Gee... ya think?

The editorial writers at the newspamazine which likes to call itself Canada's national rag have this to say: (Emphasis mine)

But Parliament has already adopted a resolution that expressly supports the training mission beyond July, 2011. That resolution of March, 2008, called for an end only to Canada’s presence in Kandahar. It went to say that Canada, with its allies, including Afghanistan, “must set firm targets and timelines for the training, equipping and paying of the Afghan National Army, the Afghan National Police, the members of the judicial system and the members of the correctional system.” The Canadian government’s decision to stay in Afghanistan to train soldiers is entirely consistent with that resolution. For quite a while now, Mr. Harper has given the public the impression that Canada’s military would be leaving the country entirely. But there is nothing in the resolution’s letter or spirit to suggest that.

Wow. That is a strangely familiar line of dialog.
Oh right! From back in 2008, 26 months ago, when I wrote virtually the same thing and predicted exactly how Harper would mislead the public a la the Globe and Mail editorial writers' newly astute observations.

How... coincidental.

OK then. Having been involved with several meetings and having been out in the bazaars (the likes of which Harper, MacKay and the G&M are denied entry) I will have a post tomorrow which will shed even more light, present even tougher questions and make even more concrete predictions.

I may even suggest that certain editorial writers lay their dinks on the table and let me take a few swings with a ball peen hammer. (I don't do this for money. I just like to watch the elitists squirm, or scream, as the case may be.)

Declare an operational pause,

Give everyone a 30 leave and wait for summer to cool. Then come back and start over.

Last week a French Foreign Legion unit stationed at Carpaigne near the southern French port of Marseille was conducting a live-fire exercise and let loose a few tracer rounds into a forested area around the camp. The problem was, the forest fire hazard level was "extreme".

French soldiers have been branded "imbeciles" for firing shells into parched woodland - and sparking a massive forest blaze that threatened up to 1000 homes.

The Foreign Legion unit started one of the worst fires in recent years when it blasted tracer ammunition into tinder dry trees at their base near Marseille.

At about the same time, the Russian Navy was preparing to celebrate Navy Day in the Russian Pacific port of Vladivostok. Things didn't go quite as well as hoped.

A missile fired from a military vessel during a Navy Day parade rehearsal has hit an apartment block in the Far Eastern city of Vladivistok, Russia.

News agencies said the missile hit a nine-storey block of flats in Leonova Street, but that noone was injured. Other reports said the missile fell a meter short of the building, leaving a wide crater on the ground and breaking the windows of the ground floor apartments.

In the profession of arms, shit happens. Usually because someone executed a really stupid idea.

Some days... you can't piss a drop

This is what happens when you rely on the Directing Staff (The DS) for your "landing intelligence".



Oh... right! They were learning how to gather "landing intelligence".

Bad beach.

Random Rumours

Busy, busy day today. In fact, all week, so my posts will be limited for a short while.

Impolitical has an analysis of the Mulroney testimony aftermath. As you read through it you start to realize that you're not alone - nobody believes what Mulroney is saying. If he'd been on the witness stand in a courtroom he would have been torn to ribbons. That isn't preventing the Harperites from bouncing out right after yesterday's hearing with PMO talking points, all of which are intended to deflect attention from their next move on this issue - expect the promise of a public hearing on Mulroney-Schreiber to be withdrawn.

Via Saskboy, BC wild salmon are being decimated by the effects of fish farms. I've seen the effects of salmon farming up close and personal. Believe me, it ain't pretty. My friend Alex Morton has even more.

Wudrick Blog gets into the DMCA fight. Good for ALW because this has nothing to do with what political party tables DMCA legislation. This has to do with imposing draconian copyright laws where they do not meet Canadian needs and which far exceed the international requirement.

Skippy (Yes, he coined the term Blogtopia) helps everyone find a new freeway blogger - Mr. Rogers.

Nobody can turn a phrase like Unrepentant Old Hippie, especially when it comes to dealing with the Fetusmobile of the forced-birth crowd. Really, the last paragraph makes the whole post.

Everybody have a great day and... be careful out there!

Leonardo. Laughing at us from the grave.

(Click to enlarge for further inspection)

So, apparently, Leonardo Da Vinci was really into codes. It seems everyone these days is picking something out of his work. Dan Brown apparently missed something when he was finding secrets in Da Vinci's Last Supper.

It's a new Da Vinci code, but this time it could be for real. An Italian musician and computer technician claims to have uncovered musical notes encoded in Leonardo Da Vinci's "Last Supper," raising the possibility that the Renaissance genius might have left behind a somber composition to accompany the scene depicted in the 15th-century wall painting.

"It sounds like a requiem," Giovanni Maria Pala said. "It's like a soundtrack that emphasizes the passion of Jesus."

Painted from 1494 to 1498 in Milan's Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, the "Last Supper" vividly depicts a key moment in the Gospel narrative: Jesus' last meal with the 12 Apostles before his arrest and crucifixion, and the shock of Christ's followers as they learn that one of them is about to betray him.

Pala, a 45-year-old musician who lives near the southern Italian city of Lecce, began studying Leonardo's painting in 2003, after hearing on a news program that researchers believed the artist and inventor had hidden a musical composition in the work.

"Afterward, I didn't hear anything more about it," he said in an interview with The Associated Press. "As a musician, I wanted to dig deeper."

In a book released Friday in Italy, Pala explains how he took elements of the painting that have symbolic value in Christian theology and interpreted them as musical clues.

Pala first saw that by drawing the five lines of a musical staff across the painting, the loaves of bread on the table as well as the hands of Jesus and the Apostles could each represent a musical note.

This fit the relation in Christian symbolism between the bread, representing the body of Christ, and the hands, which are used to bless the food, he said. But the notes made no sense musically until Pala realized that the score had to be read from right to left, following Leonardo's particular writing style.

And apparently there's something to this one.

Alessandro Vezzosi, a Leonardo expert and the director of a museum dedicated to the artist in his hometown of Vinci, said he had not seen Pala's research but that the musician's hypothesis "is plausible."

Vezzosi said previous research has indicated the hands of the Apostles in the painting can be substituted with the notes of a Gregorian chant, though so far no one had tried to work in the bread loaves.

Having never really looked at the Last Supper very closely until now, the table looks like the results of a bun fight at a mess dinner in Devonport. Not one bun is on a plate, despite the fact that there appears to be 16 plates on the table. Pala may be on to something.

I'm waiting to see what Pala comes up with when he puts a musical staff across the spots on one of these. I'm guessing Queen.

Arrr... thank ye Cap'n.

Some people just don't do numbers

Via Neatorama this story from the Manchester Evening News:

A LOTTERY scratchcard has been withdrawn from sale by Camelot - because players couldn't understand it. The Cool Cash game - launched on Monday - was taken out of shops yesterday after some players failed to grasp whether or not they had won. To qualify for a prize, users had to scratch away a window to reveal a temperature lower than the figure displayed on each card. As the game had a winter theme, the temperature was usually below freezing. But the concept of comparing negative numbers proved too difficult for some Camelot received dozens of complaints on the first day from players who could not understand how, for example, -5 is higher than -6. Tina Farrell, from Levenshulme, called Camelot after failing to win with several cards. The 23-year-old, who said she had left school without a maths GCSE, said: "On one of my cards it said I had to find temperatures lower than -8. The numbers I uncovered were -6 and -7 so I thought I had won, and so did the woman in the shop. But when she scanned the card the machine said I hadn't. "I phoned Camelot and they fobbed me off with some story that -6 is higher - not lower - than -8 but I'm not having it.

"I think Camelot are giving people the wrong impression - the card doesn't say to look for a colder or warmer temperature, it says to look for a higher or lower number. Six is a lower number than 8. Imagine how many people have been misled."

Camelot is the UK's national lottery operator. Their tagline is Serving the nation's dreams.

Tina needs to take a January trip to Winnipeg to improve her appreciation of negative numbers.

I kind of like people who carry backpacks

Far be it from me to ever defend a politician. I have little use for any of them regardless of their political stripe.

However, of late, I have noticed that there seems to be some kind of dyslogistic attachment made to the fact that Stephane Dion carries a backpack to work. Somehow, the idea that a man would carry a backpack is portrayed in a negative sense. It has, in a rather odd way, been used to demonstrate a form of pacifism associated with eccentricity.

That's odd.

Some of my oldest friends wore backpacks to work. Here's a very well-known and famous photograph of some of them, backpacks and all. Some might have been a little eccentric, but they were hardly pacifists.







Photo: Petty Officer Peter Holdgate, RN

Are you staring my codpiece, or just checking the time?

First, it was bear-proof suits. Now, indestructible body armour. Hamilton's "bear man" has come up with something he would like to market to Canadian and US military uniform suppliers.

The grizzly man is back, and this time he's ready to take on bullets and bombs.

Troy Hurtubise, the Hamilton-born inventor who became famous for his bulky bear-protection suit by standing in front of a moving vehicle to prove it worked, has now created a much slimmer suit that he hopes will soon be protecting Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan and U.S. soldiers in Iraq.

He has spent two years and $15,000 in the lab out back of his house in North Bay, designing and building a practical, lightweight and affordable shell to stave off bullets, explosives, knives and clubs. He calls it the Trojan and describes it as the "first ballistic, full exoskeleton body suit of armour."

[...]

Already, he says, the suit has stood up to bullets from high-powered weapons, including an elephant gun. The suit was empty during the ballistics tests, but he's more than ready to put it on and face live fire.

"I would do it in an instant," he said. "Bring it on."

Elephant gun?! Trojan?!

The whole suit -- which draws design inspiration from Star Wars, RoboCop, Batman and video games -- is made from high-impact plastic lined with ceramic bullet protection over ballistic foam.

Its many features include compartments for emergency morphine and salt, a knife and emergency light. Built into the forearms are a small recording device, a pepper-spray gun and a detachable transponder that can be swallowed in case of trouble.

Dangling between the legs, that would be a clock.

In the helmet, there's a solar-powered fresh-air system and a drinking tube attached to a canteen in the small of the back. A laser pointer mounted in the middle of the forehead is ready to point to snipers, while LED lights frame the face.

The whole suit comes in at 18 kilograms. It covers everything but the fingertips and the major joints, and could be mass-produced for about $2,000, Hurtubise says.

He said he hopes to earn enough of a living from the suit so he can keep on inventing, but the real reason he did this, he says, is "for the boys."

A c.l.o.c.k between the legs? Roger that. OoRah!

For the boys, eh? There doesn't seem to be a version for the "girls". And, I always wondered how you would take a quick pee wearing one of these.

Now I have one more to wonder about.

Does this door make my ass look fat?

If you're a cat person, this is sort of a Garfield tm story:

Goliath, a 20-pound stray whose girth got him stuck in a pet door while trying to plunder some dog food, is back with his owner.

His name isn't really Goliath, but it's close. It's Hercules, says owner Geoff Ernest, who was reunited with his tubby tabby Thursday at the Oregon Humane Society.

Gresham resident Jadwiga Drozdek found the feline stuck in the dog door of her home a few days ago, helped free him and gave him a plate of food on her patio.

Ernest said he had a house-sitter when he went to Seattle for a lung transplant six months ago, and Hercules departed.

Unfortunately, while Hercules was at the Humane Society he was diagnosed with Feline Immunodeficiency Virus, similar to HIV in humans. About 40 percent of cats in the US are deemed to be obese. That's about 10 percent higher than the obesity rates for humans.

Photo: Tiffany Noreuil, an animal care technician at the Oregon Humane Society, holds Hercules, temporarily-named Goliath in Portland on Wednesday. (Associated Press )