Fuck tha police

I think I’ve only used my “Fuck tha police” tag once, so, in an attempt to make quota, I will put up this video of the RCMP killing an unarmed man at the Vancouver airport. You may have seen this already, but there’s no harm in seeing it again.

If you’re the impatient type, fast-forward to the RCMP’s arrival five minutes in. Don’t fast-forward too far, though – if you overshoot by a minute the guy is already dead. To top it all off, the man who shot this video had to sue the police to get the tape back. They said they needed it for their investigation and wouldn’t release it until after the coroner’s inquest (which can take anywhere from a week to a year). Luckily, they caved under threat of a lawsuit. As for those officers, I hope they get charged (or at least fired), and I hope the man’s mother sues the shit out of the RCMP.

Lest anyone think I’m picking too much on the Canadian police, I will link to this story from The Smoking Gun: Arrested For Salting A Police Officer. A McDonald’s employee put too much salt and pepper on a burger, but since management was always bitching about waste she went ahead and served it anyway. It was just her luck that it was a cop who ended up with the overly-peppered-and-salted burger. The guy took a couple bites and then went ahead and arrested her for “Reckless Conduct”. She spent a night in jail and had to post a thousand dollars in bail money.

Finally, I’ll leave off with another video, this time involving the use of pepper spray. A cop went through a Wendy’s drive-through and thought he got short-changed. He went into the restaurant and started making a scene, then approached the teenage girl who served him and accused her of stealing his money. When she refused to be intimidated, he pulled out his pepper spray and let her have a blast, then subsequently arrested her. The kicker is that, as the video clearly shows, the girl had no opportunity to steal his money and the cop never gave her the twenty dollars he thought he did. He was just being another dickhead drunk on his own power.

I don’t know about you, but I sure feel protected and served.

Intelligence fucking blows

I guess I should explain what I’m talking about, for those unacquainted with the depths of Canadian TV. Intelligence is a TV show on CBC about a big-time pot smuggler in BC. He ends up as an informant for the RCMP, but he uses them just as much as they use him. The show goes into his operation: his grow-op people, business partners, rivals, and others. The show also goes as much into the other side of the fence, showing intelligence and law enforcement people from both sides of the US-Canada border clashing and colluding to varying degrees.

Sounds interesting, right? Ed Brubaker sure made it sound that way when he gave the show a mention in the latest issue of Criminal (Criminal’s a decent crime comic, by the way, have a look if you’re into that kind of stuff). He said, “If you’re a fan of The Wire or The Shield, you need to track it down.” Like most Canadians, I make it a habit to stay away from Canadian-made dramas, so I hadn’t heard of the show -but I am a fan of both The Wire and The Shield, thus leading me to download the first season (and let me just say it was a total pain to find torrents with enough people still seeding). It was a major disappointment. Yes, the premise and the plots are fairly interesting, but the execution falls far short of the standards Brubaker compares it to. Where The Shield has crackling intensity, Intelligence has boring characters. Where The Wire has gritty realism, Intelligence has a bland atmosphere. In fact, if I had to describe the show in one word, that’s what I would use: bland. I’ve met enough government types to know that in real life they’re actually pretty bloodless and uninteresting, and the media probably makes drug smuggling more exciting than it actually is, but that’s the advantage of fiction. Take some fucking creative license, for God’s sake. The biggest crime when producing entertainment is not to make it entertaining. Even when a potential gang war pops up, the way it’s presented on the show is pretty bland and low-key. Actually, “bland” pretty much describes every this and every other drama made for Canadian TV. Maybe I’m not being entirely fair. I know the two American shows have much bigger budgets, which lead to better production values; the budget on Intelligence probably only amounts to The Wire’s coffee expenditure. If the producers of Intelligence had access to the same kind of money, maybe they’d be able to create something as good. At the very least they wouldn’t have to keep setting so many scenes at night (which I suspect they’re only doing to take advantage of cheaper equipment rentals) and they could show more complicated set pieces and maybe an action scene or two. However, I keep thinking about Robert Rodriguez and how he supposedly shot El Mariachi with a budget of only sixty thousand dollars. Or think about the first Saw movie – shot for a hundred thousand, made tens of millions. I know there are differences between TV and movie production, but the point still stands that if the people in charge are good enough, they can find a way to make interesting fare while working within restrictive budget limitations.

(This raises the question, “Why aren’t the people in charge good enough?” This one is fairly easy to answer. The most talented and ambitious creative types overwhelmingly choose to go south, and not just for the money. The creative opportunities are just so much better, and you get to meet and work with some of the best minds in the industry. With those kinds of incentives, you’d have to be an idiot to stay behind in Canada. You do occasionally get a Cronenberg or an Egoyan, but they tend to be few and far between. Everybody else deserves to get stuck directing episodes of The New Adventures of Sinbad.)

What Intelligence reminds me of the most is MI-5, and what I was hoping the show would be like. MI-5 has the same premise, except it’s actually good (at least the first couple of seasons were, before they started trying to ape 24). The kicker is that British TV channels don’t actually have that much more money than its Canadian counterparts. I think it’s made by a private broadcaster, though, while the CBC is government-owned through-and-through. Maybe it’s true how they say that government work kills creativity? In any event, that’s another show Intelligence can be be unfavourably compared to.

I think I’ll have to revise my original title. Intelligence doesn’t fucking blow. Given what I imagine are a small budget and a limited talent pool, Intelligence works well enough with what it’s got. In other words, Intelligence is good for Canadian TV. And that statement tells anyone what they need to know about this show.

Living the dream

It turns out those Army boys in Iraq have it made, assuming they can get their boss to leave them alone.

US soldiers shy from battle in Iraq

WATERTOWN, New York – Iraq war veterans now stationed at a base here in upstate New York say that morale among US soldiers in the country is so poor, many are simply parking their Humvees and pretending to be on patrol, a practice dubbed “search and avoid” missions.

See, I do this kind of thing all the time, only I call it “avoiding work”. I’m glad “heroes” can be just as lazy as the rest of us.

Aliff [an active duty soldier with the 10th Mountain Division] said he participated in roughly 300 patrols. “We were hit by so many roadside bombs we became incredibly demoralized, so we decided the only way we wouldn’t be blown up was to avoid driving around all the time.”

“So we would go find an open field and park, and call our base every hour to tell them we were searching for weapons caches in the fields and doing weapons patrols and everything was going fine,” he said, adding, “All our enlisted people became very disenchanted with our chain of command.”

I guess I was suffering with a lack of morale whenever I goofed off at work. If I was more motivated I probably would have been working more enthusiastically. The only problem (for my boss, that is) is that I saw no reason to work harder. It’s not like it would have changed anything – there still would have been more work to do and I’d still get paid the same. Maybe being the guy everybody else dumps their work on is its own reward. For now, I’ll follow the lead of the brave boys in the US Army:

“[S]earch and avoid” missions continue today across Iraq. “One of my buddies is in Baghdad right now and we email all the time,” he explained, “He just told me that nearly each day they pull into a parking lot, drink soda and shoot at the cans. They pay Iraqi kids to bring them things and spread the word that they are not doing anything and to please just leave them alone.”

That’s pretty much the dream of any wage slave: Get left alone to drink Shasta Cola, listen to music and shoot at cans. Really, who can blame them? It’s a crappy situation to be in a country where everyone hates you, you don’t know the language, and your bosses are idiots. It’s nice to know that the American work ethic is alive and well. To quote Homer Simpson, “If you hate your job, you don’t quit. You just go in everyday and do your work real half-assed. That’s the American Way.”

Dumbledore is teh ghey

JK Rowling outs Dumbledore as gay

Harry Potter author JK Rowling has revealed that one of her characters, Hogwarts school headmaster Albus Dumbledore, is gay. She made her revelation to a packed house in New York’s Carnegie Hall on Friday, as part of her US book tour. She took audience questions and was asked if Dumbledore found “true love”.

“Dumbledore is gay,” she said, adding he was smitten with rival Gellert Grindelwald, who he beat in a battle between good and bad wizards long ago.

The audience gasped, then applauded. “I would have told you earlier if I knew it would make you so happy,” she said.

I always wondered about this but the books are fairly unclear about his relationships. The most I could get from it was that he was a “lifelong bachelor,” which can be code for “gay as a maypole” but could also mean he just never married. It’s nice that Rowling came right out and said this but why didn’t she put it in the books? I don’t think there are even any gay characters in there aside from the now-outed Dumbledore, so I figured it was another one of those fantasy worlds where everyone has “normal” sexuality. Maybe the wizarding world is just as homophobic as the real world, so Dumbledore covered because he didn’t want to get fired from his teaching job. This still leaves the question of why it wasn’t mentioned in the books. It wouldn’t have taken much either, maybe a line or two about how much Dumbledore loved Grindenwald. I hope it wasn’t just so she could trick homophobic fans into buying Deathly Hallows.

This revelation raises some interesting questions, chief of which is “who else was Dumbledore nailing during the intervening years?” Snape, perhaps? Hagrid? Or maybe Dumbledore schooled a young James Potter in the ways of manly love. I bet the fanfiction people have written all that and more, even before Rowling dropped this bombshell. Who knows, there might even be a T.H. White and Dumbledore slash out there. Maybe that’s where White got the idea for the Merlin character in his books. Or maybe Dumbedore is another one of those sexless, non-threatening gays that keep showing up in conventional fiction. The more I think about this, the more annoyed I get at Rowling for not having the strength of character to put this bit of story in the book. I think it would have done kids some good to see a positive portrayal of a non-ambiguously gay character. Oh well, we’ll just have to hope they get it right in the movies.

Carson to Santa Monica Pier Bike Route and Public Toilets

Do you own a bicycle? Do you live in the Carson, CA area? Have you ever wished you could bike to the Santa Monica Pier but didn’t know a route? Do you get nervous if you’re too far from a toilet? Are you a cheap bastard who won’t buy something just so you can use a store’s john? Well, worry no more because I wasted a couple hours making the following map (click on the picture to go to the Google map):

The route is clearly marked along with many points of interest, including public toilets. Now you can bike to the Santa Monica Pier while remaining aware of how far you are from the nearest john! No more will a weak bladder or an unexpected diarrhea attack inconvenience you!  Start living your life today!

Heather Mallick admits she writes for obnoxious, mumbly weirdoes

You may think I’m overstating things with that title, but check out what she wrote about the “Don’t tase me” guy in her column (emphases mine):

After the incident became public, there was a wave of blaming the victim. Meyer was loud and obnoxious, and deserved what he got… As anyone who gives and attends public lectures knows, there are always audience members at Question Time who hog the microphone, who don’t ask a question but deliver a statement of their own beliefs at great length, who mumble and miss the point. This is a given at public events. When it happens, I remain polite and answer as best I can.

I don’t have the man electrically shocked, mainly because this is the type of person most likely to buy my book at the end of the reading. But also, it’s just not done, in the same way that one does not use the same toothpick to repeatedly dip one’s shrimp in communal sauce; it’s not hygienic. It may be thrifty, it may even be harmless, but it is beyond the pale.

So there you have it, the type of people who buy her books are those who deliver rambling commentaries about secret societies during the question and answer portion of a lecture. The “unmedicated conspiracy theory nutjob” is a pretty strange audience to go for, but I guess writers really do have to find their niche and stick with it.

New Mount&Blade!

Modern PC games tend to be bereft of any startling innovation. It’s to be expected, given the large budgets now in existence – but it’s still lamentable. For truly innovative games you have to look outside the already established areas. I guess you can’t get more outsider than Mount&Blade, because not only are its creators not from the established game industry, they’re not even from the United States. Yes, Mount&Blade is actually from Turkey. The development team started off with just one dude and his wife, but now there’s a handful of other people attached, most of them also from Turks. It’s a really neat medieval RPG with an emphasis on historical veracity. The setting is in a fictional land, but the weapons and armour are all fairly accurate recreations of actual medieval items.

When you begin the game you’re plopped in as a virtual nobody in the middle of a gigantic civil war. There’s several different factions, from the pseudo-Viking Nords to the Khergit horse archers. Keep in mind, though, that it’s probably best to hold off choosing a faction until later. Depending on your choices as you create your character, you can either be the son or daughter of a minor noble, the adventurous heir of a merchant family, or an unknown adventurer. These correspond somewhat to difficulty levels, as the one from the noble family starts off with some acceptable equipment and an already established name. To get the full experience, though, I suggest you start off as a nobody. If you’re playing the game right you’ll eventually get called to the nobility anyway. You start off with very little money, so it’s best to earn some either by competing in the arena or buying up goods in one town and carting it to another to sell for a profit. It’s your basic mercantilist system, where if you buy more of an item the prices go up, and if you sell more the prices go down. Once you have enough money you can also buy some good equipment, assuming you haven’t already looted some from the enemies you’ve defeated.

It’s in battle that Mount&Blade really shines. It’s in a third person view, something like a more realistic version of the action in the Dynasty Warriors, or an expanded and actually enjoyable version of the combat in Oblivion. You can choose swords, lances, axes, bows, crossbows, and a whole host of other weapons. You can choose to be on foot or mounted, with or without a shield, with a large band under your command or a small one (or none at all), and all these different choices have their advantages and disadvantages. The violence is rather muted but blood does spurt and there’s something kind of gory about seeing an arrow sticking out somebody’s face.

The newest version is 0.890 and it adds a whole host of new features. The only downside is that there’s also a bunch of new bugs, but the development team is working on them as we speak and will probably release a newer, less-buggy version soon. You can download the game from the Mount&Blade website but the download section still only leads to a previous version. To get the latest, go to here. The downloaded game stops upgrading at level 6; you need to purchase a serial key to go beyond. I’d definitely suggest doing so since the price goes up as the game gets closer to full release, plus you can feel smug knowing you’re helping fund the development of a really cool game.

Update (Sept. 27): Versions 0.891 got released quite recently, followed quickly by 0.892. The Mount&Blade website still only has 0.808 available for download so go here if you want the latest version. I also notice that some people are coming to this page while looking for cracks for Mount&Blade – tough luck, I ain’t giving any. Although I don’t doubt that there’s cracks and CD keys available out there I still bought mine fair and square. It’s a small indie developer and the price is really quite reasonable. For only $22 you get the full unlocked version and it’s still cheaper than the $29 it will eventually cost and it’s better than most of these PC games with million dollar budgets. Really, it’s a great deal. I can understand people not wanting to buy a lemon but that’s why the trial version is available for download.

Fighting over nothing

Huh, I was gone there for a while. I wish I had an excuse but frankly, I don’t. I wasn’t overly busy or the like, I just didn’t feel like updating. To compensate, I offer up this Harper’s article by McKenzie Funk about the Northwest Passage. Well, the actual article isn’t online, it’s in the September issue of Harper’s, but the commentary by Scott Horton gives you a good idea of what it’s like.

(Incidentally, doesn’t McKenzie Funk sound like the name of the missing Canadian member of the Furious Five? As soon as someone invents a time machine and I learn to rap, I intend to go back to early 80s Brooklyn, adopt the name “McKenzie Funk” and have rap battles with the Zulu Nation. I will be billed as “the time-traveling MC.”)

Funk opens with the Canadian military’s show of strength in the North. A war game was held where a U.S. merchant vessel (it wasn’t really, of course) traveling without Canadian clearance had to be subdued. It ended up being slightly ridiculous since the outcome was predetermined, and it’s not as if a shipping vessel has any real means of fighting back. Funk even mentions that the radio operator of the “American” vessel, perhaps trying to add an air of verisimilitude, used a terrible version of what the writer calls a “California surfer accent.” The best lines to highlight the comic aspects of this are actually in the opening:

On the first full day of the sovereignty operation, the captain slowed the frigate and we took out the machine guns and sprayed the Northwest Passage with bullets. It felt pretty good. It was foggy, and the unpolluted water boiled as we polluted it with lead. There was no life we could see, and few waves. The wind was cold, the Arctic Ocean a drab green. There wasn’t any ice. But if there had been ice, we would have shot it.

In spite of how it comes off, the operation was deemed to be necessary by the Canadian government, and for good reason. The melting of the ice in the North will soon make the Passage a viable shipping lane. This route can be faster than through either the Panama canal or round the tip of South America, at least if you’re shipping from Asia to the east coast of America. Funk mentions that a shipping container sent to a northeastern port of America currently takes about $1500 to get there. If the Northwest Passage was used, it would only cost $500. This massive, two-thirds drop in price will have many shipping companies salivating. The only problem (for the Canadian government, that is) is that the US and other nations do not recognize the Northwest Passage as falling under Canadian sovereignty. Instead, they consider it to be an international strait, which definitely peeves off the Canadians something awful. Since a military blockade would be foolhardy for many, many reasons, the only real solution is diplomatic. This can be yet another problem, since American attitudes towards Canada alternate between indifferent and paternalistic. Funk writes about a trip to the policy-making centres of Washington and finding

a capital that was awakening to the security risks posed by global warming, and also awakening, perhaps, to the idea that northern riches could be ours—yet barely connecting the dots between the two. No one really seemed to think that Canada would get in our way. No one really seemed to think that it would come to blows. No one really seemed to think about Canada at all.

Canada and the U.S. aren’t the only nations arguing over the North. Russia, Norway and Denmark (recall that Greenland is Danish territory) also have claims, with the Russians probably the most visible in terms of the international media. Their recent flag-planting stunt definitely drew attention. In some ways, this is actually a good thing for Canada because it prevents it from just being a fight between it and its southern neighbour. All these countries necessitate the use of the United Nations as a mediator, which probably irks the Americans to no end. The most relevant treaty is the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, which highlights just how far the sea is considered part of a country. The treaty says a nation territory extends to within 200 km of their land, though “territory” and “land” are more finely defined in the agreement. This is something of a problem for the U.S. since it never actually signed the Convention (even though it actually helped in drawing it up). After ignoring it for some 30-odd years, the U.S. is now rushing to sign. (To be accurate, Pres. Bush wants it pushed through, but the Republicans in Congress and the Senate consider it a blow against American sovereignty. Will he or won’t he get it signed before he leaves office? Stay tuned to find out.)

So what’s next in the fight over the far north? A sergeant Funk met in the operation highlighted the basic Canadian strategy. Referring to a dispute with Denmark over an insignificant island off the coast of Greenland, Sgt. Strong says, “Just set up a trailer on the island with a couple guys. Give them enough supplies for a six month stretch, then rotate them out and resupply.” (Not an exact quote, I don’t have the article in front of me.) A sustained presence, military or otherwise, is the best way to show ownership of territory. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has committed to the development of a deep-water port in the area, the ranks of reservists in the North are being expanded, and the operation Funk tagged along with is just the first of many. This means that, if you’re ever traveling in the North, don’t be surprised if you turn on your radio and hear a horrible attempt at a SoCal accent. Resist the urge to mock the speaker, as he could well be part of an operation to establish control over a currently useless stretch of sea. At the very least, lay off the moose and igloo jokes.

Bonus: A Boston NPR station has an interview with McKenzie Funk about his article. Listen to Mr. Funk talk about all this stuff while curiously refraining from laying down any mad rhymes.

Suprnova is back!

Suprnova was one of the earlier torrent aggregators out there but it got shut down by the copyright cops. Fortunately, they’ve been brought back by the friendly folks at The Pirate Bay. Best of all, Suprnova actually has a search function now – I can’t tell how hard it was to look for stuff on the old site, especially near its end (when there was a hell of a lot of listed torrents). It’s still supposed to be in beta for the next few weeks but it looks to be working okay. Welcome back, Suprnova!

In related news, Torrentspy has disallowed searches for users with U.S.-based ISPs. Justin Bunnell of Torrentspy has said it was to protect the privacy of its users; I think the MPAA lawsuit has made this an extremely prudent move. See Slyck for the details.

A child’s-eye view of the impending collapse of the U.S. economy

If you’re like me you’re probably not too familiar with the details of the U.S. sub-prime lending fiasco. All the news coverage has made you aware of the broad strokes, of course, namely that American banks (in a fit of exceptional short-sightedness and stupidity) approved loans to people who couldn’t actually pay them. But did you actually know about how the banks sold off those loans, which were then split up and sold off and split up and sold off some more, such that many more times the original value of the loan was resting on the ability of the loan’s recipient to pony up and pay it off? And now I will abandon the second person since it’s fairly obvious I only bothered to scan the headlines and thought the underlying details were too complicated. Well, the Asia Sentinel has got my back with an explanation addressed to a hypothetically interested child. Titled “It’s All Gumdrops,” it uses the sale of a gumdrop to a sticky-fingered kid to illustrate how exactly the whole thing works. The short answer is that it’s another iteration of the age-old pyramid scheme; the long answer is – well, read the dang article.