WD-40 and crack propagation

Come on Ed, don't be mad at us. Sure we are way far afield of the topic, no argument. but we've pretty much beaten that poor horse to a bloody pulp and it still is not getting back up again. We are at an impasse, we have determined that there is not enough information to proceed any farther. So we might as well enjoy ourselves. Think of this ramble as everybody meeting after work for beers...=b

Stubbs shows up yearly for the annual ribfest in Toronto, believe it or not. We aint being left out.

Mark

I get your drift...

Uh, I don't think so. Alaska is only slightly more than twice the size of Texas, (2.1394978 times to be exact.). so if it split equally 3 ways, Texas would be the largest by a decent margin, followed by the three pieces of Alaska, and then California.

I see my error, I was looking at the wrong number. Mea Culpa.

http://www.city-data.com/states/Alaska-Location-size-and-extent.html

http://www.city-data.com/states/Texas-Location-size-and-extent.html

http://www.city-data.com/states/California-Location-size-and-extent.html

591,004 sq mi/266,807 sq mi= 2.2150993

But the fact remains that if Alaska was divided into three equal parts, Texas would be the largest.

I lost interest. Maybe I have to brush up on my english.

I'll take a mail order course, "The Nigerian School of English".

My first lesson repeat after me.

"America's been very good to me"

My second lesson repeat after me.

"Americans have an over-inflated opinion of themselves, as exemplified by my first lesson statement."

Given the things that we Americans have given to the world (peace being chief among them. All you non-german Europeans should remember we pulled your butts out of the fire TWICE in the last century. Same goes for the South Koreans, the Kuwaitis, the Israelis, the Iraqis, the Afghans, The Philipinos, and the Chinese, and the Russians) and achieved I'd say that it is my no means over-inflated.

All of you non-americans are just jealous. PFFFFT!

Given the things that we Americans have given to the world (peace being chief among them.

thats where our short term memory comes in handy, and then have to apoligize for it.

we have our faults, emphathy may be one of them, but I believe it so.

Given the failure of our educational system to teach history, not to mention the attempts to rewrite history by those in academia who wish the US ill, I'm not at all surprised that many of our young ones grow up with the mistaken notion that the US is this evil empire that has destroyed the world. If it weren't for us, there would not have been anyone left to complain.

Blame the US LAST, because had there not been a US, most of those whining now would not even be alive to whine about it.

I just love my country. Shouldn't everyone love their country, think it's the best and celebrate its achievements?

And on that score, here is a blog post by a Canadian voicing much the same things.

Hi, rorschach!

The difficulty with posting a link is that some interested person might follow it up and read it.

The link you posted is written by a self-confessed poorly educated woman who grew up in Canada mistakenly believing that she was a USonian because the television she watched originated south of the border. When she found out that she was not, one day, and was just a plain ol' Canadian instead, it was analogous to a child losing Santa Claus for the first time, except that she never got over the disappointment of not being a USonian.

In her blog she rails against three of the things that Canadians are proud of: our parliamentary form of government, our universal health care system (flawed, but we're working on it!), and our constitution (patterned, by the way, on the US constitution, but updated to allow for a different amendment procedure.)

Too bad you didn't carry on reading to two very sensible, serious, conservative, and educated responses to her initial post. I invite you to become more aware of the facts about what is going on in our very interesting government by checking out this response and this one in the same set of postings. In the meantime, here's an explanation of the root of the discussion you are seeing...

Begin by understanding that in Canada, we don't have an executive branch of the government as you do in the United States. We do not elect a president separately from our elected house of commons.

Instead, many parties run in the general elections. All candidated political parties are required to have leaders who are chosen for leadership by their political parties in the same manner as the Presidential candidates are elected by their parties, only without preliminary electoral voting by the people...that is, at a party convention.

The leader of the party whose number of elected representatives is the largest of all the elected parties becomes the "Prime Minister" and continues to lead his/her party in the house; as such becoming the leader of the Canadian government and its spokesperson with powers similar to that of the United States president, although slightly more limited in scope.

All elected representatives are called "Members Of Parliament", or MPs. The person who becomes the Prime Minister (PM) is --when the general election's results are tabulated-- just another elected MP. If the party leader does not get elected as the MP for their own riding during the general elections, he/she can't be Prime Minister until they do get elected in some riding somewhere.

It's not too difficult to find a local riding whose elected representative is from the leading party and that would like the prestige of having the Prime Minister be their MP in Parliament. The currently elected member from that riding would then step down, and a by-election would be held in that riding with lots of footwork and advertising, etc., to ensure that the previously unelected party leader gets the opportunity to become the Prime Minister. This scenario is very rarely played out, as most ridings who have candidates that might end up as Prime Minister really want to vote for that candidate in the first place. So party leaders are usually elected, especially if they have an opportunity to get other members of their parties elected into their various riding's seats in the house so they can have a real voice in what decisions are being made by Parliament by trading votes for bills with the ruling party.

At any time, the opposition parties are free to try to defeat a ruling party bill; and if they do it is considered to be a vote of non-confidence in the house, and an election must be re-held to allow Canadians to choose a new government.

What's going on in Canada currently is that the leaders of the opposition parties have ganged up against the ruling party --which they can do because in total their votes outnumber the ruling party's available number of voting seats-- in order to try to defeat it and force the replacement of that party by a coalition made up of their three parties. Canada would then be ruled by a coalition government instead of its current minority government. Some people thing that's OK, and some don't.

But the Prime Minister foiled the plot temporarily by dismissing the house to have a nice long Christmas vacation (until the end of January!) The keffufle you read about in the media and on the net is that some Canadians who wanted to their favourite parties to topple the government are worried that the Christmas holiday delay will weaken the resolve of the three plotting party leaders; and others think that the entire idea of trying to topple a brand new government (general elections were only held a few weeks ago) without giving it a chance to rule is placing politics ahead of getting on with the nation's business, especially in a threatened recession.

The important thing to remember about universal health care in Canada is that nobody has to pay for it (except for elective procedures like cosmetic surgery), and nobody goes without.

It does not include dentistry as of yet.

Just as in the USA, we don't blame any local insufficiency of family physicians, the odd unfortunate misdiagnosis, or waiting in hospital waiting rooms for attention on our health care system. Just as in the USA, everyone in that system does his/her best to care for the patients. And our hospital waiting rooms, where triage is practiced to ensure that the more important ills get seen first, are more heavily populated because nobody has to debate whether or not they can pay for attention and whether or not they should go for it. It's free, and we go without fear. All across the entire huge country of Canada. Any time of night or day. Any hospital or (in an emergency or by appointment) open doctor's clinic. By anybody...tramp off the street or millionaire. Equally. The disillusioned writer of your blog pointed out that many medical students in Canadian universities are from the USA. They are world-renowned centers of medical learning and research. The equipment used in our hospitals...far from being old and out of date, is the newest and best available. The "out of date" stuff goes to Medicines Sans Frontiers and other first-response medical teams from Canada, and is the envy of first response medical teams all over the world, because not just used but current technology is carried by them...and this is augmented with unused and redundant new equipment donated by the Canadian hospital systems on an ongoing audit basis.

Although our constitution has flaws like removing the death penalty in the penal code, and requiring citizens to apply to the Freedom Of Information Act to force authorities to reveal their deep dark secrets, it has other components that are distinct advantages and tries to retain all the personal rights and freedoms both from its parent British North America Act and components plagiarized from the US constitution among others studied to get the best of the best from them all.

All in all, not a bad system for servicing the population of this country. I hope this dispassionate revelation of simple facts will help you understand that the poster in the blog you linked was just a little bit hysterical in tone about some pretty mundane matters, perhaps based upon the disappointments she experienced when very young about discovering that she was not a US citizen, and having her mother mis-diagnosed prior to her death and searching for somewhere to place the blame. No one can fault her for unresolvable youthful disappointments.

Mark

Thank you for a very enlightening view of Canadian government. My new question to you, and other Canadian residents, is this. Do you think that the method in which your Prime Minister is determined prevents them from making decisions that are unpopular, for fear of being voted out of office?

Hi, bob c!

At the risk of revealing my own political preferences re the four ruling parties in Canadian Parliament (NIC two independent seats):

The four parties in Parliament currently are the New Democrat Party, the Bloc Quebecois, the Liberal Party, and the Reform Party (conservatives). The last is the ruling party because it has more seats in parliament than any of the other parties. And their leader, Steven Harper, is thus the Prime Minister. But in total, the other three parties have more seats, and should they ever get together on anything (and they rarely do), they could defeat the government on any vote about anything and thus force a new general election. Or upon defeating the government, they could assume power as a coalition government with one of the four leaders taking over as Prime Minister and the others participating in a major way in the government.

Harper and the Reform Conservative Party are currently popular in Canada. In the recent election they gave the other parties quite a drubbing at the poles, stealing traditionally held ridings from all of them. But this left them still 12 seats short of a majority government.

Harper is a singular individual, very bright and successfully on-purpose in carrying out his mandate. He is known for fulfilling his election promises...a rare commodity in Canadian politics over the past few years. This is his second minority government.

The leader of the official Liberal opposition party (the party who came in second in the general election and who is the other usual government, trading off from time to time with the Conservatives) is Stephan Dion. His tenure with his party as leader is fragile at best. He does not present well in the visual media (although it must be said that he is improving rapidly), and is in the doghouse with his party after their poor showing in the last election. His ideas are not often well-formed, being frequently made on the fly. The party has decided to choose another leader in the new year.

The Bloc (as the Bloc Quebecois is fondly known) is a 10-member federal political party based entirely in the province of Quebec (to date). It and its leader, Gilles Duceppe, are unapologetic separatists, calling themselves Sovereigntists, and want Canada to break up, especially with the transformation of Quebec into a separate country. The political parties who promote this are determined to set up a pseudo sovereignty with themselves as kings and queens because they are hugely power-hungry people. They get elected by Quebeckers time after time because some Quebeckers (who are by-and-large federalists, not sovereigntists) believe the Bloc and they alone represent Quebec's interests in a concerted style better than any of the other parties (all of which run in Quebec, and have Quebec seats in the house as well.) Provincials government are a fractal of the Federal Government. The provincial government in Quebec is a Liberal party government and they are about to have a Provincial election where until this incident began it appeared that the Liberals with their current popular Quebec Premier Jean Charet would gain a majority government there. [Note: A Provincial head of government (kind of like the governor of a State) is known as a Premier. The Federal head of government (kind of like the President) is known as the Prime Minister.]

The New Democratic Party, known familiarly amongst Canadians as the 'New Democrats' or the 'NDP', is a socialist party whose most faithful constituent is the left-leaning liberal thinker and the trade unionist. They have been led in the past by great minds such as David Lewis, his son Stephen Lewis, and Ed Broadbent; under all of whom they actually were considered to be genuine threats as a governing party. Their current leader, however, is not in the same class as those...being more of a media style leader. His voter opposition describes him as a lightweight sound-bite grabber, the kind of spotlight seeker who might use media attention from a shooting death to promote anti-gun laws (thus rousing his left-wing supporters) rather than to express sympathy to the victim's family loss. He is married to another popular NDP MP and they both hold long-time Toronto ridings.

The three leaders of the opposition parties were told that in the as-yet un-issued federal budget about to be revealed, funding by the government of all official parties in Canada would be severely curtailed as an economic frugality measure. These parties are not wealthy, and depend a great deal on government funding to maintain their party infrastructure. To remove that support would literally cripple those parties for a long time before they could recover sufficiently to support another election campaign. The move would be intolerable to them.

But as it was cleverly disguised as a frugality move, and as the frugality measure was aimed at a non-governmental fiscal support initiative that the voting public could not understand the devastational properties of and therefore could be sold on it, it would be difficult for the opposition parties to get together to oppose it on its own merits.

So they instead are opposing the government on the as-yet un-proposed federal budget which, they contend, does not contain any economic boost measures intended to bolster Canada against a coming recession. When asked whether measures they have expressed as wanting to insert in the upcoming budget were to be included before the budget is read into law, they said that they still would not support the government on the budget because "Harper is untrustworthy". They realize that calling another general election just weeks after the last one would ruin even more held seats for them and quite possibly produce a majority Conservative government in place of the current minority one. So they propose a coalition government headed by the Liberals with NDP members in the cabinet, and supported officially by the Bloc, although due to its separatist nature, the Bloc would obtain no cabinet seats in the coalition.

They were on track to depose the Harper government this coming Monday.

Then Harper pulled an end-run around them. He prorogued government. That is, he has dismissed government until after the holidays by closing the house for a period of time. This was inevitable, and although the opposition loudly cried "foul!", they knew it was coming. The end result will be that some of their measures will enter the budget after all or the government will fall to a coalition of lightweights who could not maintain it.

The entire exercise is like a football game of political manoeuvres taking the place of plays. Fourth and field to the Conservatives by an opposition who have no intention of preventing the touchdown, so long as the team with the ball can figure out a way to make them look good while they score. It's high political drama. Everybody gets involved and has a good time. Protesters from both groups gather and wave their banners and placards at rallies. The media has a ball. Television stations are chock full of sound bites from pundits, reporters, and the man on the street, and are promised more of the same for a whole two months. How, we all wonder, can Harper make good with the opposition in such high dudgeon? Will they get their party funding after all? What will this budget look like when it is finally revealed? Will we be saved from a recession?

Great fun and great drama.

Mark

So Mark, how do you target shoot in Canada? Handguns are outlawed. You must be a benchrest long gun shooter I suppose?

"The important thing to remember about universal health care in Canada is that nobody has to pay for it (except for elective procedures like cosmetic surgery), and nobody goes without."

Not true at all. not even close. EVERYBODY pays for it, in fact they pay for it many times over because of the additional overhead placed on the system by the government itself. And EVERYBODY goes without as well. Care is rationed, and as a result thousands of patients a year die waiting for care. Alberta's health system killed my father in law. he was diagnosed with leukemia and instead of being treated with chemo or radiation or a bone marrow transplant, he was given epotien, oxygen, antibiotics and pain meds and allowed to die.

If the health care system is so great and wonderful why is it that women with complicated pregnancies are sent to US hospitals? Why do thousands of people opt to come to US doctors and hospitals and pay for it out of their own pockets every year? Why are illegal private payer clinics popping up all over Canada in spite of the fact that such clinics are illegal?

In the US, you are not denied essential health care. If you show up at the ER with a stroke or cancer or a toothache even, you will be treated. You will get a bill, and if you do not have money to pay, they will eventually write the cost off. They will not deny care to you because you cannot pay. It is illegal to do so.

And in Canada, you canot find a family doctor, nobody is accepting new patients. And if you get lucky and can find a doctor that is, good luck getting an appointment to see him or her.

in Canada, if you have a stroke or a car accident and need an MRI to see if you are going to die, you had better not be dying because you won't get an MRI in time to save your life. In the US, even private clinics can afford to have a CAT scan machine and many can afford an MRI in their offices. There is a freestanding MRI imaging office within walking distance of my house even. if you come into an ER with a head injury or a suspected stroke, you will have an MRI within the hour, no questions asked.

In this USA, become a congressman or a senator, you get free health care for life.

ok so yas if from come by chance 'den ' sswalers what bringin de fwush t shore also brung swale. yer feeds the livers t de dock pony or t aulin dog he be ealthy ncause of the blubber oils.

ya puts it to the thwart ya got no rust and it dont rot nieder.

drop it some on te old inges dey aint gonna rust nor crack nuff said?

'da ber

Hi, barfnagler!

Not 'alf bad, bye! Yer momma would be proud.

Mark

I guess that all depends on what you are shooting I suppose...

Hell, she can work on my pipes any time she likes.

Just make sure she warms up that wrench first.

If she's going to turn my nuts, I'd prefer she do so only hand tight. We wouldn't want to damage anything important now would we?

I dunno. Take Michael Jackson. His career wasn't going anywhere until they gave him a pair of vice grips for Christmas.

Here I am thinking that the guy is a plumber because those are his hands under that sink while the girl looks on.

On the other hand it's quite possible that she is an apprentice, a supervisor, or a customer.

Or his wife, a girlfriend, the local postal carrier (did she ring twice?), or a complete stranger who is anxious to sell him some crack.

So what is crack selling for these days?

Only her pimp knows for sure.

That's true, you gotta take into account all of those hidden costs too.... It's hard to get a written estimate for things like that....=D

You guys!

Look at her shoes! They aint work shoes. She 's obviously dropped her ring down the drain. and called for an assist.

She's watching like a hawk because she knows plumbers carry a bunch of cheap cz jewelry to switch with for calls like this.

She's the daughter of the guy who owns the house, its too dowdy a kitchen for her taste...

The guy with the camera is the probably the pool boy...

milo

Hi, europium!

Now, see, that was my problem too. I automatically ass umed that he was the plumber because he was the guy and she was the gal. But the crack proves otherwise. As attractive as it seems, that is pure plumber's crack you're seeing there.

Mark