Diogenes's blog

Welcome to the Rex Murphy Goo page, which was inspired while listening to Rex go on about Harper's prorogation of Parliament while hosting CBC's Cross Country Checkup last night.

Rex Murphy looks so weird already that he doesn't really need his own Goo page, but having one does gives a Rex fan something to do while listening to one of his many diatribes. You can give him more hair, for instance, or make his cranium so small that future anthropologists will declare that he has no brain at all, which is what many of his contemporary critics also claim.

This page makes use of a java applet so in order to work properly, your browser must be java enabled.

Welcome to the Stephen Harper Goo page, your chance to have some fun with Stephen Harpers mug.

This page makes use of a java applet so in order to work properly, your browser must be java enabled.

Move the mouse pointer over something in the picture, like an eye or nose, hold down the mouse button and move the mouse around. You'll soon get the idea of why we call it a Goo picture.

Today was protest day. It was frantic for me. I had to make the Jan 22 news update. Living in the Netherlands, there is this time shift issue I have to deal with . Since I am 6 hours ahead of most of Canada, news arrives kind of late (yesterday's news today!) and the demonstration here in the Hague was one of the first to happen.

So I also had to get my news page updated, the Netherlands Facebook rally group page updated and prepare for a protest/rally that I organized at the last minute. I fully anticipated a rally of one.

Oh, a storm is threat'ning
My very life today
If I don't get some shelter
Oh yeah, I'm goin' to fade away

War children,
 it's just a shot away,
  it's just a shot away

War children,
 it's just a shot away,
  it's just a shot away

Stephen Harper put on another performance for his caucus the today, in a bid to stem the rising tide of protest about his prorogue of parliament.

With membership to the Facebook group Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament approaching the 200,000 mark, demonstrations planned across Canada for January 23, and plunging poll numbers, conservative MP's are getting a little nervous about the situation.

Since he does it so well, Harper sang another song - this time a cover of a Rolling Stones hit, in yet another command performance.

Put ths one in the ROTFLMAO file. Travis Martin responded yesterday with a post to his favorite discussion thread. Apparently, we, all of us, are NOT illiterate donkeys. We had it ALL wrong!

Ha-ha, good one Travis, didn't see THAT ONE coming at all.

Here is what Travis had to say (emphasis mine)

If you read what I wrote, on my facebook page, which is now displayed on this thread, and soon to be published, you will know that, in fact I do not view anyone in this group as an "illiterate donkey" and that the initial reactionary statements I posted were nothing more than calculated baiting to the hypothesis I was prodding at.

I am rather more interested in how a group of people, if attacked, would respond. Would they respond with the intent to educate, or would they wallow in the muck?

The vast majority of Canadians, to their own shame, do the latter. This is too bad. I would expect any group of people, on any political issue, however to act in like kind. What was shocking was how little of an attempt was made to educate the troll that you thought you had in your midst.

and You are all illiterate donkeys!!!

Yesterday, some dude calling himself Travis Martin became a new member of the Facebook group Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament. The group is now 150,000 members strong.

He started a discussion thread with this charming post…

Just thought I would join this group to publically declare you all illiterate, devoid of civic understanding, and completely unaware of the history of Canadian politics. A total omnibus of idiots! As such, your membership in this confederacy of dunces is symbolic only of how little you know about your own country and at the same time are willing to protest under the banner of your own ignorance. It is a shame to live in a country populated by such donkeys. Please god read a book, go to school, and develop skills such as critical thinking, the ability to understand Parliamentary Procedure, and the ability to read your own Constitution and governing legislation, and until such a time as that, if such a time ever possible, collectively shut the hell up and go back to your Pentecostal churches, your hippie compounds, and your pot-reeking congo-drum-circles. Sandals, a shawl, and black horn-rimmed glasses are not symbols of education they are symbols of “wanting to appear educated”. Get real jobs, meet real, people, and please, when you talk about democracy, please, god please, understand what it is you are talking about.

Sincerely,

Travis Martin
(Considerably more wise, and at least able to read a long book).

Stephen Harper has done it again. He crossed the line, was too clever by half, and he prorogued parliament for no good reason. Now he has pissed off more people than most anyone could ever imagined. People have reacted.

The breaking story from the CBC garnered over 4200 comments, the first Globe & Mail story logged over 2000 comments, all within 48 hours.

Harper has unleashed a tsunami of protest. A facebook group Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament now has close to 80,000 members, which is 22,000 more than it was just 18 hours ago! The debate on Facebook group is passionate, the activity intense.

An election is now on the horizon when parliment resumes sitting in March. Mr. Harper, you are responsible for this one. You, and you alone. You reached too far, assumed too much, and acted too imperially.

<div style="" :float:left;="" clear:none;margin:thin="" dotted="" red;"="">

A couple of years back, not long after we arrived in The Netherlands, a good friend paid us a visit. I was marvelling at the bike paths, the canals, the absence of mosquitoes in a landscape filled with calm water. Public transport was great, trains were on time and frequent. Who needs planes? Most things were more expensive but bread, milk, wine, beer and cheese were cheap. Life was good.

Holland was clean. It was safe. It seemed to work remarkably well. My friend quipped that Dutch society was probably 100 years ahead of Canada. I thought this was a bit exaggerated, reckoning maybe 50 years tops. That was before 2009. Now I'm thinking 100 years is a being very kind.

We draw the year to an end today. It has been a remarkable year. A flurry of articles about the 'best of the decade' have appeared, and this last decade has even been given a name - the Aughties, which is a lame effort to make it sound as exciting or memorable as other decades. I suppose it all started with looking back at The Roaring Twenties and The Dirty Thirties. Some decades stand on their own - The Sixties were just so different from the others it defies attaching any defining adjective to it.

We returned home to Calgary for xmas again to find lots of snow but a little warmer than last year. It has been a white xmas for two years in a row now and much colder than average. It's as if Alberta set out to prove that global warming is a myth with a convincing demonstration that it is not getting any warmer and we need all the warmth we can muster from around the globe just to get our cars started.

Yesterday marked the end of the KPN Chronicles, a bunch of blogs about our adventures with the Dutch phone company.

We switched our home phone to an old fashioned analog line recently. It turned into a two month project and we are still cleaning up the bits and pieces.

What is so remarkable about this story was how difficult it was to become a new customer of a business that laments its declining customer base - the Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) business.

Customer service and the telephone company were never very good dance partners. They still aren't.