Ntuple Indemnity

I told you I wouldn’t be talking about politics here, so I won’t. Nonetheless, the campaign being mounted by an organization known as Concerned Citizens of Calgary West to oust MP Rob Anders come 28 June is worth not only a mention, but a few honours for being skilfully punny. This is evident on their website and the banners that are going up, which profess to be “Giving Rob Anders the Full Nelson” in reference to his opposition to granting Mandela honourary citzenship. In response to inquiries about why their campaign is so Mandela-centric, I quote: “Because we think that this referendum on Rob, like apartheid, is a black and white issue.”

While the Vote Out Anders! team is busy digging up what they can about Anders’ record – and let’s face it, it’s fairly public, but one can never presume the citizenry is well-informed – there are two things I want to know about him: first, did he really debate in CUSID ten years ago, or was that back when the University of Calgary’s debating clubs were still departmental? Second, while it seems that he plays my second-favourite board game at the Sentry Box, is he any good?

As an aside, I generally avoid talking about my referrer logs as a matter of principle, but since the launch of the campaign yesterday, I have been receiving a surge of hits from people looking for the President of Concerned Citizens of Calgary West, Queen’s political science student Josh Kertzer, due a prior mention of him this post. This can only mean one of two things: either said Concerned Citizens are keeping an eye out for press coverage and Google PageRanks, or Team Anders is desperately trying to dig up some dirt linking him to an opposition party – an accusation that has already been leveled. If the latter is the case, I have some advice: don’t bother (but tell all your friends to visit my blog often and read my movie reviews).

There is something different about the federal election campaign atmosphere this time around, and I don’t mean the fact that the Liberals are actually in a spot of trouble. The biggest difference is the presence of “something there that wasn’t there before,” to allude to Beauty and the Beast completely out of context: the prevalence this time around of the “blogosphere” and the sudden mobilization of Canadian Internet writers everywhere offering varying degrees of punditry about the second-most important thing happening in the country – the first, of course, being something big, silver, and three victories away. To quote Tim Louman-Gardiner, “When did the Bhulin Wall crumble? 1989. Think about it.”

The election’s effect on the Internet is inescapable; already this site is receiving hits from, say, people looking for Paul Reikie, the NDP candidate for Edmonton Beaumont, who has been mentioned before on this site in relation to his stint on Students’ Council. He is not the only name from Alberta student politics running for Parliament; the other one, as most of this weblog’s readership should already be aware, is former CAUS Executive Director Melanee Thomas, who is running as the NDP candidate in Lethbridge, the same riding where former provincial Liberal leader Ken Nicol is going federal. While on the subject of just how creepy it is to either know or know people who know candidates running in this election via entirely non-political circumstances, one cannot forget Wascana’s very own Erin Weir.

However, this is where I disappoint you all by saying that the amount of political talk that will go on here will be minimal, aside from some coverage of the happenings in my home riding of Calgary Nose Hill, in which I do not to my knowledge recall having a readership. The real fun is happening over at Points of Information, where some Hack Club 7 alumni and others are reveling in a thirty-six day windfall of big fish to fry. Now that’s a political party if I ever saw one.

As far as said Calgary Nose Hill goes, here’s the lineup: Diane Ablonczy returns for the newly and bitterly pepperminted Conservative Party of Canada, while Ted Haney challenges her from the Liberal end of things, alongside also-rans-in-the-making Vinay Dey (NDP) and Richard Lawson (Green Party).

The campaigning has all the rip-roaring intensity of a Jane Austen thriller. Ablonczy’s name is appearing in small print on a few lampposts down Edgemont Boulevard, and her website seems oblivious to the fact that there’s even an election going on; it seems like her team is rightly expecting this to be a walkover. Haney, on the other hand, has signs… on lawns. Maybe I’m expecting a bit much given that we are only half a week into campaigning, but considering how already higher-profile candidates in neighbouring ridings are coming out guns blazing – I refer specifically to Jim Prentice here, whose pulling-out-stops-to-necessity ratio is the greatest I’ve seen since Tyler Botten spent his entire allotted budget on an unopposed run for Students’ Union VP Operations/Finance – could things not be just a tad bit more exciting?

Ted Haney, of course, does have a campaign website up and running – and right off the bat, one can tell that he’s quite the enigma. The President of the Canadian Beef Export Federation and someone who obviously has a background in issues such as the whole “shoot, shovel and shut up” BSE fiasco with that one poor cow last year, the real question – upon a perusal of his stance on most of the major issues – is why in the blazes he’s running for the Liberals. I’m not sure what he’s getting at with his support of accessible and universal “heath care”, either. That sounds more like something the Green Party would say.

Of course, he’s not the only source of confusion between the new Conservatives and Team Martin. One look at TeamMartinSaid.ca poses a matter of much curiosity: is it just me, or are the Conservatives trying to slam the Liberals for acting like Conservatives? If the quotations there are meant to be taken negatively (and honestly, I can’t see what’s so controversial about Paul Martin once saying, “I don’t think there is any doubt about just how evil Saddam Hussein is”), is this campaign not self-defeating and counterproductive?

But that’s stepping out of bounds. After all, I’m not going to talk about politics, right? Right?

When I first put this site together, it was originally intended to be a testbed for some basic CSS layout techniques. I finally got around to playing with the code and implementing the stylesheet switcher explained in this ALA tutorial. To your right, under the “décor” heading, you may currently switch between the current layout and an otherwise identical one that uses a blue colour scheme, effectively remodeling Nick’s Café as a casual seafood restaurant on Fisherman’s Wharf – and here I refer specifically to Neptune’s, where I last dined in April 1999 whilst inadvertently separated from my school band tour, but without the barking sea lions.

As time goes by I will likely add a few more colour schemes or even wholly different layouts, while also fixing some of the less standards-compliant exploits I used to force certain things to work, such as the spacer image setting minimum dimensions for the title graphic above and the open <p> tags that get paragraph indentation going – ugly cheats that CSS was meant to eliminate, only certain web browsers refuse to handle the specification properly.

Speaking of standards-compliant browsers, I now primarily use Mozilla Firefox 0.8 on my Windows XP machine, and I would recommend it to anyone still stuck on Internet Explorer, even the lazy ones that hate downloading and installing new software. The switch is well worth the effort, and though it is visibly in the pre-1.0 stage in some respects, it’s a vast improvement. Tabbed browsing is a godsend to anyone such as myself accustomed to having eight to ten pages open at any given time. When I require pages to be open simultaneously – say, for example, submitting Diplomacy orders in one window while having the game map open in another – I can easily switch between the two on the main Windows taskbar without having to wade through everything else. Better still, most of the current shortfalls are easily circumvented by the mountain of extensions available for quick and easy customization.

I still keep MSIE around for testing purposes, and because FTP access is where its integration with Windows really shines, but there’s no substitute for better software.

And sealing it up is exactly what No. 23 has done in both series thus far – first with the overtime goal against Vancouver in Game 7 two weeks ago, and now the solitary goal in tonight’s elimination of the Detroit Red Wings.

I did not live in Calgary in 1989, the year the Flames won the Stanley Cup. By that, I mean to say that I have never lived in a city where the home team advanced past any round in the playoffs, let alone to the Western Final or its Campbellian counterpart – until tonight. The continuous citywide hooting, hollering and honking of horns following the overtime goal and the otherwise scoreless contest that preceded it was an indication like no other that yes, the spirit of Calgary hockey is more than alive and well. It was not dead these past eight to ten years, just comatose – and now it’s awakened to enact what the movie advertisements called “a roaring rampage of revenge”, though I suspect I’m confusing it with another story.

The funny thing is, I had tickets to the game. But it’s only so often that one gets a chance to trek all the way across the city to hang out with enlightened defectors from Edmonton in a sports bar – and besides, as far as going to a Flames playoff game is concerned, there’s plenty more of that coming.

On an entirely symbolic note, after years of never really adjusting to the new team designs with the colour black and the snorting-horse insignia, I finally acquired a new Calgary Flames jersey. I wear it with pride.

A month ago, I would not have believed for a second that I would spend this particular night at the Saddledome watching the Calgary Flames in, of all things, the second round of the Stanley Cup playoffs.

Game 4 was fun, no doubt about that. It would have been more fun if they had won. Though there was a lot of ball-dropping (puck-dropping?) all over the map before and after, the back-to-back goals in the middle of the second period was about as much of a prolonged collective orgasm of excitement as one can expect to see under a single roof at a given point in time. And despite three majors and a misconduct with three seconds on the clock, you’d have to admit, the fight at the end was mildly entertaining amidst a solemn sea of red.

I believe tonight was the first time I attended a Flames game since Jarome Iginla’s debut series so many years ago, but if there ever was a year to be following this team, it’s this one. Not to jinx them, but who knows when they might make it this far again? And speaking of making it however so far, mark my words: we’re taking this one in six, damnit.