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01.31.2006 || 16h16 Organisation, elections, and a fight The election; don't get me started. Everyone's saying how at least it's a mniority government and all, but what *I* think's going to happen is that Harper 's goign to soft-pedal his agenda until the next election, when the Consies will get a majority due to their able and balanced governance, then take us all into neocon hell. Oh, and Paul Martin responded to the election results by stepping down as leader of the defeated Liberal Party. From Prime Minister to backbench peon in one day. Nice. In all fairness, the Liberals formulated their own arse-kicking by being so damned corrupt and lousy, but you know... The office: I Have this big old shelving unit that I hate and that's been collecting crap for the past six years, so I decided that it was time to organise it, and my general mess of papers at the same time. By the end of the process I had thrown out five full green garbage bags of junk, more junk, art supplies, broken and obsolete computer crap and general mayhem. As for the papers, I shredded and recycled about 24 cubic feet of old tax returns, notebooks from as far back as high school, old sketchbooks, pay stubs from former jobs, endless copies of poems and stories, a few books and waaay more crap. Then Jazz and I moved a few bits of furniture about and cleaned up the epic mess of ethernet cables and extra routers that were left over from last year, when our computers weren't all wireless-friendly. The finances. That's just a numbers game. What I have to do is stop putting everything I can on my student loan and just accept it as a) a constant, known figure that I'm used to seeing leave my account every month, and b) the debt with the lowest interest rate. Instead, the credit card has to go down first, followed by the line of credit. The card's already way down due to some numbers I crunched and funds I moved about. I'm poor right now, but I'm poor with a purpose. So, something interesting went down in Toronto recently, and it brings up all kinds of questions. I'm talking about the altercation between a motorist and a bike courier that resulted from the gasbag tossing some garbage out his window and onto the sidewalk. the biker picked up the trash, opened the driver's door and tossed it right back in. He threw coffee on her, she (allegedly) keyed his car, and he took her down and tried to stomp on her bike. People finally pulled them off of one another and everyone went on their way, but what's interesting is that someone photographed the whole thing, unnoticed because everyone was so focussed on the fight. The Driver finally threatened the photographer with a baseball bat when he tried to shoot the man's license plate. The questions are as follows: I know that the biker shouldn't have opened the car to throw something in because that might be actionable as mischief or assault or something. The man responded by escalating the situation with a potentially scalding cup of joe. Actionable as assault. If indeed she keyed his car, then for some reason that's arrestable as well, though for god sakes less motorists'd get keyed if they didn't turn into dolts behind the wheel. Now, a scratch on a car is expensive, but totalling the bike is completely off in that he's actually destroying the girl's transportation *and* her means of providing for herself. The skuffle that ensued was, by that point, most likely unavoidable, but the girl gets props for not taking the U-lock off her belt and denting the guy's head. At the end of the day, the motorist is the fucknugget. Littering is bad and there has to be a way of making people pay for it *without* a cop witnessing it and then deciding whether it's worth it to go after the guy. We need some sort of citizen's framework through which to nail people who don't care about our public places. And no, I'm not talking about the kind of Big Brother shite that the Homeland Defense (sic) goons to the south are propagating. And he was getting into her space. Cyclists who pay taxes pay for the upkeep of roads as well as motorists. Ergo, they own the space just as much. If someone tossed a bag of food onto the road in front o f a car's wheel, the wheel rolls over the bag, crushing all within into a smear. Do the same to the front wheel of a bike and it's a different story. I'm tired of people not treating driving as the operation of a large and dangerous device, and of just not thinking when they're doing so. I mean, if the guy had any consideration in him, he'd have a garbage bag in his car and wouldn't have ended up in that situation at all. If the courier had been me, I'd have taken out one of his windows as soon as he stomped on my bike. |
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shite One last little note... - 09.21.2006 de-stressing, biking and terrorism - 06.06.2006 Mildly stressed... - 05.29.2006 More crime stupidity - 05.28.2006 Scary stuff - 05.25.2006
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