From Cork to Toronto

Georgian Bay sunset, from the dock of some good friends who hosted us for the weekend.

a classy move by Shelbourne . Big congrats to Cork City for their win in the European Cup preliminaries and let's hope for good things against Red Star Belgrade.

A good move by Bill Graham but he should have made a better one - get the process moving for all ridings so they are ready to go at any time - something that would make Harper pause before throwing around threats of confidence motions. Graham said doing some but not all would preserve the Leader's role in selecting candidates, when apart from basic screening (which cost the Tories one of their BC candidates last time) LPC HQ should stop imposing candidates on ridings entirely. In the particular case of Vancouver-Kingsway, local Liberals had Emerson imposed on them by Paul Martin, he was elevated to cabinet immediately but then defected to Harper's cabinet this year. It's time they got to pick their own guy or gal. I suspect one part of the Liberals thinking is that without a prospective candidate to focus on, the rage against Emerson might wane - not to the point of retaining the seat but in terms of national attention-getting. The incumbents remain protected, including ...

Jean Charest visited France today and received an offer of assistance in the evacuation of Lebanese-Canadians from President Chirac. Since Stephen Harper's last stop before Larnaca was Paris, how did this offer not take place then? While the offer is of course most welcome, how can this be diplomatically proper on the part of the French? The BQ must be doing handstands. Meanwhile Dalton McGuinty was talking equalisation with Pat Binns. I wonder was it Ontario equalisation money that funded the new Quebec office in Munich ...

The Secretary of State for External Affairs of Canada requests, in the name of Her Majesty the Queen, all those whom it may concern to allow the bearer to pass freely without let or hindrance and to afford the bearer such assistance and protection as may necessary. This La Presse article ( Google Translate ) has caused a certain amount of stir in the blogosphere. On Vues d'ici, a blog I recently started reading regularly for its perceptive commentary especially with respect to equalisation, a post lambasted the report that permanent residents of Canada were to be denied evacuation by the Government of Canada's relief effort. The writer noted that her husband, a British permanent resident, could be stuck in Lebanon while she was evacuated. James Bow proceeded to make a similar point on his blog, having previously detailed the grief his wife got while becoming a permanent resident in the first place. There's only one problem - the La Presse article indicates (twice) that a...

Massive operations are currently underway to extract thousands of foreign citizens from Lebanon as Israel continues operations against anything they left standing from the previous week. The screeching from Montreal regarding a perceived failure of the Canadian Government to extract citizens with sufficient speed is getting really annoying, not because of the families concern (absolutely valid) but because the media makes no effort to make clear the differential difficulty Canada faces in comparison to other involved nations, instead having fun by taking Peter McKay to the woodshed as Peter Mansbridge did the other night. They also in the main leave the impression that every country is having an easy time getting their people out, when it's not true ( Detroit Free Press ) ( The Guardian ) and the CBC did report from Cyprus last night that the French had to leave 300 on the quayside because their time window to get the ship away unharmed ran out and once they got to Larnaca Port th...

A question posed by Martin Sheen in his TV role as the President of the United States . Israel answered that question, correctly long ago - there is no virtue in meeting an attack on your territory with anything other than overwhelming, punitive force sufficent to dissuade future attacks. While I would oppose many Israeli security policies, in which Islamic state would you have seen the courts override the executive on humanitarian grounds, such as with their decision on the Concrete Curtain? The pullout from Gaza was widely predicted never to happen because Israel wouldn't stand up to its extremists - yet the landgrab settlements there have been removed. The proportional response from Hamas was to kidnap soldiers from the Israeli side of the fence. The proportional response from Hezbollah was to continue firing missiles into northern Israel - the fact that their missiles can reach Israeli soil at all being because (a) Israel complied with the negotiated settlement and pulled o...

Declan Lynch reviews "Nomad" , an implementation of Notes 7.0.2 on a USB memory stick. Chris Miller adds some comments too . It takes 340Mb but with 1Gb sticks becoming common another iteration or so will mean even very large local replicas should be feasible. Combine that with VPN and IP softphones and maybe the dream of "your desk wherever you are" will be possible without lugging around a laptop from place to place but achievable even from internet kiosks. Seen at edbrill.com .

United Rant has a round up of possible transfer targets if the big names in Italian football face demotion due to the alleged match fixing. Sadly under the Glazer regime we are only likely to be disappointed but it's nice to dream.

Some Irish food is excellent. Other Irish food makes you wonder if all your taste buds went on strike at once. Sandra relates a recent experience which reminds everyone that no matter how much "Ireland has improved" boiling food items to within an inch of their lives "hasn't gone away you know". As for me, I'm looking forward to a revisit to "Pearl River" on Princes Street in Cork for traditional Irish "chicken with green peppers and black bean sauce and chips" and if a second visit is possible "chicken with ginger, spring onions and chips". God I'm hungry just thinking about it and it's nearly three months away still when I used to be there most Friday nights of my seven years living downtown. I have yet to see anything close to it in Toronto but then you don't pay that kind of money here either. Lennox's fish and chips was something I used to torment my brother with when he lived in Dublin, ironically he ...

With the advent of the Tories back to Federal government, one of the guns expected to be turned on supposed bastions of Liberalism within that organisation was thought to be aimed at the CBC. Private broadcasting can do just as well, we're told. Well, if you thought so too, today's evening news might give you pause. These were taken from various broadcasts from 7pm EST onwards in different timezones (courtesy of my digital cable box) Global top story - painted Canadians waving flags celebrating the victory of another country in a soccer match CityNews top story - painted Canadians waving flags celebrating the victory of another country in a soccer match CTV News top story - painted Canadians waving flags celebrating the victory of another country in a soccer match, second story about the discovery of a "kitten mill" CBC News top story - the death of Corporal Anthony Joseph Boneca in Afghanistan . Of course, this display of priorities, while appealing to those who ac...

Apparently anyone who joins the Federal Government service for more than six months is brought to Ottawa for a mandatory two-day orientation session by the Canada School of Public Service . Treasury Board pays $750 for each attendee and the costs of hotels etc. The policy which replaced a previous Continuous Learning policy was adopted by Treasury Board on January 1st this year. The participating Federal departments are listed on the CSPS website along with a course overview . I realise the Feds need to train their people, some would say more than they do right now, but it doesn't necessarily have to mean traipsing around Ottawa right after hiring - surely the course content could at least be brought out to regional centres. Combining this with Garth Turner's broadside against the parliamentary allowance towards the mortgages of MPs , the elimination of waste seems to have slipped out of Mr Harper's vaunted priorities. Hat-tip: the Politic via Ontario Blogs

Just a quick follow up on a previous post . Remember Rooney's "accidental stamp" which "only got a red card because Ronaldo stuck his interfering head in"? FIFA have taken a different view , and now Rooney will miss the first two England qualifying games for Euro2008.

No, not that "city" , the City of Toronto (though it's equally true of the former). The Star reports that the City's Budget Advisory Committee wants to make the Toronto Zoo charge more for visitors who can't produce ID verifying that they live in the City , so visitors from other parts of the GTA as well as tourists from other parts of Canada or internationally would pay a surcharge of $2 ($21 instead of $19). This wheeze was proposed by Joe Mihevc, who will face former Mayor John Sewell in the upcoming ward election. The City is always moaning that tourist numbers are down but now they come up with this notion which will discourage tourists from visiting once, as will inevitably happen, other City owned attractions are told to do likewise. $12 million dollars is not small change to keep the Zoo going but there's a lot of fat that could be trimmed from City disbursements before you got that far. $2 is not much more to pay but it's the principle - it mak...

Apparently there's a reason the media, camped on the road outside by order of the Prime Minister's Office , had such a good view of the return of deceased Canadian Forces personnel from Afghanistan as they did. Some of their colleagues stationed at CFB Trenton moved equipment that would have otherwise blocked the view . Meanwhile the Ontario Provincial Police provided traffic control. Harper failed the "Trenton test" - the CF and the OPP passed with flying colours. Meanwhile Lt-Gen. Andrew Leslie, the new Chief of the Army , had a very impressive interview with Craig Oliver on CTV this morning. Answering Oliver's quotations from a London thinktank with "when I was in Kabul" and "when the Croatians were coming at me with main battle tanks" showed this still relatively young officer has seen enough to know the challenges his subordinates will face executing the tasks Canada will expect in the next few years. Particularly tricky is the question of...

Another Manchester United player sent off for kicking during an England match - but then eight years ago Rooney was 12 years old so maybe the lesson was lost on him. At any rate, at least he will start the season fit which is after all what United supporters (even English ones) tend to value over England's needs. One wonders if he will be booed as Beckham was, and receive the same loyalty from the United support (who sang "Argentina" to the rage of the In-gur-land chavs at various away grounds). One can only hope that Cristiano Ronaldo, who with his agent is appears to be playing games with a candidate for the presidency of Real Madrid , does actually leave - although I have to admit I thought the initial reports were just the usual throwing names around . Unlike Beckham, four years remain on Ronaldo's contract so financially United are less likely to get as comprehensive outwitted as they were with the Beckham deal. Nonetheless even if the report in Marca blows ov...

You're 139 years old but every prime minister says you're a young country. I didn't decide to do anything special this year, and certainly nothing as special as last year . If an alien landed in Toronto especially near College Street or St. Clair Avenue it might be hard pressed to figure out what country it was in given the number of cars with Italian or Portuguese flags, never mind the English and Brazilian ones, given that it's World Cup time (haven't seen a French car flag yet). So since those people are busy, I'll put up this one right here. [ from the website of the National Flag of Canada, Department of Canadian Heritage ]

As a non-lawyer, reading a dense judgement riven with partial joinings and multiple dissents such as this week's 185 page Hamdan versus Rumsfeld from the United States Supreme Court, it is difficult to make sense of the legal appropriateness of the 5-3 decision, with Justice Kennedy siding with the majority and Chief Justice Roberts abstaining due to involvement in previous Court of Appeals proceedings. I can only go with my gut instinct which is to agree with Justice Breyer's comments: Congress has not issued the Executive a “blank check.” [...] Indeed, Congress has denied the President the legislative authority to create military commissions of the kind at issue here. Nothing prevents the President from returning to Congress to seek the authority he believes necessary. Where, as here, no emergency prevents consultation with Congress, judicial insistence upon that consultation does not weaken our Nation’s ability to deal with danger. To the contrary, that insistence strengt...

I had a brief look at beta 2 when it was released but having read some reviews of Beta 3 I decided to take a chance on my PC and install it there. My reaction is that while IE7-b3 is a significant improvement from IE6, existing IE6 users may be perturbed that the address bar is on top and apparently immovable and that the command ribbon can't be relocated either. Corporate users who like to minimise change may not be enthused. Firefox users will note that Microsoft has finally introduced tabs but without their own bar, leaving a minor amount of screen width for tabs. IE7's big win however seems to be the font smoothing - I use a CRT and the fonts displayed in IE7 are pleasant on the eye compared to their Firefox equivalent. It's not enough to get me to switch, but it's a big wake-up call to Mozilla that Microsoft have a browser that people who never used Firefox may never feel like switching from - especially if the anti-phishing measures and the revised security act...