We have the guys on video.  They brought a gun and a sword. They eviscerated the victim, live on video, cut off his fingers and then killed the guy. Five guys got off (I suppose hanging around a guy with a gun and sword who ends up killing someone just isn’t a crime in this country), the sixth, Mr. Man (Wahab Dadshani), who defended HIMSELF against the full might of the Canadian prosecution, got convicted for MANSLAUGHTER. Murder just wasn’t proven. We’ve got a dead guy. A murder weapon. The act on video. (Lenny would say: I love it when they make our job so easy). But murder wasn’t proven. Bringing a gun and sword and someone ends up dead at the end, just isn’t premeditated. For manslaughter, Mr. Man will get up to six years, with time served he’ll probably be out next week.

What a joke.

…I am YEARS ahead of everybody else…

At a speech at an Ottawa Rotary Club, Ontario’s Municipal Affairs Minister Jim Watson told the members that the Ontario Government now mistrusts the City of Ottawa after they used money designated for infrastructure for snow removal instead.

I suppose the irony is lost on Mr. Watson: he works for the least trustworthy government since Bob Rae had his day(s):

We will not raise your taxes

Right.

Does anybody know how to spell anymore? Does anybody care? I know several people, grown-up people, with degrees, and double degrees, and high paying jobs, who don’t know the difference between “their”, “there” or “they’re”.

The worst cases can be observed on Facebook: I’m board (or better yet: bord), could of (as in: I could of passed this test if only my brain was functioning) and the one I saw this evening that put the icing on the cake: I am happy because my friends graced me with there presents. Instead of playing Facebook games all day long, maybe you should invest a couple of minutes brushing up on your spelling?

Look, I can understand young people: they’re trying to save their thumbs by minimizing everything while texting from a cellphone the size of a postage stamp, but I do not understand someone with an Master’s Degree writing: “There dogs we’re lose”. How did they get through school? And “I can wate” is not any shorter than “I can wait”, so why do it? Are you trying to be cool, or do you just not know how to spell?

And don’t get me started on the abuse the apostrophe has to take in our daily lives: “the cat lick’s it’s coat”? Are you just throwing those apostrophes in there because it looks cool? Do you have any living braincell?

Does anybody use the word “whom” anymore? Is it just too hard to put your brain to work, so you just use “who”, who’s to know? (you’re thinking:  isn’t that “whose”? No, it’s not.)

I am not saying I am perfect, and I am sure that, in my Dutchness, I slip in a few weird sentences and misspellings once in a while, as I am sure there are a few typos in this post, but eventhough English is my second language, I am proud to say that I know where the apostrophe goes, and you will never catch me putting down “there” instead of “their”.

So there.

As I was standing at 7 am, with about 200 other people, in a dingy and poorly lit hallway, waiting for the doors to open to give us access to the glorious Ontario healthcare a la 2009, I was thinking to myself: I just forked out another $900 last year to make our healthcare system better and faster, shorten wait times and whatever else was promised to us, and here we are, herded like cattle in a small hallway waiting for “the system” to serve us better. We were out at about 10:30. Just to do some bloodwork. Three and a half hours! Some of us have to get back to work, you know. That’s three and a half hours of waiting, staring at walls and feeling sorry for little old ladies with canes and walkers who also have to stand around for three and a half hours, because there are about 20 seats for the 200 people arriving every day.

And I was left wondering: does Dalton McGuinty stand in a hallway like this when he has to do some bloodwork? Does he get up at 6 am and arrive at work at around 11? Doesn’t he get sick and need some bloodwork done once in a while?

So I guess Twitter has gotten too big for its own good–the web site’s down half the time due to traffic, and I am now getting about 200 notifications a day of various vague people following me with such names as: Susan, Allison, Alyssa, Melody, James, Kristen, Erma, Jodie and Alexis: it’s like the cast of Melrose Place wants to be my friend! As a result, I now have 20 spammers listed as followers and the fun has been taken away. Much like Facebook, which was a good tool at first to keep in touch with people, but is now not much more than a glorified soapbox for narcissistic people who want show off what they have, and let us know about every fart they pass. That, and having to install sixty-five applications to watch a video. No thanks.

I think it’s time to quit Twitter, before it gets REALLY annoying: when Viagra wants to follow me, or worse yet, Elizabeth May.

Enjoy.

Thursday, April 23, 2009. Question period. The Liberals spent the first half hammering away at the government to get our own homegrown Omar the Terrorist back home. He’s a Canadian citizen, you see. A nice, Canadian citizen (and, uhm, an  accused terrorist with a looney-tunes terrorist family). Following this onslaught, the Liberals used the second half of question period attacking the government on failing to point out to the Americans that Canada is NOT the source of terrorists coming into the US.

Do you have to be a Liberal to see the logic in that? Because I sure don’t.

Neo from hallsofmacadamia requested this bit of code which will allow you to put your (ever growing!) Blogging Tories Blogroll list into a scrollable “window” to reduce its screen size:

Just wrap your <script></script> code from BT with a <div> like so:

<div style="width:220px;height:300px;overflow:auto;">

<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript"
 src="http://www.bloggingtories.ca/scripts/btblogroll.js">
</script>

</div>

The <script> code you already have, it comes from the BT site when you sign up.
The sizes specified in the style tag of the div are the width (22opx)  (make it the width of your sidebar minus 1 or 2) and the height (300px) of the scrollable box. You can put it to any size you want by changing these two numbers. A scrollbar will be automatically added by your browser if your list is longer than your height (by specifying the “overflow:auto” in the style tag). You can also add a border to it (any color or size) by adding:

“border:1px blue;” to the style tag, like so:

<div style='width:220px; height:300px;
  overflow:auto; border:1px blue;'>

Have fun!

Funny how the current deficit budget is now universally referred to as “The Conservative Deficit”, even after this current budget was forced upon us by the Liberals, NDPers and the bloc-heads after a mid-winter stand-off on the Governour General’s front stoop. As I recall, the Conservative’s Economic Update, brought forward in December, did not make us go into a deficit at all. It was after the three stooges reared their ugly heads and blackmailed the country, that the current deficit budget was tabled. In fact, the Libs and Dippers were crying foul that the $30B wasn’t enough.

So now it’s the “Conservative Deficit” eh? And as usual, Canadians just happily go along with it. After all, we Canadians like to hear what we want to hear and will go along with whomever says it at the time. Eventhough at another time he may say something completely different.

First they had Mr. Dithers, then they had The Dion-Witch Project, now they’re stuck with Mr. Flip-Flop. Those Libs just can’t get their act togther, can they?