eau de porneau.

Chong’s smokin’ hot to local potheads

At Two Guys with Pipes, Ryan Cameron pops over as soon as he hears the name Tommy Chong.

“He’s good. More hippie-like than hipster. He’s funny and he’s pretty smart about marijuana. He knows how to grow, like, a billion-dollar operation,” he says before going out on a break to share a joint with an employee.

I’m not really posting about Tommy Chong, here… but if you live in Edmonton make sure you go check this out, Tommy Chong’s great. What makes me angry about this is the way Albertan media constantly portrays cannabis as this thing to joke about, and it’s almost like they make the users look like goofy cartoon characters, like Shaggy from Scooby Doo. It seems like every second day my Google News feed has something in it from Alberta like “Grow ops ‘up in smoke’,” or “Local Head Shop ‘gone to pot’.”

These so-called journalists may be providing the biggest thorn into the side of legalization by simply making the entire issue look like something to laugh about. Furthermore, when something happens that can’t be laughed about, they spin it so that it is not the assailant who is the menace and the assailed who is the victim, but cannabis that is the menace and society that is the victim. These reprehensible hacks seem to not care about delivering news in an objective, professional manner, but instead lower themselves to producing content that is even below that which can be read in your garden variety supermarket checkstand tabloid magazine.

In Obesity Fight, Many Fear a Note From School - New York Times

Even health authorities who support distributing students’ scores worry about these inconsistent messages, saying they could result in eating disorders and social stigma, misinterpretation of numbers that experts say are confusing, and a sense of helplessness about high scores.

It seems many schools in America are sending home reports on the obesity factor of their pupils now. I applaud any effective effort to combat childhood obesity, but this doesn’t seem like it will have any real positive effect. What they really need is some form of real government regulation on the quality of food served in school cafeterias, and more funding for physical education programs. My estimation would be that parents are unwilling to put their children on any form of diet that they themselves won’t adhere to. The same goes for any form of exercise regimen.

Mister Rogers - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

“My whole approach in broadcasting has always been “You are an important person just the way you are. You can make healthy decisions.” Maybe I’m going on too long, but I just feel that anything that allows a person to be more active in the control of his or her life, in a healthy way, is important.”
-Frederick Rogers

It turns out that when the manufacture of VCRs was being contested by the TV and Film industries, Mister Rogers stood up, pretty much alone, and defended our right to watch what we want, when we want to. I would honestly read through the entire Wikipedia page.

This guy was a champion of public broadcasting. When President Nixon (read: scumbag) reduced funding to public broadcasting, Fred Rogers stood before congress and gave a testimony so strong that funding was raised from 9 million to 22 million dollers (in 1971, that was a lot more money than it is now)

Bush Has Quietly Tripled Aid to Africa - washingtonpost.com

Bush has increased direct development and humanitarian aid to Africa to more than $4 billion a year from $1.4 billion in 2001, according to the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. And four African nations — Sudan, Ethiopia, Egypt and Uganda — rank among the world’s top 10 recipients in aid from the United States.

This is shocking, but pretty cool. I never really expected anything except for scumbag moves from that administration. It’s come to be run of the mill.