A Few Updates

So . . . wow, Friday already and no posts this week yet.  Busy times.  Today I'm just going to do some housekeeping for my blog (blogkeeping?) and give a few updates about some of the stories and topics that I have covered in the few months I've been doing this.  And because I've been lax this week I've packed a bit more into this one. 

Bonus feature: I'm going to try a new thing that I may incorporate more extensively in the future.  But more about "after the jump" after the jump . . ..


Glad you made to the other side of the jump.  Maybe there could be a show called "After the Jump" about the people who worked with Gordon Jump and how he affected their lives ("Next on After the Jump, Gary Coleman talks about pretending to be photographed by Jump's pedophile character on Diff'rent Strokes").

So here are a few news updates on some past stories.  And yes, it is also a blatant attempt to get some of my more recent readers to look through my back pages.

Chris Neary, the advertiser turned drug mule, has been sentenced for his crime.  His attempt to raise cash for his business has resulted in an 8-month prison sentence int he U.S.  The good news is that he seems to have gotten over his intial denial and admits that it was wrong all along.  I still have doubts that he won't do something equally dumb in the future, but I think it's pretty unlikely that he'll do exactly this again. 

We're still in denial about steroids in sports.  In a completely, utterly unrelated story, Jose Bautista of the Blue Jays has hit 54 home runs in 557 at bats this season (previous history: 59 home runs in 1754 at bats).  And he's from the DR.  Following the other story in this post, a University of Waterloo football plater became the first athlete in North America to ever test positive for HGH.  Go Canada!

As I mentioned in several posts, school is back in session, and so is lateness.  My students had their first assignments due this week, and there was typical lateness due to last-minute writing and printing.  If you want to make a deadline, you have to leave a buffer.  The excuses offered usually refer to something unexpected happening - if what eventually happened was expected, you would have planned for it.  The whole point of trying to hit deadlines is to expect a little of the unexpected. 

There are calls for the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to resign because he lessens its scientific validity.  Rajenda Pachauri has been vilified just because he admitted that he guessed the numbers around things like when glaciers would melt.  There was also an extensive report on the IPCC, basically saying that it needed to understand how the world perceives it, and how that perception is shaped by things like bullying dissenters and trying to scare the populace.  Oh, and also Pachauri has business dealings with carbon-credit trading companies, but I'm sure that wouldn't influence his judgment.

NFL players are starting to be kept out of games due to concussions, which is a step in the right direction but doesn't really prevent the concussion in the first place (or the sub-concussive injury).  Also, in a few cases (like Ryan Grant) the player didn't go to the medical staff for help, but rather they saw him kind of woozy and swept into action.  Mario Manningham of the New York Giants won't be playing this week because of a concussion, and in that case he notified the team.  Sounds like a stereotype of football players, but the coach said that he didn't notice any change in Mario's behaviour post-concussion.

So now prostitution (or communicating for the purposes of it) is no longer banned in Canada (kind of) but chocolate milk may be.  Prostitution laws (communication, keeping a bawdy house, and procuring) were struck down by a court and the government has 30 days to appeal.  Already both sides are up in arms - either we're going to be overrun by strumpets (is that the title of Charlie Sheen's autobiography?) or new laws will send us back to the Victorian age.  The chocolate milk thing - the Ontario government decided that drinks sold in school vending machines had to have 28 grams of sugar or less.  Chocolate milk has more.  Rather than deciding that an arbitrary sugar level is a bad idea, they're going except chocolate milk and spare it from the ban.

And finally, despite saying it was an unproven method that didn't warrant funding, Dr. Zamboni's MS treatment took over the agenda for two days at a meeting of Canada's federal and provincial health ministers (health ministers for the provinces, not unsophisticated health ministers).  Leona Aglukkaq (hah - take that spellcheck!), Canada's health minister, was quoted as saying "we never said no to a clinical trial," which is translated as "we said no to a clinical trial and that proved to be unpopular, so we're softening our position."

Now you're all caught up.  I'll try to blog more next week.