The Map

Sometime in the very near future you may notice that most of the red dots on the map (on the right hand side of this page) have disappeared. That's because ClustrMaps (the service that provides the map) archives and resets the map every year, to prevent it from become a big red splotch. If you want to see a map that covers the last year or so, click on the map, then click on "Maps Archive."

Better than Hasselhoff?

(By the way, I put a couple of links to David Hasselhoff videos in this previous post.)

Update (May 16, 2012): It appears that this copy of The Urkel Dance has been removed from YouTube. You'll have to find a different copy yourself.

Reminiscing about politicians

The years 1993 to 2003 were special years for Canada and especially for Alberta. No, I'm not saying this because of economic growth or paying down the government's debts. One reason I miss those years is this: we had hilarious political leaders at both the federal and provincial levels. I've seen Jean Chrétien (Prime Minister of Canada from 1993 to 2003) and Ralph Klein (Premier of Alberta from 1992 to 2006) on TV in the last two days, and it's had me reminiscing.

Chrétien was known for trying to strangle a protester, defending himself against an intruder with an Inuit carving, and most of all, for bungling the English language. Hardly a week went by without a gem in the news. Like the time someone asked him about the increased drug traffic across the border and he said, "It's more trade." (He thought they'd asked him about increased truck traffic.) Or the time some protesters got pepper-sprayed and he said, "For me, pepper, I put it on my plate."

Ralph Klein was known for his drinking (which he cut back on after the infamous homeless shelter incident that most Albertans probably remember) and for speaking without thinking. He accused eastern creeps and bums of driving up the crime rate in Calgary. He said dinosaur farts caused the ice age that killed the dinosaurs.

Stephen Harper and Ed Stelmach just aren't that funny.

(In case you're wondering, Jean Chrétien was on TV having lunch with Rick Mercer, and Ralph Klein was on TV giving horse racing advice to Lynda Steele, a local news anchor. If you want to see the Jean Chrétien clip, click here, navigate to Season 5, Episode 7, and click on "Mercer: At Harvey's with Chrétien.")

"I'm telling you, it feels good to get up without a hangover."
--Something Ralph Klein learned in his third term as premier

A Recent Weekend

The weekend before last I had a guest in town, so we visited a few places like the rodeo:
Elk Island Park:

and we took a quick detour to Toronto while we were at it:

Eskimos

Last year I attended one regular season football game. It happened to be the game where the Edmonton Eskimos got mathematically eliminated from a playoff spot for the first time in more than thirty years. For the first time in my life, just one year after winning the Grey Cup, they missed the playoffs. Coach Danny Maciocia wasn't a very popular person around Edmonton, despite winning a Grey Cup in his rookie year. (Some people claimed he just inherited a great team and got lucky.) Although I'm no expert on when coaches should be fired, I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and hope that hiring an offensive coordinator would help.

A year later, the Eskimos have missed the playoffs again and Danny Maciocia is keeping his job. After two years in a row of doing what no Eskimos team has done since the 1970s, I thought it was time to let him go. Like many things I say on this blog, this isn't a strong opinion. But they need to do something different.

Baptisms

I go to a church that doesn't baptize babies. We baptize people after they personally make a decision to follow Jesus. Last Sunday eight people were baptized. Seven of them are in our youth group and the other one is a youth leader (who was in the youth group until recently). Being a youth leader myself, I've had the privilege of getting to know all of these people better over the last few years. It was really special to hear each of them talk about why they're getting baptized, each in their own unique way. I think I learned something new about each of them too.

Amid my doubts about God and my questions about what God really expects of us, here's one thing I'm pretty sure of: if the God that the Bible tells us about is real, there is nothing better than living a life devoted to him. Congratulations to everyone who was baptized. I think you've made a great decision.