Checking in

To my reader:

Heehee.

I've been uninspired recently, so blogging will be relatively light.

In the meantime, here's a joke someone sent me:

An Alberta cowboy was tending to his herd in a remote pasture when
suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced out of a dust cloud towards him. The driver, a young man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban Sunglasses and YSL tie, leaned out the window and asked the cowboy, "If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, will you give me a calf?" The cowboy looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing herd and calmly answers, "Sure, why not?"

The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects it to his AT&T cell phone, and surfs to a NASA page on the Internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite navigation system to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo. The young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg , Germany. Within seconds, he receives an email on his Palm Pilot that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accesses a MS-SQL database through an ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet with hundreds of complex formulas. He uploads all of this data via an email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, receives a response.

Finally, he prints out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet printer and finally turns to the cowboy and says, "You have exactly 1586 cows and calves."

"That's right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves," says the cowboy.

He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on amused as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car.

Then the cowboy says to the young man, "Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my calf?"

The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, "Okay, why not?"

"You're a consultant for the New Democratic Party." says the cowboy.

"Wow! That's correct," says the yuppie, "but how did you guess that?"

"No guessing required." answered the cowboy. "You showed up here even though nobody called you; you want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked; and you don't know anything about my business........ Now give me back my dog."

The volume getting turned down

Now that the hysteria and firing inward has slowed, I'm leaning to the side of "I don't have enough information about this; nor am I likely to get it, so trust in Harper that there's a bigger plan in play that I don't know about."

It is true, though, that Harper wasn't disingenuous at all. I watched the CBC interview everyone's pointing to, the one where he talks about how outlawing floor-crossing would open up a bigger can of worms than the crossing itself. I remember thinking "wow, I didn't know that" at the time. Which is why he's Prime Minister and I'm not.

I hereby nominate Occam for the best quote on Harper I've seen since the election. The quote?

"[Harper has] just proven he can be a bit of a son of a bitch when he has to."

Beautiful. And true. And why not? Don't we want a PM who can make the tough decisions when there are few good options?

I thought so.

More thought on Emerson

Please tell me it's a bad dream. That and the unelected senator/party hack being selected to cabinet.

Or better yet, tell me it's part of a master plan that I haven't seen yet. Because I don't want to have endured 8 weeks of campaign garbage and boundless anxiety and stress and paid my dues as a volunteer and reasoned with die-hard liberals, just to have Harper do something we'd expect from him or him or him.

Please tell me that Emerson is going to have to go through a byelection (but if so, I feel sorry for the residents of Vancouver-Kingsway). Please tell me that Fortier is just going to kick ass, take (Lib scammer) names, and get the hell out of there within a year. Please tell me that Emerson isn't actually becoming a Conservative--that he'll still sit as a Liberal but be in cabinet--a rare thing to do, but not illegal or impossible.

Or hell, just go to the press tomorrow and take it back, telling us that doing so was an ill-informed decision.

Whatever it is, something (hope, maybe) tells me that this isn't the end of this, that Harper is going to show us why doing this was all part of a greater plan. Why it had to happen this way, and that all is not as it seems.

Something tells me. I just hope that something is right.

Otherwise, we might see this come back, and him as our next small-c conservative Prime Minister.

Emerson crosses the floor for a cabinet position?

If this is true, it's just as wrong as when Belinda did it.

Edit: it seems I'm not the only one pissed off about this.