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The Globe and Mail has the summary

According to Mr. Fife, Ms. Guergis has been telling people that she has grounds to sue Air Canada after the report of her tantrum was leaked to the media. Mr. Fife says senior Conservatives have told him this suggests “she just doesn’t get it.”

Certainly there are high-profile Tory faces, including former PMO communications director Kory Teneycke, who have been publicly critical of her behaviour.

Reports suggest the PEI incident has cost the party some support with the Conservative base.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper is the only one who can decide whether Ms. Guergis stays or goes. Mr. Fife suggests he may wait until some time has passed and then quietly replace her.

I have been saying this for a couple of weeks now and I don’t think she will be in cabinet after the next shuffle.  Again, while I agree going through airport security is a pain, we all have to do it and to have a Minister of the Crown have an epic temper tantrum because she is running late for a flight and it’s her birthday, Canadians know something is wrong.  Even Senator Mike Duffy is taking shots at her now.

• Okay, for years I thought people who paid extra for Crocs brand sandals were idiots.  Why pay $40 when you can get the same thing for $7 at Wal-Mart?  I was in Sport Chek last week and they had some on for $5 and had my size (13 in case you were wondering).  I bought some and tried them on and within seconds I realized how much better they were then the cheap rip off brands I had used before.  Crocs has a new version made for life at the beach or on the boat and they feature sturdier construction, better fit, and antibacterial fibres that make Crocs the standard that we judge funny looking shoes by.
• I do eat my own dog food around here and I bought a Kodak Zi8.  It replaces my Movie Pix HD which I was very happy with but I am blown away at the quality of the Kodak Zi8.  Not only is it a great piece of software but I become instantly fond of it’s built in editing software (Arcsoft MediaImpression Software).
• Here is a fun gadget, the Oregon Scientific Handheld Weather Forecaster.  It’s about the size of a cell phone and the Handheld Weather Forecaster predicts what’s in store locally up to 24 hours in advance via easy-to-read animated icons displayed on the illuminated backlight.
• Check out the Coghlan’s Sierra Saw.  It was one of those things that was never on my radar until we got one and it is incredibly handy at the lake.  It’s small enough that we keep one in our car emergency kits as well but I found that we used it a lot for trimming dead branches off trees to making some kindling for he camp fire.
• While you are surfing along, you may want to check out Wendy’s post on the cabin blog about what we are doing with our front porch.

If you have any suggestions for the Outfitters, send them here.

The Broncos acquired the former first-round draft pick from the Cleveland Browns for fullback Peyton Hillis, a 2011 sixth-round draft pick and a conditional pick in 2012.

Not a good sign if you are Kyle Orton and want a new contract and as for Chris Simms, well it’s been nice to know you.  It will be interesting to see if Josh McDaniels opens up the starting QB job in training camp.  While Kyle Orton did a serviceable job in 2009, he didn’t exactly cause teams to fear his arm and rarely threw the ball downfield.  While Quinn was horrible in Cleveland, he didn’t have a lot to work with, didn’t have the support of the head coach but is familiar with the New England offense from his days at Notre Dame.  It should be interesting.

During the Jaffer discussions, the prosecutor apparently realized that what she had was a dog’s breakfast of a case. Because of the protected nature of the discussions, we don’t know precisely what the problems were, but they must have been substantial for Ms. Balogh to determine she had no shot at conviction. (Most often in such cases, there are problems with the legality of the police search, or the alleged discovery of the "drug," or the "drug" isn’t a drug, or it was someone else’s.) And if there was any pressure in the air upon the prosecutor because of Mr. Jaffer’s prominence and connection to the federal government, it would have been a pressure to proceed with the case, not the other way around: You’d have to live in a cave not to understand that there would be howls of outrage if Mr. Jaffer were to be seen getting a kiss, which is of course exactly what has happened.

Would Canadians have preferred that Ms. Balogh, knowing her case was a mess and that Mr. Jaffer would be acquitted, go ahead with the charges anyway? At least one federal politician appears to think so. Former trial lawyer and New Democrat Joe Comartin was quoted by one columnist this week saying, "There isn’t a Canadian I think who would believe that he or she, faced with the same set of facts that Mr. Jaffer was faced with, would have at the very least had to go through a trial." Really? Does Mr. Comartin somehow know what those facts were? Has he forgotten that plea discussions are protected?

Some commentators are demanding absurdly that Mr. Jaffer himself issue a Tiger-Woods-style mea culpa and explain himself, as if he were still an MP, not merely married to one.

You’re going to have to get it together, though, Mike.

You’re going to have to grow up, first and foremost. Nothing starts until your childhood ends, and there’s nothing more childish than a game of freakin’ HORSE. You think Bill Gates is playing jacks in the mailroom? Trying to best the water delivery guy at Minesweeper?

From there, you’re going to have to act like a proper owner or a GM. You can’t be both. You’re either going to have to cede control with some input to Rod Higgins, or you’re going to have to take over fully and deal with the idea of someone else acting as principal owner. The job is too complicated, and no person could pull it off in 2010. No man, not even you. Once you’ve grown up, then I’ll believe you can understand that. I’m not holding my breath.

As owner, you’re going to have to show the same initiative and hands-on interest that made you such a successful businessman in the 1980s and 1990s. No, you didn’t build the Nissans or make the Nikes, but you knew how to run things. Sometime, around the time of your second retirement (and, say, MVP.com), that went away.

Now, that’s OK. That’s what retirement is – not having to really answer to anyone, and turning 18 holes into 36 holes. There’s nothing wrong with that, you’ve certainly earned that, but you’re not retired anymore. Your input was on point back in your heyday because you had a set schedule. Meetings to attend, shootarounds to show up for, close to a hundred games a year. You don’t really have that anymore, even with your supposed commitments to the Bobcats. Those days are over.

And if you continue to play the role of the retired guy who isn’t? You’ll fail. Because this organization is set to fail.

I am going to say here that the Michael Jordan era won’t last five years and he is going to replace Donald Sterling as the most disinterested owner in the NBA.   Like everyone, I was rooting for him when he took over the Wizards and we saw how that turned out.  His involvement so far with the Bobcats?  Well he had final say on personnel moves and seemed totally disinterested in that role.  Now he is owner…  I don’t expect a lot more.

I had some plans to go out tonight to a steak night.  Wendy and I bought some tickets but she had already booked off last night and couldn’t get tonight off.  Meanwhile I am at home tonight and watching the NASCAR – The IMAX Experience.  It’s a little Dale Earnhardt, Jr. heavy and Mark asked me, “Where’s your Dale Jr. watch?”  I replied, “The watch band is broken.”  Mark quipped, “That happens quite a bit for him doesn’t.  You should have gotten a Jeff Gordon watch.”  Of course Mark was the one that gave me the watch.  I feel like he set me up somehow.

I could take my entire three weeks of vacation and all of my flex days and just play this game.  Details here.  Quite an improvement over the original graphics for the NES.

Not only is Tecmo Super Bowl coming back but take a look at this. 

NBA Jam is being remade.

Boom-Shaka-Laka indeed.

Take five minutes today and make sure you watch this tilt pan video of New York in HD (make it full screen).

Why does Saskatoon need Station 20 West.  According to their website.

Limited access to healthy food

• Many residents do not own a car. For many, there are no grocery stores within walking distance. People sometimes must depend on convenience stores and gas stations as a source of food.

Health Disparity (Based on government data from 2001)

Income disparity

It will be occupied by these partner organizations.

While I have some concerns over the sustainability of the grocery store, I have been at the 7-11 on 22nd Street on a night when Social Services issued their checks.  It looked like a riot had gone through there.   I am not saying that a grocery store is going to solve all of the problems, giving people a better option than buying groceries at a convenience store, is  a big deal.  The convenience store takes a really small amount of money and makes it a lot smaller.

You can donate here. 

I wrote about Station 20 West previously.

Before I was really awake today, Wendy, Mark, and Oliver woke me up and gave me a couple of birthday gifts.

• Ollie :: Bushnell BackTrack GPS
• Mark :: Ultimate IMAX DVD collection
• Wendy :: A new daypack
• Maggi :: Energizer head lamp

Thanks everyone.  The IMAX DVD collection has Fires of Kuwait which was narrated by Rip Torn.  I realized this morning that I had vowed to name one of my kids Rip Torn and now that chance is gone.  Well I don’t know if the chance is gone but I asked Wendy if we could have another kid for the sole reason of naming it Rip Torn and it wasn’t a warm look I got back.

9:04 a.m.

1:20 p.m.

Wendy came by later and gave me The Gamble by Thomas Ricks.  I read his book Fiasco and found it to be one of the best books I had read in years.  It will be interesting to see if The Gamble is as good as it’s predecessor.  She also gave me two Moleskine notebooks, one large and one small.

Around coffee time my colleague Micheala was holding Oliver.  Now for those of you who remember, Wendy and I have babysat Micheala’s daughter and her and Mark get along like brother and sister.  Micheala has also managed to spend a couple of Christmas’s with us.  She is also Mark’s arch nemesis at Guitar Hero.  Oliver’s loyalties obviously lie with Mark as he head butted Micheala pretty hard as the video shows.

Good job Ollie.

After work we joined some friends at the Konga Cafe.   While others had some curried goat, I had the excellent spicy peanut shrimp.  If you have never eaten at the Konga Cafe, it is amazing.  It was spectacular up until Wendy had them sing me happy birthday.  I don’t blush often but I did tonight.

We retired to home and fired up the DVD player and watched Mark Twain’s America.  First of all, Mark mispronounced Twain as Twan so we have been calling him Mark Twan all night to his chagrin, secondly, that is one horrible IMAX movie we just watched.  I am glad that wasn’t the only one that came in the box set.

Before you get uncomfortable about losing your daily paper, the Star Phoenix’s national and international coverage comes from the wire services and most of it’s staff are all local.  Anyways, if you are inclined to burn the boats, this is a way to do it.

He said the second problem is not with the most complex technology but involves the copper sheaths around the superconducting joints in the tunnel.

The copper sheaths are a failsafe mechanism designed to take up the current if one of the magnets in the Large Hadron Collider warms up – an incident known as a "quench".

The 2008 accident caused one tonne of helium to leak into the tunnel and resulted in a series of "quenches" and a 40m Swiss franc (£24m) repair bill.

Engineers believe the machine is now safe to run at 7 trillion electron volts (TeV) but are anxious to avoid another breakdown.

So they have taken the decision to run the machine for 18 to 24 months at half-maximum power before switching it off for a year to carry out improvements to the 27km tunnel.

Dr Myers said the decision was taken jointly with the physicists working on the four giant particle detectors on the LHC.

He said they appreciate the chance to test their own equipment while the machine is running at half its maximum power.

Of course there are some competing theories over why it is having problems.

The economy shed 36,000 jobs last month, and that was trumpeted in the press as good news. Well, after your house has burned down I suppose it’s good news that the flames may finally be flickering out. But once you realize that it will take 11 million or more new jobs to get us back to where we were when the recession began, you begin to understand that we’re not really making any headway at all.

It’s also widely known by now that the official employment statistics drastically understate the problem. Once we take off the statistical rose-colored glasses, we’re left with the awful reality of millions upon millions of Americans who have lost — or are losing — their jobs, their homes, their small businesses, and their hopes for a brighter future.

Instead of focusing with unwavering intensity on this increasingly tragic situation, making it their top domestic priority, President Obama and the Democrats on Capitol Hill have spent astonishing amounts of time and energy, and most of their political capital, on an obsessive quest to pass a health care bill.

Health care reform is important. But what the public has wanted and still badly needs above all else from Mr. Obama and the Democrats are bold efforts to put people back to work. A major employment rebound is the only real way to alleviate the deep economic anxiety that has gripped so many Americans. Unaddressed, that anxiety inevitably evolves into dread and then anger.

But while the nation is desperate for jobs, jobs, jobs, the Democrats have spent most of the Obama era chanting health care, health care, health care.

Sounds about right.

I have been a long time fan of Blue Jake and WNYC has a great video profile about Jake Dobkin.  I don’t know why but lately I have become a hug fan of these kind of videos on YouTube.  Simple one camera videos that tell a good short story.

While on the topic of city hall, Dave Hutton’s post points out that the province could be tossing some money into Gordie Howe Bowl, something I have been saying needs to be done since I was 12.  Seriously, since I was 12 I have been telling anyone who cared that Gordie Howe Bowl has tremendous potential as an entertainment destination.  I wonder if I put up a PayPal link if we could get enough donations in to get the naming rights. If Stephen Colbert can get a urinal on the space station named after him…

If you read a site and care about its well being, then you should not block ads (or you subscribe to sites like Ars that offer ads-free versions of the site). If a site has advertising you don’t agree with, don’t go there. I think it is far better to vote with page views than to show up and consume resources without giving anything in return. I think in some ways the Internet and its vast anonymity feeds into a culture where many people do not think about the people, the families, the careers that go into producing a website. People talk about how annoying advertisements are, but I’ll tell you what: it’s a lot more annoying and frustrating to have to cut staff and cut benefits because a huge portion of readers block ads. Yet I’ve seen that happen at dozens of great sites over the last few years, Ars included.

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Andreessen once famously put the New York Times on deathwatch for its stubborn insistence on trying to save and prolong its legacy print business. With all the recent excitement in media quarters recently over Apple’s upcoming iPad and other tablet computers, and their potential to create a market for paid digital versions and subscriptions of newspapers and magazines, I wondered if Andreessen still felt the same way. Does he think the iPad will change anything?

Andreessen asked me if TechCrunch is working on an iPad app or planning on putting up a paywall. I gave him a blank stare. He laughed and noted that none of the newer Web publications (he’s an investor in the Business Insider) are either. “”All the new companies are not spending a nanosecond on the iPad or thinking of ways to charge for content. The older companies, that is all they are thinking about.”

But people pay for apps. Wouldn’t he pay for a beautiful touchscreen version of a magazine? Maybe, if it were something genuinely new that blew him away. It would have to be more than an article with video and graphics though. (I agree, otherwise it’s no better than a CD-ROM).

Oh, and he points out, that the iPad will have a “fantastic browser.” No matter how many iPads the Apple sells, the Web will always be the bigger market. “There are 2 billion people on the Web,” he says. “The iPad will be a huge success if it sells 5 million units.”

Despite trying time and again, Andreessen’s observation is that media companies have no aptitude for technology, nor do they really understand what technology companies do. The one thing technology companies do really well is deal with constant disruption. “Microsoft is going through this right now,” he points out, “Ballmer is not complaining about it.” He’stackling it head on. So did Intel when Andy Grove gutted it to shift from memory chips to microprocessors. So does every technology company CEO. It is ingrained in the industry Andreessen comes from, so it is just obvious to him: “You are cruising along, and then technology changes. You have to adapt.” Media companies need to learn that lesson fast. To the extent that their products are now delivered and consumed as digital bits, they too are becoming technology companies.

This post in honor of Mike Todd’s tweet today.  For those of you who have been terrified by grizzly bears in the past, this cult favorite documentary by Peter Lynch about Troy Hurtubise shows you how you can survive a Grizzly Bear attack.  More seriously, this is kind of what Super Dave Osborne would be like if he really existed and spent $100,000 on designing a suit to fight grizzly bears.

Police have found the body of a Toronto man who wanted to test his survival skills in the woods north of Huntsville, Ont.

Richard Code was an avid follower of the television show Survivorman and had taken few supplies on what was to be a weekend trip.

His brother, Stephen Code, said provincial police told him that his brother died of hypothermia.

It dropped to minus 12 at night in the area and snowstorms hit much of southern Ontario during the weekend.

It’s not clear if Mr. Code had formal wilderness training but relatives said much of his knowledge came from watching the television show which features Les Stroud living in the wilderness without food, shelter or equipment.

Mr. Code’s landlady Barbara Ellis said he frequently read books about wilderness survival and would regale her with tales of his adventures.

Wow, I don’t really know what to say.  Having watched all of the Survivorman episodes with Mark, the one thing that you come away with is that this is really, really hard and also there is an emergency team standing by in case things do go bad.  You also get how important it is to have the right supplies with you if you do get sick, hurt, or just plan unlucky.

According to CTV

She said Code would use what he learned in the books to make shelters in the summer using branches and bark.

"He would strip tree bark off the tree in the backyard, and he’d weave them and braid them like rope," she said.

Ellis said Code went on four previous trips without a tent or food, but she was especially nervous about what would turn out to be his final trip to the Huntsville area.

"He’s come back from all these other survival trips but I knew this time he was going up into a snowstorm and I wasn’t very happy about that," she said.

Surviving a weekend in the summer is a lot different than going into the Canadian winter at –25 and a snowstorm.  It’s too bad it ended this way.

In case you are wondering what the drive is like from Saskatoon to the cabin, it looks like this video from the Hedge Society.  The big difference is the music, generally Mark is singing out loud while playing his iPod in the back seat at this point of the drive.

There are 85 search-and-rescue associations in the province, staffed by roughly 4,700 volunteers. However, these groups can only launch a rescue mission after they are enlisted by an agency such as the police, the Coast Guard or the military, and then receive a task number from the Provincial Emergency Program. Regulations prohibit them from self-deploying. The Golden search-and-rescue team is a well-trained unit. Composed of roughly 40 volunteers, it conducts mountain and swift-water rescues, and is one of only six search-and-rescue associations in the province that also does highway vehicle extractions, an additional role that keeps members busy on the treacherous stretch of the Trans-Canada snaking through the Kicking Horse River canyon. Hale estimates that each year his team receives around 90 tasks, many of them involving wilderness missions coordinated among rescue volunteers, police and mountain professionals. But in the case of Blackburn and Fortin, that coordination started going haywire the moment the first report of strange tracks and a distress signal was made.

Hale claims that, after Kicking Horse Mountain Resort staff had checked for any indications of missing skiers, Rudi Gertsch was told to notify the local RCMP detachment about the SOS sighting. Gertsch denies this, saying he left it with the mountain safety people at Kicking Horse, assuming they would follow up on his report. What is known for certain is that for some reason, the RCMP were left in the dark.

Speaking of Jordon Cooper Outfitters, it is now listed at Outdoors.Alltop.com where as the badge says, part of the best of the best.

• Anyone else find it weird that an American multinational has to be the one that creates a commercial showing Canadians how much we love the game of hockey.  I am just saying that it’s weird.  via

It’s not a groundbreaking documentary but was worth the viewing time.

What I came away with from watching the video was an appreciation for what I think is a predominantly American characteristic which is the ability to take huge national gambles with no guaranteed results.  I am fascinated of the construction of Oak Ridge, Tennessee and it’s massive warehouses…

… despite the fact that the equipment that was needed inside them hadn’t totally been designed yet, there was no city around them (early workers lived in tents) and the amazing cost ($6 billion in today’s money).