British Columbians as sheep rant #1 · Wednesday April 16, 2008 by colin newell
When it comes to taking a fleecing, it seems that no one bends over more quickly (for the man with the scissors) than the average British Columbian.
I mean – we love being taken to the cleaners… and I am not entirely sure why? Living on the West Coast in a haze of pot smoke could not possibly account for all of the passive behavior… or could it?
Take the price of gas. It can go up 3 to 5 cents in a day and there is nary a whimper from the general public… alright, maybe there are faint little bleats from the average British Columbian… but nothing sustained.
It is simple. We are all gutless, two stomached, masticating wimps in furry lavender soaked coats.
Now take todays news for a moment. The B.C. Ferries Board (whatever the heck that is…) have just voted themselves a 60% raise… pretty much out of your ruminant pockets. And before ewe get your trotters all a-twitter (as if!) how about a few more details? The board chair, Elizabeth J. Harrison, received a pay raise on April 1, when the pay hike went into effect, from $105,000 to $140,000 a year. Five new members were appointed to the 13-member board on April 11.
On April 1, BC Ferries hiked fares by an average of 7.3 per cent on the three major routes connecting Vancouver Island to the Lower Mainland and an average of four per cent on the remaining routes.
The company said the “fare increases are necessary due to the rising cost of fuel as well as operating and capital expenditures.”
I wonder what this Province of lamb-chops will do about it…
apart from uttering…
Baa
Humbug.
B.C. transit use of taser shocking · Tuesday April 15, 2008 by colin newell
I ride the B.C. transit system in Vancouver any time that I am in the city –
Bus, Train or Seabus – It’s the only way to go in a city choked by single vehicle traffic.
But what is this that I hear via the CBC? B.C. Transit Cops are using taser weapons on fare scofflaws?
The CBC website reports – Transit police have fired Tasers 10 times since January last year, and three cases involved non-violent suspects, according to internal police reports obtained by CBC News using access to information laws.
In one case, a person ran from transit cops during a check for free-riders and “the Taser was deployed as the subject fled,” the documents say. Another person who didn’t pay the fare was arrested but “grabbed onto the platform railing and refused to let go … the Taser was deployed.”
I ride the “trolley” or diesel buses regularly and drivers are explicitly instructed not to be fare regulators or police – as a result, there is lots of abuse. On the Trains it is another matter. Transit cops are there for some good reasons. The additional visibility of a peace officer on a system only mildly beset with violent incidents is a plus. But why the additional firepower in an already peaceful environment?
Have we learned nothing from the Vancouver International Airport incident when a confused and dehydrated Robert Dziekanski was tasered and died?
The officers on B.C. transit should not have these weapons.
Comments?
Comment [3]
All in a days work #1 · Saturday April 12, 2008 by colin newell
You might find this funny… or not.
I work at a local University in Technical-Rich Media.
I would tell you the department but we change names almost weekly.
Part of my job involves debugging anything electronic anywhere on campus… on any piece of equipment… excluding fax and photocopiers.
Anyway – I noticed a ticket in our computer based help-desk system for a task over in IMP – the Island Medical Program… in an area that I had a small part in building. But other than some visits to various lecture halls in the last year, I have not been upstairs.
One of the labs on the Upper levels had some issues with a flaky multi-media distribution matrix… and they wanted a 2nd opinion on expediting a solution.
So I exchanged a few e-mail with the lead tech over there, grabbed my doctors bag and some extra cable terminations and the appropriate tools, and away I went.
The issue in question was in G.A. Gross Anatomy…
complete with bags… and people, I mean, cadavers in them.
I should have read the fine print on the work ticket… not that it would have mattered.
So there I was… working in a lab full of bodies… one “bag”
within a few feet…
So I said… after looking in my tool-bag.
“Which one of you knows where my Red Robertson screwdriver is?”
“Anyone?”
Yea. Funny huh?
I felt a bit queasy for a minute or so… but it passed.
I asked the resident Tech there: “Why didn’t you tell me that
I would be in a room full of bodies?”
And he said…
“Because you would not come over…”
And I said.
“You have a point…”
I my entire life, I have seen about 2 bodies one with his head underneath a jacket. I will spare you the details because this is not that kind of web-blog.
But being in a room with 12 sets of human remains in body bags… a room cooled to single digits… well, it was sobering in an odd kind of way. It is one of those experiences that you never know how you will feel until you are actually there.
Bonus blog life in the big city #1 · Friday April 11, 2008 by colin newell
Pulled from BoingBoing.Net – and I am looking for comments from a Victoria B.C. or Canadian perspective…
Lenore Skenazy wrote a piece for the April 4 edition of the New York Sun about letting her 9-year-old son find his way home from downtown NYC using the subway system. Many people were upset with her.
Isn’t New York as safe now as it was in 1963? It’s not like we’re living in downtown Baghdad.
Anyway, for weeks my boy had been begging for me to please leave him somewhere, anywhere, and let him try to figure out how to get home on his own. So on that sunny Sunday I gave him a subway map, a MetroCard, a $20 bill, and several quarters, just in case he had to make a call.
No, I did not give him a cell phone. Didn’t want to lose it. And no, I didn’t trail him, like a mommy private eye. I trusted him to figure out that he should take the Lexington Avenue subway down, and the 34th Street crosstown bus home. If he couldn’t do that, I trusted him to ask a stranger. And then I even trusted that stranger not to think, “Gee, I was about to catch my train home, but now I think I’ll abduct this adorable child instead.”
Long story short: My son got home, ecstatic with independence.
Long story longer, and analyzed, to boot: Half the people I’ve told this episode to now want to turn me in for child abuse. As if keeping kids under lock and key and helmet and cell phone and nanny and surveillance is the right way to rear kids. It’s not. It’s debilitating — for us and for them.
Personally, I think there is a right age for allowing this kind of exploration. And I guess it also comes down to the environment as well.
I was about 10 or 11, on or about 1970 when my parents dropped me off in a somewhat more innocent and small Victoria B.C.
I spent about an hour downtown before I high tailed it back to my country home some 4 miles from where I was dropped off. The World seemed like a much bigger place then.
I do believe that we live in a World (at least here in the West) where we are constantly exposed to a barrage of fear-filled messages on how dangerous our World is… and that is because there are corporate forces at work that profit from a culture of fear – plain and simple.
The government of Canada (and especially the government of the U.S.A.) totally buy into this culture of fear; terrorists under every rock and baddies around every corner…
I say: The only thing to fear is the Government itself!
