Instructional Video

This confuses me even more than the crocoduck

So the geniuses at The Way of the Master have been hard at work putting their videos back up on YouTube. I'm pleased to see that they're reloading the footage of their "debate" with the atheists, but I'm not so pleased to see what they've done with it.

They originally loaded about 10 separate videos, each about 9 minutes long and labelled "1", "2", "3" and so on. You could start at "1" and watch all the way through if you wanted to. I personally watched it over on ABC.com, but I was really pleased to see this approach to transparency. This is part of the reason I was so impressed with Kirk.

It might go without saying, but the atheists did not take the same approach to transparency over on their YouTube account. They posted a 13-minute video that included selected clips from the "debate". Not that this is bad -- it's definitely not -- but it wasn't in the same spirit of openness that I was applauding from WOTM.

I discovered that WOTM wasn't quite so open this afternoon when I clicked on the embedded link I'd posted on my blog. The video had been removed. In fact, they'd removed all of their videos of the "debate".

I did a search on their account a moment ago and discovered that they have reloaded some of their videos -- but they are shorter now. WOTM has edited them down, and I'm not entirely sure why. Surely it's not to remove the deer-in-the-headlights stares from Ray and Kirk or to make them look like they did better in the "debate"?

Hmmm, that would make them no better than Brian and "Kelly".

Clarification

UPDATED: Maybe I don't respect Kirk so much after all. His staff have pulled their clips off YouTube. I'll try to find another clip of the crocoduck, bullfrog and sheepdog.

UPDATED AGAIN: Link re-directed and edits made to the next post so you can find your way to the right spot on the video.

It's a bit late for an update to the last post, so a new one is in order. I am not saying that I have a new respect for Kirk Cameron because his argument about evolution is so great. It's clearly laughable. SnarkBitch's partner in atheism was pretty polite throughout the 90-minute discussion but lost his patience when Kirk hauled out the sketch of the crocoduck.

I'm also not saying that I think Kirk won this faux debate. He was the one who said he could prove his claims, and he was the one who set the ground rules (no references to the Bible). It wasn't up to SnarkBitch to prove anything: that was Kirk's job, and he didn't do it.

My new respect for Kirk comes from the way he handled himself on stage -- and yes, I know that he is a professional actor. That was a tough crowd. You could tell from the applause that the group was not exactly the church-going type. I don't know if the atheists managed to get a bigger crowd in or if this was just the group that happened to be available for the taping. Some of those guys were pretty angry. And I don't know if I could have put up with "Kelly"'s tone and eye-rolling for an hour and a half.

Kirk Cameron

UPDATED: The Way Of The Master pulled all of their clips down from YouTube, so I've re-directed the link to a video that still exists. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), this means you won't be contributing to WOTM's hit count, you'll be contributing to BS Alert's hit count.

A while ago, I promised that I wouldn't re-write history: I wouldn't pull any posts down from the blog, and if I changed my mind I'd say so.

Time to fess up: I have a new respect for Kirk Cameron, and not just because I used to know him as Mike Seaver.

I was going to do this over on the Uriel blog, but I just can't work up to that level of anger after watching Kirk deal with SnarkBitch's eye-rolling for an hour and a half. (Sorry, feminists: That woman was not very nice. I don't think she did herself any favours by acting like a brat. She should have let her partner do most of the talking. He was much better.)

I still think the banana guy is ridiculous, but I feel sorry for Kirk.



Kirk's staff at Way of the Master have uploaded the entire discussion to the show's YouTube account. This is just a small part of it. UPDATED: Not anymore. They pulled it down. You can watch the whole clip if you want to (for example, if you haven't met your eye-roll quota for the day -- SnarkBitch is prominently featured), but I'd like to draw your attention to the very end, starting at around the eight-and-a-half-minute mark. UPDATED: On this new video from BS Alert, you'll be looking for the 1:20 mark (40 seconds remaining).

Kirk is explaining why evolution is impossible. He believes that evolution is the reason people don't believe in God. From what I know of evolution, it's neutral on the question of whether God exists, but Kirk and I respectfully disagree. His main argument is that there are no transitional fossils. I've heard this argument before, mostly like this:

omg dont you even read teh bible!!11!! there r NO transishonal fossils!!1!! read what kenthovind has to say he isa frickin genus!

Now, these people are highly credible right from the start -- you may already have been swayed -- but I had trouble following their logic. It seemed that all life forms were obviously transitional whether they were living or fossilized, so I couldn't understand why anyone would say there are NO transitions.

Kirk has cleared this up for me. The reason he believes there are no transitional forms is that he has re-defined "transitional form" to mean that a cat would give birth to a chicken with fur. This is actually very helpful for me. I hadn't thought that the transition-seekers might be looking for bullfrogs and sheepdogs.

Busy day

It's been a long day and breaking news requires that I turn my attention to the Uriel blog today.

Two notes for those who are boycotting Uriel and other fundamentalist whackos (and really, who could blame you?):

1. It's funny that everyone thinks my last entry is about them. What, is there something you want to tell me?
2. In case you're not following Lonelygirl as closely as I do, Bree and Daniel have totally gone off the deep end:

UPDATED: Uriel's opposed to YouTube, so if you go over there and want to see the videos, you'll have to click the link and watch them from inside ABC's player. This was a 90-minute debate hosted by journalist Martin Bashir and aired on Nightline and ABC.com. I haven't seen it all -- ABC is holding part of it until tomorrow -- but I think the woman on the stage was rather rude and should have shown Ray and Kirk the respect they showed her. Maybe she was nervous, but I didn't like her attitude and thought she could have made the same points in a different tone. It sent a bad message.

I need to make a respectful request.

Please stop harassing me about the choices I’ve made. My choices are not evil, or wrong, or selfish. Yours are not permeated with divine approval. That’s right, I’m judging you for being so judgmental.

I can already tell from the responses I’ve received in the past few years that you are not going to like this, but here goes: It is possible for intelligent, reasonable people to make different choices than you do. If I talked to you about your choices in the same way you talk to me about mine, you’d be horrified. You’d probably rave about me for a while and then, realizing how you look to others, say that everyone’s picking on you but it’s OK, you’ve dealt with it for years and you can continue to bear this heavy burden.

One of these days I’m going to snap and grab Little Miss Know-it-All’s beheading knife.

My favourite front-page editor’s note EVER

The story promoted in Friday’s {name of paper withheld} for today’s front page, “Councillors call for better bike racks,” has been held in favour of the breaking news on White Stripes ticket sales. The bicycle rack story will appear in Wednesday’s {name of paper withheld}.

This is the first time I’ve ever heard it called “breaking news” when people buy tickets to a rock concert.

For the maenad

Summer People

This is the lake where my brothers and I have been talking about buying property. When we were younger, we lived about a quarter of a mile from it. My grandfather still lives there, and it's where my dad and his brothers grew up.

The summer people would show up every year and set up their cabins. Now we want to be summer people.

Steve is alarmed about this. He didn't mind when it was just a silly idea we batted around every few months, but when we actually started looking at real-estate guides, he got nervous. Property values around the lake have shot up to insane levels, and cabins with water frontage cost more than our house did when we bought it two years ago.

Anyone want to sell a cabin on Lake Wassookeag? We're in the market.

Welcome, Steve

No, not this Steve:


THIS Steve:

Steve Dawe is an old friend of mine and an even older friend of my husband's (who is also named Steve -- try to keep up, would you?).

I asked what he would like me to write here, and he said (and I quote):

I've renounced the heresies prevalent in the North American Anglican Church and am now a refugee within a Baptist congregation. Oh, and I'm extremely handsome, intelligent, humble and witty.

He's been pestering me to set him up with my girlfriends since 1993. If you're a hot single Christian girl, please apply directly to Steve.

For new readers

Welcome! I'm so glad you're here. I've created this post to answer some of the most common questions from new readers, in no particular order:

Who are you? I'm a wife and mom. I care about grammar and journalism. I live in a small town in northern Canada.

Do you have an RSS feed? Yes. You can click here to subscribe, or you can use one of the buttons on the right.

Did you name your blog after the Stevie Nicks song? Yes, sort of. I think it's a particularly good name for my blog for a number of reasons, the most obvious being that this is a personal blog that's written in the north. On another level, it's a song about a woman who is thinking about making changes in her life and watching other changes go on around her, and I really identify with that. I think most people can.

Why do you call your town Name of Town Withheld? Just to thwart the search engines, really. I'm not hiding from anyone, but I don't like to come up in search results for the name of my town, either. This is also why I don't use my last name on the blog.

What is the CBC? The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is the national broadcaster and a former employer of mine. I sometimes call it the MotherCorp.

Do you really think David Hasselhoff is the sexiest man alive? I'm not going to dignify this with a response. If you really need more information about this, please look here.

Who is Uriel? Uriel is a fundamentalist Christian, I think. Don't worry, she's not real. She's a joke. I banished her to a separate blog because many, many readers didn't get the joke.

Who is Little Miss Know-it-All? She's me, sort of. She hates bad grammar, especially from professional writers. She was on hiatus for a while after attacking my brother for misusing the word "impacted", but that didn't last long. Fear not: Civilians are relatively safe.

Why is Little Miss Know-it-All always threatening to behead people? My friend Glen claims that she is on a journalism jihad. She has never followed through on her threats, but she has come close.

What is Name of Paper Withheld? You shouldn't protect the guilty. I would tend to agree, but again, I don't like to come up in search results. If you know where I live, this won't be hard to figure out. If you don't know where I live, it doesn't matter which paper it is. And in case you were wondering: I don't hate the people who work there. In fact, I have high hopes for them. The problem is that they don't appear to aim as high as I do when it comes to their own work.

Who is Rebecca Eckler? Ugh. She's a Canadian "writer". If you came here through Technorati, you're probably looking for this link.

Why should we care what you have in your MP3 player? You don't have to. You probably won't like half of my selections, anyway.

I think I found a secret message in one of your posts. Congratulations!

I think I might be insulted by something you've written. You've either missed a joke or you're a moron who deserves to be insulted. You pick.

Back to the main page.

What's in my honest-to-goodness iPod?

What would be in my JPod if I had one?

Support, help and comfort all who are in danger

I received a few calls today from my true friends. They were worried about me. This is a rough time, and I thank you for your support.

I'm referring, of course, to the latest video of David Hasselhoff. He's lying shirtless on the floor, so...vulnerable.

My first reaction was HECK YEAH! No shirt -- is it possible he's not wearing PANTS, either? Where's the b-roll of this tape?

My second reaction came about five minutes later, after I'd wiped the drool off my shirt. I watched the video again and decided that it was very sad. I wish you would all just leave David alone. It's hard to be the sexiest man alive. He doesn't need your judgmental stares.

My sadness quickly turned to anger. What, have you never been so drunk that you forgot how to chew? Ahhh, how quickly the judges become the judged! It's sooooooo easy to point fingers at others. I bet that if I followed YOU around with a videocamera, I'd find a few choice nuggets.

I beg you, on behalf of the family and everyone who loves David as much as I do: Please respect our privacy in this difficult time.

Our hero

If you're not familiar with Cute With Chris, you should be. We are addicted to his twice-weekly YouTube show. He's Canadian (note the old CBC T-shirt he's wearing today) and is the reason I know what Stephen Harper's cat looks like. I've been wanting to post his stuff for a while, but he kept killing his inner child, and I thought the blood spatter might not be the best way to introduce our latest obsession. Half of my readers are already concerned for my mental state, and I didn't want to push them over the edge.

UPDATED: Aaaaand here's the video with Stephen Harper's cat:

Tensions running high

There was a noticeable shift in the mood around town today. People are upset about the schools. I've said that before, but I was using the word "upset" to mean agitated and dismayed. Today, people are sad and distressed.

Clearly, there is some selection bias in what I'm hearing. I'm a mouthy parent, and people know my son's at YK #1. Parents who have strong opposing opinions don't usually come up to me to state their cases. Actually, that might be for the best. A friend called today and said that she was unexpectedly on the receiving end of another parent's emotional pitch for one of our schools. I might get testy if that happened to me.

Today Name of Paper Withheld had a lot of coverage about this. I'll dispense with my usual snarky grammar critiques, because I have some serious concerns about the information that's being put out there.

I am speaking only for myself, not for the YK #1 board or any group of parents (formal or otherwise).

The first story is called Education at What Price? and makes the following notable observations (my comments are in bold text):

• Charles Dent will make one more attempt this Thursday to convince parents that shutting down one of Name of Town Withheld Education District No. 1's school is in the best interest of the students. Yeah, good luck with this. It's just not going to happen. Charles Dent is the minister of education.
  
  
• As both schools engage in what Dent classified a "turf war," {name of paper withheld} made some calculations on what costs could be saved and redirected back into the classroom. I don't know that it really is a turf war, but I'll let the reference go. I'm more concerned about how the reporters might have calculated the savings ($400,000). Call me suspicious, but they are not exactly accountants over there.
  
  
• J.H. Sissons students will have to be relocated in two years for those renovations regardless of whether Yk 1 chooses to shut it down this year. This was news to everyone involved. They usually don't shut down an entire school to do renovations. They relocate some students and work around the others.
  
  
• "We were full to the rafters and with no solution," said Kern Von Hagen, superintendent of YCS, at a budget information session last Thursday. "Everyone was looked after but us." Normally, when there isn't room for more students in a school, administrators stop accepting new students. Don't they??? But I don't like this comment about everyone else being looked after. There are TWO English school boards in town. There is no "everyone else".
  
  
• While Von Hagen said they appreciate the space, renting scattered classrooms has been a logistical nightmare and not a permanent solution. The classrooms are not scattered. They're at Michael's school. They're even all in the same wing with a separate entrance.
  

The second is called Parents Cry Out Against Shared Space and makes the following notable observations:

• Von Hagen expanded on the administrative nightmare managing two spaces has been. While he said staff did their best, sharing space has ultimately taken resources and time out of the classroom with staff travelling between two schools. Wow. If it's so much work to manage a few extra classrooms, how much of a headache will it be to manage an entire extra school?
  
  
• Von Hagen also put further pressure on Yk 1. "They would rather see half empty schools and not see that money put into programming," Von Hagen told the approximately 150 parents who came. This made me really mad. We do NOT want to see half-empty schools. We want to share our schools!
  
  
• Gullberg mentioned two levers Dent could pull to encourage Yk 1 to hand over a school: give YCS Sir John Franklin, the only school still owned by ECE and not Yk 1, or not follow through with J.H. Sissons' planned retrofit. Nice. Shannon Gullberg is the chair of the YCS board, by the way.

• Gullberg also reacted to Yk 1's political agenda of looking to amalgamate the two school boards; a recommendation that can be found on the Yk 1 Web Site.

  "How do you negotiate with someone who has as their goal your ultimate destruction?" said Gullberg. "We will not negotiate in a way that will result in the same way as last year." This is just silly. If YK #1 wants to destroy YCS, they want to destroy themselves as well: the recommendation to have one school board is one that I personally support in the name of efficiency. This whole dispute shows exactly why it's stupid to have two boards.
  

I do feel bad for YCS in some ways. They've rejected all offers and now they have no options. Their backs are against the wall and they don't want to give an inch because they're afraid of losing their position. They missed the date to renew the lease agreement, but their only Plan B was "bully YK #1 into giving up a school".

I missed the education minister's first public meeting a few weeks ago because I was trapped in an airport, but I'll be at tomorrow's meeting.

Megan is going to get you the healthiest call girl this town has ever seen

I was avoiding Facebook, and I thought I was doing a pretty good job. I spend my life on the computer anyway, and I really didn't want another Web 2.0 program to worry about. At any given time, I usually have Blogger, MSN, Yahoo! Messenger and YouTube open, plus my e-mail and iTunes. I don't have room for much more. This wasn't about hiding; I'm pretty open about myself here on the blog, but I wanted to keep things simple.

I successfully rode out the MySpace wave, or so I thought. I do have a MySpace account, but just so I can look at a few friends' blogs that were set to private.

Then Facebook started to pester me. I got my first invitation a couple of months ago. I ignored it. Glen reassured me that it's not just for students and that adults do indeed use it. More invitations followed. I ignored them.

Then two days ago an invitation arrived from a very sweet person who I have not technically met, but who I assume must be close to sainthood since she's planning to marry Steve's brother Sean.

I thought about this. It's one thing to tell real-life friends that I don't want to be "friended". It's quite another to tell a complete stranger. This seemed a bit rude. Also, a rejection could put me in the bad books with the in-laws. I couldn't have that.

I clicked the link and set up a page.

I'm still very new at this (I was chastised earlier tonight for responding to a message on my own page) and am completely lost most of the time. But one thing is already clear: Facebook is aggressively interactive. Actually, let's put an exclamation point on it, like the government of Saskatchewan: Facebook is aggressively interactive!

It was fun to find a few people, but I was ready to stop after about an hour. I'd found everyone I really wanted to find. I have a few friends, real friends, who I've lost touch with over the years. Since I made the mistake of telling it where I went to school, Facebook has been bombarding me with messages about people I have not seen in over a decade, many for good reason. I've received 34 messages since last night. In two days I have amassed 22 "friends". Just in case there are any lingering questions among my readers as to my geekiness, let me assure you: I have probably not had 22 true friends in my entire life. I tend to form close relationships with a few people, and I am friendly with everyone else, except for the few people who I loathe intensely. (Actually, I'm pretty friendly with them, too. They probably have no idea that I'm plotting to destroy them.)

But it's interesting to see who has suddenly popped up. I feel rather nostalgic right now. This should help:

Are you only here because you want to read about the YK #1 / YCS space issue?

This link will take you to a list of all my posts about it.

More schools stuff

I'm putting the post with the links to all of my school posts back up at the top of the blog. I've been getting a lot of searches for keywords related to the current space shortage, so I figured I ought to put it back up to save people the work. If you are new to the blog, you can find all of the background there.

Last night, the Catholic school board held a meeting to talk to parents about the issue. I wanted to go, but realised that I probably would not be able to answer the skill-testing question at the door:

Burly Catholic monk with arms crossed: Name the books of the Apocrypha.
Me: Um, Enoch?
Burly Catholic monk with arms crossed: Please leave now.
Me: Can I show you my genuflection? No?

I do, however, have a few secret sources out there, so I know what happened. CBC's coverage is here. Among the more interesting reports from the meeting:

• There is no school spirit at Michael's school, which has been sharing space with YCS students for the past year. (This was news to me.)
• Catholic students are not allowed to use the gym or specialty rooms at Michael's school. (This was also news to me. You'll be looking for section 25 in that link.)
• The YK #1 high school is the only school in the city that is not owned by one of the boards. It could be taken from YK #1 and given to YCS over the board's objections. (Until this year, I had no idea that the boards owned the schools. I don't know why the high school is different.)
  

This is not going to end well. I feel bad for YCS in some ways -- YK #1's reaction to the education minister's threat to cut their funding was basically "OK, so we'll dip into our savings. Nice talking to you." This has left YCS without many options. While everyone was arguing about whether they could take one of our schools, the deadline to renew the tenancy agreement at Michael's school passed.

The minister of education is holding another public meeting on Thursday. I think we need to figure out the following things as a community:

• What does YK #1 mean by "share"?
  
• Under what circumstances would YCS be willing to share space?
• Do we really need two public school boards? When we say we want a choice about where our kids go to school, do we mean that we want to choose the school or choose the district office?
  

Glen begins his new career