinet. What do I take from it? It's pretty big...

It seems that everybody got some sort of role. Hard to say too much about who got shafted or celebrated today, since you never know what's planned for the roles. Overall, at least nothing sticks out like a sore thumb. It seems pretty balanced between leadership support, with some key roles (finance with McCallum, environment with McGuinty) going to Iggy people and GK's people featured prominantly all around.

What'll be most interesting is that we'll have to see how well people can learn their roles, especially if we're heading to an election this spring, like everyone seems to think. If some of teh critics need some time to learn their roles, we may not be too excited to head into an election. However, if some of them can learn quick and shine, it'll give us a lot of momentum heading forward. I look forward to hearing these guys and girl perform!

Faux Klingons

Stop the Klingons!

Multiculturalism

Lots has been made about multiculturalism recently, with Wajid's decision and with Kenney's appointed as secretary of state for multiculturalism.

Reading an article in the Ottawa Sun by Greg Weston, and you'd swear that the Conservatives were the first government to recognize multiculturalism. Now I applaud the fact that the Conservatives are willing to recognize that there are multiple cultures, but looking it up, it appears that the basic position was first appointed in 1972. Now, as I said, it's good that the Conservatives are finally deciding that minorities are important in our society, but maybe we should think of the fact that they didn't have a secretary of state for multiculturalism in the first year of their government instead of the fact that they now decided that one could be useful to them.

Kalifornia

Well, I'm finally set up here now, so I should be able to resume blogging now. Before I do, I should remind everyone to watch the premiere of 24 tonight, which is the best show on tv. And with 4 hours of it tonight and tomorrow night, you can't go wrong.

New Term

So what's going on in the world the last few days? I don't know. I'm busy moving in and trying to get settled into my place in California that I haven't had the chance to follow the news much recently. I did hear of Khan's move to the dark side (followed by a good round of Star Trek punnery), and my opinion: I don't care. Khan was never a guy who I think most real Liberals cared about losing. Sure, it's never good to lose a member of the team (no matter how bad a member they are), but I don't see any bad or good that will come of this.

Hopefully my housing can get resolved in short order, and then I'll be able to get back to my regular postings.

Go Canada!

Good luck to the Canadian Juniors against the Russians this morning (or by the time they get started, I guess it will probably be this afternoon)! Let's hope Price can continue his hot play and lead Team Canada to victory today!

Happy New Year!

Well, 2006 has come to a close now, and it was a packed year for political junkies. Conservatives win the election in January, Liberal leadership race from February to December, Democrats win in November in the US. Heck, I was even getting interested in the Alberta PC leadership for a while there as well!

I won't bother going through any year end lists or countdowns or recaps, since it seems everyone else has them already, and I don't really feel like taking too much time away from my short time at home to do that. I hope everyone has had a great holiday season, and wish everyone the best of luck in the upcoming year, wherever that may take you!