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This Canadian company makes bulletproof vests… for dogs.

Reading some of their customer testimonials makes it clear just how dangerous it can be for a working dog: getting shot, stabbed with a pitchfork, burned with a Molotov cocktail, blown up with IEDs… it’s scary stuff.  You might be inclined to think, “Well, it’s just a dog.”  But it takes a while to breed and train a working dog, longer than it takes to train the dog’s handler; a trained working dog is considered a very valuable piece of ‘equipment’.

Cops and soldiers also become very attached to their dogs.  Dogs often spend their entire careers with the same handler.  A number of years ago I remember reading about an American K-9 soldier and his bomb-sniffing dog.  They got blown up in an attack of some kind in Iraq, both were badly injured and the dog died.  They’d seen it all as a team: people getting shot, burned, stabbed, blown to bits and so on.  But the one thing the soldier couldn’t get past was the death of his dog.  He had a nervous breakdown and had to be discharged.  Conversely, there is also the tale of Lex, whose handler was killed in Iraq and who became the first American war dog to be granted early retirement to live with the fallen soldier’s family.  He now works as a comfort animal, raising the spirits of war vets back home.

Having read all this, now I see why people will spend two grand on a custom-fitted doggie stab vest.  People love their dogs.  And as it turns out this is nothing new.  Humans have used dogs in war for thousands of years and even 2000 years ago people greatly valued their canine companions.  Ancient armies like the Greeks, Persians and Romans all equipped their war dogs with armour, often leather, but sometimes even with chainmail.  Why?  They considered the dogs warfighters just like the men and thus they deserved similar protection.

If are you are curious, you can see what I might be like if I got the spelling, grammar and creativity genes from my parents.  And if I were a chick.

My sister, Melanie Card, has decided to take the plunge and pursue wiritng full-time.  This is good.  Hero’s Calling is fully on and being serialized right up there on Wordpress.com for your enjoyment.  If you’re into fantasy, check it out.

Battlestar Galactica is back for its final half season and the killin’ has resumed anew.

A while ago I predicted the death of a major supporting character, and sadly, I was eventually right.

In spite of the fact that the Earth turned out to be nothing more than a bombed out, useless planet, Dee finds a bit of comfort in the fact that her relationship with Lee is beginning to mend.  They go out for drinks.  She wishes him good night by her bunk, cheerfully says “Hi” to a sullen Gaeta, then pulls her sidearm out of her locker and shoots herself in the head.  She dies on the floor, in a pool of her own blood, while Gatea and Seelix helplessly try to do something.

No one knows why she did it, but maybe Dualla wanted to have it end while she still felt good, rather than suffer looking for the next ‘Earth’.  Bill Adama loved her like a daughter, even before she became his daughter-in-law, and her suicide sends the Admiral out of control.  He gets drunk out of his mind and it takes, if you can believe this, a relatively sober Tigh to talk him out of his own suicide.

Watching BSG is almost like watching a car accident, but it is so gripping and so visceral, that I can’t stop.

Poor Anastasia.  This is right up there with Cally’s swift and pointless death.

Update:  Oh, and as it turns out, Gaeta is bi. Watch the webisodes.

The full text of Mr. Obama’s inaugural address can be found here.  One paragraph that really grabbed me was this one:

We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defence, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.

Wow.  That is bold.  The big O ain’t mincing words and he obviously isn’t interested in being fucked with.  I respect that kind of honesty from a politician.

I don’t envy you in your coming labours, sir, but I wish you the best of luck.  Show America what it is like to be great again.

Big Bank bailed out again, blah, blah, blah… one has to wonder who is going to pay for it all. This gives me a great idea.  What if nobody does?

Long ago, money was actually backed by something real, like gold or silver, it could actually be redeemed for physical things.  But that all stopped years ago. Money, in the modern sense, is now an ethereal thing based solely on the belief of its worth.  That, when you think about it, is a giant con.  All of the ‘real’ money in a fractional reserve banking system, like the ones we use today, is created by the central bank, much of it when it loans money to large banks which in turn loan it to you.  But what if you just didn’t bother to record the creation of new money?  Your society would simply have more.

So you make more money out of nothing.  *Poof* just like that.  It’s easy for a central bank do, go into the computerized ledgers and start adding numbers.  If more money appears out of nowhere and is never recorded as debt no one is really going to know.  Essentially, you are forging money.

Now when an economist hears something like this, they go spastic.  For starters, I’m pretty sure it is illegal.  But these are desperate times and frankly, their dumb, Keynesian, debt-based economics obviously haven’t been working so methinks it is time to start thinking out of the box.  “What about inflation?” the economist is going to ask.  Here’s how you avoid the inflation monster: you fence the money, just like criminals do, so no one realizes the supply is increasing.  Unload a little bit at a time and don’t tell anyone you have done this.  Some of the cons you can run might include:

• Issue random tax refunds to individuals, corporations and banks and then don’t record the outlay in the Treasury’s books.  Not every taxpayer, just some of them.  Who’s going to notice or question it?
• Randomly forgive certain tax debts, citing some bullshit new program.  Fudge the books accordingly.  Again, who’s going to say anything?
• Slowly increase payments on foreign debts using the ‘fake’ money.
• Create venture capital firms secretly owned by the government.  They loan the ‘fake’ money to manufacturing interests then close down without ever collecting.  I especially like this con because it even makes jobs!
• Grant money numerous small-scale infrastructure projects in small towns.  Don’t record this, just mint the money and go.
• Launder money through State-owned casinos by having the customers win more often.  Bribe managers to keep quiet.

You slowly inject, into various world economies, a few trillion dollars and when you are done, you shut the programme down and never speak of it again.  You publicly lie and say that people are saving more and that prosperity is assured.  Debt relief as if by magic.  Now obviously this is going to require some high-level co-operation from high-ranking officials at various federal banks but from what I’ve seen those folks are all crooked anyway, so with the right amount of bribery, I think this could be made to work.

Talk about your bad timing.

One of the little things I do to fight off the increasing insanity this world heaps on you is writing fiction.  Most of it does not wind up here, though every now and again I share the rough stuff.  One of my little projects over the last little while is an attempt to write a screenplay for a big screen version of Cowboy Bebop, quite possibly my favourite anime ever.  I have been smitten by it since I first saw it, and figured portions of it might be adaptable into a live action screenplay. My first movie length one, actually.  You may scoff, but the process is fun, and there is always the remote prospect of it being sold.

I figured pitching it would take a couple of years.  More than enough time since it takes Hollywood about 20 years to find good source material and Cowboy Bebop only came out in ‘98.  I had the story basically set and was well into the first draft.  And then about an hour ago I discovered that someone has beaten me to it.  I should pay more attention to industry journals I guess.  Worse, they intend to cast Keanu Reeves as Spike Spiegel.  Arrrgh!  He ain’t right for the role.  Just not right.  I’m not sure who would be right, but it’s not him.  The fact that they have attached such a big name to the project sends off little warning bells in my head that say, “Suckage is imminent.”

Goddamnit!  I might as well press delete on this fucker, because there is no way anyone is going to option it now.

“I have no idea.  These boxes have been here since I started.”

Two boxes of cat-5e cable have been sitting there for two months, the wires going up into the ceiling of the basement.  “I’m supposed to be fixing this ceiling, but I’m afraid to touch them.”  The fella is a ‘just’ a labourer but these are good instincts.  I normally stay out of the way of the other tradesmen, but this guy actually approached me, wondering what some of the wires were.

I hate this dumb building.  In the process of being renovated, it is partially ripped apart, a real disaster area.  This is one of these places that has a gazillion rooms in its basement and none of them make sense.  This is where all the Ethernet (and telephone, electrical, who knows what else, etc…) cables are, dozens of ‘em along walls and ceiling, no rhyme or reason to it.  Half of them aren’t even hooked up to anything, or rather, anymore. There is a tendency for telco and computer people to string new cable and leave the old stuff in the walls because there is this general fear that if we cut them, something important might stop working.  This is acutely true for this place.  I’ve been working on it on and off for two months and I’m still uncovering hidden rooms around the sprawling property with computer systems (some attached to the network and some not).  The staff also hook up and move stuff when I’m not around.  They don’t mean it in a bad way, but sometimes they don’t understand that I’m not omniscient and don’t know about all the little changes that have been made when I’m not around.

I look at the dusty wire boxes.  “Well they aren’t going to anything since the wires are still on the rolls.  And you say these have been here for months?  Give me your pliers.”  The building is full of abandoned wiring bullshit and I’ve had enough.  I cut the wires off from the boxes and shove them aside.  “There, now you can do your ceiling.”

A while later I’m talking to the electrician, who is also trying to cope with bizarre condition of the electrical systems.  We walk down the hall and he spies the wires I just cut and starts cursing.  “What the fuck is this?!  Who the fuck did this?”

Well, that’s my fuck-up.  You see, this is the reason why you never remove old cable.  It also is the reason you hire a foreman, rather than have a bunch of tradesmen like me sort of go at it randomly.

After I apologize to the man, I tell him I thought the cables were abandoned.  He tells me the cables were intended to support a computer system.  He’d been told there was to be “Internet” in a location upstairs so he pulled two cat-5 lines.  He didn’t know where the other end of the “Internet” was supposed to go so he left the boxes there, figuring someone would fill him in later.  That was months ago.  Normally the telco guys do the communications wiring for me, but I guess he figured he was supposed to do it.  I didn’t have the heart to tell him he was wasting his time, as there will never be a computer in the location he wired, but I promised him that I would splice and patch the wires back to the central hub myself when the reno was done.

Why do I get involved in these sort of jobs?  I dunno.

Astronomer Ellen Milley gazes lovingly at her cool extra-terrestrial find.

I’m being a jerk, I know, but the pose in the photo is quite flattering to her face and her snowsuit ensemble is excellent, practical and sophisticated at the same time.  Fellas, this is one of the reasons why you need to get into astronomy… pretty girls like to look at the stars too.

Thanks Phil.

[part 1]

Egon, my trusty furnace, has been running constantly lately.  My home is old and poorly insulated, but it’s not normally this bad.  It’s as if the furnace can’t keep up to the heating needs of the house.  The blower runs constantly, the burner cycles on and off, seemingly barely able to keep the temperature at 20.

Something is obviously not right.  Egon is running hard, but the air coming out of the registers seems weak.  Not weak as in cold – it’s plenty warm – but weak as in not so much of it.  Barely a breeze.  Not the furnace I used to know.  There’s a 3/4 hp motor attached to that blower.  Air used to blast out of those vents.  Furnace repair ain’t my thing, but something must be done here and I really don’t have the scratch to call a furnace repairman (last time it cost $250).

One of the things I’ve noticed is that the air pressure around the heat exchanger is considerable.  There is this curious little vent installed on the furnace right on the main stack and if you open it, air blasts out, just like it should.  Are some of the vents broken?  A collapse, blockage…?  I had been pondering this for a couple of days when it occurred to me: the A-coil of the air conditioner is blocked.  That little vent is probably below the array of A/C coils and this is why it still works well.

I begin to hack on my furnace.  Egon’s an old machine, converted from a 50 year old oil burning unit into a natural gas burning one.  He’s big and clunky, though not quite as decrepit as the old units at the shop.  There is a panel on the one side, fastened with many screws.  I remove it.  I can now see the top of the heat exchanger (basically a big steel box) as well as the A-coils of the air conditioner.  It is obvious what the problem is.  The zillions of little aluminum fins bonded to the copper coils of the air conditioning system are plugged up with shit.  A hard, caked on shit that was likely formed by years of dust that got through the shitty air filters that I buy, turned into dough by the moisture on the coils in the summer.  It’s amazing that air is even getting through at all.

In the dust and the grime around the furnace, through the small hole in the side, I slowly scrape the crap off of the coils with a bristle brush.  It is filthy and smelly.  The hole I have to work through is cut out of the sheet metal that forms the main vent stack; I get cut on it’s nasty little edges a couple of times before I wise up and tape around it with duct tape.  This whole process takes around an hour.

Success.  When I flip the breaker to power up Egon again the thermostat immediately orders him to bring up the temperature from 19 to 20.  The burner fires, the blower kicks in and warm air blasts out of the vents, just like it used to.  After twenty minutes the temperature is nominal and then something magical happens — Egon gets a rest.  Now that he can actually deliver large amounts of warm air to the house again the thermostat is appeased and he is allowed to shut down for almost twenty minutes before the leaks claim the heat and he has to start again.  I figure I’ve doubled the efficiency of my furnace by simply cleaning it.

Gotta pay more attention to poor old Egon.  This is Canada and it’s winter.  He many be old, but I need him to be at the top of his game.

It’s neato food art, you can’t deny that, but there does seem to be a disconnect from reality on the part of the Mr. Adrià and people who dine at his restaurant, or really any joint with a 3 star Michelin rating.  $400 for a meal and the place still loses money? Perhaps he could shave a bit off the tab by using a blender to fluff up the food instead of laughing gas. Then he wouldn’t have to sell overpriced cookbooks.

It all makes you wonder who in the world places so much value on food preparation. I don’t understand it myself, but then again, I’m not stupid rich.  I also live in Canada, a land with food so backwards and unsophisticated that the Michelin people don’t even bother to come here.

Having eaten at some nice places in my day (to be honest, always on someone else’s dime), I can tell you that after you pass the $50/plate mark, the food doesn’t taste any better, the service isn’t faster and the digs don’t look any better.