Things That I have Learned On My Trip To Port Alberni!

1) Vancouver island is "The Land That Time Forgot!"™ Old hippies with equally old dogs mingling with a highly mobile yet laid back younger crowd. Many, many people who commute to the oilsands at Fort McMurray or Calgary AB for work and still live here in the area, like a big suburb with low wattage lighting. Low population density, some interesting folks to be sure. Great lifestyle. Never a dumb conversation (baked guy in the bar admits to holidaying in Torsten, Honduras when the winter clouds get him down, he's like 60ish). A climate which rarely exceeds +6℃/+23℃ through the year, low level cop presence. Not everyone has a smart phone. Fun fact.

2) No straight lines by road. Internet sez 50 km as the crow flies being the distance between the YQQ airport at Comox and Port Alberni for example, in reality the drive takes 1.25hrs through some drop dead gorgeous country (see pics). Cheapest rental car is $50/day while Ambassador Shuttle Service is $125 one way. By way of comparison my man Bob with United Taxi here in Port Alberni sez his rate one way is $216! I'm still searching for a better deal but my hopes aren't high. Still have to check out Island Chauffeur.

3) Air travel is something you have to figure out if you want to survive. CMA (Central Mountain Air) is a well connected service with Comox being the hub for flights inland and Vancouver (which is why the Comox/Cambell River/Port Alberni and valley is so popular, plus real estate is well below the 1.3 million starter home in Vancouver) but there are smaller carriers for hopping around the island like KD Air or any number of terrifying float planes. It cost me $409 to fly in from Winnipeg on a Tuesday and it looks like it will be $625 to fly out of Comox on a Tuesday. If I had known more about the job I would have booked round trip airfare, but it's not a perfect world. Flying out on a Sunday would be $1,200. Complete craziness. Better to stay an extra day or two and try to argue the invoice.

4) A 750ml bottle of JD's is $30. My man Steve at the cold beer and liquor store is originally from Montreal. I didn't recognize a single bottle of wine in his shop. Not one.

5) Everyone seems to be from somewhere else.

6) It's so civil here I can barely stand it. Even the drunks/addicts are well behaved as they try to scam your taxi driver into fronting them a lift to be paid for tomorrow like Wimpy feeding his burger Jones. Most of you are probably too young to catch that.

7) Tonight there is a wedding and most of the peeps are staying here in my hotel on my floor. Not a noise. Completely quite. And they aren't all olds! Some of the guests arrived on bicycles and left them in the lobby.

8) Almost everyone over a certain age is a laid off worker from Catalyst, the local Paper mill which is right here in town a 5 minute walk from my hotel. There are sea lions in the river right outside the mill, bears when the water level drops later in the fall. As a matter of fact the bears have been known to congregate around the front lobby of the hotel (Best Western Barclay). This is from Bob the taxi dude, I think he's jerk'n my chain. Still, when I was working the LNG on Sakhalin island in the Russian Far East there were whales in Aniva Bay and the project hired bear hunters to keep the critters out of camp. Fortunately nothing was killed while I was there. Except for a poor half tame camp fox that was in the wrong place at the wrong time and ran across a drunk Russian who promptly skinned him and left the carcass on the steps to his shack. I don't make this up folks. Ask Colin with Kentech.

Bad pics, I can't get anything worthwhile out of my freaking phone. Old growth forest. Deep emerald green that reminded one of fairy's, leprechauns and provoked a desire to doff ones clothes and masturbate wildly. Or maybe that was just me.

And I must admit as I suck out of the bottle of 2009 Chase Warren Merlot, the grapes are just fine, very, very, fine.

Being An Empire Means Never Having To Say You're Sorry!

It isn't a new concept, making the loser pay the bills, ask the Romans. Rumsfeld apparently being a student of history or just completely corrupt knows this in his cells and pretty much sold the Iraq war to the American public through 43 on the premise that the Iraqi people would be so thankful to be released from Saddam's oppressive yoke that they would repay the "American" invasion without question which is just a neato way of saying the same thing, not that he really cared what anyone thought as the fix was in already. Just how such things are tabulated in public hasn't been explained which isn't a big deal when you have a country by the short hairs after all. The missing 6.6 billion in cash as an example would presumably be included but how to compensate the coalition of the willing, maybe ask Rep. Dana Rohrabacher? Never mind, they (the coalition) got theirs on the front end presumably.

Lets just bypass Afghanistan as I don't think anyone knows what to do with that stinker unless one were to, oh, get into dealing huge amounts of heroin. For instance.

But now we are witnessing the Americans dragging Libya into the same equation, at least according to Sen. Mitch McConnell on CNN's John King USA this evening. Libya must pay, sez he, but America first of course! I would presume France would have a few unkind words for Senator McConnell but who cares what the Frenchies think.

This is of course just a fast track to plundering a country for it's gold, America being so far in debt and so morally unhinged it is now acceptable to simply invade a country for no reason at all and then bill them for it. A very long and impossible to read bill of course, one that could never be fully repaid. Ever.

The future in one big fucking rainbow.

James Carville Isn't On Twitter!

Don't Trust Social Media! Or anything/anyone else for that matter. Why? Well, as regards social media there are several reasons as it turns out but being fed and then possibly acting upon false information is the point behind this post. Maybe even a little identity theft as well if you want to look at it that way.


Example? I like James Carville's opinions but I haven't been over exposed to him, I don't fixate on any so called pundits in particular and prefer to keep an open mind by playing the field as I don't consider myself to be "right" or "left" on the political spectrum. I've watched Mr. Carville a little with Eliot Spitzer on CNN and sometimes I catch him on a Sunday morning doing one of the political talk shows. Always entertaining but I don't know the mans opinions well enough to pick him out of a crowd, unless he's being witheringly sarcastic ("am I a potted plant here?"). 


I have visited his official website a couple of times and just today spurred by the Anthony Weiner debacle I decided to find Mr. Carville on Twitter and maybe get a chuckle. I didn't put too much effort into it, just a Twitter search from my account which came up with one feed that simply listed the names of American servicemen that had been sent in by family and loved ones. One twat after another of names but it did link back to the official website which I was familiar with. This didn't sit well with what I thought I knew about the man but I had other things to do so with a disappointed shrug I moved on.


Then I was fortunate enough to catch Mr. Carville on CNN just hours ago, again with Eliot Spitzer in the Arena discussing the Weiner thing and he (Carville) made the comment that he did. not. use. Twitter and didn't really know or care what it was!


?


So I Googled "James Carville on Twitter" and came up with two more Twitter accounts purporting to be Mr. Carville. I suppose there are more but this is enough for me to make my point.


http://twitter.com/#!/jamescarville  2576 followers
http://twitter.com/#!/James_Carville  298 followers

http://twitter.com/#!/ragincarville  1116 followers

So, there are at least 3990 people who think they are following James Carville, 298 of them who were apparently duped into sending him the names of servicemen and women to be listed on his Twitter feed. I would go out on a limb and suggest that none of these feeds belong to the real James Carville.

Now this shouldn't surprise anyone with even a smattering of knowledge as to how the Internet works as in the back of our minds we are all aware of how easy it is to set up a Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr etc account in someone else's name let alone actually gain access to an existing account simply by using the reset password option, no hacking required! It's one of the reasons I deleted my Facebook account. That and my total lack of friends.

So I wonder what kind of opinions and thoughts have been expressed on these feeds and whether they bear any resemblance to what the real James Carville would opine, and should I let him know? It's really none of my business as I'm sure he has people who should be looking out for that sort of thing so I'll just let it slide. And there's a reason for that.

I actually believed that Anthony Weiner had been set up by that shit Andrew Breitbart and that Weiner would eventually be vindicated. After all many well respected websites who know much more than I as to how things work on the intertubes had performed a forensic search of the data available and the consensus was that it was a set up.

Imagine our embarrassment. Sometimes I hate the Internet. ;)