Cause and Effect

A study has found a correlation between the number of fast food restaurants in a city and the city's comparative obesity rate. The study's author draws what I find to be a surprising conclusion:

The strong relationship really suggests that access to fast food may indeed be one of the issues that may explain increasing obesity rates.

Why do I say "surprising"? Isn't it equally possible that a city filled with people with bad eating habits might be able to more successfully sustain a couple of extra Burger Kings? Or perhaps cities that are more designed for cars than for people have both a positive impact on the drive-thru business and a negative impact on physical activity?

But never mind these questions, local television news program! Send out a camera crew to shoot some footage of fat torsos and asses belonging to nearby pedestrians - you've got a story to run!

Upgrade to Windows Irony, Service Pack 1

Coding Sanity has taken the plunge, upgrading to Windows XP from Vista, and he finds the performance improvements staggering. This might be the article that finally convinces me as well - if I wasn't in the IT support trade, and didn't feel like I should know my way around it, I would have kicked Vista from my laptop to the curb months ago.

Estimates accurate to within plus or minus 88%

American right-wing rabid dog Michael Savage explains why Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize - 90% of the selection committee are into child porn, "according to the latest scientific studies". I thought the last bit was a really nice touch, myself - if Science says so, it must be true! I'm wondering how those studies were passed over for the Nobel Prize for Medicine.

Hey, wait a minute - of course! Savage is right, it must be some grand conspiracy! That, or he's a moron.

Domain and e-mails are all back in action

Now I just need to get back to writing. Unfortunately, I'm only slightly more interested in Karlheinz Schreiber than I am in the Leave Brittany Alone kid, so I'll have to look elsewhere for my fodder.

Thank you all for your patience - I'll look forward to the cards and letters once again.

And I'm back

E-mail is still not functioning properly, but I'm back and ready to bitch about the news of the day again. Maybe this host could do me the favour of remaining in business?

My webhost is definitely out of business. I should have the entire site restored to a new host by the end of the week... thankfully, I'm a huge believer in backups.

In the meantime, plesase don't attempt to e-mail any addresses at revmod.ca - I hope to have those addresses restored by Wednesday, but you never can tell. I'll keep you all posted via here, and thank goodness my name registrar was somewhere else, or I might have lost the domain totally.

My webhost hasn't been operating for three days. I haven't received e-mail at revmod.ca for three days, and that continues to be the case. If this lasts a few more days, I'll be looking to replace my webhost. Any suggestions you might have along those lines will be happily received in the comments.

Thanks for your continued patience.

Nothing you haven't heard from me before

As POGGE points out, Jack Layton is entirely capable of being a moron. Had he become the leader of the NDP twenty years ago, no doubt prairie right-wingers would have found a friend on the vital issues of the day, such as Sikhs in the Legion and the RCMP.

Canada filled with disappointment and pain

The UN has published its annual Human Development Index ratings, and it turns out Canada is only the fourth-best place in the world to live. We may be comforted in our meagre existences of quiet desperation, however, to learn that what put Iceland, the winner, over the top was its score on the Bjork Scale - Iceland scored an impressive 0.32 Bjorks per 100,000 population, compared to Canada's disappointing 0.00.

Also, a lot of our native population lives in staggering poverty, and our life expectancy is dropping because some of our citizens are dying through playing whack-a-mole with the Taliban. So, you know, fourth isn't bad.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.


.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.


.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.


.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.


.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.


.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.


.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.


.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.


.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.


.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Royalties Day

To listen to some of the media, and some of the Tory caucus, you would think the Royalty Report was written by some anonymous group of Marxists (The People's Revolutionary Royalty Front?) sending it as a manifesto to select media outlets from their secret lair. In fact, it was written by a panel of primarily businesspeople, some from the energy industry, hand-picked by the Premier specifically to re-examine royalties in Alberta in the fulfillment on one of his leadership campaign promises.

Any cries from the oil industry about the unfairness of the findings are nothing but short-sighted NIMBYism. We all know that as buyers of this resource - owned by Albertans - these companies naturally want to get it at the cheapest price possible. But we're the sellers of the resource, so we should be interested in getting the best possible price for it. The Government of Alberta has a responsibility to get that price for us. The Royalty Review Panel attempted to determine how much that price could be, based on what the market can bear and what other jurisdictions charge.

This is why it's been so disappointing to me that the government has taken this long to announce how much of the report they're willing to accept, and (judging from the hints dropped so far) that they won't take the entire report:

The premier says the government's response will be balanced between what Albertans deserve for the province's resources, and the interests of the big oil and gas companies.

Wait - what? The government has a responsibility to the former, and none at all to the latter. If a government anywhere said that they were offering their unions a contract that strikes a balance between what the workers deserve to be paid based on what the market will bear, and the workers' desire to become independantly wealthy, the voters would rightfully scream bloody murder.

But it's been almost as disappointing to me that Kevin Taft wouldn't come out in full-throated support of the report at a minimum until yesterday, when it became clear that supporting the report would tactically be a position that would put the Liberals at odds with the government. Had he taken leadership with that position much earlier, would the government have felt more pressure to accept more of the report? It scares me more to consider that had the hints coming from the Premier indicated the report would be accepted wholesale, the strategy of differentiation pursued here by the Liberals might have led Taft to suggest that the report went too far.

Regular readers know I don't spare criticism for the NDP just because they're my chosen party. But in this, I'm proud that Brian Mason came out early and strongly to say that accepting the recommendations of the report is the minimum the government could do in order to execute their responsibility as custodian of this non-renewable resource.

A collection of random stuff

- In the wake of the Ontario referendum vote, I'd half-written a post about my opposition to PR. And then I had a conversation with an old friend, and now I'm rethinking it. I would have posted "I dunno", but that doesn't sound very engaging.

- It's municipal election day in Alberta. If you haven't given it any thought at all, and need to rush a decision, Daveberta likely has the links you'll need to do the reading before you head to the polls, at least here in Edmonton. For the record, it's pronounced "mu-NISS-i-pull", and I will not cast a ballot for anyone that pronounces it "mewn-i-SIP-all".

- The Sunday Family Circus actually made me laugh. Out loud! Surely, the apocalypse is at hand.

- Confidential to Caribbean Cutie: One piece of cake won't kill you.

Once a year, I can be bought

Notwithstanding my "ad-free" declaration on the left, once a year I let my poker freak flag fly. Here we go:

I have registered to play in the PokerStars World Blogger Championship of Online Poker!

This Online Poker Tournament is a No Limit Texas Holdem event exclusive to Bloggers.

Registration code: 5248482

Wish me luck.

Small Potatoes

Maybe it's because the smaller sin is easier to understand, or because it was more obviously unethical. But honestly, in the face of giving away our resources at fire sale prices, foregoing more than enough revenue to make Alberta Health Care premiums disappear, how can anyone get worked up about Ron Stevens' little three-day Hawaiian vacation on our dime?

Another reason to get out of that car. Or city.

Toronto has long been known as The Boringest City in History, at least in my circles. I'm sure maintaining that reputation is a full-time job. As Torontonian Bruce McDonald over at Canuck Attitude points out, the Dullification of Toronto is currently being perpetuated by the Toronto Parking Authority, because can you imagine a more Kafkaesquely-appropriate wing of government to be the iron hand of The City That Flavour Forgot? (Be sure to follow the link if only to see the great Leonard Cohen)

Torontonians, am I being unfair? Prove it, and stand up to this plan to mow down a great old club in favour of twenty - twenty - parking spaces.

Metapost

I'm attempting to get my domain registrar switched over, over the course of the next week. Expect glitchy nonsense to ensue, as normal. If I go missing, I'm optimistic I won't stay that way for long.

In case you missed it

Which you certainly did. Who stays up late enough to see The Daily Show?

Last night, the correspondent piece was about the Mexican immigrant invasion - of Canada. The story featured jackass Paul Fromm, of "Canada First". (I debated about putting up that link, but honestly, does anyone come to RevMod who might be swayed or sympathetic to this guy's viewpoint?) As always, it reinforced my belief that hate shouldn't be criminal, but we should take seriously our responsibility to stand that hate up in the public square, and gut it of power by mocking it relentlessly.

Plus, I almost pissed myself when Raffi Torres was interviewed, which made it all worthwhile.

Bear604 has recently posted about "comedy" that divides. The best comedy makes people rethink their ideas and prejudices, not reinforce them. Paul Fromm wasn't the butt of the joke here - he was the funhouse mirror being held up to the rest of us.

Welcome, Canadian Tourists! We accept Canadian Dollars at par!

There's been a lot of ink wasted talking about this, so let me hop in with a little of my own. One question that arose from the story isn't being answered very well.

How did this happen?

The basic answer in the media to the first has been that the US dollar has collapsed. That answer, while true, is not the whole story by any stretch. On the last solstice, March 21, as well as buying 86.37 US pennies, a single Canadian Dollar bought 22.48 Russian roubles, 101.77 Japanese Yen, 64.92 Eurocents, 1.05 Swiss Francs, and 57.74 Icelandic kronas. Against every one of these currencies today, the Canadian dollar buys more: 25.03 Roubles, 115.50 Yen, 70.98 Eurocents, 1.17 Francs, 62.46 Kronas. For the record, that's increases of 11.34%, 13.49%, 9.33%, 11.43%, and 8.17%, in the same time as we've gained 15.78% on the US dollar. Pick a currency, and you'll find this same approximately 10% gain in a loonie's buying power in the last six months.

I personally think this has more to do with the fact that we've spent the last few years discovering that no matter how much turmoil our government is in, no matter how many minorities we elect, no matter what stripes our provincial and federal governments are, things are going to be generally managed competently. We're not going to play out any extreme weird theories either of central planning or of extreme laissez faire barbarism. We're predictable, and money markets love predictable. It hasn't hurt that the United States has put themselves deeply into hock to the Chinese in order to "fight them over there" ("over there" being anywhere bin Laden isn't, apparently), but that hasn't been the driving force of our own gains.

Peace. Order. Good government. Money markets love that stuff!

Robert Jordan, 1948-2007

Like, as of Sunday. Am I the only one who hadn't heard about this?

I've been reading this man's Wheel of Time series for sixteen years. And rereading it. The prose was... well, it was a bit much. And later books in the series advanced the plot almost not at all. Nonetheless, the world he'd created in the series was engaging and complex, and there were enough questions raised that we as readers were sure there would be answers to; in fact, we were sure that the answers were already there if only we managed to puzzle them out.

He was working on the book that he had been promising for some time would be the last of the series. I'm sure that his publisher has enough of an eye to the revenue side of the ledger that something will come out with Jordan's name on it, something called A Memory of Light, that will wrap up the series. I'm also certain that given the lengthy illness that led to his death, he's made sure that there are notes, that there have been conversations with family and friends and editors about how he'd like to see the series concluded, so what is eventually published may actually be very much what Jordan himself would have written. It won't be quite what we all wanted: there will be puzzles that seem minor to those left behind, that Jordan himself may have forgotten he'd planted, that will now never be solved, and the text won't have the same feel - whatever else you might say about the man's writing, it was distinct - but it will give us some closure on this world we've been so invested in for so long.

For those of us who have lived in Jordan's world these many years, I know some of you probably shared my initial reaction: disappointment that he wouldn't finish the series. Selfish and callous, sure, but I know I wasn't the only reader upon hearing about his illness to think "that bastard's had me on the hook for way more books than he's deserved; he better survive this long enough to get to the end." What I'm suggesting above is that he probably did - close enough, at any rate. So take a moment to reflect on what he's actually given to us, the world that he shared with us, and give him his peace.

Thank you, Robert. May the last embrace of the Mother welcome you home.