I was out at my parent’s place today and took a look at my Franken-design on their PC. It’s safe to say that the site does not render properly in Internet Explorer and I have zero idea how to address the problem. I realize that a lot of people use IE (I’ll forego launching into a tirade against it), and if I knew how to fix the problems I’d get on it. But the truth is I haven’t the first clue how to.

So for those of you that are still using Internet Explorer, for whatever messed up reason – apologies. If I may be so bold as to suggest some alternatives…

- Firefox
- Flock
- Safari

There are others, I realize, and everyone has their favourite, but those are my top three.

Updated: Check out the image linked in this comment to see what I’m talking about.

It’s been a bit of a tense morning. My younger brother is a commercial diver and owns and operates a boat up north, which means that during specific seasons he’s gone for extended periods of time. This morning, while driving a friend’s truck to the tenders he hit a stretch of black ice, lost control, and went over a 30 foot embankment. Thankfully he walked away unhurt, though had to stand in the freezing cold for an hour and a half until someone picked him up – even though the police were called twice.

Personally, I don’t know what’s worse, hearing stories like that or the ones where he gets caught in storms and his boat is cresting swells so large that everyone on board is literally hanging on to something with their feet dangling in mid air.

Twitter is currently crapping out, so my attempts to fix the spacing of the Tweets at the top of the page is on hold – nope it’s back up again. Actually, it’s been down on and off since last night. A reader emailed me a while ago and told me that a friend of theirs interned at Twitter for a while and said, in essence, that despite its popularity, it’s basically run by a hamster on a wheel – it’s that dodgy. That’s the web for you. The only sites that don’t crash are porn sites – the true web innovators.

So what do I mean about fumbling like a moron in the dark with code I don’t understand and simply producing front end designs? Click the thumbnail on the left and you’ll see the difference. The problem, of course, is I have nowhere near the skills to make that a reality. Most of the time I’m just guessing at how the code works, and if you did a check on this website with regards to CSS and XHTML errors, I’m sure they’d be off the charts.

I am also up way too early. That’s because last night I slept with a cat scarf on. I’m excited though, I’m going to look at a house that’s being rented along the river across from Fort Langley today. Imagine that – actual bedrooms. And there’s even an organic farmers’ market down the street. Shit, I might even get cable. Unless I become a regular at Roosters – oh those buckle bunnies drive me mad!

Tip: When you click the thumbnail and it takes you to the larger version, put your mouse over it and a magnifying glass icon should appear. Click it again and it will produce the image full page.

Well, it’s not perfect, but it’ll do for the time being. While I’m sure that it’s filled with a million coding errors, it’s at least a slight improvement on the last crappy design – and I do mean slight. Hopefully, in the months ahead, I can get some scratch from somewhere so that I can have a proper design implemented. Anyway, I’m going to go and scrub my brain with a wire brush now.

So the recording of the next record has been moved back a month, commencing on January the 5th. To be honest, given the material that I have to go over, the preparations, and various meetings – such as working on getting a string quartet up to speed to augment those arrangements that I’m using – it’s for the better.

For those of you who have asked if I’ve gotten a cat, the answer would be that I’m fostering one for a few weeks. I named him Eli, and keeping him hinges on how well the dogs get on with him over the next 14 days. Last night he slept for periods next to Casey, who is far more relaxed around him than Benji is. Benji tends to bark and jump around playfully, which, were Eli a puppy, would be fine, but being that he’s a cat it scares him.

Having raised four of my own dogs from infancy, I have to admit that cats are a lot less work. Eli is just under two months old and already uses his litter box. Being that I’ve little experience with cats, I have to admit it’s a massive relief. No scrubbing stains off the carpet, no surprise wet spots on the bed in the morning.

One of the hilarious things about Eli is that he seems to prefer eating dog food to cat food. He also has a tendency to chew on pretty much any cable he can get his teeth on, including the cord to my desktop mouse – his particular favourite.

Given his size, and the amount of trouble that he can no doubt get into, I woke up at 4:30 in the morning to discover him running around the apartment, so I spent an hour and a half sitting on the couch until he tired himself out. I have the feeling that that’s going to be a routine feature over the next two weeks.

Hopefully, if everything works out, all of them will get comfortable with each other and I can keep him. One thing that I don’t want to do is to keep him in an environment in which he’s constantly being barked at and cornered. If that continues, primarily on Benji’s part, then I will sadly be forced to return him to the SPCA or look for someone that wants to adopt him. I am hoping that that isn’t the case though because he’s fantastic.

And yes, this does symbolize the terrible ‘I’m pushing 40’ reality that I have basically abandoned hopes of having an intimate relationship with a woman and replaced that void with having a cavalcade of pets for company. Sad, I know.

Comedian turned conservative radio jock Dennis Miller is one of those intellectuals that is so overburdened with a sense of himself that he is literally incapable of abandoning the rolling blackouts of pedantic white noise that he employs when opining on anything. Personally, it stuns me when a man that obviously possesses such intelligence actually credits the Bush Administration with doing what he feels had to be done in the interests of national security - the historic mother of all justifications of excusable villainy.

Now is not the time to silently gift the Bush Administration a free pass, nor is it the time to forget its abuse and degradation of the Constitution, its role in the diminishment of global human rights standards post 9/11, its disregard for international law, and its use of criminal practices and falsehoods to attain its objectives. Now is not the time to overlook the fact that the United States has held hundreds of individuals outside of any measure of the law, without council, without recourse, and yet claims to be a nation of laws. Now is not the time to overlook Extraordinary Rendition, Black Sites, and the use of foreign nations in which torture is not frowned upon to do America’s dirty work. Now is not the time to overlook the fact that the United States illegally invaded a country based on lies fed the public that has cost the lives of thousands of Americans and, most likely, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.

Now is the time to remember what has occurred over the last seven years and hold those guilty to account – even if all that is left us is to do so with our collective conscience.

The Iraqi Cabinet has voted 27-1 in support of the Status Of Forces Agreement with the United States, which includes allowing US forces to remain in Iraq until 2011. While there were some 100 amendments made to the agreement before the cabinet voted, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani’s backing of it is most likely one of the reasons that it received the almost unanimous support that it did. The legislation now goes to the Iraqi Parliament where it will be deliberated, and where many believe that it will receive opposition more reflective of actual Iraqi public sentiment.

While pro-war pundits will view this vote as an “I told you so”, the truth is that popular public sentiment does not support the occupation, not to mention the fact that highly influential groups, such as that of Moqtada al-Sadr and the Association of Muslim Scholars, oppose the SOFA.

There’s no questioning that everyone from the President to the ex-Secretary of Defense and his underlings should be held accountable for their actions, but the chances of that happening are highly unlikely. The Bush Administration politicized the CIA, now those commonly thrown under the bus are doing their best to make sure that doesn’t happen…

“Senior intelligence officers are lobbying the outgoing president to look after the men and women who could face charges for following his orders in the war on terrorism.

Many fear that Barack Obama, who has pledged to close the Guantanamo Bay detention camp and put an end to the policy of extraordinary rendition, could launch a legal witch hunt against those who oversaw the policies after he is sworn in on Jan 20.

Most vulnerable are US intelligence officers who took part in intensive interrogations against terrorist suspects, using techniques including water boarding, which many believe crossed the line into torture.

A former CIA officer familiar with the backstage lobbying for pardons, said: “These are the people President Bush asked to fight the war on terror for him. He gave them the green light to fight tough. The view of many in the intelligence community is that he should not leave them vulnerable to legal censure when he leaves.

“An effort is under way to get pre-emptive pardons. The White House has indicated that the matter is under consideration.”

In addition to frontline CIA and military officers, others at risk could include David Addington, Dick Cheney’s former counsel, and William Haynes, the former Pentagon general counsel who helped draw up the regulations governing enhanced interrogations.”

Someone asked me yesterday who I would like to see appointed to four specific positions within Barack Obama’s administration. I might get some flack for my ‘fantasy pool’ choices, but here goes…

Secretary Of State: Hilary Clinton. To be honest, I think she has a decent chance of actually being offered the position, if she hasn’t already.

Secretary Of Defense: Colin Powell. Controversial perhaps, but a man that was screwed over while Secretary Of State by the military/intelligence apparatus, so I believe he’d bring much needed oversight. Keeping Gates on would me a mistake.

Director Of The CIA: John McCain. Yes, you read that correctly. Like him or not, his record regarding the abhorrence of torture would play a significant role in dismantling the practices of Rendition and suspect interrogation methods.

US Ambassador To The UN: Dennis Kusinich. While some consider the Congressman to be too radical, I believe his appointment would significantly aid in repairing damage caused by the Bush Administration’s abuse of the UN.

There are many outrages in this world, and many of them get buried beneath various facades that justify them. The Israeli expansion in the West Bank is a prime example of this phenomenon. After all - how dare we speak out against the Israelis? As far as many are concerned, to do so insinuates anti-Semitism, terrorist sympathies, and so forth. But what people forget is that at the heart of the matter there are ordinary human beings involved, many of whom just want to live their lives in peace and security, which is why things of this nature make my blood boil…

“Fawzia al-Kurd, 52, raises her black cloak to show the bottoms of the pyjamas she is still wearing several days after she and her wheelchair-bound husband were forced from the home he had lived in for five decades.

She had no time to change or gather her possessions when the Israeli police arrived in the early hours of Sunday morning.

In borrowed shoes, she shows us around the tent that she now calls home near the single-storey, two room house in East Jerusalem.
Jewish Israelis who had already moved into the extension the Kurd family had built for their son, have now taken over the rest of the flat.

Mohammad al-Kurd, 55, who is partially paralysed and suffers from heart and kidney problems, diabetes and high blood pressure, is now staying with relatives.

He had lived in the house for 52 years when the Israeli Supreme Court served an eviction order on him in July.

“I will never forgive the Israelis for what they have done to me and my sick husband, kicking us out of our own house in the early hours of the morning. I may forgive other things they have done, but not this,” said Mrs Kurd.

The Jewish-occupied houses are adorned with Israeli flags
The eviction is the culmination of a decades-long legal dispute between the Kurd family and organisations seeking to boost Jewish residency in the Israeli-occupied east of the city.”

It seems to me that such things once happened to Jewish people. Their homes were also taken, they were also forced to move. The fact that they consider such behaviour acceptable given their own past simply astounds me.