Japan Calls Off Whale Hunt Early

[Image: "Sounding Whale, Labrador Sea" by David Blackwood].

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I suppose there are 352 whales somewhere who owe their lives to Greenpeace tonight. Fortunately, Nature smiled, and reckless behaviour by the Sea Shepherd didn't cause a greater problem than it solved.

Chill out people, seriously. Remember, you can be part of the solution or you can be part of the problem. Stopping a whale hunt by causing an oil spill in Antarctica is not cool.

I say if Japan wants whales that bad they can start breeding them faster than they're killing them for a few centuries, until the whales are back to more normal population levels, maybe not where they were before nations like Japan (and Canada) participated so merrily in their wholesale slaughter (let's be real) but better than they are today.

Oh, and by the way, stuff your country did a long, long time ago doesn't always automatically qualify as culture. You don't see anyone arguing for their right to have a smallpox epidemic, do you? Our ancestors in the 19th Century CE did what they had to to survive, and we should be able to commemorate that without a death toll. If they didn't eat whale they sometimes didn't eat, and the more sometimes they didn't eat the more oftentimes they died. Where would that have left some of us?

Thanks in part to those whales, though, we have thrived; indeed, nowadays we are overfed. Yet from this satiety we've been able to invent synthetic versions of everything we once got from them, save their flesh as meat. And just think: if no one ever had it again, eventually no one would remember or even miss the taste of it.

The best way to give thanks for our survival then (as well as in the future) is to ensure theirs now by leaving the whales alone.

Read more, at Yahoo News while I try and get down off this magical soapbox the Debate Club must have left lying about.
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Oscar Night Bum Fight

Once again I'm torn. I have an interesting sequence of photos to show you, and I can't decide whether to present them comically or straightforwardly. I want them to be sincere, but need them to be offensive, in much the same way I want to be sedated, but need to be lobotomised.

I will therefore present them both. The serious story will appear above the photos, the funny one captioned beneath in curly brackets (that's how you know something's funny, by the way - curly brackets). They also make a cool beret for your winkie, to give him that Continental flair... Ooh la la! {; )

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About three minutes into the red carpet coverage of the Oscars I heard an argument in the alley beneath my window, over the possession of a certain valuable item. Once the sound of it had drowned out Shrillapalooza, I went to the window to learn more.



{"That's my [Oscar] [Alan Arkin]!" "Fuck you [Eddie Murphy]! This is my [Oscar]."}

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Naturally, things escalated, as they will do in a bum fight. Eventually the one not in possession of the cart tipped it over, which caused a certain lamenting by its owner, who was nearly pinned beneath it when it tipped. It was at this point I considered calling 911 to give Mr. 9/10ths of the Law his other ten. I mean, there was their privacy to consider, weighed against my own voyeurism and the fact that I just hate calling the police. This was a complex decision.



{"If I can't have it then neither can you. CRASH!" "Fuck you [Eddie Murphy]!"}

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Following this altercation (not to mention the lamenting) Pushy comes back and helps Guy in Yellow put everything back into the cart. This fragile entente is doomed to failure, though, and once again the angry talk escalates. If Hell is, in fact, Other People now is when he all broke loose; Pushy struck the first blow but the defender quickly overcame him. Two minutes of drunken flailing ended in what looked like pilates in prison, complete with grunting and f-words.

A hundred people walked past this altercation as it grew, most on phones, and no one even stopped; now there were six on their cell phones, frankly a waste of 911, when one call would have been fine. Not that it mattered much anyway. Oh well, at least the police will have six accounts to work from and/or confuse them.

One minute later the police arrived, and by the time Ellen hit the stage it was all over but the cleanup.



{"[Alan Arkin] get the fuck off of me!" "Smell this [Eddie Murphy]!"}

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Come to think of it, both of these were pretty offensive, on so many levels. Yikes!
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Vancouver's Newest Neighbourhood: Partialview

Definitely NOT from the developers who brought you Grandview and Fairview.
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