Love on the rocks

Ex-lovers in charge when ship crashed
Report blames total safety system breakdown
Cindy E. Harnett, Canwest News Service, with files from Reuters
Published: Thursday, March 13, 2008
VICTORIA - As the Queen of the North ferry sped toward the rocks of Gil Island off B.C.'s northwest coast, the two crew members in charge of the vessel at the time were deep in a personal discussion with the bridge lights dimmed and music playing in the background -- oblivious to the danger.
Former lovers 4th officer Karl Lilgert and quartermaster Karen Bricker had ended their affair just weeks before. The doomed voyage was their first shift together since their breakup.
Those intimate details were part of a much-anticipated Transportation Safety Board report released yesterday, nearly two years after the BC Ferries ship sank on March 22, 2006, killing two passengers.
Rumours that a romantic relationship contributed to the accident have circulated for a long time, and the TSB refused to provide more details on the pair's conversation -- saying only that the bridge crew co-operated fully with the investigation.

Maybe she was studying English

I've been accused of hogging the bathroom in my day, but this is unbelieveable.

NESS CITY, Kan. - Authorities are considering charges in the bizarre case of a woman who sat on her boyfriend’s toilet for two years — so long that her body was stuck to the seat by the time the boyfriend finally called police.
Ness County Sheriff Bryan Whipple said it appeared the 35-year-old Ness City woman’s skin had grown around the seat. She initially refused emergency medical services but was finally convinced by responders and her boyfriend that she needed to be checked out at a hospital.

The Sheriff is Mr. Whipple? Any relation to this Mr. Whipple ?

John McCain=Maverick

Bugs Bunny - Oily Hare

A shitty way to learn a language

When I first came to Japan, I came to teach English at a chain of school that was to linguistics what Mickey D's is to haute cuisine. Nova talked a good game, but their real selling point was that they had the lowest prices if you bought enough lessons at once and had schools at every station, which means they are thicker on the ground in a city like Tokyo or Osaka than Tim Horton's in Toronto. They were the biggest employers of foreigners in the country with hundreds of schools and thousands of employees.

It was very much a place ruled by moronic policy manuals and systems designed to squeeze as much money out of customers as possible and there is little good to be said about it. At least I wore a necktie instead of a hairnet, but if you weren't in the glass-walled closet classroom kissing ass flirting entertaining teaching a group of one to three Johns suckers students, or trying to get toddlers to stop punching you in the nuts crying for their mommy being scared of the big pale-skinned blue-eyed giant learn English, you were expected to be in the parlour Voice room kissing ass flirting sarcastically abusing shaking your moneymaker entertaining facilitating English communication among the waiting psychopaths, suckers, random strangers and mental patients off the the street and no I'm not exaggerating students. 

Too make an already too long story shorter, NOVA corkscrewed in for a landing last fall thanks to the sleazy, grasping fuckery of its president and owner, throwing thousands of young foreign teachers out of work after not paying them for a month or more. Suffice to say if this man were to walk into the wrong bar today, he'd get his ass kicked until his nose bled, but I digress.

This week I finally found out what happened to all the lame textbooks the schools had been using since the early 1980s

For those who can't make out the label, this is Let's study English! toilet paper.

Cheaters never prosper
I know you'll be shocked, as I was, to learn that Republicans like to cheat in elections.

16,000 Republicans in Cuyahoga crossed over and voted Democratic in primary
Sunday, March 09, 2008
Amanda Garrett
Cleveland Plain Dealer Reporter
A staggering 16,000-plus Republicans in Cuyahoga County switched parties when they voted in last week's primary. That includes 931 in Rocky River, 1,027 in Westlake and 1,142 in Strongsville. More than a third of the Republicans in Solon and Bay Village switched. Pepper Pike had the most dramatic change: just under half its Republicans became Democrats. And some of those who changed - it's difficult to say how many - could be in trouble with the law.
At least one member of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections wants to investigate some Republicans who may have crossed party lines only to influence which Democrat would face presumed Republican nominee John McCain in November.

All may be fair in love and war, but all is not legal in politics.

Lying on the pledge is a felony, punishable by six to 12 months in jail and a $2,500 fine.
Election watchers said they don't know any cases that have been prosecuted in Ohio. And it's unlikely the Republican crossovers influenced the outcome since Clinton handily defeated Barack Obama, said Edward Foley, an election-law professor at Ohio State University.

The result isn't always what matters when a crime is committed - attempted robbery and attempted murder are still crimes, as is conspiracy to commit a felony in some cases.

It started a few weeks ago when conservative radio powerhouse Rush Limbaugh suggested that his Republican following cross over during the primary to vote for Clinton. Clinton, Limbaugh argued, would be easier for McCain to beat in November than Obama.
Soon, local morning radio show host Bob Frantz echoed Limbaugh on WTAM AM/1100, and the buzz began to grow.

The Republicans managed to steal Ohio in the last presidential election (see Greg Palast's Armed Madhouse or his explanation here of how votes don't always get counted. As Stalin said "its not the people who vote that counts, its the people who count the votes") The Democrats should be screaming about this and demanding that people be prosecuted for breaking election laws. The lengths to which these scofflaws will go to cling to power really knows no bounds.

.... ... ... door ... ... .. ... ass .. .... way out - I'm sure you can fill in the blanks
In what I'm sure was a moment of emotional conflict for Jon Stewart, it was revealed today that grating, talentless, preening hack with pretentions of intellectual adequacy Tucker Carlson will no longer have his own extended version of the two-minute hate on MSNBC.

And there was much rejoicing.

Children of the Corn

Rep. Steve King (not exactly as pictured) announces that

He Who Walks Behind The Rows has commanded him

to stand for a fourth term in Congress.

How do people this stupid manage to get out of the house in the morning without cutting their own wrists on the mirror they shatter trying to grab " that guy I keep seeing in the bathroom" and do they really think there are people even stupider than them that will fall for their "klever planz"?

Lawmaker: Terrorists to cheer Obama win
By James Beltran
Associated Press Writer
/ March 7, 2008
DES MOINES, Iowa—An Iowa Republican congressman said Friday that terrorists would be "dancing in the streets" if Democratic candidate Barack Obama were to win the presidency.
Rep. Steve King based his prediction on Obama's pledge to pull troops out of Iraq, his Kenyan heritage and his middle name, Hussein.
"The radical Islamists, the al-Qaida ... would be dancing in the streets in greater numbers than they did on Sept. 11 because they would declare victory in this war on terror," King said in an interview with the Daily Reporter in Spencer, Iowa. King said his comments were not meant to demean Obama but to warn how an Obama presidency would look to the world.
"His middle name does matter," King said. "It matters because they read a meaning into that."

The AP gets it wrong, sort of. King was not being interviewed by the Daily Reporter, but speaking on radio at the time of his incredibly assinine remarks. Read the original piece for the pure unadulterated wingnuttery.

The Carpetbagger report gives us the story and then turns Rep. King into Swiss cheese with the machine gun of truth pumping out bullets made of all the other vile and stupid things King has said in the past

There are many good things about Iowa worthy of admiration, the Iowa Writer's Workshop not the least of them. People there should do the right thing and vote for anyone other than Steve King in November.

Happy feet



Nero just had to fiddle, George's gotta dance!

Maintenance time

Go here to have your screen cleaned. No, really --trust me, I'm a blogger.

"We are the weird, so hide your children"



Sometime around here, beers are not enough...

Out of hit points and missed the saving throw
The man who co-created Dungeons and Dragons and sparked the rise of role-playing games and gaming generally in the 70s and 80s, Gary Gygax died earlier this week. I enjoyed the game very much in my younger day (yes, I know you're shocked that such a suave, debonaire, man of the world like myself was high school nerd -- cope with it) and many of the friendships I formed playing the game are still going strong. I learned team work, communication, problem-solving, history, mythology and creativity...and only a little bit about worshipping demons and black magic and dice odds, honest. Thanks Gary.

Granny get your gun

This silly little story on CNN the other night can be spun this way- America is gun crazy - and that-This brave pistol-packing old woman was defending her property, as is her right. I don't know that I would call it a "gun incident" if I were writing it up or claim the journalist was "almost shot" but many of the comments are hilarious and a perfect crystalization of what is wrong with a certain subgroup of Americans.

Joe Adams

March 2nd, 2008 6:40 pm ET
Foreigners need to bone up on Texas law before they go wandering across the terrain. They need to remember that bullets don't care who you are. Bravo, lady!!!
If he got shot, she'd be on solid legal ground for the hole in his body.

David

March 2nd, 2008 6:43 pm ET
This story seems a bit biased. I see nothing wrong or unusual in a home owner being legally armed on her own property, it would be stupid to do anything less in this situation. I say good for her. A strange man person standing in my front yard would receive a similar welcome.

Ben

March 2nd, 2008 6:46 pm ET
Sounds like someone needed to pay better attention to their surroundings. That being said, I doubt the old lady would of really done anything unless the reporter seemed threatening somehow. That being said, the old lady certainly had the right to
point that gun at him for being on his property.

Mike
in Indy

March 2nd, 2008 7:17 pm ET
She had every right to protect her property and herself he could have been a nut job. She is elderly living in the country and if it were my mother I would want her to be able to do the same.
This probably happens all to often living close to the President's ranch. I'm sure all these people are just sick of the populous showing up and sneaking on their property either to protest or to photograph the President. I for one am sick of the prying eyes of the media in everyone's lives. Bravo to this young lady! If Denmark and other Europeans don't like it than stay in Europe.

son of liberty

March 2nd, 2008 7:17 pm ET
Idiot Europeans and other socialists/communists (xiaoli, chinese?). This sums up everything that's wrong with YOUR countries. Trust your government fools, in America power is in the hands of the people.

Life, Liberty and Property.

Dr.Richard Gaines(Cicero)

March 2nd, 2008 7:18 pm
Good for the lady. Media people do not own our world;especially foreign media people. Watch the hell where you wander,Old Boy !!!

Terry

March 2nd, 2008 7:19 pm ET
He should have been more aware of his surroundings. When in foreign countries I pay extra special attention to my surroundings.
She was well within her rights, and as long as we keep the likes of Hillary or Obama out of the White House citizens can count on being having the right to defend their property


Samuel Mullen-Perron

March 2nd, 2008 9:55 pm ET
You know, She did not know who he was or what he was doing there. As far as she knew, he may have been there to hurt her or burglarize her home. the way I see it she did what any normal red blooded American would do. I am from Oregon and they do the same thing there as in Texas. Oregon Legislature though is trying to get rid of the rights of Gun Owners. Alot of that is because of the Homosexuals who want their rights to do what they want and they figure that their lives are endanger because of the Gun owners. Good, let them think that. As for this incident, Great! I am pleased that people are taking a stand for their rights for a change and not backing down from a Facist Government who wiretaps our phone calls, monitor our emails, you name it! Maybe the Secret Service and that idiot that they are protecting will take note now and realize just who runs this country.

David

March 2nd, 2008 9:55 pm ET
Maybe she thought it was an immigrant crossing the border…..to avoid things like this in the future we should re-deploy our army in Iraq and put them on the border with orders to kill anthing that crosses the border….problem solved YAY!

And those are not the most extreme examples of the mind set I'm talking about. Admittedly about half the commenters expressed embarrassment on behalf of the United States or dislike for gun-toting Texicans or suggested the reporter was lucky it hadn't been Dick Cheney who came out packing heat. One simply said that Cheney's mom needs to relax.
Seriously though, while I agree that old people everywhere have the irrefutable right to tell young whippersnappers to get the hell off their lawns, bringing a piece along to show you're serious is not done in the civilized world. The cowboy noise about how this "pore ole woman lives out in th' cuntry an needs to protect herself" is such bullshit. She lives down the street from the president. If the guy on the cell phone in her front yard had been Secret Service, she'd be pushing up daisies now. It's not like she shouldn't have had some idea he was a reporter, there were a crowd of the them across the street.

As PJ O'Rourke once said (about Somalia and Ethiopia if I recall correctly) they might be past helping, the only solution might be to fence the place off, pat people down when they leave and drop ammunition inside for the rest until they finally kill each other off.

Death don't have no mercy in this land

It has not been a good few weeks for Canadian music

RIP Jeff Healy 

RIP Willie P. Bennett

or for my family either -  I learned today that one of my cousins died of cancer this week, and one of my favorite high school teachers passed away a couple of weeks ago. Sometimes living overseas really sucks.  

"Every picture tells a story, don't it?"
And some of the stories told by these are ones I'm not sure I want to hear. Especially the one involving the first guy. And I'll go out on a limb and suggest that perhaps numbers 2, 7, 9 and 13 are not in front of the camera for the first time.

Doughy E. Pantload, Super Genius





A "long-time reader" fluffs the Pantload in such a way that I can only assume the letter is a joke that, typically, Jonah didn't catch. They're laughing Jonah, but their not laughing with you.

Instead, you've written a brilliant, hyper-intellectual yet accessible book correcting a historical fraud (sadly, sans women's prison movie humor) AND you've sold a ton! You, Jonah Goldberg, are a Super Genius.

Yes, a "Super Genius." If only he had his own copy of the Acme catalogue, he'd really show that pesky roadrunner those pesky liberals who was boss.





Really, it must be difficult for him having to shave his palms every morning before sitting down to the keyboard in his Capt. America underoos going to work.

Other uses for those ribbon stickers

You've seen the Asylum Street Spankers' take on the ribbons, here's another.

"My name is SUE, How do you do?"

 The other other videos I posted earlier are the reasons everyone loves Johnny Cash, and they are excellent reasons. But here's why I love him - because he played these songs:

Kris Kristofferson has told the story about how Johnny Cash was warned not to use the word "stoned" when he performed Kristofferson's song "Sunday Morning Coming Down"  and didn't take kindly to the suggestion.

Denied!

A little music for our special friend His Lordship Conrad, Baron Black of Crossharbour

I love the smell of justice in the morning, it smell like...schadenfreude.

Our spiritual leader of the moment is the Man in Black

"Hi there, I'm Johnny Cash"

History always repeats itself, first as tragedy, 

then as farce

and then as tragedy again

A nice round number

What a long strange trip it's been and continues to be.

1,000 flips and 40,000 clicks ago, I laid down this riff - and stayed there.

Knock me your lobes one more time and I will hip you to the story of the Woodshed.

Believe it or not, the first two blogs I ever read were Powerline and Glen Reynolds. I'd read some piece of crap in Time about political blogs in the wake of the 2000 U.S. presidential fiasco that mentioned those two and went to take a look. Naturally, I was appalled after reading just a few posts. Heh, indeed.  Much like Todd Snider when he first saw Jerry Jeff Walker, I thought to myself "Well shit, I could do that" - so I looked around for a better example of what blogs should be and I found my blogdaddy, Atrios.  To paraphrase Lord Buckly, some fellas are Kos cats, some are Josh Marshal men, some dig on Tbogg, but me I started out as an Atriot. 

This blog started as a group forum for me to writing messages back and forth with the members of my tribe back home, but very quickly became a one-man show. Hanging out in the comment threads at Ecshaton in the 2004 campaign ("Mars, Bitches!") lit a fire under me to start writing my own screeds here and eventually I started copying stuff from work onto the blog and discovered the Canadian blogosphere and things got more and more fun and interesting as I looked around and found more and blogs and more and more material. 

I moved on from Eschaton and started commenting a lot on a variety of blogs, especially the Galloping Beaver and Axis of Evel Knievel, back before Dave Noon joined Lawyers, Guns and Money. 

I blogged my little blog and things chugged along at a steady dozen hits a day. And then The Asylum Street Spankers can to town. Wammo and his lovely wife Tracy bunked with us on their last night in Japan and when he was checking his email that night, he found out that the video for "Stick Magnetic Ribbons on Your SUV" was finally finished and had just been put online. Naturally I put it on the blog and did a little blogwhoring and the next thing I knew someone had put it on the Democratic Underground  site where it went viral. About half of the 40,000 visits this blog has received have been for that video, and three quarters of them came over a period of a couple of months.

Eventually, and only Cthulu knows why, probably a combination of pity on his part and persistant commenting on mine,  Admiral Dave asked me to help fill in at the Galloping Beaver while he was off at sea and so I got to hang out virtually with Alison, whose blog I already admired, and West End Bob (formerly know as West End Bound) and Laura and Boris and Dana while Dave and Cheryl were off catching salmon or something.  And by the time Dave and Cheryl got back I had infested the place like a bad smell you can't get rid of, and rather than fumigate, they let me stay. I like to think I contribute some small measure of leavening silliness and indignant moral outrage to the place, but it is Dave's place.

The Woodshed is mine and has been since before it was a blog, before it was even The Woodshed, in fact. Back in the days before teh intertoobz, when the closest I'd come to cyberspace was reading the science fiction readers group on the in-house IBM company email bulletin board as a lowly co-op student at the Don Mills Lab, I worked for a series of small community newspapers starting in Ingersoll, Ont. and progressing through Caledonia, Port Dover, Listowel, Napanee and finally Picton. The first place I worked still had typewriters and I even went door to door delivering copies one week in the middle of winter. All for wages that would have qualified me for welfare. I started writing a weekly column in Caledonia and hit my  stride on it in the Port Dover Maple Leaf. By the time we got to Listowel, it had been named the Woodshed and it was both the highlight and major stress point of my week to sit down and try to come up with an idea. I think of those as the precursor to this blog, although there was no such thing as blogs at the time.

And wonder of wonders, I still have a hard copies of a bunch of them that I found again only just a few weeks ago amid the paper-strewn chaos that is my desk. And this week I will be posting some of them, as soon as I get the dead-tree copy typed into the laptop.

I will also be reviving "the Rules" and "Kanadian Korner" a couple of series that started out strong, but eventually faded off my mental radar as shiny objects entered my field of vision.

As you can see I've done so renovating of the look of the place, and changes will continue for the next week or so. If you'd like to be on the blogroll, drop me a line at rev(dot)paperboy(at)gmail.com

Soon there will be swag and probably a lot more stuff at the emporium.

And there will be music -- once a few technical issues get sorted out, Radio Woodshed will take the internets airwaves with audio attitudes, platitudes and assorted dudes from a variety of latitudes to put a cut in your strut and glide in your stride...

until then, well,  I'll let Ms. Davis speak for me.