Migratory Bears

Since we now have our own web space and domain, I am about to begin migrating all of my blog entries from Blogger to our own space.

Once our new domain is confirmed I will post it here as a reference. Once it is done, I will be blogging there and not here any more.

Thanks for your patience.

UPDATE: the blog homepage is now http://www.holyjumbo.ca/figjam... not that it is a lot of help since you would have had to have found it to see this post.

GM Campaign

I don't know if they are doing it in the states as well, but in Canada GM has had an ad campaign going on about "Johnny" in support of their small car line - mainly the ugly Aveo (No, I don't care what you say, the damn thing is ugly).

I think I get the intent of the ads - sort of an after school special parody sort of thing - but I find them just stupid. Younger kids would not get the "Past School Special/ABC After School Special" aspect of it but it MUST be the audience they are aiming at, right? Certainly it could not be my generation, because I don't think I am alone in thinking I would not buy one of those cars if only just to protest the lameness of the ads.

But lets examine what "Johnny", the protagonist in the ads, has done so far:

1. Been terribly uptight about someone eating in his car like a total clean freak.
2. Refused to drive his friend and 4 girls in his car, leaving his friend behind, unwilling to be possibly squeezed up against a girl.
3. Hated loud music (although no one cranked up any house or dance so it's not totally conclusive).
4. Refused to make out with a hot red headed chick - giving the excuse of possibly getting a parking ticket - instead agreeing to go out to get food at a restaurant.

This leads me to arrive at an inevitable conclusion. GM is trying to cash in on the craze over shows like "Queer Eye"...

Johnny is totally gay.

Not that there is anything wrong with that.

Accident Prohan?

Lindsay Lohan has been hospitalized AGAIN.

Seems like the girl just can't keep it together. Friday, she fractured her wrist walking in flat shoes in an "outdoor area". Apparently, there is going to be an "investigation" to find out if Milk Studios "took adequate health and safety precautions with the ground". Yep, that's right - apparently now when you deal with Lindsay you are responsible for not only worshipping the ground the spoiled brat walks on, but for making it nice and squishy for her to fall down on too.

And if you need a recap - so far this year she has been hospitalized for a severe asthma attack in January, then a couple of weeks later needed stitches in her shin after an incident with a broken cup at Bryan Adams house, and in July was again in the care of doctors for exhaustion or dehydration (Hollywood code for: I did too much crystal meth last night).

Good thing she can afford to pay her medical bills.

UPDATE: She was back in the hospital for "Pain" 2 days after getting treatment for her wrist. I think they should just have an ambulance follow her around.

If I Said It Once...

I have said it a hundred times. If a psycho wants you dead, you're dead. This is likely to get rambly, so hold on... Kimveer Gill obviously had some very serious issues with the world. He didn't want to be a part of society, didn't like the way the government was run, and didn't much trust most people in general. Hey - he's a lot like me. The difference is that I'm not about to and never will go and shoot up a school full of kids. At least I hope not . Anyway, he was a social misfit and an outcast, or at least that is what he portrayed himself to be online. Some part of him obviously felt that way... and the line between reality and fantasy became more and more blurred over time. This wasn't someone you would be able to reason with or reach out to. This wasn't something you could predict. Yet, as always, there are the usual chorus of idiots... the typical coalition of morons... who think that everything like this is preventable, or that someone needs to get sued, or that someone was not doing their job. Or that we should put metal detectors in schools and institute "Zero tolerance" polices. Sorry, morons - you know who you are - "Zero Tolerance" has absolutely NOTHING to do with what happened yesterday. Metal detectors would only have accomplished anything if they also had armed guards, and even then "Trench" the vampire freak would likely have just gunned them down before they could move. Saying it was preventable just isn't true. We live in a supposedly free society. That means that people are free to make their own decisions and suffer the consequences. Kimveer Gill suffered the consequences - he was shot dead by police. Had he lived he would have gone to jail or a psych ward. He CHOSE to break society's rules, whether his mental state dictated making that a rational choice or not. Criminals choose to break the rules on a regular basis. We can't police people's thoughts and live in a free society. All that can be done is what is done - make things like walking out and shooting people completely taboo, and hope that the stigma works to prevent it in most cases. I know how some people would answer this (they would be the other extreme of the borderline fringes) but - if you had a choice between taking the risk that 1 in 30 million people once every 10 years loses his mind and tries to shoot people or checking with a government official every time you wanted to wipe your ass or write in your blog, which would you rather? Oh, and Jack Layton, you are an ASSHOLE. In comments yesterday he asked "Was this an illegal gun?" WHAT THE FUCK difference does it make? Legal or illegal, he got his hands on a gun and killed people. Hell, even Stephen Harper didn't try to jump on politicizing the shootings so fast. Layton, who grew up in Montreal, was among the first national-level politicians interviewed and he could not resist trying to lay the groundwork for another of his borderline psychotic attacks on all government, any government, anywhere (ironic that he is a part of the government). So, if it was a legally registered weapon, it is the former Liberal government's fault for not implementing it right, and if it was an unregistered weapon in is the Conservative government's fault for trying to dismantle the gun registry... yeah, you know, that's pretty transparent, Jack. Off. Amazing to me is the fact that the incredibly heroic actions of a couple of mainline Montreal police officers are seemingly being downplayed. I don't know whether it is fear of negative publicity or not, but the Montreal Police Chief should have come out fully with what was written all over his face - his officers did a fantastic job, possibly preventing a lot more killing. They put themselves in harms way to save lives, and that's what police should be doing. We have a real hero on our hands and no one seems to even know who he (or she) was yet. I am not talking about United 93-type "heroism" - I am talking about risking your neck for others. It doesn't matter whether the guy ran out of ammo and they shot him or some other extenuating circumstances - this was a guy out to kill people and get himself shot by police and obliging him was the best thing to be done under the circumstances. Yeah, not exactly a huggy-bunny buddhist sounding philosophy, is it. Sorry. There are situations where you can negotiate and there are situations where you have to act. Maybe if someone had talked things over with Kimveer a couple of years back... maybe if his Mom had given him more hugs... maybe if his Dad had praised him when he built his first model M16, we wouldn't be here today. Realistically, though, nothing could have prevented this from the moment Gill decided he was going to take weapons and shoot people except if police had spotted him a few minutes sooner and shot him then. In our modern world, the law of the jungle is don't be in the wrong place at the wrong time. If you can figure out how to predict that, I will happily award you with the Johnny Smith Medal of Honour. UPDATE: Turns out Gill shot himself after being shot by the police. I reiterate - the police did a great job.

We Miss Steve

We miss Steve Irwin. We decided to find something to wear, and black arm bands and stuff seemed so... old fashined? Lame? Meaningless? Someone I know decided on these. I think its cool and I will wear one. I guess he will live on forever on TV. I am not sure how the goodbye will be handled as his family has turned down a state funeral. And youtube has gone nutty. Don't type in Steve Irwin there.

Crikey!

Steve Irwin is dead. You know Steve Irwin - the Crocodile Hunter. I didn't hear about it until today, because the one page I went to this weekend has a news thing that is not updated on weekends. We were away at a wedding or working on our new business all weekend and I never watched any news or read anything on the web. Now, I didn't watch this guy faithfully on a daily basis or anything but I really admired his chutzpah not only in braving the creatures he did, but in fighting for conservation causes. He was one of the good guys. A bit crazy, maybe a little too interested in getting attention on television, but definitely one of the good guys. Apparently it was a wrong place-wrong time, freak accident where he was stung in the chest by a stingray. The sting hit him right in the heart - anyplace else would probably have not been fatal. This was sometime on Monday (the 4th), although some reports said Saturday. It saddens me to think that Bindi and Bob will now grow up without a father, and one who could have taught them so much. It pisses me off that there are now assholes crawling out of the woodwork saying, "Seem I told you so! TV makes people do crazy dangerous things! We must put an end to it!" All I can say to those people is, "Fuck you, assholes." Oh, and Germaine Greer, that goes double for you. Stephen Robert Irwin... February 22, 1962 - September 4, 2006 As an epitaph, I'll leave you with a comment he made a couple of years ago: "If something ever happens to me, people are gonna be like 'we knew a croc would get him!'"

Mac vs. PC

I am sure by now you have seen them on TV - those commercials for the Mac that portray Macs as "cool guy" while the PC is a geeky and confused chubby. PCs and Macs have, or used to have, different capabilities but the whole thing has always been an "elitist" thing. Its just the latest in a long line of Mac advertising schemes, trying to spin "unpopular and overpriced" into "elite and superior". Everyone on Earth who uses a PC looks at Macs and goes, no big deal... why pay so much for a computer? Why buy all different software? So they are more or less unpopular. But the Mac spin on that has always been that they are better quality and more expensive as a result, and that makes them elite and special and "better". So lets just make a comparison to a real-world situation - high school! You take two people in High School, a cheerleader who has 100 friends and a geeky, funny looking guy who has 2. The cheerleader is universally seen as popular and nice. The geek is seen as unpopular and weird. If you asked the cheerleader she might say he is a loser or she might say she doesn't know him, depending on her personality (is she Cordelia, Harmony, or Buffy?). If you asked the geek he would almost certainly call the cheerleader a bitch or a snob, while secretly wishing he could fuck her or be friends and hang out with her friends. If you asked them about themselves and their friends the cheerleader could give a range of answers from the "I'm the greatest" to "I'm just glad people like me", but the geek would almost universally say, "I'm just picky about who I am friends with" - as though he had a wide selection clamoring at his door. Fat chance. PCs are the "popular kids" - sometimes arrogant, sometimes swaggering, usually popular with lots of friends but also a few detractors. They are a part of the rumour mill, and sometimes victims of it. Like real people, a wide range of capabilities from the athletic (gaming) machine to the brainy (accounting) machine. Macs are the geeks - cut from roughly the same cloth, they can learn almost anything eventually and can do certain things well but often having difficulty with certain kinds of tasks. Most people avoid dealing with them because they seem disconnected, although those that get to know them well realise they are worthwhile after all - unfortunately they have such an inferiority complex that anything more popular must be bad. No one talks about them because no one thinks about them until they stand up naked on a cafeteria table and scream about being smarter than everyone. They're a bunch of Peter Parkers without any spider bites. So, there ya go. The Mac commercials have it backwards, the dorky unfit guy in glasses should be the Mac, not the PC.