Click the picture to hear the Mitt Romney quote.
Lucille and Mitt is the perfect mash-up: Mitt Romney quotes as captions for stills from Arrested Development featuring Lucille Bluth, the nasty, wealthy matriarch who was never made eye contact with a waiter.
Click the picture to hear the Mitt Romney quote.
Click the picture to hear the Mitt Romney quote.
Check out Lucille and Mitt. You laugh! You’ll cry! You’ll want a Bluth Frozen Banana!
The polls for Alberta’s upcoming provincial election — essentially a battle between the right-wing incumbent Progressive Conservative Party and the johnny-come-lately and far-right Wildrose Party — seem to indicate that the Wildrose Party has a pretty good shot at winning. The Conservatives have been in power in Alberta for the past four decades, and with that entrenchment comes the usual corruption, entitlement and sloth. On the other hand, the Wildrose Party, while promising that a new broom will sweep clean and doing some American-style libertarian/conservative campaigning, will also likely bring with them a rather unpleasant brand of social conservatism if some of the more embarrassing statements made by a couple of their candidates (pastors both) have made are any indication.
Hence this video, titled I Never Thought I’d Vote PC, in which voters are encouraged to respond to their Morton’s Fork situation by picking the lesser of two evils:
The video’s “Buckley’s Mixture” theme is best summed up with a quote from one of the young, non-stereotypical Albertans featured within: “Fuck it, I’m voting PC.”
(Note to my non-Canadian readers: In this case, “PC” means “Progressive Conservative”. If you think that name sounds like a contradiction in terms, it’s not as odd-sounding as the Liberal-Conservative Party, which was their name their federal counterpart until the turn of the previous century.)
My internet friend and Maclean’s contributor Colby Cosh has some interesting commentary in his article on the video:
What does it tell us about the state of the campaign? It doesn’t seem to have been bought and paid for by the Progressive Conservatives; it may, for example, have merely been made and shot pro bono, in their interest and with their blessing. But it is hard to believe they didn’t have some hand in it.
…
It’s a risky move. The ad will alienate old-fashioned, loyalist blue Tories who happen to see it. It is not just old fogies in Alberta who like guns and vote for Stephen Harper. And it is not just young people who watch YouTube videos. At the same time, the sentiment that the ad is trying to appeal to is real; I have already talked to strategic voters who are going to cast their first PC ballot out of fear of the Wildrose Party. I’m actually kind of sorry to see them caricatured so brutally.
If you work in Shopify’s HQ in Ottawa, one of the perks you get is catered lunches every day. Better still, you get a choice: there are usually two different lunches to choose from, and you’re always free to mix and match. Today’s lunch choices were shepherd’s pie (more accurately, cottage pie, since it was made with beef and not lamb) and sushi.
Another perk is access to Shopify’s library of hot sauces. It’s a fine collection, and various Shopifolks have been adding to it. I’m going to have to bring back some sauces from my next trip to the southern U.S..
The Shopifolks have been spicing up their lunches with these sauces and while some of them have proven to be zesty and delicious, a number have been discovered to be the sort that are produced solely for creating pain and not enhancing the flavour of food. We kept these sauces, but added some warning labels on post-it notes.
The worst by far in our set are Widow (pictured above, labelled “Don’t be stupid”) and Mad Dog’s Revenge (labelled “Liquid ‘You’re screwed’ / Not a sauce or condiment – SKIN IRRITANT”).
Blair’s After Death Sauce shas some redeeming qualities, but it still merits a warning label.
We have a couple of sauces made from the naga jolokia pepper, a.k.a. bhut jolokia or “ghost pepper”. This pepper has been rated at over a million Scovilles and the sauces based on them are nasty, nasty stuff.
One the reasons I’m here at Shopify HQ in Ottawa is to meet with Chief Platform Officer Harley “H-Fizzle” Finkelstein in a one-on-one later on this afternoon. He seems to really enjoy them — in fact, he jiggles as much as Christophe Waltz does in Inglourious Basterds:
I’m at Shopify HQ in Ottawa all week and I’ve been snapping pics of the office. Here’s one — it’s the very first thing you see when you exit the elevator.
John Brennan’s approach to protesting the TSA’s ridiculous “security theatre” was to strip naked at the security line at Portland’s airport. He was arrested, held on $4,000 bail and charged with disorderly conduct and indecent exposure.
Equally amusing was a quote from Brennan’s dad, who had this to say when contacted by local TV news:
This is quite a shock. He hasn’t been under any stress that I know of. He’s never really under any stress. He works for a computer company in California. He does something with the Internet, which is just kind of mystical to me. This is quite a surprise.
Now that’s a feeling I’m familiar with. My parents — doctors both — were never quite able to articulate what it is I do for a living when their friends ask.
I’m reminded of this photo, which I posted a little while back:
The province of Alberta — often simply explained to people outside Canada as “it’s our Texas” — is in the middle of an election, and it’s shaping up to be a battle between the right (the Progressive Conservative Party of Alberta) and the far right (the relatively new Wildrose Party, named after the official flower of the province).
The Wildrose Party’s candidates have been attracting the wrong kind of media attention lately. There was the discovery of a blog entry written in 2011 by Allan Hunsperger, a pastor and candidate for Edmonton Southwest, in which he condemned the Edmonton public school board being “wicked” and “godless” for welcoming and accepting gay students. “You will suffer the rest of eternity in the lake of fire, hell, a place of eternal suffering,” he wrote.
Hot on the heels of that debacle is a statement made by Wildrose party candidate Ron Leech, who during a radio interview this weekend said that being white gave him the advantage universal appeal:
I think as a Caucasian, I have an advantage. When different community leaders such as a Sikh leader or a Muslim leader speaks, they really speak to their own people in many ways. As a Caucasian, I believe that I can speak to all the community.
For the benefit of the Doubting Thomases in the audience, you can listen to the audio recording of this statement.
You might be asking yourselves this: “Wait a minute…by his logic — and we’re using the term loosely here — wouldn’t he himself be speaking to only his own people?”
The answer, of course, is “no, silly!” By his logic, being Caucasian is the Platonic ideal. And like the Platonic ideal, everything else is just an imperfect (and darker!) copy.
Leech has since apologized for the remarks, with these explanations:
Expect plenty of “clarifications”, sophistry and accusations of “reverse racism” in the next couple of days as the Wildrose Party’s PR machine works feverishly to maintain the seven-point lead they have in the advance polls.
There’s less than a week left in the campaign; voting day in Alberta is next Monday, April 23rd. This should be interesting.