The Omnifarium

Peter: Apologize to Belinda

Category: Politics
Sun, 22 Oct 2006, 10:04

The saga of former lovers Peter McKay and Belinda Stronach took another nasty turn this week when Peter reportedly referred to Belinda as a "dog" in the House of Commons.

During a debate about the proposed Conservative party's Clean Air Act, a Liberal remarked "What about your dog?". According to at least a dozen witnesses, Peter retorted "You already have her." while pointing at Belinda's empty seat.

Peter has since wimped out and denied that he said any such thing. Officially, he argued that he never said the word "dog". While that might technically be true in a linguistic sense, from the context, he was clearly referring to a female member of the official opposition as a canine.

Granted, debates in the House can be rancorous. But this kind of behavior is unacceptable. Peter seems to like to play up the supposed hurt he endured when Belinda left him and his party. Perhaps the party see some public relations benefit from portraying him as the jilted lover. But that still doesn't excuse throwing loaded insults during debate.

This goes well beyond a tiff between two former lovers. Because of this egregious behavior by a senior cabinet minister (along with other actions by this government), women in Canada have genuine cause to be concerned about how the government treats womens issues.

Peter: Be a man, and apologize now to Belinda. You owe it to her. And you owe it to all women in Canada.

Hans

path: /Politics | permanent link to this entry

On Web Rings

Sat, 21 Oct 2006, 08:36

A while ago, I decided to join a couple of web rings. My main rationale was to link to sites related to specific pages in our site. For example, our Kingston page belonged to a ring related to Eastern Ontario. These rings were all hosted at WebRing, which hosts the vast majority of web rings.

But WebRing recently decided to change its terms and conditions. The changes meant that I would soon have to pay for membership. It didn't take long for me to decide to leave the world of web rings, at least for now.

The concept of a web ring is a tempting one. It's a way to group together various different web sites that share a common theme. But there are several problems. The first is that there's very little quality control over the web sites included in a ring. Many ring owners simply seem to prefer quantity over quality. Why get included in a ring if the other sites don't offer useful information?

Another problem is that navigation is sometimes tricky. Some pages belong to lots of rings, and so it's easy to lose track of which ring you're surfing through. To make matters worse, some sites put their ring navigation in a separate common page with lots of other web rings.

A further problem is that most rings don't have many options for navigation. Almost all use wide banners, but I'd prefer something narrow that would fit in the left side menu.

Will I ever go back to a web ring? Perhaps, there's an acceptable ring that addresses all of my concerns. But in the meantime, I'll leave the web rings to others.

Hans

path: | permanent link to this entry