Gambling

When I went to Vegas the other month, I lost $11US at the slots. I’ve put in about $80 lifetime at VLTs and casinos ($1 at VLTs, and I broke even). It appalls me that the AVERAGE Sask. household spends a month’s rent on gambling in a year. That it doesn’t bother Minister Cheveldayoff, says a lot about the priorities of the Sask Party government. It’s not there to protect people, it’s in the business of exploiting them, and is proud of it!

To Ken Cheveldayoff, the minister responsible for the Saskatchewan Gaming Corp. — which runs the casinos in Regina and Moose Jaw — the relatively high per-household expenditures are a good indicator that speaks to the quality of Saskatchewan’s casinos.

“I would credit SIGA and [SGC] gaming with marketing very well, with providing an attractive and a positive entertainment experience for people,” he said. “That’s why they keep coming back, that’s why they do well.”

Cheveldayoff said he’d rather govern a province that spends the most per capita on gambling than the least.

People with gambling problems are building our roads and hospitals according to Cheveldayoff. It’d be interesting to see how much money is spent on gambling addiction, and how many people have gambling problems in this province compared to other provinces.

Sasky Bridges Falling Down

It’s perhaps not a coincidence that in the same week that a Saskatoon bridge was shut down by inspections, that Highway 2′s important bridge between Saskatoon and Moose Jaw is ruined by a falling crane doing repairs. I recall a few years ago learning that Saskatchewan’s bridges do not get as many inspections as are required to keep all of them safe. Our politicians are spending our taxes on too many unimportant things, and are leaving our infrastructure to become substandard. My Dad could have been killed in the Highway 2 bridge collapse; he was on it less than 24 hours ago. Commenters on CBC.ca remarked having similar fears about their own families.

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Yorkton is charging $20/year to have backyard fire pits. Sheesh, what gouging!

Saskatoon Traffic Jam Bridge

Saskatoon has bad traffic at the best of times (for Saskatchewan anyway), but it’s worse now with the closure of the Traffic Bridge. This leaves clever people to ponder why there aren’t more people in Saskatoon biking to work instead of driving cars. The weather is great, the exercise is good for most people, it costs nothing in gas, and the city should be encouraging it by installing more bike racks and painting more bike lanes.

If I’m not borrowing a vehicle, or sharing one, my primary transportation is city bus or bicycle. My Buick sold last week. That’s an average of $8400/year I don’t have to spend on a car now. I also don’t have to bother getting oil and transmission fluid changes, washer fluid, trunk hydraulics, fuel gauge repair, air filter, cabin air filter, temperature sensor repair, Winter tires installed, etc. And I won’t be scraping windows in the Winter either.

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Rantwick has a fun sign on the back of his bike, I’d consider doing this.

Sell Death

I ended up on the mailing list of a Vancouver/Toronto PR company at some point about a year ago. Back then, they sent out a job opportunity for this role, and then resent a posting leaving out the “Smokeless tobacco” part of the description of what people would be pushing. Now they’ve decided it’s not worth hiding that ugly bit. I’m helping expose it to a little more daylight too.

I’m currently recruiting for 1 more Promotional Model Representative for the National Smokeless Tobacco program. The scheduled events are listed below. Please note that these dates are subject to change. If you are still interested and available, please let me know ASAP.

Aug 12 – CFL
Aug 13 – Reggae Festival
Aug 14 – Saskatoon Ex
Aug 20 – Chuckwagon Races
Aug 21 – 22 Glam Festival
Sept 3 – Rotary Park Beer Gardens

Pay rate – $17/hour

Each shift will be 4 hours long (typically in the evening) and team will be required to arrive 15 minutes prior to shift in uniform and ready to go.

Thanks!!

“Spit tobacco” is harmful and deadly. Companies selling, and promoting smoking and chewing tobacco should be criticized for their money grubbing greed.

Hi everyone,

I’m currently recruiting Promotional Representatives for the Saskatoon Exhibition. If you or anyone you know would be interested, please let me know ASAP. There is a $50 referral bonus available if your referral is employed on the program.

Thanks!!

No, I will not be referring anyone to this program.

This PR company has also contacted me with job postings pushing Nintendos for $13/h, or involvement in the Olympic torch relay.

Hitting Snooze

On the weekend I had a four hour nap. This came about because it was terribly hot outside, (and warm inside too), and I’d been getting less than ideal levels of sleep attending concerts and a family reunion.

-River south of Moose Jaw, SK

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The American government is getting ready to let BP hit the snooze alarm on the people living in the Gulf region.

For Acy Cooper, a shrimper from Venice, La., weekly checks from BP had replaced income lost when large sections of the gulf were closed. But then his 25-boat task force shrunk to 21, to 12, to nine. And he wasn’t one of the nine.

Cooper says that leaves him in a hole; shrimp-trawling season won’t start for one week. And even then, he worries that the remaining oil could turn up in somebody’s net and ruin his business all over again.

“If we get these shrimp and they get one person sick, you know how long it will take us to come back?” Cooper said at the meeting with Mabus. To prove his point that oil was still out there, he held up a Gatorade bottle filled with oil taken from a nearby marsh. “We ain’t through the cleanup. We can’t go into recovery. It is not recovery. Somebody’s lying.”

Washington’s solution to their problem is to say that if the oil is out of sight, it’s not their problem.

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Also on the weekend I had a very interesting discussion with my uncle. He’s a respected journalist for a large newspaper, and I always learn lots from him and his stories. One quibble I’ve not been able to get out of my head though, is his idea of “sustainability”. He’s in favour of nuclear energy for this province, in part because it’s “sustainable” (even though uranium is clearly a non-renewable mineral). He’s not convinced that what happened at Chernobyl could happen here (because we have different politics over here). I think the BP oil spill and Chernobyl meltdown are perfect examples that even though safety systems can be in place to prevent or limit catastrophes on a global magnitude, they will be turned off. Just hit snooze, it’s what humans do to alerts they don’t want to hear.

Saskatchewan Vegetation

Some of my favourite, and not so favourite plants from back home.

- The tasty chokecherry, bitter, but great for syrup and jellies. I eat ‘em raw for fun though.

- Here they are next to my favourite berry, the saskatoon. Saskatoon berry pie is the best pie possible, sorry apple.

-The caragana is difficult to stop from growing like a weed in a fence row. This makes it an excellent windbreak on the dry prairies. The brown seed packs are green then yellow, earlier in the year.

-A berry which I do not know the name of, but was instructed as a kid not to eat the red or white berries of these sorts.

MS Trials in Saskatchewan

I have to give Brad Wall credit in this case. He’s right to start looking more closely at a possible treatment for MS that is better than the current drugs. Angioplasty is a well known treatment for blockages, and should be offered if patients and doctors are willing to undergo studies on its new implementation.

One case the CBC followed, has so far been a success story. That it apparently works, even for a short time, is sign for hope. The drugs used for treating MS are not a cure, and could be the entirely wrong way to go about treating the disease. Ulcers were treated incorrectly for a long time too, until a smart doctor realized the actual cause of most stomach ulcers. Pharmaceutical companies don’t exactly have an incentive to find a cure, when they can stay rich by treating symptoms instead.

If only Wall would recognize the importance of minimizing pain and debilitation in the rest of the population too!

The Brightest Star

Taron, my cousin’s husband, wrote a number 1 song. Read how he wrote it, in the Leader Post.

-55000 views as of writing this. Chazz Valentine is the singer.

Improving Emergency Alerts

It has concerned me for a number of years how unprepared Regina is for another tornado. A few pass the city every year it seems, yet there’s no siren system for those who don’t have a radio or TV on at the time a storm is set to come through. There’s no guarantee the radio or TV will broadcast an alert in time, or that Environment Canada has the ability to warn Saskatchewanians in a timely way either. How do they do things in Tornado Alley, USA? Surely there are some affordable systems that work in small urban settings?

The UofR is testing some sort of alert system for the Green. Other outdoor spaces in the city should have an early warning system too.

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Civilization is also unprepared for a large solar storm. We’ve built our devices and economies around the expectation that ground threats to telecommunication are as bad as it gets. That’s not true, there’s a threat from space, and more specifically the Sun. It’s quite possible that dozens of satellites essential to telecommunications could go off in a day, and take months to replace. Could the Internet handle the rerouting? Possibly, but you may be without TV stations for a few days or weeks, or longer, and GPS functioning could diminish, or cell phone towers may need repair, etc.

It’s happened on a “small” scale before, and will likely happen again in our lifetime on a larger scale.

Thumbs Up Canada

There’s a man couch surfing and hitchhiking across the country to gather and spread information regarding racism and discrimination in Canada. He’s in Regina tonight, and you may see him on the Trans Canada highway soon.