Another Data Loss

Posted on January 20, 2013 | 7 comments

It seems that folks can’t seem to keep track of their stuff anymore and with the easy access to data, it makes is even easier to lose the confidential stuff.  Ottawa’s Montfort Hospital is the latest place to have confidential patient data go missing.  Data breaches are becoming common, with Human Resources and Skills Development Canada losing data on nearly 600,000 student loans earlier this week.

The gut reaction of everyone is that someone, somewhere will find it, put two and two together, steal your identity, clean out your savings account, buy a big-screen TV and then sit on their ass, sending spam email under your name for the rest of time as we know it.  With confidential data, the effects are even more chilling.  Conceivably, the Montfort data loss could allow someone to publish the names and treatments of everyone on that drive.  Would you be embarrassed if it became common knowledge that you were treated for recurring UTI’s and IBS? 

The reason confidential data is lost is dirt-simple:  USB drives or keys that hold a lot of data are as common as lint in just about every office we’ve ever been in. Putting confidential data on a USB drive is about as easy as leaning back in your office chair.  Walking out the door with the data is no harder than taking your car keys out of your coat pocket.  This doesn’t mean that people are deliberately stealing data to resell to Kazakhstani identity thieves, it just means they’re being careless, forgetful or dumb, like most humans.  Which is probably what happened to the Montfort Hospital data.  The drive was lost in a snow bank somewhere when it fell out of a pocket. 

The fix is almost too simple, which is why it hasn’t been done and why there are still serious data loss incidents.  Since I’m a Microsoft guy, forgive me, but we’ll focus on that pathway, as it is is the one we know best.  There are alternatives for other platforms that do the same thing more or less.

It’s called BitLocker to Go and in Windows 7, it can be applied to any USB storage device that can be plugged into a computer.  What it does is apply military-grade encryption to the data, so if you lose that drive, as long as you don’t have the password written on the back of it in Sharpie marker, the data is unreadable.  Yes, all encryption can eventually be broken; nothing is forever, but BitLocker makes it mathematically unlikely that it can be broken in a reasonable amount of time. 

Now, put a big, bold-face asterisk next to that statement.  Most of it depends on the strength of your password.  Having ‘password’ as your password, is about as dumb as it gets.  A complex password, using lower case, upper case, numbers and special characters, as well as spaces, can make things even tougher.  Tougher as in 4032 years, tougher,  By the year 6045, we don’t care if you find out what my identify was, or if I was ever treated for athlete’s foot.

So how do you come up with a ‘strong’ password to protect your stuff?  This site, from Symantec, is a secure password generator.  For giggles, I generated one and this is it:  sU!Ru@ac.  It’s tough enough and almost impossible to guess, as it isn’t my favourite colour, my Mother’s maiden name, or some mishmash of birthdays, anniversaries and collar measurement.  Is it easy to remember?  Hell no.

Thereby hangs the problem: Humans are lazy.  I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve found passwords under keyboards, or written on a pad of paper in an office.  Most of us in IT have stories that will turn your hair white of critical passwords readily found in the clear. 

There needs to be some process in place, with consequences for those who slide on the process.  Users will copy files they ‘need’ to a USB key or drive and just as likely lose them.  The only way to stop them is to break their hands, which tends to have Workplace Compensation Board implications in most offices.  You tend to not get the best candidates for open positions, if part of the interview is the question “Do you mind having both your hands crippled by our Security Department as a condition of employment?”  

BitLocker and BitLocker to Go can be enforced easily with Group Policy Objects.  You can make it impossible for users to plug in their own USB drives or keys.  One organization provides a specific brand and model of USB keys to their staff, with BitLocker to Go already on it, and makes it impossible for any other kind, brand or model of USB device to be usable, except the company-provided one.  This fixes the human problem, at least a bit, by forcing those who insist on copying material off the network onto a USB key, to only use an ‘approved’ key already configured with encryption.  

One other organization I’m aware of goes one step further:  Before a computer gets to a user, the USB ports are filled with epoxy.  You can’t physically plug in a USB drive.  It voids the computer warranty, of course, but they’re willing to go that far.  Desktop chassis’ are locked with a tamper-evident seal and woe betide the user who breaks that seal, even accidentally.  They get an E-Ticket to the Seventh Circle of Draconian Security Hell that starts with the words “Charged with Corporate Espionage” and gets uglier from there.      

To circle back.  Data loss can be prevented easily enough by addressing the technology and the humans.  Make sure there are penalties for moving any confidential data to a USB drive for whatever reason.  Make it as hard as possible to actually get the data off the network.  Make anything that could be a destination as secure as you can with strong passwords and military-grade encryption then make sure everyone understands why as well as the consequences.  

We’re certain hospitals would much rather have a press conference and say “We lost 25,000 patient records, but the file is protected with military-grade encryption.  It sucks, but we’re confident the information is as secure as we can make it.  And the person who lost it, has had their legs broken by the IT department’s Managing Director.”

Fix the technology and fix the human factors.

7 Comments

Posted in Computers and Internet

Karma Time

Posted on January 16, 2013 | 2 comments

There are so many different ways to describe karma that we could easily spend the next thousand words plucking it into submission and still wind up with nothing more than used WordPress server space and another post.  We’ll keep it simple this time.

I managed to misplace my electronic pass and transit pass somewhere yesterday.  It seems small enough a hazard of modern life to be unremarkable, but it can be annoying to get another work pass, another photo, then off to the bus company, another photo another pass, standing in lines, explaining to the drones why you need a replacement and, naturally, the paperwork involved.

Of course I looked all over the house, cars and yard for it in a frantic flurry early this morning, but to no avail.  At work today I wore the Badge of Shame, the dreaded T pass, Turkey pass or ‘Tard pass, depending on your preference and tolerance for political incorrectness.  Coming home, I had mentally planned to all but disassemble my car, assuming it had slipped off my belt and fallen in the millimetre slot between seat and console.  Upon arriving home I happened to look up at the windshield of my car, passenger side and there was my pass, placed there by a kind soul who had found it, probably at the end of the driveway and knew that it was important.

There was no note, or explanation scribbled with it:  Just the small rectangular holder, belt clip and passes, under the windshield wiper waiting for me to be in the right frame of mind, at the right place in the right time to see it.  After a small, but grateful thank you to the Karmic deities, I have it back. 

Thank you, kind stranger.  May you get your reward of positive karma when you need it, to brighten your day, as you have illuminated mine.

2 Comments

Posted in Social Constructs

Mason Baveux and the NHL Strike

Posted on January 12, 2013 | 3 comments

You know he wanted to.

Thanks for the bloggery chance again lad to finish off the commentatin on the NHL strike.  The Owners voted to settle up and the Players voted to settle up this week too, so’s they goin to Trainin Camp startin tomorrow, games firin up on Jan 19th with a 48 game season, then playoffs until the friggin end of June if they go seven for the Cup.

I’m a two minds here.  The owners are a bunch of greedy snots.  The players aren’t much better, except they can always argue that their career could end every time they lace up and hit the ice, leavin the paydays behind right snappy.  I suppose you could say I’m semi-sidin with the players, more onside than offside, but I’m callin offside on the owners. 

The owners know they ain’t nobody going to pay $200 a seat to watch them examine a balance sheet or shake hands with a City Counsellor in their private box with the deluxe catering and rivers of booze.

Which brings me back to the whole economicals of hockey.  If you’re a hockey fan and want to go see the Leafs (and whatever they prop up behind the bench as coach now that Burke’s been sent down) there’s a bit of an investment you’ve got to make.

First off, the Leafs suck this year.  Odds are the new coach is as likely to be a terrarium on wheels that they’ll roll behind the bench, wheelin it back and forth each period.  Inside’ll be a turtle or a spotted lizard who’ll do as good a job as anything coachin this collection of players they got.  If the lizard sticks out his tongue, change lines.  If he sits under the heatlamp in the third period, pull the goalie.  Coachin done.  Feed him some raw meat, or likely just a leftover hot dog from a private box.

What I mean of investment, is more in the financial side.  Gettin to the game is $50 for parking.  Seats are $100 at least so you can see the ice in the near distance.  Beer is $14, program is $10 and they’ve got a special on hot dogs.  Their $2 hot dog is now $12.  Or to add up the numbers, if you were inclined to take a family of four to a game, you’re in the ditch about $600 before the players hit the ice and you mumble the words to O Canada. 

For your 6 large you get packed into a sweatbox, surrounded by yahoos, drunkards and truckers with Tourette’s who insist that standing up in front of your kids and swearing is “good for team spirit” up until they puke on the youngest, or pass out face first into a urinal between periods in a Men’s room that smells worse than a latrine trench at the dialysis sleep over camp for the Incontinent. 

Then when she’s all over and the Leafs have lost again, you got a 2 hour wait to get out of the parking and start home in a car that smells like piss, beer, sweat and puke.  And you family.

Frankly, you’re better off to stay home and watch the game on TV, investin the $600 in upfront payments to some Nigerian minister who’s get $10 million of ill-gotten gains he wants to launder through your chequing account. 

I spose this is my way of sayin’ eff this season, I’m not goin to any games.  The NHL can go to hell, get cancer of the eyes, fall down a flight of stairs, break a hip and die in a fire for the 2013 season.  I’m not givin Bettman my money. 

You can call me back in September and maybe I’ll think about it, but right now, to hell with em.  I’ll watch indoor soccer, or stare at the aquarium channel for four hours on game night.

3 Comments

Posted in News and politics

Snow

Posted on January 1, 2013 | 3 comments

As a Canadian living in the snowy part of the country, we have snow:  Lots of snow.  Unlike the urban folklore, we do not have 200 words to describe snow.  Nor do the Inuit, (whom some of you refer to as “Eskimos”) in their extensive oral tradition.  We limit ourselves to only a few terms and a bit over a thousand words to explain it all. 

Fluffy Snow: This is the kind that gives downhill ski folk a case of the hot n’ bothereds. Cross-country skiers like it too. Shovelling it is like trying to push a pallet-load of loose cotton balls with a tractor: It goes everywhere and always falls back into the place you’re trying to push it out of, like the driveway.

Wet Snow: Heavy, wet and sticky, a simple shovel-full weighs 80 pounds and if you don’t move it now, it will solidify into a mass that will not be moved until April. We also know it as Heart-Attack Snow, which our hospitals and ER’s dread. Every day a few dozen are rolled in, clutching their chests, hooked up to an AED by the paramedics.  This is because sedentary men try to shovel it out and their primary occupation is listed as “Analyst” or “Bureaucratic Drone”, not “Stoker”,  “Navvy” or “Farm Hand”. 

Snowman Snow:  Kids love it as it is moist and sticky and rolls up perfect, dense globes of snow perfect for the application of a carrot nose, small rocks for eyes and no hat.  Usually happens early in the season when the air is warmer.  It is also the ideal snow for snowballs, which have been banned by Health and Safety for fear someone could have their feelings hurt or their self-esteem bruised.  Snowman Snow always results in a pile of wringing-wet woollen mittens, scarves and toques over the hot air vent in the kitchen.  

Squeaky Snow:  After a few days that fluffy powder coalesces into a solid that squeaks like Styrofoam underfoot.  It also means the outside temperature is –10 C or lower.  The only way to move it is with heavy equipment, air compressor powered chisels, or shaped charges.

Slop/Slush:  In my corner of Ontario, we salt our roads and streets, which turns the snow and ice into slop about the consistency of loose oatmeal or cornbread batter that can’t freeze because the salinity is twice that of the Dead Sea.  Eventually slush will freeze, but not until –40 C or so.  At that temperature it freezes into sharp ridges and boot prints.  If you slip and fall down on the sidewalk, the likelihood of puncturing a lung is high.  Jumping onto a pile of bricks headfirst hurts less.

Snow bank Snow:  In order to exist, we have to put the snow somewhere out of the parking spaces, driveways, roads and sidewalks, so we can move about in our daily activities.  Snow banks are a compressed amalgamation of snow, slush, salt, road grime and the occasional mitten or hat, comingled with the usual crud that lives on the sidewalk.  Think basalt, or exotic kitchen counter stone that has a little bit of everything in it including fossils, unaddressed third-class mail, lightly chopped advertising flyer mulch and that door to door guy who tried to sell you a hot water heater in December. 

Drift Snow:  You can slice this stuff into blocks and build a house with it.  If you drive into this stuff on the highway, expect the air bags to go off.  It is also the best snow anywhere for making snow forts with and for children.  Grownups use it to fill the ice bucket to chill down the champagne, stepping out the back door for a few seconds to grab a pail full from the deck.  In a glass with a little grenadine or crème de menthe poured over it, you have a grownup sno-cone, assuming the snow is clean.  You could use that ancient bottle of Galliano (left over from your notorious Harvey Wallbanger party in June 1983) hiding in the back of the kitchen cupboard to make your own ‘Yellow Snow”    

Yellow Snow:  Just like the little bag of silica crystals in the packaging for the blender says, “Do Not Eat”  Especially if it is found in the middle of the park.

Freezing Rain:  Glaze the neighbourhood in a centimeter-thick layer of ice, everywhere, then drop the temperature to –40 C.  In Ottawa this is called “February” and is usually followed by a blizzard of fluffy snow that sits on the ice as a disguise.  Imagine walking on ball-bearings on a Teflon pan that has been oiled with 5W-50.  You will fall down and with any luck, not face plant into a tree or a brick building.  Invariably two days later, the temperature goes above freezing and all the sheets of ice fall off the buildings downtown, usually decapitating some poor unfortunate who gets whisked up by a sidewalk plow.  We find them around the last week of March.

Corn Snow:  Often produced by snow guns on ski hills, it is the skin equivalent of 20-grit sandpaper when you slide on it.  Who needs dermabrasion treatments to look younger?  Go tobogganing on corn snow for an afternoon.

Effing Snow:  What we get in the first two weeks of March.  Every day for two weeks, just enough to call out the plows and salt trucks to tangle the streets into a morass of front-end loaders, slush and swearing because we’ve had enough of winter.  It is also the time of year when you see able-bodied people standing on eight-foot high snow banks trying to find somewhere within shovel-range to throw snow from the driveway.

Gottdamn Plow Snow:  After you have spent two hours shovelling out the drift from the driveway, unearthed the car and found the approximate location of the front walkway, the City plow or grader comes by.  It is piloted by a grinning sadist wearing an aloha shirt over flannels, ski-doo boots and quilted snow pants, with a battered Leafs toque and a pair of silvered sunglasses that cost more than your car payment.  He proceeds to fill the end of your driveway waist-deep with everything that has landed in the 613 area code for you to dig out by hand, including an ice floe that is cousin to the one that did in the Titanic.

There, a thousand words on snow. 

3 Comments

Posted in Entertainment, Social Constructs

Christmas Greetings To Our Readers

Posted on December 24, 2012 | 3 comments

We’re doing Christmas a bit differently this year.  No, we haven’t gone Aztec, or decided to celebrate the Winter solstice with gory offerings to unusual deities (The Single-Malt God demands we offer a Welsh virgin!  Insert your own joke here) – instead we decided to change it up a bit.

We swap Christmas dinner with another couple and a few other folks, taking it in turns to do all the work and of course swap presents.  We’re all at that point in our lives where the things we want for Christmas are in the four-figure range, like a new kitchen, or six months in Costa Rica being hand-fed peeled grapes and rum-based drinks with paper umbrellas.  The other potential gifts would be under the heading of cute, stuff, tchotchkes or clutter, depending on your point of view.

Instead, we took the money set aside for gifts and repurposed it for others.  Plan Canada offers matched giving for charitable gifts for people who actually need our help in less developed areas of our little planet.  We’ve bought a couple of goats, some chicks, peanuts, clean water and maternity supplies, which, with funds matching has increased the actual dollar amount a few times over.  Gifts under the tree are limited by prior agreement to very few, silly and cheap.

Of course, in less than an hour, CBC will be running Alan Maitland reading The Shepherd.  We will stop all our preparations and sit quietly listening, Frederic Forsythe’s words turning from the solid to the gaseous state without passing through the liquid state, becoming magic, as they fly through the air.

No matter how you celebrate your holiday season, please do it with generosity of spirit, kindness and warmth.  Our very best wishes and a Merry Christmas to all.

3 Comments

Posted in Social Constructs

Newtown II

Posted on December 16, 2012 | 1 comment

We’re  not a fan of stirring up stuff but with the previous post Newtown, we think we hit a nerve.  Fair enough we hit a nerve and by way of acknowledgement, we’ve published the responses as they stand.  Not agreeing is perfectly acceptable behaviour in our books as well as vociferously backing up your argument with as many facts as is reasonable.  Being able to dish it out, means being able to take it and we accept that as part of genteel discourse.

Now, is America the problem?  By our judgement, yes and here come some facts that we left out of the published version for editorial reasons and we’ll take that criticism as given.

Population adjusted per 1,000 citizens, the Seventh United Nations Survey of Crime Trends and Operations of Criminal Justice systems during 1998 to 2000, (the most recent figures readily available) lists Murders with firearms per capita, by country thusly:

#1 South Africa – 0.719782 per 1000 people

#2 Columbia – 0.509801 per 1000 people

#3 Thailand – 0.312092 per 1000 people…

Skipping Zimbabwe, Mexico and Belarus here..

#7 Costa Rica – 0.0313745 per 1000 people

#8 United States – 0.0279271 per 1000 people

#9 Uruguay – 0.0245902 per 1000 people

Skipping a bunch more…

#19 Switzerland – 0.00596718 per 1000 people

#20 Canada – 0.050297 per 1000 people

#21 Germany – 0.00465844 per 1000 people.

Our source is here if you want to look it up and feel free to.  We don’t mind being fact-checked.  We encourage it.

Some other facts. Number of guns per capita by country, 2007

#1 United States – 88.8 per 100 residents

#2 Serbia – 58.2 per 100 residents

#3 Yemen – 54.8 per 100 residents

#4 Switzerland – 45.7 per 100 residents

#5 Cyprus – 36.4 per 100 residents…

Skipping a few here…

#13 Canada – 30.8 per 100 residents

#14 Austria – 30.4 per 100 residents

#15 Germany – 30.3 per 100 residents

Interesting how Switzerland has the 4th highest number of firearms per 100 people and yet ranks only 19th in Murders with firearms.  Switzerland has mandatory military service and citizens who serve are expected to keep their weapons and ammunition at home, ready to go on two hours’ notice, which explains why they have such a high ranking in number of guns, but not their low ranking in the number of murders with firearms.  It proves that sensible, secure, trained gun ownership is not the issue.

As for rampant stereotyping, we’ll buy some of the critique, but hear us out.  It is no more stereotypical than saying the Swiss are neat and fiscally prudent, Italians passionate, or that all Scottish cuisine is based on a drunken dare at a slaughterhouse.  We’ll partially apologize and try to do better going forward.

Exceptions don’t prove the rule and the millions of sensible, safe, concerned and sane gun owners are not all ready to run amok at the slightest provocation.  If you’re interpreting our remarks that way, give you head a shake and go read our post again.     

Crazies exist, which is why we noted Anders Brevik from Norway, as a crazy, who in possibly the best, most progressive health care system in the world, was not identified beforehand as a loon.  Health care can’t do that job, no matter where.  If we tripled American mental health spending tomorrow, we still can’t identify individuals who are likely to flip out and kill people.  Health care is not the issue.  

It was and is American media that stuffed a microphone in the face of the kids who survived the shooting and had the unadulterated gall to ask a child what they felt and heard during the shooting, parental permission or not.  This link from twitchy.com lists several of the comments from others regarding the media vultures who have wrapped themselves around this story.  Read some of the links and be embarrassed for your country rewarding that kind of corporate media behaviour.  Bloodthirsty and sensationalistic are the terms that come to mind. 

This doesn’t mean the UK, or Canadian media are any less culpable in our own back yards, or somehow ‘better’:  It means the US media as a whole needs to stop and think a moment or two and ask the hard question:  Is this the right thing to do, now, or can it wait?  We’d love to hear their argument as why they didn’t and we bet it comes down to Freedom of the Press as the reason and a Competitive Marketplace as the excuse. 

Using that same logic we expect to soon see Bill O’Reilly violating a giraffe, live, because Piers Morgan molested a mule and pulled a 12 share last night that beat Fox with a measly 4 share with O’Reilly talking to a vending machine about foreign policy.  “Dammit Bill, we need that 12 share to make our numbers for the quarter!”

To close the loop, as others have noted, it is the need for a discussion about National US Firearms laws to end the knobby melange of contradictory laws and standards that have mutated across the US, pushed and pulled by lobby groups and think tanks with more disparate agendas that Carter has little pills.

We’ve stood on the firearm platform before.  We’ve got no issue with firearm weapons more than 18 inches long, with a mag that holds no more than 8 rounds (or so) and can fire semi-auto.  Anything else you want, apply, wait for the background check and probably the firm, but polite ‘no’ from the authorities.  We are in favour of extensive, mandatory training of anyone who wants to have a firearm weapon so they can operate them in a prudent, safe and responsible manner.  Military re-enactors?  Apply, your reason is good enough (to us anyways) assuming you pass the background check and you have passed a firearms safety course.  Do expect to be audited once in a while, but not onerously so.   

We’ve also promulgated a societal and legal change using something called a “Double Double” meaning. committing a crime with a firearm weapon doubles the sentence.  Discharging the firearm doubles it again. No time off for good behaviour or parole.  You serve the full sentence.  The concept being to discourage the criminal use of firearm weapons as harshly as possible.  It will take a generation to get that to sink in, much like it has taken a generation to curtail cigarette smoking, drinking and driving, having a martini to cure morning sickness or using seatbelts in your car.  It is time consuming and is not an instant fix.

Which is what all the nattering is really about.  Everyone wants an instant fix to prevent a copycat, or another loon from going off and finding the readily available tools, cheap-jack rationale and attendant media coverage to slaughter innocent people.  Most have glommed onto “Gun Control” as the Instant Fix, but that’s not the whole story or even half of the fix. 

Where the blame lies is in the inability of America to have a peaceable, dignified, sane, learned, fact-based discussion about how they want the citizens of their country to behave with each other.  There is too much sensationalism, knee-jerk reactions and political axe-grinding in the media to have anything but sensationalism, knee-jerk reactions and political axe-grinding by their citizens.  It has to stop and you have to fix it.

Goddammit, you’re Americans, you know better, you’re smarter than most and you have the will to take back your own media from the cretins.  Open a dialogue, in all directions, come to a consensus, make the decisions and get on with life where you aren’t being manipulated every 12 seconds by the circus you call a media telling you what you think and how to react.  Ignore the political manipulations from the Right and the Left and make up your own minds. 

Get this fixed.  You deserve better.

1 Comment

Posted in News and politics, Social Constructs

Newtown

Posted on December 16, 2012 | 3 comments

Unless you’ve been on a four-day Jack Daniels’ bender you have heard and seen the horror of the the Newtown, CT. killings at Sandy Hook Elementary School. 

After the first four hours, the various media outlets shifted into their accustomed role of speculation, as there were no hard, actual facts to report.  The usual commentators were dragged up, psychologists, security specialists, gun control advocates, PTSD counsellors and of course, loose cannons, sandwich-short-of-a-picnic social commentators and the monomaniacal who won’t change their mind and won’t change the subject.  I think I recall some halfwit on Fox blaming the Palestinians for the shooting, and it was Obama’s fault because he wouldn’t let Israel build a 40 foot wall around the Arab homelands.  That’s when I turned off the TV. 

Facts, those slippery things, are slowly coming out, as they should with some care for the accuracy.  We’re going to add a few of our own facts to the hopper, leavened with rational opinion.

Gun Laws as they currently stand had very little to do with the incident.  The weapons were legal as of today and the ammunition was also legal.  The killer wasn’t using anything full-auto or cut down to hide it.  Connecticut has some of the stronger gun licensing laws in the US. 

Health Care or ObamaCare has nothing whatsoever to do with the shootings.  Norway, with a very good cradle to grave healthcare system produced Anders Brevik, who calmly executed 77 people in July 2011.  Norway’s health system didn’t spot the looney.  No health care system, however funded, can spot the looney, unless we revert to a Stasi-era system of everyone being secret informers for the government.

Government Funding of Education:  Please, go away, your stupidity is making my eyes hurt.  The same for those who believe that the Fiscal Cliff debate, Obama’s re-election, Two-party politics, or stalemates in the Congress and Senate have anything to do with this.  Go away, shut the F up and go back to sucking your thumb until you join the real world, you pseudo-intellectual orifices. 

Here’s where the problem lies.  You ready?  It will hurt.

Instant access of firearm weapons of all types, legal, illegal, auto, semi-auto and the willingness to use them on a moments’ notice to settle disputes. 

There’s the real points, the real points that are not being talked about.

The issue is the American societal fixation on having firearm weapons readily to hand to “defend” themselves.  It is ingrained by decades of media rationalizations and societal conditioning that the ONLY way to settle a problem is to kill the other party. 

Even after the Aurora, Colorado theatre shooting, some commentators very directly defended the right to bear arms (and by extension, concealed carry) as a way to have stopped James Eagan Holmes from killing 12 people at a screening of The Dark Knight Rises.  If only the other people in the theatre had responded with a volley…

Using that logic, if the staff at every school in America were issued or allowed to carry firearm weapons, then incidents like this would never happen again. 

A second factoid, making the rounds of Facebook. 

Last year handguns killed:  48 people in Japan, 8 in the UK, 34 in Switzerland, 52 in Canada, 58 in Israel, 21 in Sweden, 42 in Germany,

and 10,728 in the US.

The problem is not guns, laws, health care, politics, fiscal cliffs, unemployment, drugs or bad parenting. 

The problem is America.

  

3 Comments

Posted in News and politics, Social Constructs

Joseph Arthur Lonley

Posted on December 9, 2012 | 5 comments

Indulge me dear readers.  On a wall at the house is a B.Sc. from 1929, University of Toronto, for someone called Joseph Arthur Lonley that I had collected back in the 80s from a garage sale.  The importance of this will become clearer.

Come the mid-90s we adopted two animals from the Humane Society.  One, a collie-hound cross was known as Rusty by the Humane Society.  The other was a brown tabby that was picked up as a stray.  All they could tell us was that he was maybe as old as four, had a split in one ear, was now neutered and had obviously been on the street for a while, as he was quite thin. 

On the drive home from the Humane Society, Rusty decided to change his name, by vomiting, vibrantly and gloriously all over the interior of the car as well as us.  Consequently, his name became Ralph in the 30 minute drive home.  The cat however, provided no clues; we were not sure what to name him, until we noticed his dignified demeanour.  Then we remembered the B.Sc. on the wall, so in keeping with his gentlemanly aspect, he became Joseph Arthur Lonley.  He seemed to appreciate being named after someone with an important degree circa 1929.

Over the years he shared many moments of joy and love with both of us.  He was leash-trained by Marylou’s mom Eleanor, at the cottage at Victoria Beach and liked nothing better than to go for a walk with Ralph to the park, taking the air, enjoying his surroundings.  Like all cats, he could sit in a window in the sun for hours, staring off into middle-distance, mentally calculating pi to thousands of decimal places.  But unlike most cats he would come when called and adored sitting on your lap for hours. 

One story of Joseph will suffice.  Marylou was home sick from work and decided to watch the movie “Fargo” on the (at the time) VCR.  Joey hopped up on her lap and stared intently at the screen for the whole 98 minutes.  When the credits came up at the end, he hopped off and went to do whatever cats do, having fulfilled his task of keeping Mom company and enjoying the antics of Steve Buscemi, William H. Macy and Frances McDormand.  He didn’t like Hitchcock but did like the HBO series “Band of Brothers”. 

He had stopped eating and drinking, his body running down with nothing more than old age.  He hadn’t the strength to keep his head up and wouldn’t or couldn’t cry out any more, his dignity starting to desert him, being carried to the litter box.  This morning it was his time, as we made the compassionate decision, the right decision to take him to the vet one last time.

As is our tradition, we read Psalm 23 over him as the vet injected him with the sedative, then the final shot.  He died peacefully in Marylou’s arms this morning.  Still dignified, still loving, still loved.

If you have a moment over the next couple of days, would you mind putting in a word with your particular deity for the spirit of Joseph Arthur Lonley.  The World’s Most Fabulous Cat.  

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Posted in Social Constructs

Bread, Circuses, Current Events

Posted on December 3, 2012 | 1 comment

We’re catching up with the panoply of events current.

Kim Jong-un is the the hottest of hottiest, at least according to North Korea, having been given the title Sexiest Man Alive by no less an august source as The Onion.  Needless to say the national press in North Korea has agreed, pointing to the exceptional taste exhibited by the decadent Western Capitalist media hordes. 

Naturally, the Korean Central News Agency has also found and reconfirmed the lair of the mythical unicorn  ridden by King Tongmyong before 668 AD.  Not 200 metres from the lair was a rock, carved with the words “Unicorn Lair” and an arrow.  And we make such a fuss about investigative journalism.

KC Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher lost the thread last week, murdered his spouse, then went to the stadium and killed himself in front of the coach.  A heart-wrenching tragedy to be sure, but so many of the mawkish tributes are conveniently leaving out that initial act of ‘shot his wife…’.  They are also leaving out Belcher’s string of concussions and substance issues that seem to be inconvenient around such a nice guy.

It’s much like the mandatory neighbour interview of someone who goes nuts and murders fourteen student nurses;  ‘He was just a great guy, kept to himself and wouldn’t hurt a fly, until we saw  the body parts coming out of the tree chipper and he was wearing a blue cocktail frock.  It was a bit of a surprise to the wife and me when we saw the SWAT show up with the Coroner.’

Prince William and his spousal unit, Kate have finally admitted that she’s pregnant, having been hospitalized with industrial strength morning sickness besmirching her perfect wardrobe  and demeanor. 

The headline, of course, is very wrong.  It  should be the more newsworthy:  “Happily married, heterosexual, white couple are having a child they deliberately want to have, likely through conventional means.” 

We’re looking to get some wagering action that the name will not be Beep, Bing or Nobby Windsor.  The current line is 6-1 that the offspring will be a ginger, at least according to the bookies in the UK who will accept wagers on anything.

The NHL strike is still going on.  That means the jock-sniffer component of society is starting to drool in withdrawal.  They might have to break down and actually talk to wife sometime between now and June 2013.  Sucks to be them, don’t it?

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Snack Cakery

Posted on November 21, 2012 | 1 comment

The previous post seems to have struck a nerve of comment on snack cakery, with more comments than usual.  Which brought up memories of various snack cake creations we have consumed. 

Up here in Canada we have most of the same concoctions consumed below the 49th, save some of the regional oddities like Whoopee Pies.  Our menu includes the Jos. Louis, May West, Au Caramel and the Passion Flakie.  Most are from a company with a long pedigree, Vachon Inc. from Ste Marie de Beauce, in Quebec who were purveyors of sugar bombs starting in 1923 under the steady hand of Joseph-Arcade and Rose-Anna Vachon-Giroux.  It is now owned by Saputo Inc. and is also the Canadian licensee for Twinkies.

The Jos. Louis (pronounced Joe Looey, or ‘dejuner tabernac!’ depending on your background) is technically two five-inch red-velvet cake rounds with a cream filling and the whole works coated in chocolate.  The originals of my childhood vintage actually were coated in real milk chocolate that melted gleefully on your hands. 

The current version is the impervious and inert “chocolately” coating with a cream filling that has too many syllables in the ingredient list to be considered an actual food.  The red-velvet cake is red because of the 55 gallon drum of red dye that is slopped into each batch of the cake.  This is the same dye used to make explosive dye packs for the Banking Industry, blood hits for film special effects or smoke markers for Search and Rescue.  Conceptually, there is cocoa in the cake.  Once a shift a photo of a can of cocoa is shown to the machines while a worker yells “Cocoa!” over the din of the depositors.

The May West (originally by Stuart’s) is the same deal, except it is white cake, instead of the red velvet pseudo-cake variety with the same .0004 inch ‘chocolately’ coating that leaves your mouth feeling like you’re just engaged in an act of oral intimacy with a block of Tenderflake lard which was recorded on a cell phone and is now being posted online.  Eating one makes you feel that dirty. 

Cream filling, technically should be butter, sugar, air and vanilla, perhaps shortening and some milk.  However, in commercial manufacture if you use enough horsepower, heat and pressure, you can get melted beef lips or rendered ostrich pelvis to off-gas enough lipids to whip and remain shelf-stable.  Spray enough fake vanillin at it to kill the smell, bleach it polar white with the same chemicals used in the pulp and paper industry (or add titanium dioxide powder) and you get a Universal Manufacturing Goo that you can blow-mold into anything from flotation devices for the cottage dock, or cream filling for confectionary from the Jos. Louis, to the Twinkie.  Done correctly, you can produce 1500 liters of cream filling out of the things you find in your sofa cushions plus a late-night delivery from an unlicensed, pop-up abattoir.

The cream filling gives you a lipid hit equivalent to a melted margarine colonic irrigation by a lady named Helga.  You leave feeling bloated, coated and them surprisingly emptied of your entire soul out a bodily orifice you would not expect to be that kind of pathway.

You see, commercial manufacturing of snack cakes has nothing whatsoever to do with nutrition, baking, flavours or food.  It has everything to do with the lowest possible cost per unit, with the fastest possible production of the most shelf-stable product with the widest distribution imaginable.  Costs are manipulated to the tenth of a cent and the accountants in collusion with the marketers are continually massaging the manufacturing process to get the product to the point where you’ll pay, but won’t complain enough to cause fuss or ruckus with the stock price.  This is called “adding value”.

This is not to say that snack cakes are evil, or will cause unrest in the world.  Just keep in mind that what you are eating is worthless in every measurable vector, except the few moments of childhood pleasure you get in revisiting a old friend, be they Twinkies, Jos. Louis, May West, Drakes, Ho-Ho’s or Swiss Rolls.  That moment lasts until you actually taste the treat. 

Like your aspiring-to-become-white-trash fifteenth cousins who have PVR’d all the episodes of Hillbilly Handfishin to play them back to back on Oscar night, one visit to the Snack Cake aisle every five years is about all you need.

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Posted in Food and drink, Social Constructs