Geo's Queue Theory

Madel's street: clean.
10 blocks north, 10 blocks west: the surface of the moon

Here's an aerial map of two very similar neighbourhoods. They both service around 60 houses. They are both in the West end of the city. They both have citizens who pay taxes.

One of these communities is not like the other.

 

There are several things that are the same between Ormsby West and Lessard. Neither of the communities are on the bus routes. There are elementary schools in the vicinity. Neither route can be considered 'short cuts'/'alternate routes' to get from one major road to another.

As far as I can tell, the only difference between these two neighbourhoods is that Mayor Stephen Mandel lives in one of them. Probably a lot of other high-profile people live there, too. My street, on the other hand, has plumbers, electricians, school teachers, laid off UofA employees, and bus drivers.

The good news is that Ormsby neighbours have really gotten to know each other over the last few weeks -- out of necessity, everyone is helping out: pushing vehicles out of intersections, away from curbs, and out of driveways. After a successful escape, there have been many man-hugs and high-fives. We have apparently accepted the responsibility to "take one for the team", and as good citizens, do the work that the city is paid to do... after all, any money saved on roadway maintenance can help to build a new hockey rink for downtown ... and that's what we really really want!

I don't believe that Mandel actively "ordered" his minions to clear his street before mine. I'll blame the transportation department, who would most certainly have arranged their shovelling schedule to look after their bosses first. After all, they don't really have to deal with the public - complaints from Joe Scheme to an answering machine definitely carries less weight than a phone call from the Mayor to the shift boss, onto Dispatch, then down to regional road workers. Still, a good leader would make a conscious effort to ensure others were taken care of first, before his own needs were met. So, his street was cleaned first. He didn't brag, but he didn't protest, either.

Something else... I've noticed some of these city owned/leased vehicles rumbling into my neighbourhood with their empty buckets high in the air. The only way they can get into our streets is to roll over top of our craters. These mindless drones probably are thinking:

"yeah, it's bumpy here, but it's not my job; I wasn't told to plow here. I'm heading for the rich people's houses".

Our city employees are not paid to think (hence windrows blocking driveways). They were told: "Plow street X." So, that's what they do. You are not paid to think, Mr. Grader Operator. Just do your 'designated route', and forget helping out where you actually could make a difference.

I'm including a little "drive-through" of our two neighbourhoods. This slide show, taken at about 1pm on Jan 28, shows that Stephen's block(s) have probably been dry to the pavement for a long long time. You can't say that about my community... Can you? Judge for yourself:

CLICK HERE for a slide show of Mandel's streets.

CLICK HERE to see a mere mortal's street

There's an old saying that may have been applied here: "Shit before Shovel" -- it was supposed to be a sarcastic, less-cordial version of "Age before Beauty", in declaring who should go first at something. If the Mayor and the Planning Dept were thinking of this when they were developing the cleaning priorities, then, I guess, I concur.

Until spring comes, I'll just entertain myself in my lunar hut, in my lonely crater, looking out my window -- watching the UPS driver, School Bus Driver, Garbage Truck, and Epcor vehicle push themselves out of my district's two-foot slush-ruts. ...I'll also be anxiously waiting to see how our civic brain-trust screw up the mosquito control this coming spring.

P*I*T*C*H     D*E*A*F !!!

It's only bothered me for 35 years.

I'm home during the afternoon (another tirade, but I'm not allowed to write about it, because I signed an agreement  PS: the UofA sucks  ).

I now get the privilege (?) of spending hours glued to daytime TV.

History Television is actually pretty good...

except...

... when they run the opening credits for M*A*S*H.

That TV show is still fun to watch. I used to fall asleep to it when I was in high school - an after supper routine that I cherished.

Here's the problem:

About half-way through the tenure of the series, they re-did the opening credits (when B.J. Hunnicut was introduced, I believe - 179 episodes). For the revised opening credits, the theme tune ("Suicide is Painless") was made painful; a flute comes in over top of the harmon-muted trumpets, and is completely, terribly OUT OF TUNE!!! [LISTEN]

M*A*S*H survived eleven seasons. My ears did not.

EASTWEST STUDIOS is the culprit. They claim to have recorded/engineered the theme song. A show-off flute (or very shitty piccolo) goes up the octave just in advance of the bridge, then plays out of tune for the remainder of the tune. Everywhere on the 'net, posters have been smart enough to avoid that copy of the tune in "tribute" pages. That is, even tone deaf computer nerds know to avoid the newer version!

Those eight bars permanently damaged musicians' ears for over 170 episodes - not counting reruns. Strung end-to-end, that's about nine hours of this ochestratic butchering. (If you want, I'll tie THIS together 179 times...)

Michael Altman (14 years old at the time) wrote the lyrics - he's rich because of residuals. Johnny Richards (a very accomplished composer) deserves the money, too.

But, by musician's union rights, the flute/piccolo player presumably gets a little piece of the action, too. He/She doesn't deserve it.

So, suicide is painless, huh? -- Hey, Mr. Out-of-Tune Flautist!
Go ahead! You've certainly inflicted enough pain on us! Please play out the song for us all.

To Beeeeeeeee or not to Buh

I've been in the computer industry longer than most of you whippersnappers have been alive.

Thus, I don't much appreciate being corrected on my pronunciation of words that happen in the ever-changing world of techno-verbage, thank you very much.

Let's all pronounce the following terms together, shall we?

SAY the first letter		SAY all letters
EMail derived from regular mail Elearning   "Electronic" was the "in" prefix Etrading online stock trading iMac Steve Jobs thought the "e" was overused iPhone so the world now embraces the I iTunes ... and it's pronounced "eye-Tunes" iPad let the spoofs for over-using begin iFart I rest my case   CATV Cable television VLan Virtual local area network EProm Erasable print/read-only memory DRam Dynamic random access memory ADSL Asynchronous digital subscriber line Btree Binary search tree VRam Video (card's) random access memory		URL    Universal Resource Locator - does not rhyme with "Earl" DTP Desktop Publishing FTP File Transfer Protocol LED Light Emitting Diode - does not rhyme with "Fred" OS Operating System - not from the place the Wizard comes from CGI Common Gateway Interface EDI Electronic Data Interchange DPI Dots Per Inch ISP Internet Service Provider - does not sound like a snake speaking UI User Interface

Okay, now that we've studied our techno-derivatives,
let's all say the following word out loud:

BLog

Alog
Blog
Clog
Dlog
Elog
Flog
•
•
•

 B L O G 

This thingy refers to a linear, time-line based diary (or "log") of things to say. Digitally, it's existed by many names over the years, even before today's internet. Posting to a public forum has been accomplished by conferencing systems, news groups, email lists, web pages themselves, and the one that the "B" is derived from: "Bulletin Boards". More accurately, it's replicating the BBS experience, using the Web, thus the web based log.

"Bulletin Board Systems" had the abbreviation: BBS, and no, it wasn't pronounced "bibs".

A hundred years ago, sailors called their daily journal a "log". A hundred years ago, "mail" was delivered by over-paid postal workers.

We called the electronic mail system "EMail". It could have easily have been coined as "DMail" ("digital mail"), or if Steve Jobs were to re-invent it, it would have been neon blue, and called "IMail".

"Blogs" could have very easily been coined as "Elogs" or "Dlogs", or for Steve, "Ilogs".

 

So...

Don't rag on me when I pronouce a "blog" as:

BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE Log

... and, yes, my two learned offspring, I'm talking to you!

 

By the way -- it's CHOW - DAH!! - not "choire dierre"! Say it Frenchie!!

Leave no dunce behind

Besides the ridiculous preaching to 'vote, no matter what', we are experiencing another really bad trend in our society.

As if we don't have enough morons in our city, we get the following brilliant statement, "We want every single kid to walk across the stage with a high school diploma."

Haven't our teachers and principals suffered enough? The "Leave no student behind" has left our city riddled with twenty-year-old illiterates; when dimwits should have failed grade three (because they couldn't recite the alphabet), our teachers have been completely pressured into passing them into the next grade.

Passing from one grade to the next is not a right — or at least, it shouldn't be!

Most school principals don't seem to have the balls to look a parent straight in the eyes and say:

Mrs Jones, little Johnny has missed five out of seven exams this year, and has only handed in fifty percent of his homework. He needs to repeat grade 10. Next year's grade eleven courses rely on a level of mastery of the grade ten lessons. Johnny has not proven that he has the requisite knowledge to ensure an adequate opportunity to learn grade eleven material.

By making Johnny repeat grade ten, we hope that repetition of grade ten concepts will lead to a better grasp of the materials needed to make grade eleven.

Of course, this is where the parents of little, precious, Johnny do one of a few things:

• "Could you dumb down what you just said? You are speaking above my head to try to embarrass me".
  
• "After I graduated high school, I aspired to be a lamp post. Now I are one. I didn't never need no advanced English".
  
• "You fail my precious Johnny, and I'll take the matter up with the School Board!"
  
• "My Johnny is a special child, and you get extra money for having him in your school. Do you want me to take him to a different school?"
  
• "I blame his teachers — they know he's a football player, and they're biased against athletes."
  

But idiot parents aren't the only problem. The system is stacked against high calibre. Money is given to schools based on the number of enrolled kids, the number of kids taking a full course load, and a truckload of other administrative contrivances. All of the pressure can be traced back to a political system that does not embrace excellence. Just like our newly elected trustee implies:

It's QUANTITY — not quality

 

Slightly off topic — Examiner editor Scott Haskins, asserts that there should have been more talk by the city counsellors about the fate of schools ("Miss: The lack of focus on school closures in the election campaign. It's a huge issue and shouldn't be confined to the school boards"). Scott must have been one of the students not left behind in our public school system: in Canada, education is a provincial matter, not a municipal matter. I believe I learned that in (about) grade 8.

Sanctimonious maroons with big media profiles

James Cameron? Bob Barker?

How is it that James Cameron can take a huge leap and criticize the Alberta Oil Sands, when he admitted that he "didn't have the whole story yet?"

Sure, he eventually took a skewed view of Northern Alberta by talking to some of the residents near the Athabasca river. But for months before that, he had already made up his mind.

How would he like it if things were reversed:

I haven't seen the movie Avatar, but I have been told that it promotes bestiality.

Yes! Avatar promotes Bestiality!

Apparently, the natives of the planet use an external appendage to mate with other blue people. But, they use that same appendage to attach to flying dragons. Just to insult us further, the female natives are nude, with blue paint applied.

I think we should be boycotting James Cameron films (as if we needed another reason - thanks for promoting Celine Dion, Jimbo). He has successfully disguised porn in a way that has sucked millions of dollars out of the moviegoing public.

I also don't think the movie is anything other than a remake of a 1960's Western, where John Wayne protects the natives from the encroaching of white man on Sioux territory. Or Kevin Costner protecting the Indians in Dances With Wolves. Or Tom Cruise in the Last Samurai. Or Sigourney Weaver in Gorillas in the Mist. Or Sean Connery in The Last Dragon. Or Daniel Day-Lewis in The Last of the Mohicans. Or William Shatner in Star Trek The Voyage Home (save the whales). Or ... well ... you get the idea. How lazy is Cameron for regurgitating this old story?

Hey! James Cameron recycles old ideas, and passes them off as his own!

 

--- Oh, and Bob Barker: Have all of the cats and dogs in the world been spayed or neutered yet? No? How 'bout you spend more time on that crusade? If you're completely successful, you'll have contributed to adding domestic animals to the list of endangered species. Bob Barker, you must hate animals!!

 

Oh, and Jimbo and Bob? Thanks for visiting Edmonton the other month, and contributing to our economy.

GAP joins a growing list of corporate idiots

Somehow, they're going to boycott tar sands' oil
It just proves that the 'GAP' is really between their ears.

So, people are going to boycott oil and gas from the oil sands of Alberta? Now, how the hell are they going to do that?

Here are two sources of oil Yes, they're different. There are three regions in Alberta that handle the Oil Sands. There are 220,000 conventional oil and gas wells. HERE is an excellent report on oil and gas resources in the province. The Institute for Sustainable Energy out of the University of Calgary has a lot of great information. Check it out.

OK, fine. Different sources of raw materials. One type has been cutting roads through the prairies and farm land for a hundred years. The other scrapes clay from the earth, then digs out goop.

 

But...

THEN WHAT HAPPENS?

Answer:

it ALL goes here!   ALL of the oil goes to one of these!!!

 

From that point, ALL of the oil travels using one of these techniques:

 

 

Can you tell which molecule of oil/gas came from 'conventional' methods, rather than the tar sands????

I can't. And I really doubt that a flogger of expensive jeans can, either.

 

 

 

 

END RESULT:

HOW THE HELL CAN YOU
TELL WHERE YOUR OIL AND GAS CAME FROM?

Morons. Let's boycott morons before we pick on anyone else.

Oversell of excitement for boring things

Example: Attendance at the Capital-Ex Parade

I was a band judge at this year's Capital-Ex parade. That is, I was there. (The quality of the parade? That is a different tirade).

This tirade is about the absurd exaggeration on radio and TV about the attendance at the annual event. They do this as part of their continued contribution to convince us that Edmonton has the best of everything; we have to continually lie to ourselves. We need brainwashing to artificially inflate our self-esteem (that's also another tirade).

Before and after the parade I heard this -- over and over:

"Over 200,000 Edmontonians lined the parade route for the annual event"

In fact, check out this 'report' from the Capital Ex web site:

Unadulterated crap.

Actually, if you watched Global TV news last night, the teaser into the news cast had Lynda Steele tout "250,000 people" came out to the event. Then, at the end of the newscast, they show a few snippets of the parade with an voice-over stating "over a hundred thousand people lined the streets... etc etc"

Somehow, even Global must have realized how completely impossible is would be to have over 25% of the population of the city of Edmonton come out to "line the streets". 20 city blocks . So, they downgraded their exaggeration to 100,000.

Still bullshit.

Take a look at the parade route:

(click to enlarge)

That parade route amounts to twenty city blocks. Edmonton city blocks, not Las Vegas city blocks. 200,000 people into 20 city blocks means that, on average, there were 10,000 people sitting on the sidewalk for each block! Or, 5,000 people per side per block.

Here's a typical site of the density of the parade route (I know it was typical - I was there):

(click to enlarge)

Is there any human out there who would be able to extrapolate the number of bodies along the parade route by thinking that this small area held over 5000 people?

Morons. The city is full of morons - that is also another tirade.

Join George's one-man protest of the insulting, ear-bleeding presentations of Football games at Commonwealth Stadium.

To:

Nicole Turenne
Communications Assistant
Edmonton Eskimo Football Club
(780) 448-1696 wk
(780) 429-3452 fax
nicole.turenne@esks.com

I'm sending this to you in the hope that you will pass this message along to members of the Esks' board. The web site doesn't make it easy for people to contact the general manager or others at a high administrative level of the organization.

--------

I'd like to voice my frustration with the game presentation and the deterioration of the essence of the football game.

I was at the game last night. The game was okay, but I'm getting more than a little weary of how the Esks present the game at the stadium. Along with my lifelong pal (we both turned 50 this year), I've had seasons' tickets since the team moved into Commonwealth (1977). Before that, I was a Knothole ganger in Clarke Stadium (when I wasn't playing trumpet at the stadium with the JP Rebel marching Band).

I'm not enjoying the games in person anymore -- the action on the field is always fine (whether we win or lose), but the constant CONSTANT blaring of ear-piercing music coming from the speakers every split second after each whistle is really killing the game for me.

And for the last few seasons it's gotten worse: the stadium announcer compounds the frenzy by soliciting cheers from the crowd -- how lame can you get. It reminds me of the "APPLAUSE" sign held up in the old-time studio audience TV shows -- apparently, the Esks fans aren't intelligent enough to know when to cheer without some paid shill with a microphone soliciting a cheer.

You have obviously decided that the product and goal for the four-plus hours of game night is to keep the noise level up and "entertaining the crowd in anyway you can", without any regard to the actual sport on the field.

The people who are loyal to the CFL will know when something good happens. They'll also know nuances of the game that are quite trivial -- for example: people who are there to watch the game will instantly know that when there's a flag in the backfield, it's usually a "holding" call (whether they saw it or not). In contrast, people who are there for the "experience" will know that alcohol sales stop promptly at the end of the third quarter.

The audience that the Esks and the CFL have embraced over the years would be targeting the "WHOLE EXPERIENCE of being at the park", which includes fans watching people walk up the stairs, or those same ridiculously over-/under-dressed people parading multiple times up the stairs in order to willingly show off to others. Even the Esks' tickets are printed with photos of people dressed up, prompting the "LOOK AT ME" crowd mentality, rather than "LOOK AT THE GAME". This fake pride reminds me of the so-called "patriots" who rioted on Whyte Avenue after playoff games, or July 1 celebrations.

We may have the highest attendance in the league, but it's an embarrassment compared to the early 80's. Why are there 25,000 empty seats in the stadium? It's because veteran sport enthusiasts who used to fill Commonwealth to its capacity of 63,000 every night have given up. The erosion did not come because we haven't had another Wilkie/Moon era, it came because real fans have been forced to compete in a stadium filled with people who are there for "the experience".

There were years when _true_ fans would go to the game, and, without being coaxed into cheering, roared approval only when something good occurred on the field. After the whistle, (during the downtime) the fans could converse with their neighbour about what just happened -- without risking impending throat surgery from shouting over the blaring of the loudspeakers.

Consider television broadcasts. After a play ends, the announcers replay the down from a couple of angles, and talk about what just happened. In the stadium, we hear only thunderous electric guitars and hammer-wielded drum kit cymbals! Would TSN ever consider scrapping the colour commentary between downs, and simply play 29 second snippets from some 26-year-old's iPod?

If the experience at the stadium was "watching football", rather than being barraged with a 110 decibel lambasting, the occasional rain wouldn't drop my spirits -- and I would have stayed to the end of the game last night.

Now, there's too many negatives for my threshold of tolerance - from now on if the weather isn't going to be perfect, I'm not going. Going to every game has turned into an undesirable obligation to simply fill my (paid) seat. Given the randomness of weather in Edmonton, I'm likely going to drop my seasons' tix next year, and only go when the weather's guaranteed to be nice, the starting time is convenient for me, and I have earplugs.

Thank you very much for taking the time to consider this letter.

2008 Oct 3

IGNORE THE PRESSURE TO VOTE…

… if you’re just going to be a lemming.

“...but I like what party XX believes in…”– what a crock and a cop-out.  Do you really think that just because you voted for a member of a particular party that you will have automatically secured a “voice”?!   Get real.   The governing party has twelve-to-sixteen people who speak (the “ministers”) – the rest of the so-called elected officials become mirrors to your own blind lemming status; the back-benchers have no “voice”, other than “yes, sir”.    Why not elect someone with the gonads to stand up as an individual, and rock the boat once in a while when necessary?

Something else about “yes men” – the leader is only going to select ministers that will not become a threat to him/her.  The strongest elected member, will likely not be put in a place where the party, leader, or “party-line” will be jeopardized. 

Lemmings are ruling our society.  And most of you are to blame.

Thanks, media, for screwing up my society.

WATCH FOR MORE TIRADES:
(in no particular order)

• Tatoos
• Fahreheight vs Celsuis
• The customer is always right? In my eye.
• Tax/Financial "industry"
• Dirty Oil vs Oil Spills
• Global Warming
• Airport(s)
• Ft. Edmonton
• Expo
• Marching Bands in our city
• Northlands is Non-profit???
• The world will collapse if we lose the Oilers - yeah, right.
• Free Advertising (front page, etc) for Sports
• Urban Sprawl
• "Time limit" TV shows -- Mantracker, most renovation/makeover shows
• Artificially long/pregnant pauses before announcing a winner/loser.
• Interviewing losers.
• "exclusive" accu-weather/traffic copter, etc.
• Techno-gimmickry
• Lotteries that 'support' social services because the Govt won't
• "Civil" Engineers and Planning?
• Prices to "rent" public facilities
• The list of word misusage
• Purposely misspelling a baby's name to make it "unique"

Geo's Growing List of Personal Boycotts and Whinings
[aka shit list]