If I have to see another blog by another set of newly-minted parents doing nothing but posting picture after picture of their baby eating, their baby cooing, their baby smiling, their baby frowning, their baby in clothes, their baby in a diaper, their baby in a bonnet, their baby reading the Belgic Confession, their baby in the forest, their baby in the living room, their baby in the bath, their baby near a stream, their baby in a jumper, their baby with a rattle, their baby with other babies, their baby with other babies and other babies’ parents, their baby with other babies and small animals, their baby waterskiing, their baby lighting Rome on fire, their baby farting, their baby crying, their baby lying down, their baby being held up, their baby being cradled, their baby being entertained by pictures of war-torn Kosovo, their baby having its diaper changed, their baby being outclassed by others’ genetic material, their baby burping, their baby gassily smiling, their baby sleeping, their baby holding on to a finger, their baby wrapped in a “bundle of joy blanket” or any of a seeming million other precious moments that simply must be kept on a the internet for all to see as if the web is a pageant for every infant without a deformed face, I’m going to jump off a cliff. A very high cliff.

My mother had 11 of them, bless her soul. Babies are special, sure. To you personally, sure. And I’m not entirely serious about this post, but certainly one or two of you fresh-out-of-the-box parents can think about something (anything!) interesting other than your poopy progeny?

Full disclosure: I am a libertarian at heart. That extends wherever it can, whether that arena be the economy, the family, the church, the state, the school system, and finally, seat belts laws.

For those of you who don’t live in Ontario, a collision occurred this weekend, between a transport truck and a minivan full of Korean tourists. Of course, 680 News hopped on the story right away, as it their right, and in the process, it turned up that the minivan had ten people in it (several more than minivans are meant to carry, I’m led to believe). This is how I turned on my radio this morning - an experience I come to regret more and more frequently these days - and found the lead story was about how Ontarians are allowed to put as many people as they like in a vehicle, as long as all the seat belts are taken.

The reporting on 680 News went like this: Ontario allows you to “stuff as many people into a car” as you like, that police want the law changed, that the transport minister supposedly agreed, and someone said that the 30 year-old seatbelt laws need to be “updated”.

Last to first, then. Have we gained some insight over the past thirty years about seatbelts and moving vehicles that wasn’t immediately obvious when the law was made? Come on; a seatbelt is a restraint device, and those not wearing a seatbelt won’t be restrained. Yet there are times when one needs to put more people in a vehicle than one has seatbelts for. This may not be obvious to a lot of Toronto’s single-car single-driver types, but not everyone has the luxury of an entire vehicle to themselves at all times.

Of course the police want the law changed. Because the police as an organization exist to do one thing: gather revenue. Just like every other organization that takes in money, the OPP and other services exist as self-propagating organisms designed to further their own existence. And, yes, the stated purpose of police forces is to stop crime as defined by the legislature, the only reason the police actually do this (collectively, not individually, of course) is because if they didn’t, their organization would cease to effectively gather revenue. The fact that people trust the police is beyond me; why would you? Because they have a stated aim of being the good guys? That’s pure idiocy. What they have is power, and we all know power either corrupts or attracts the corruptible (depending on how you look at it). The police want this law changed for several reasons: it looks like they care about public safety (as they probably do), it increases their power (ever time the police can make an arrest or give out a fine for something new, they increase their power or their revenue stream), and it gives them an excuse to hand out more fines (revenue flow).

680 News - ah, there’s a topic. How many times have I been frustrated by the rampant amateurism exhibited day after day after day after day by the people who write the news for that station? More than I can count, that’s for sure. They are the Fox Broadcasting of Toronto radio. They sound like news, but they are one thing and one thing only: entertainment. At least for Fox, you can tell they’re a right-wing propaganda machine, incapable of being impartial if they so much as tried, which they don’t; 680 News on the other hand seems to have no particular slant, though every story on the station is somehow slanted. You can tell almost immediately whether or not the writers like or dislike something by how they refer to it. They don’t like people in cars without seatbelts and they say “In Ontario you’re allowed to cram as many people into a car as you like”. Cram? When did that become an acceptable journalistic term? It gives a distinct impression, that word. It’s not even camouflaged as unbiased.

At least I have the liberty of slanting things as much as I like: I’m a blogger. I don’t have any responsibility to the people who read this, or to the history of journalism, or to any association. Everything I write here is opinion: that’s the way I like it. But 680 News does have all those things, all except the liberty of slanting their stories. But they do it anyways. So here’s an opinion for you: 680 News is a shitty, bush-league radio station. It is proper journalism as T-Ball is to major league baseball. It is to human understanding as U2 is to transcendent music.

At least connect some of the dots for me! Their journalism is so very, very poor that it didn’t answer these questions. How is the story of the collision and the ten people in the minivan related to seatbelt laws? Is it simply because there were people in the van that weren’t wearing one? Or were there more fatalities and injuries among the seatbelt-less? Does this sort of thing happen often? Are people in cars without seatbelts more likely to die? Are there statistics that would indicate some sort of correlation between filling cars over capacity and people getting hurt? Answer me this: does this story even deserve to be on the air? At all? In any way?

If you can’t get a story on the air without leaving that many gaps, maybe it’s time to rethink that particular piece before it, you know, gets out there. Just a few thoughts.

* * *

Now that I have that off my chest, Happy Birthday to Laura, who is now 20-some years old. We gifted her with a surprise party; she was so very grateful for the thought.

Really. If you want to convince of the virtues of your software or your hardware, let me try it out, give it a spin while you softly outline its virtues somewhere in (distant) background.

Even if you’re brash and self-assured and quite convinced that what you use or what you’ve written is the best thing to happen to computing since the command line interface I’ll listen.

But if you’re an ignorant twat, do the world a favour and shut up. Got that? If you can’t even give me several real selling points for whatever you’re advocating, not only are you making yourself look stupid, but you’re spreading manure over that very thing you’re evangelising.

Mac fanatics are truly guilty of this. Especially neophyte Mac addicts. You know, the ones that decided to drink Job’s Kool-Aid and woke up feeling like they were truly enlightened? You probably know at least one.

The guy, for instance, who told me I should switch over my entire workplace to Mac because - his words, not mine - Macs can now run Windows programs! Oh really? I will try to treat this with grace, but there’s no possible way that it can unless some sort of virtualisation is going on in the background. (Which, as a side note, was exactly the case.)

I understand this is a fundamental misunderstanding of the fact that Apple software and hardware are two different things, but still. Let me spell this out for him. He wants us, a company of 30 or so people, using more than 30 computers to switch to Mac so that I can switch inbetween Windows and OSX in order to - again, his words, not mine - do better email, surfing, and desktop publishing? That’s somewhere in the range of $75,000.00 just to get new hardware and licenses for all those copies of Windows.

And for what benefit? None that I can see. Sure, I like OSX as much as the next guy. I’m that guy in the advert that is all hip, and I get the fact that Mac is cool and Windows is not. But you have to understand that I’m not at work to be hip. I’m at work to do work. If a Macintosh can help me do work better, I’ll consider it. But not until then.

I managed to explain all of this clearly and without raising my voice. Amazing.

Things that are not made properly. This includes: malformed HTML that won’t run on multiple browsers; IKEA furniture; almost anything manufactured in China; George Bush’s mental functions or lack thereof; Internet Explorer; Windows; JAVA; Javascript; the W3C; the English system of Parliament; cheap binders; McDonald’s “food”; paperbacks with bindings that crack when you open them for the first time; wireless keyboards that can’t get a signal despite the receptor being mere inches away; Linux binary driver support; iTunes; most cordless telephones; most houses; most airports; almost ever vacuum I’ve owned; people with bad tempers; people with no sense of humour; the “art” of Thomas Kinkade; battery technology; sentences with no structure; poems by goths or emokids; goths and emokids; wireless networking in almost all circumstances; and last but not least, most public policy as envisioned by both fanatical left- and right-wingers.

Christian music sucks. Most of it anyways. It sucks in all the ways that lowest-common-denominator pop music (and I mean “pop” here in the broadest sense) sucks, but it also sucks in that it applies all that suckiness and sends it right on up to God.

You would thing people supposedly in tune with the higher power that created the universe would have a better idea about what true art is, wouldn’t you. Nature, for instance, is true art, even if God only defined the patterns underlying it.

For crying out loud, the Catholic church has had a better grasp on what is and what is not good art for the past 500 or so years. If you people with your guitars and ridiculously simple and flat out wrong lyrics can’t get it together long enough to pump out just one, one interesting song, why should I listen?

There are some people I wish didn’t exist. For instance, people who insist that being gay is a lifestyle choice, not something one can be born with. Also, people that insist mental illness is something people can just snap out of.

And when I try to tell them about my - admittedly anecdotal - experiences with gay friends, and friends on meds, they insist that I run in “screwed up” circles. Well yeah, I do. Welcome to the giant fricking entire rest of the world! If you want to conveniently ignore that not everything fits inside your own model of the universe, fine, you’re an idiot.

[Editor: *dan should not write posts when he's angry!]