…when Londoners decide it might be wise to pad lampposts to protect distracted people bumping into them.
I guess they first tried posting signs that said "WATCH WHERE YOU'RE GOING, YOU IDIOT!", but people didn't look up and see them.
Next up: equipping automobiles with cow catchers.
Hat tip to Engadget
Liberals: Just Go Home
I have to agree with Stageleft, that this is one of the sillier motions I've seen introduced to the House of Commons.
Liberals will attempt to turn the tables today on rival parties who've ridiculed them for being afraid of toppling the minority Conservative government.
They'll introduce a motion condemning the NDP and Bloc Quebecois for defeating the previous Grit government in November 2005, thereby enabling Stephen Harper's Tories to win power.
(link)
What a bunch of whiners!
If they're still having problems with the decision of the New Democrats and the Bloc Quebecois to vote down the tired and incompetent Paul Martin regime back in 2005, they may want to take it up with the 70% of voting Canadians who spanked the Liberals in the election that followed. Otherwise, move on, and do your job of actually, you know, opposing this government?
You know, if I were Stephen Harper at this point, when the NDP come to introduce their motion, I'd encourage the Conservatives to abstain or not show up, thus allowing the non-confidence motion to trigger an election without the Liberals' help. The Liberals don't want to show up for confidence votes for fear of triggering an election? Well, let the Liberals run to their benches and vote in favour of the government if they want to keep this government alive. Now that would be something to see. And if people criticized the government for not showing up? Point to the Liberal abstentions and suggest that they thought that Stephane Dion had called for an all-party siesta.
Though, of course, given Conservative moves, I suspect the Conservatives fear an election almost as much as the Liberals do.
Blogging Alliance of Non-Partisan Canadians, Waterloo-Wellington Bloggers Association Get Refreshed
I'm pleased to announce a few changes to the Blogging Alliance of Non-Partisan Canadians and the Waterloo-Wellington Bloggers Association, the two aggregator associations I manage.
These changes were sparked when the aggregator program — a piece of php-based server software known as CaRP started to go haywire, prompting my webhost to shut down the Non-Partisan directory and taking the BANPC offline. The tech support people at Hostgator were kind and friendly and identified the offending program without difficulty, but we were both darned if we knew what went wrong (although the sudden malfunction and overuse of server CPU resources suggests a spambot attack). So in the end I decided to delete CaRP from my directory and look for other ways to duplicate the features of the BANPC.
As you can probably guess, this decision hardly pained me. I'd been happy enough with CaRP's ability to turn a bunch of RSS feeds into HTML, but the BANPC and the WWBA never operated with an RSS feed that functioned very well. So I experimented with Google Reader. Not only was this program free, it was offsite, saving my webhost's resources.
Google Reader is primarily a personal RSS feed reader, but you can share the RSS feeds you gather. I'm not able to control the feed's appearance as much as I'd like (I can either show the entire post or just the title, not an excerpt), but it seems to work fine, and it produces an RSS feed that's an exact duplicate of the list of posts that appears on the aggregator page. As an upshot, maintaining the BANPC list is a lot easier on my side. Add a few forums within Movable Type, and I think it all makes for a decent spruce-up.
I also went through the BANPC membership list and removed those sites which had been dormant for over six months, or which didn't have a link to the aggregator page. The WWBA's membership requirements are less strict, but there was a spring cleaning there as well. If you feel that I've removed your site in error, please let me know by e-mail. And if you want to join either aggregator, and meet the criteria, let me know.
Those of you who have the old Blogrolling.com-managed blogrolls for the BANPC and the WWBA, I'll be maintaining these for a little while, but I encourage you to replace your blogrolls with the Google-based ones now available from the "join" pages of both sites.