Marvel comics bought by Disney

Phase 1, ripoff the Fantastic Four, create incredibles, make bazillions of dollars

Phase 2, merge with Disney

Phase 3, buy Marvel comics.

The circle is complete.

Is Gary Doer a patsy or is Stephen Harper just not that clever

Extending a rare olive branch across party lines, Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper was widely applauded Friday for his surprise choice of an NDP star as this country's new ambassador to Washington.

• from an article in the Ottawa Citizen
  

Forgive me if the timing of Gary Doer's appointment as ambassador isn't suspicious. Gary Doer was Premier of Manitoba during a period that saw increased Beaurocritization of the medical industry. Take the amount of WRHA offices in Winnipeg and hospital hour cutbacks at the same time. He was Premier during a period of time when a man who went to the hospital died after being transferred hospitals and waiting in a waiting room. The Swine Flu crisis hit Manitoba aboriginals the hardest for some reason, the NDP passed responsibility off of that to the federal government. But all the same that and many other things both reported and not have occured under his watch. There have been numerous MLA's responsible for the health care portfolio, but ultimately, it was a failure of his government to live up to a campaign promise over 10 years ago to end hallway medicine.

Now he's seemingly under increased scrutiny in Manitoba and his teflon is slowly peeling away, and lo and behold, all of a sudden Prime Minister Stephen Harper needs someone in the USA as an Ambassador. I'm not saying Gary Doer isn't a personable looking fellow, but right now in the USA the biggest issue is so called socialized medicine. With a masterstroke he has put Gary Doer in a position where journalists who actually do their job (moreso than in the city of Winnipeg anyways) can tear him down and he can't avoid their interviews or select who he wishes to talk to. If he wants to be heard, if he wants to defend his record and our medical system, he has to go on CNN and/or FOX News. Can he? Apparently he's a great interview. However I've never heard anyone ask him any tough questions.

So did Stephen Harper set this up on purpose? He looks good because he's appointing someone from the dreaded NDP to a post. He eliminates the leader of a provincial party that is being held together mostly due to its leaders personality, in the same way the Liberals were. There will undoubtedly be leaks, if not floods as soon as his replacement is appointed, leaving a potential conservative party to gain heavily provincially and splitting the vote in Manitoba between Liberals and Conservatives.

Completely ridiculous and baseless prophecy or eerily and chillingly possible scenario? It depends on how smart you think Stephen Harper is. I may not agree with him on everything, but he has played this minority government pretty well and is still in charge despite the fact that a majority of Canadians seem to find his party's policies distasteful.

Maybe Doer thought being Ambassador would be a nice line to add to his resume and he could build many contacts. But Michael Wilson the outgoing Ambassador doesn't think its an easy job. Still, it'll at least be interesting to see what happens, wont it?

Reddit does something right

So I wake up this morning to see a bunch of atheists are indignant that their soapbox on reddit has been taken away. Well tough. I don't want to hear article after repetitious article about atheism any more than I want to read article after article espousing how great Islam is or articles about barbie doll collecting. There was way too much of that shit showing up on the front page of reddit and for no good reason. It was all the same "blah blah blah My mom disowned me for being an atheist" whinage over and over again or basically insulting people who for whatever reason, wanted to believe in religion.

Many militant atheists seem to think they're at war with religion in the same way I'm at war with velcro. But its a war they (and I) cannot win. Religion preys on the stupidest most dangerous people, and also the stupidest and most corrupt individuals. The only way to stamp it out is to eliminate corruption. Yeah exactly. Some religion will always replace another religion. Fact is we do not have all the answers, and playing games with logic isn't a sufficient solution that most people accept either.

It's not like their atheism page has been taken away, it has merely only been kept from reaching the front page of reddit. Which is good because its rarely news and only gets its signal to noise ratio due to controversy. It would be the exact same thing if they created a subreddit called /trollytrollytrolltroll and monopolized the front page. It's still trolling religion, no matter how much you think you're morally right to do it.

So again, congrats to reddit for doing the right thing for once to a group that cannot stand dissenting views. Except now they're all going to go to bannination.com like locusts and ruin that too.

Reed Solomon reviews Inglorious Basterds

There will be spoilers, but they don't really spoil anything. Except the movie.

Have you ever seen a movie, a historical movie, that takes liberty with history, and makes it much much better? Yes, you have. It was called Gladiator. That movie won at least one academy award. And it fucking deserved it. Inglorious Basterds will win at least 32 Academy Awards. You heard it here first. They will invent new categories. Best Villain (Hitler), Best badass (Brad Pitt's character), coolest Jew. They will create new categories for Oscar because this movie deserves them.

Inglorious Basterds maybe suffers in the same way all artistic Academy Award winning movies suffer, in that its a bit too long. That's not to say the movie is bad at any point, because truly, it isn't, but my butt hurt and I really had to take a piss by the end and that really can ruin the ending of any lesser film. I once had to take a massive crap at the end of the movie Arachnophobia and I never found out what happened with all those stupid ass Spiders. But whatever, Spider killin's easy. Nazi killing.. that's a movie.

Quentin Tarantino can be a good director when he doesn't get obsessed with bullshit women talking about bullshit. When theres violence on the screen, he's your guy. Now, there are parts in this movie where people get scalped or cut up.. I personally hate surgical shit like that because its gross. I don't mind heads getting chopped off or whatever, but for the same reason I can't watch ER, I just don't like those kinds of things. They just bug me on some level no matter how practical or clinical the setting. There weren't TOO many incidents like that, but I'm just bringing it to your attention. But when theres real violence like people getting shot, or shit exploding, its done masterfully akin with the grace of swans attacking a puppy. There was very little bullshit women talking about bullshit in this movie, and it was good.


Now, there is a lot of subtitles in this movie, and a lot of readin'. Some folk won't like that. I can't blame them, but it does work to distract you. Myself, I've played enough 80's video games that I don't mind subtitles. Theres enough english in there that you're not reading a novel, but its impressive that the actors and actresses had pretty good accents (and the detection of accents were even written into the plot). I'm assuming most of the actors and such were American, and even so, it was pretty good. Sure people slipped into regular American English at points, but it was pretty subtle when it happened and only a trained professional ear like mine would detect something like that. Were the subtitles there to serve to distract the viewer that this was a wordy Quentin Tarantino movie? I don't think so. It wasn't that wordy. For a Tarantino flick.

There were quite a few cat and mouse scenes which I quite liked. The Nazi's weren't played for laughs as much as I expected. It was pretty serious. The Nazi we focus on at the beginning is a pretty impressive antagonist. Very cerebral and intelligent. You almost get the sense of that cop who was after Jean Val Jean in Les Miserables, he was that type of character. Very well acted, so much so that I can't for the life of me place the actor, he was that deep into the role. Well done, actor, whoever you are. I'm too lazy too look your name up on imdb, but you know how I feel. Sure, Hitler and those characters were played for laughs, but I've seen enough youtube Hitler videos to know that that's probably how he really acted.

Theres one female character who kinda looks like a young Christina Applegate but also doesn't, and she plays a Jew who escapes and runs a movie theatre for some reason. Again, I can't be bothered to learn the names of actors, but she was pretty good. Now, having the setup of the movie to get Hitler, the Basterds, and this women all in the same movie theatre at the end might make you think that Tarantino is just such a Cinemaphile that he needs to somehow make the concept of movies central to the war, but WWII did have a lot of propoganda and use of movies as part of its oeuvre, therefore I will forgive this. It makes sense.

Anyways, in the end the basterds kill Hitler and end World War II. Really, it makes more sense than Hitler commiting suicide or Communists marching into what was later to be known as East Germany. There was some cool gunmanship and out-assholing between the Nazi's and the Basterds.

I saw the movie Munich, and it had a similar premise, but Basterds does it better and is probably truer to real life than Munich was. Now, I'm not a Steven Spielberg fan. He goes for the heart strings a little too often and I don't have a heart, but I understand what he tries to do. This deserves all the Academy Awards Munich thought it deserved.

I'm sure I'm forgetting something. But my brain has been melted by the awesomeness that is this movie. Oh right, I saw the trailer for Avatar. That's gonna be an interesting movie. It looks like they get their minds transferred into the bodies of aliens for some reason and then they run around fucking and riding dinosaurs in 3D. James Cameron is a fucking genius. Also they had the new Trailer Park Boys movie trailer (at least here in Canada) and that also looks like fucking genius. And there was another trailer I liked where this guy is a badass and his daughter gets killed and the killer walks free so he fucking kills everyone who was a part of that bullshit, and that was a good trailer too. There was also a shitty trailer for A christmas Carol in 3D with Jim Carrey. Jesus Christ that was bullshit. I'm not paying to see that fucking crap. What the fuck, Robert Zemeckis?! What the fuck! But I digress, the trailers added a bit too much time to the overall length of the film. While most were good, they should have cut the Scrooge one.

So in summary, I do recommend people see this. You don't have to go to the theatre, its probably best to have it on a DVD where you can pause and appreciate it more, but all the same, it was a good film. Tarantino is back on his game. Bravo. Also Mike Meyers was in this shit and he didn't totally ruin it, so that oughta count for something too.

32 Academy awards.

DISSOLVE THE CRTC

Someone has set up a website at http://dissolvethecrtc.ca. The purpose of which is to have the CRTC dissolved. This is something I agree with wholeheartedly. The CRTC is composed of ex-industry hacks and political wonks who do NOTHING in the interest of the Canadian consumer and should be scrapped and replaced right away.

So what will happen to Canadian content on television some might ask. WHAT CANADIAN CONTENT? Saying that is like an abused puppy coming back to its owner. There is no Canadian content.

But then who will allocate the spectrum? That is done already by industry canada.

But then who will take complaints about radio stations and television stations airing nudity and profanity and whatnot?

Personally I could care less either way about that. Certainly its in a radio stations self interest to regulate their language. Complaints need not go to some other body whose only recourse is to shut them down.

If you care about the internet, about being able to watch what you want when you want to watch it, about paying reasonable phone charges, about not having stupid channels bundled in with the channels you want, then sign this petition. I'm not one for signing petitions usually, but this one has the potential to shock those in power. I don't think they have any idea how dissatisfied Canadians are with their consumer regulatory bodies. Incompetence has been the case for far too long.

BIOS locking

One thing that really bugs me is when computer makers lock your computer so that you can only use their add-ons. There is no practical reason for this except for pure greed. Dell does this, HP does this, Occasionally Lenovo/IBM did this.

I recently got an HP mini 1000. There is a mini-pci slot there, you could conceivably add shit like a 3D card. But you cannot, because it is bios locked to only accept official HP parts. Which would be fine if they were reasonably priced, but they are not, and they are also not easy to obtain. I want to throw in a 3G mini-PCI card in there, but no, HP doesn't want me to, they want me to go on a 3 year contract with rogers and pay $600 for a netbook. (When you can get the same deals in the USA on a 2 year contract for .99 cents for the netbook)

If I ever start a company, I won't do shit like this, and shit like this erodes any loyalty you may have gleamed from me. But go ahead, sacrifice longterm customer loyalty for short term profit. It's the American way.

On the bright side, someone did create a bios hack for the sunofabitch, so I could probably be fine regardless, but its the principle of the thing.

Sunday Hours in Winnipeg

I hate Sundays. Stores are only open until 6pm here in Winnipeg. They should eliminate Sunday store hour laws. Heck, most stores would probably still only be open until 6pm anyways.

It's what they do on Saturdays a lot of the time I know at Staples they close at 5 or 6 on Saturday AND Sunday. Sure, some stores like Wal-Mart would stay open 24-7, but the only law is that people should not be forced to work on a Sunday or Holiday. Perhaps a good idea would be to require employers who chose to stay open on weekends to pay a small weekend bonus per hour of like 5% total pay. That would both encourage employees to work on weekends, and prevent employers from taking advantage of them.

It has always made me curious how businesses are open late on weekdays, when people are usually busy working, yet on weekends when people have time to do shit, they're closed. I guess people are going out to the lake or the cabin and things slow down, but its weird. Less so for the hours of operation and more so for the strange movement habits of humans.

In any case, I wasted my Sunday. It was raining all day and now that its nice out everything's going to close anyways.

civic holiday

Today is a civic holiday. Which is not a statutory holiday. So what purpose does a holiday serve if I still have to work 5 days a week or not get paid for 1 day? NONE. Fuck you civic holiday, or as its better known, SHITTY LONG WEEKEND!

At least I've still got 3 weeks of holidays before the year ends, and Labour day is less than 30 days away. Still, it sucks to waste a holiday on this.