February 28, 2006
Bye Bye Blogpatrol
Well after having the blogpatrol for a couple years I finally had enough and removed it. I'm sorry but if the service is unavailable 1/2 of the time, how can it keep track of hits, visits, etc.? I estimate 40% of the time an icon didn't even show on my homepage, and therefore gee... it's hundreds of hits behind.
So, in the immortal words of Mitsou "Bye Bye Blogpatrol". Ok she didn't say blogpatrol specifically but ... whatever you get the point. I figured I'd drop a little earworm on you, "Bye Bye Mon Cowboy" is one of those songs that just loops infinitely in my head.
February 23, 2006
Trim off the excess and get back to the fundamentals
I've been thinking alot over the last while and I think I've come up with a good theory on life, the universe and religions. My brain came up with this: most worldly accepted religions (not cults, those are a different story) started out good, and in many cases great. The supreme being(s) (whatever his/her name being) spoke to some people, or came to earth in the form of someone/thing and showed humans what they should or should not be doing, and how they should be conducting themselves so as to be successful and prosper. The fundamental goal of everyone, when you get down to it, is to procreate, eat, drink and prosper.
The unfortunate side of religion is that humans are involved in it's continuation. There are sides to humans that too often override the above fundamental goals; these being of course the 7 deadly sins: pride, envy, anger, greed, sloth, gluttony and lust. No matter what we do or how hard we try someone has some self interest involved when decisions are made. Fear of change, and fear of outsiders causes laws to be made to exclude non-believers (or in most cases other-believers) sometimes to extremes where punishment is a painful death. Humans live in little bubbles of perception until that bubble is burst and they realize others are outside that bubble, whether physically or philosophically. We also don't understand new concepts or opposing points of view unless it somehow applies to us. Here's a good example: George Bush's government denied emphatically that global warming was a problem, but now they are pushing hard to remove the US addiction to oil, only because now they are faced with opposing forces controlling the fuel source, alongside blatantly erratic and extreme weather changes. No change in perspective unless it smacks them across the face, and when it does there is no admittance to being wrong at a previous time.
Recently we were faced with a culture clash of a magnitude never seen before, where a religiously ignorant (or racially ignorant, you choose) cartoonist and (from a western perspective) mildly racy cartoon turned the Muslim world on end. Here we have an example of a people who live with an extreme set of rules where one step outside of them (in some areas of the world anyway) leads to death; no questions asked, no apologies accepted, blood must be spilled. Western religions have been jibed and poked fun at for probably a century, I mean hell, some of the most popular cartoons are out and out blasphemous, take Family Guy for example. Folks in these religions have had to exist beside other religions for many many years, and at no point were they allowed by the government to make a call to arms vs. each other. People left England and Europe and came to Canada and the U.S. to escape religious persecution and intolerance, so we have (in a perfect world) countries with a large base of people with this frame of mind. How could anyone expect us to abide by their rules and then if we did, would they abide by ours?
From what I've seen, it is partially because of the information age that this clash came to be at all. How else could these crudely drawn depictions be sent around the world and then when the item appears in the news in just days world-wide protests, burnings of embassies etc. The most destructive protests in countries where they live and breath that way of life. They can't understand how people can live any other way than they do; religion fills their life and everything they do, from what I see anything outside of religion is blasphemy. How can you expect someone who lives this 24/7 to understand jibing of a religious figure? I can't relate this to anything in my daily life because everything is up for mocking, everything in western ideology has been jibed and made fun of. What I don't understand is how persecuting the jews by denying the holocaust existed and mocking the deaths in concentration camps sneaked it's ugly head in there too. Danish - Jewish ... I'm sorry, there's a big difference. Perhaps it gave the extremists and hate-mongers on both sides (see the 7 deadly sins) a reason to show their idea of freedom of speech. Blogs and emails are still fired up around the world tossing around words of hate and intolerance, horrible words that should have long since been put to death. People scoff at politically correctness, but hell if someone would have been thinking even slightly PC maybe this shit wouldn't have even started. If people thought about consequences before they took actions then there would be much less anquish around the world.
Basically what I'm trying to say in this long drawn-out post is that it's not religions that put people against each other, it's people. People draw the lines in the sand. People write the books with the laws. People insert their own agenda into what they think their religion stands for. People make a stand when they should be making a conversation. People join a religion to make them feel superior so they can gang up on other-believers and talk down or judge. People decide they should kill each other or other-believers to appease/please their God. People do these things in the name of {insert name here}, but it is really for their own purpose.
My quest is to shred away the excess crap that religions contain and get back to the fundamentals. We want to live, eat, procreate and prosper, we all want this so why don't we accept that we don't agree and get past that? Trim off the human influence and corruption and get back to the rules about how we should act and treat each other. Children learn this at an early age and perhaps adults should re-learn these values, start sharing their toys and stop being so pushy and mean.
February 21, 2006
Tuesday quip #3
What would ever make someone want to specialize in Urology? Is it a deep seated need to manipulate/fondle others genitals?
Tuesday quip #2
Countdown to sterilization
And now at last I scream into the wind "No MORE! No MORE!"
Tuesday quip
My dad is 71 this year, I walk out the front door of my house this weekend and he's got an 8' slab of drywall on his back and he's hawling it into our house.
February 17, 2006
Red light!
Flash light!
Well at least that's what I saw back in December. As I was driving through a yellow light (which by my 20 years of driving told me should have stayed yellow) the instant I entered the intersection the light turned red, and FLASH and FLASH and my heart sunk. Red Light camera. About a month later I received the ticket in the mail, $287.
I remember the instant it turned red I had thought to myself "That was way too short, it should still be yellow". Unfortunately the intersection is quite a ways from where I live so just this week I did some research. As there was nowhere to park I parked in a Transit Parking Only spot and I managed to get a good timing of the light with my cellphone stopwatch after 4 or so tries: 2.5 - 2.8 seconds. I thought "Damn, that's pretty short", and after a timing a couple other intersections it turned out my suspicions were correct. 2 other intersections, same speed limit, pretty much the same traffic and each one was a good 1 second longer than the offending intersection.
I did some research online today and found 2 other sites citing suggested lengths of yellow lights, one even gave length vs size of intersection and the minimum just happens to be about 1 second longer than the offending intersection.
So anyways, I went today to the Law Courts building and pleaded not-guilty, got a trial date in June and I'm gonna fight this motha$#@!er.
Wish me luck
February 16, 2006
Ground level Ozone : not your backyard friend
So it turns out that a study done recently found that ground-level ozone is unsafe even at low levels. This is particularly of concern to me because both I and my wife suffer from asthma, along with An estimated 2.5 million Canadians and 12% of children in Canada.
The study, sponsored by the EPA and the Centers for Disease Control, and performed by Yale University and Johns Hopkins, found that if a safe level for ozone exists, it is only at very low or natural levels and far below current US and international regulations. A 10 part-per-billion increase in the average of the two previous days’ ozone levels is associated with a 0.30 percent increase in mortality.
Also of concern to me is the fact that 95% of the time I check the Air quality websites for Alberta the main pollutant is Ozone. It's no wonder Alberta is right up there in the top numbers in population in Canada that are afflicted with asthma. Here's a screenshot from weather.ca from yesterday.
....ground-level ozone is different. It's found close to Earth's surface and is a serious pollutant. It's produced when sunlight combines and reacts with chemicals produced by cars, power plants, and factories.
Ozone has long been known as a pollutant and dangerous at higher levels but the finding that at any level above what's found in nature increases human mortality is just... scary.
February 14, 2006
Val-eee Day
My 36th Valentines day is here, it's also the 15th I've spent with my Wife ... well make that 13 since I was away at school for 2 of them, of course I was with her in spirit.
Happy Valentines day everyone!
Happy Hallmark day to the rest of you cynics (I'm also on that side of the fence many days, the materialism that flares up on these holidays makes me sick). Of course growing up a pencil necked pimply geek didn't help with my perspective.
Regrets
I carry a load of regrets,
they fit in a pocket
in the back of my brain.
They swirl and churn
in their little space,
sometimes the strong ones
jump out
into my conciousness.
I recall times
I wish to forget and
remember
things that I
have
yet
to
forgive
myself
for.
- DKH 02/14/2006
February 07, 2006
Ramblings
I don't have very much to say these days, and that's not because I don't have much to say, but I can't say it in this venue. Needless to say things in other places fill my time and crowd my concious, not always in good ways.
I would like to send a shout out to my old friend dark Rum who has made a comeback. Ahh... so warm and cosy and full of memories. Good ones that I try to hold in front of the not so good smelly cleaning carpet the next day memories.
One such memory I remember walking from a club downtown, after more than sufficient of amounts of my aforementioned friend, to my room in a house about 22 blocks (long blocks) away. Oh, and I didn't mention that I had also left my leather jacket, my glasses (I was wearing glass contacts ouch!) and my keys (in the jacket) in my friends car who neglected to come back to the club in time for me in my state. I remember an older guy tailing me in a big boat of a car wanting to know if I needed a ride home. Yeah, I was not into that, no sir, the sidewalk was my friend, the people were my enemy and the air was fresh and crisp. Plus I can bet the 18 or so dark rum and coke wouldn't have went well with the interior of his car, or whatever he had planned for me. Lucky for me my roommates were home and let me in after sufficient banging, and my friend came by in the afternoon to drop off my seeing devices, as I am nearly blind without them.
Welcome back old friend, welcome back.
make that a double
February 01, 2006
Alt Oorgo
Hey so I know I don't post much lately, but if you want to see some of the stuff that I'm finding and mini-posts go to oorgo.stumbleupon.com. I have little time for full posts about my life these days, maybe one of these days I'll catch up.