Xanthippa's Chamberpot

Don’t you just love migraines?

Not only do they incapacitate one for days, for even more days afterwards, my brain refuses to function on anything more than 20% of my cognitive capacity…  So, no reasoning, very little reading (that still hurts) and just a lot of listening to TV shows and videos.

Listening to a bit of the radio, the lunacy and unimaginable disconnect between the Ottawa city government and, well, reality, reared its ugly head up again.  And, yes, it was again regarding the cursed ‘O-Train’.

This time, it is not the tunnel under the downtown, to be dug in ‘loose shale’ (but will, in no way, undermine the integrity of the foundations of the really tall buildings right above), nor will it have anything to do with the disruption of the geological station placed in ‘isolated’ area of the Greenbelt, which is being used to calibrate all the other geological stations in remote ares (and, yes, I helped develop their data acquisition/calibration system for them back when I was working in the science field – did you know that scientists pack water bags around their equipment in the Arctic so they can collect data for longer before the instruments/laptop freeze?  Sorry, I’m rambling…) and that is being threatened because the idiotically planned O’choochoo will run right by it.

Nor is it attempting to run  the ‘western’ portion of the O-choo-choo line on parkway land along the Ottawa river – and thus effectively halving the accessibility to it as potential riders would live south of the line and only fish north of it…

No, this time it’s the airport.

It seems that, in its wisdom, the city planners have not only failed to take into account the Convention Center near the airport (and the major cause of traffic jams in the area) and ignored it completely, they have charted the O’choo-choo tracks to run over a bit of land that the airport people own and have, on a few occasions, told the Ottawa people they plan to build a runway on.

How do I get off this planet?

And while I’m ranting on my municipal government…

OK, another bicyclist got killed on out streets.  This time, Hunt Club Road.

What is unusual about this one, the bicyclist was traveling in the bicycle lane, not making any turns, and in the same direction as an 18-wheeler truck that did not even know it struck anything…

The fault for this one  lies squarely with the City of Ottawa!

Why?

It has an insane obsession with making people bike on roads not designed to accommodate bicycles.

There used to be a law on our books, prior to amalgamation, that stated that if a bike path exists between two spots, a bicyclist must use the bike paths instead of public roads to get from one point to the other.  After amalgamation, this rule has not been enforced at all, so I am not sure if it still exists.  Indeed, one can drive on a road which is flanked by a bicycle path which is separated by about 1 to 1.5 meter grass buffer from the road – and encounter bicyclists on the road, blatantly ignoring the bike path.

But, this particular fatality is significant.

It happened on a road that is a major thoroughfare with a high speed limit.  Hunt Club used to be a generous 2 lanes in each direction road.

Then, the bicycling fetish took root with our elected classes and the right lane of this road – generous, true, but not overly so – got narrowed by having a bicycle lane painted onto the right part of it.  Now, it is a road that has a generous left lane, a very narrow right lane and an in-your-face, unprotected bicycle lane.

The right lane might be able to accommodate ‘smart’ cars comfortably, but it is by far too narrow to accommodate 18-wheelers…

And that is why I blame the City of Ottawa for this particular death!

Just because you WANT something does not make it SO!  You know, like making a road physically wider and safe for bikes without actually, you know, widening the road.

Putting ideology over reality will have real-life consequences – and, in this case, deadly consequences…

Or, there is this story out of Saudi Arabia:  a man is sentenced to beheading for ‘crying at a cemetery’.  It happens to be the cemetery where Muhammad is supposedly buried and crying at his tomb, apparently, constitutes adolatry, which is a capital offense in Saudi Arabia.

And the braves of Hezbollah successfully identified and killed a filthy Jewish spy:   yes, yet another endangered-species bird.  Those guys as SOOO brave and clever!

Of course, we all ‘know’ that ‘human rights’ is a gay plot to destroy Islam…my headache is coming back…quick, somebody, pull my teeth out!

And if you have been suspecting that there is a reason why the mainstream media is not telling you the story, the whole story, about world news, you may be gratified to know that a respected journalist has blown the whistle on CNN and revealed that it takes money to not report some stories and to put a positive narrative onto others.

Since I was not really up to reading much, my hubby (I won the spouse lottery – he is the perfectest hubby ever!) has been entertaining me by showing me the original 1978 Battlestar Gallactica TV series.

I LOVE it!

Not only is it totally pro-free-speech and anti-oppression, it shows the fallacy of ‘peace in our lifetime’ of appeasing bullies… OK, I’m not too far into it (I kept falling asleep from the meds), but, it is so much better than the remake which was stripped of the principles that are core to defining the character’s actions…

Then, of course, there are all the videos I’ve watched (or, rather, listened to, over the last few days)…some of which are interesting, very interesting (and not all are political – some are just fun….it’s quite a mishmash!

Let me put some up: