Many of those interviewed said yes and I think these people are ignorant.

Sure there are safety concerns for anyone who buys fireworks. It’s obviously a buy-at-own-risk type product. But backyard fireworks are so simple to set up it would be hard to any careful user to cause bodily harm.

Personally, I don’t see the difference between regulating fireworks any more than regulating stoves or circular saws. Any of these products bring with them inherit dangers.

One person mentioned that some people are shooting off fireworks as early as 7am and she said there’s no need. She was an older lady who probably never had any children who would enjoy fireworks but may not be able to stay awake until midnight. I think people who shoot fireworks early for their kids are sweet. My parents did it for me a few times when I was young and I remember how happy they made me.

My friends and I have purchased our own fireworks every New Years for almost a decade and not once have we ever had any incident of concern.

Regulating these products would be silly, in my opinion.

The two look strikingly similar.

There is a YouTube video (below) circulating now that features this Tim Horton’s guy ranting about how upset he is that James Reimer dressed up as him for Halloween.

This struck me as unusual since James Reimer is one of the most likable hockey players in the NHL and he dressed up like a guy from a national ad campaign who looked surprisingly like him.

Then I thought about how a national ad campaign wouldn’t feature a real people with no acting experience unless they were going to feature it as a ‘true story’ or label them as ‘real customers’.

This guy is likely an actor.

So I decided to dig further. The video was posted by Boomology101 which appears to be a comedy troupe. They are even featured on Funny Or Die.

This is a gag. Fake!

This probably isn’t even the same dude. Though he looks very similar.

I’m not talking about the sound or wardrobe issues that were littered through the performance. I’m talking energy and love. You could tell they weren’t feeling it, except for Will.i.am who was 100% in.

This half-time show could have been great. But it wasn’t. What shocked me in the performance was the grade it was given afterwards. F in every state? I don’t know guys. Really?

Oh yea, and if I were Usher, I’d start firing some dancers. You can’t dance with Usher unless you meet certain standards and his short performance was filled with choreo miscues.

From Next Round: The Black Eyed Peas Awesome Halftime Show Performance

Some of you may be thinking this won’t affect you. You don’t use the internet enough. Well before you brush it off consider this. Do you download music? Stream videos or use Netflix? What about online gaming? Some places will only get a base of 25GB before being charged between $1-4 per GB up to $80 (which won’t take long for people like me).

If you are half as concerned as I am about usage billing, visit Open Media’s Stop The Meter page and sign the petition.

We need to find ways to get this ruling reversed. Remember, even though it’s usage billing you don’t save money by not using a lot of your bandwidth.

Where is this all going?

Net Neutrality ringing a bell? Well eventually big service providers will charge extra for or restrict websites based on traffic. It will be effectively been the end of small-time websites like GregPike.ca.

Get involved. Sign the petition.

From Open Media: Strombo Talks Internet Metering

How stupid is this? If the Party Bus, or any other bus or limousine, was going to get fined for having open alcohol on board it should have happened the day they opened shop. Not after years of building a brand and corporate goodwill.

CBC reports that the RNC say “the law is clear – it is illegal to have open alcohol on any type of vehicle.”

That’s totally true. But for as far back as I can remember, and I’m sure as far back as my old readers remember, limos almost also had open alcohol in them.

This has been allowed forever.

I believe there should be an exception to the open alcohol rule that allow open alcohol on vehicles that separate the driver from its occupants. It’s as safe as having open alcohol in a moving vehicle can be.

From CBC: Booze not a problem: Party Bus owner – Difficult for the industry to operate without it

Some of those changes include:

• Authorize police to use traffic safety stops as a means of determining whether drivers are impaired, driving while suspended or driving without insurance, among other serious offences.
• Increase the current 24-hour driver’s licence suspension to a minimum of seven days (14 days for a repeat offence) for drivers with a blood alcohol level of greater than 0.05 per cent, down from 0.08 per cent.
• Reduce the allowable blood alcohol level to 0.0 per cent from the current .05 per cent, for drivers accompanying a novice driver.
• Prohibit the use of electronic devices such as cellphones, BlackBerries and iPhones to send or read text messages, or programming GPS devices while the vehicle is in motion, which can distract drivers from driving safely.

Take note txters

The fine for txting while driving is set to increase to $100-400. Take in to account your insurance premiums taking a hike and you have a serious reason to pull over and txt, if safety wasn’t good enough for you.

From CBC: N.L. police need no reason to stop drivers – Province’s Highway Traffic Act changes Friday

Yesterday while driving to work I was coming up on a dump truck. Not wanting to drive behind because of previous bad experiences (a rock flew up and cracked my windshield on two separate occasions) I began to over take him.

Then I heard a sound I could only describe as a meteor bursting through my car.

It was a rock. And it came from under the dump truck.

Note: This isn't my windshield. I brought my car in to be fixed before I could take a picture.

That’s 3  cracks on my windshield from rocks on the ground that fly up as dump trucks run over them.

The first couple of cracks I chalked up to bad luck. Now I’m really considering how often this must happen to other drivers.

There must be a lot of windshield cracks out there from this same effect.

In fact, I asked my insurance broker out of curiousity if this is a regular claim.

“You wouldn’t even believe how many claims we get.”

Why hasn’t anyone acted to correct this?! Insurance companies are spending a fortune and it’s creating major headache for you and me. Not to mention the safety ramifications of flying rocks while driving.

Obviously the government cannot ban these vehicles from the highway, but surely something can be done to prevent these problems from happening in the future.

This is dangerous. I am a composed driver, but if my mother was behind the wheel when that rock his my car there would have been panic. There could have been an accident on the highway yesterday. The kind that could be avoided.

Perhaps regulating better mud flaps to deflect rogue stones. Perhaps limiting the speed of these trucks to a speed that will not catapult rocks as they drive over them.

Alternatively I could stop using the highway and take a route that takes four times longer but why should I have to drive the long and painful route?

What can we do to fix this problem?

* It came to my attention yesterday that front-loaders, which are always driving along the shoulder of the highway, may not be driving legally (someone told me a vehicle must be able to reach the speed limit to be allowed to use that roadway. Not sure how best to verify this) and that they have to be loaded on a flat-bed truck to be carried on the highway. Consequently when these tractors are givin’er on the shoulder of the road, they are pushing loose stones out on to the highway.

We finished watching it together last night  and it was just as good the second time around as the first.

Of course, by now people have seen the movie and warned us about how terrible it is.

Being a man who likes to come to his own conclusions on movies (I liked Alice in Wonderland) I convinced Riss that we still had to go see the movie.

Well we did and now here is my unbiased objective review of it.

Directing: 0 / 10
I doubt the director was even on set

Screenplay: 0 / 10
Did anyone read this? Actors even?

Cast selection: 1 / 10
Surely there was somebody out there suited to one of the characters from Avatar. Aang could have been good if they played to his happy-go-lucky character, but they didn’t. 1 point for potentially finding a diamond in the rough.

Acting: 1 / 10
There must have been a competition between the actors to see who could stink the best. It was an all-way tie. Hat’s off to Yue for not competing in that challenge.

Characteristics of characters: 1 / 10
Iroh is seen drinking tea in one scene.

Special effects: 1 / 10
I have to give them 1 because they did a better job than I could do, with my lack of education or experience in the subject, but the ice couldn’t look more like clear plastic.

Sticking to the original storyline: 3 / 10
Any Holywood production is going to lose points here because you have to make a movie appeal to a wider audience and shrink the duration to make the movie withstandable to those stuck in the theatre chairs for a few hours. I’m not going to say it was great (they did manage to convert good dialog into rotten feces), but it was certainly the best part of this movie (next to the Fire Nation ships; those were badass).

Pronunciation of names:  2 / 10
Congratulations of pronouncing Katara, Appa, and Zuko right out of all of the characters from the show. By the way, their names are announciated clearly enough in the cartoon series that you can pick out what they are. Who the flip is “Uung” and “Aero”?

Everything else: 1 / 10
Just in case I didn’t cover anything.

Overall: 1 / 10
This may be a tie with Hally Berry’s Catwoman. I only give it a 1 because they went through so much effort to entertain us. As bad as it was, they tried. (I could only really give them a 0 if they did not finish the movie really… Actually, I might have given them a 2 if they had not finished the movie. Too bad they did).

RE: The Last Airbender showing in your theatres

Dear Empire Theatres,

You are supposed to be a business. As a business, are you not concerned about people losing faith in the quality of your product? Have you not read reviews or seen the movie for yourselves? Or heard your costumers complain about?

You may think I’m speaking in jest, but I want my money back. As well as compensation for the time wasted in this movie.

By that way, that was not a jest.

I understand that not everyone is going to enjoy every movie as everyone has their own opinion. Unfortunately this movie is the exception since how much it sucks is grounded in fact, not opinion.

Please stop showing this movie immediately and send me a cheque for the money I am owed. You can make the cheque out to: Gregory Pike.

Thank you. I am sure you will not slip up like this again.

GregPike.ca

RE: The floating turd you recorded from your toilet

Dear M. Night Shyamalan,

I do not understand how you could hate such a great show so much to go through such lengths to make a mockery of it. I mean, you could have written a blog post or tweeted or even just punched a pillow. There really was no need to disrespect such a great franchise.

Please eat a turtle shell and choke.

Sincerely,

GregPike.ca

PS: Book 1 was a great spot to end off. In fact, the first scene was a great place to end off. Unfortunately you let the whole first book unfold into your vision.

Editors Note: Just found some more fire power.

“If any movie ever warranted a class-action lawsuit against the filmmakers, it’s The Last Airbender.”—Keith Phipps, AVClub.com, June 30, 2010

“The Last Airbender is an agonizing experience in every category I can think of and others still waiting to be invented.”—Roger Ebert, June 30, 2010

“Once ‘A film by M. Night Shyamalan’ promised suspense and power, but that was 11 years ago. We must stop enabling him and not pay to see this garbage.”—Matt Pais, Chicago Now, June 30, 2010

“He hasn’t mastered the craft yet, but M. Night Shyamalan may be on to something with this action-movie thing.”—David Bowles, USA Today, July 3, 2010

“[S]ome unsolicited advice for Mr. Shyamalan: Stop writing. Direct, but let others write. Don’t produce. Don’t adapt. Don’t polish someone else’s screenplay. And last thing: drop the over-the-title credit. Besides being another sign of hubris, it’s no longer deserved.”—Mel Valentin, Cinematical, July 4, 2010

“But Shyamalan’s strengths as a director are formidable, and unlike other auteurs we’ve written off, we’re genuinely hoping he can get his groove back.”—Bilge Ebiri, New York magazine, in “Don’t Give Up On M. Might Shyamalan,” July 7, 2010

“If you describe someone as ‘a filmmaker of rare talent and creativity,’ as I did, and then they follow your vote of confidence by releasing Lady, The Happening, and now The Last Airbender (currently the worst-reviewed movie of the summer, below Furry Vengeance and Sex in the City 2) on an unsuspecting public … well, let’s just say I wouldn’t blame anyone who cited Shyamalan as exhibit A in the case against my critical acumen.”—Ross Douthat, NY Times, July 7, 2010

“The current national priorities should be as follows: reduce carbon emissions and stop funding the films of M. Night Shyamalan.”—Cliff Doerksen, Chicago Reader, August 5, 2010

These quotes are from Blastr: 40 kindest and cruelest things ever said about M. Night Shyamalan

I know a few people who ought to enjoy this post.

If you compare the indices below you can see that Mount Pearl is virtually only ever average or below (though it should be known St. John’s in much in the same boat). Part of this can be accredited to our education system, part of it can be accredited to our dependencies of St. John’s.

For instance, everyone assumes Mount Pearl has no arts scene because there are never any events held in the city. Well that can almost single-handedly be attributed to the fact that there is no infrastructure to handle it. Consequently Mount Pearl artists show off their wares and talents in St. John’s. The Association for the Arts in Mount Pearl is trying to combat that.

I am sure there are other factors that Mount Pearl’s averageness as well.

In the same census, St. John’s is ranked as the single highest improver in a 5 year span, skyrocketing from a total score of 65 to 80. Yes, better than Mount Pearl. I said it.

From Yahoo News: St. John’s impresses in Maclean’s magazine’s ranking of Canada’s smartest cities