Well I just finished playing a game of Prime Minister Forever. Aside from having a ridiculously misleading title, the game is also ridiculously boring. I suppose it’s an interesting idea though. You take on the role of a party leader, can change their party platforms (but the papers will call you a flip-flopper if you do), make policy speeches, make ad campaigns (which also tend to backfire), travel to different parts of the country (which I did at random), spin different news stories, and other stuff.

The problem is that there’s far too many numbers and charts and not enough animations of Layton throwing a lemon meringue pie at Harper. And you can’t really do anything fun, like you could in Sim City. I thought maybe I would declare war on Turkey just for fun. And declare inuktitut our new official second language. But none of that is possible.

Also, it turns out that I really sucked. I played as Jack Layton in the NDP, and only managed to get 9 seats. If I ever play again, maybe I’ll play as Jim Harris and focus all my hundreds of dollars on a single riding. The seats in general were predicted as follows:

Liberal: 140
Conservative: 88
Bloc Quebecois: 70
NDP: 9

Yes, that’s definitely a Liberal minority. Big surprise. The one thing that the game simulated surprisingly well was that once the election was over, I certainly didn’t want to play again.

Quotes of the day (by Meghan):

“I’m sure the Bible is a great book, but Christianity has ruined it for me”

and, on somebody’s Christmas lights: “Ooo it’s pretty! Except he’s voting Conservative, so it’s less pretty.”

Shainaz had a good one last Sunday but, alas, it is forgotten.

So as of yesterday I escaped the horrific snow banks of downtown Montreal and rode the train 20 odd hours to get to my own little Saint John, and their horrific damp brown lawns. Turns out I really liked the snow. Anyway, the whole trip I kept thinking about things that I thought I could write about, which is good for flexing the writing muscle and all, but my laptop’s battery now calls it quits after just 53 minutes. So there wasn’t much I could do. Maybe I should add a blackberry to my list of various electronics I want for no valid reason…

Speaking of excessive blogging, though, I’ve been noticing that the election coverage on TV mentions blogs an entirely unhealthy amount. And every time they do, I think “I wonder how much my writing has to improve before they mention my blog.” Well, CBC has a blog about blogs, and it was there that I read about the NDP TV ads mentioned in my last post. The exciting part is that in that very same post, they quote me! The part where I say Stephen Harper gives me the willies, no less.

Maybe that explains the mysterious spike of traffic December 8th, when I got ten times more page loads than usual. Come to think of it, that was the same day I posted hundreds of new photos in my galleries, so that could have been it too… either way it seems not enough people read CBC’s blog on blogs to boost my site up to 100,000 hits a day. Oh well.

Well, the NDP are now in the lead for best campaign yet. The Liberals had been doing awesome in that category, as their blog was always good for some laughs and their TV ads beat out the Conservatives by a long shot, but the NDP’s “Give’em the Boot” Bingo was fantastic. Too bad I didn’t know it was there until today… I’ll have it handy for January’s round!

OH! I just found the NDP television ads… I love this one! Oh that was a good laugh.

Well, in the Washington Times there’s a commentary talking about how great it would be if Stephen Harper becomes Prime Minister: Gift from Canada? by Patrick Basham. My favourite part was:

If Martin’s Liberal Party is re-elected for the fourth consecutive time, Canadian taxpayers will continue footing the bill for an expensive welfare state epitomized by its archaic government-run health-care system. Social policy experimentation on issues such as drugs and homosexual rights will continue in an incremental but decidedly progressive direction.

Damn the evil Liberals with their archaic health care and their homosexual rights. Oh please, Mr. Harper, “put a smile on President George W. Bush’s face”, and save us from socially progressive policies. Save us from all this gay sex in the streets and lack of firearms with which we could take care of it.

It puts in mind, in a kind of roundabout way, a joke from a few years ago (thought I can’t remember who said it… I’m guessing either Jon Stewart or Rick Mercer) - Why doesn’t the US take over Canada as the 51st state? Because they couldn’t handle 30 million more democrats.

Here’s just a taste of all the fun that can be had now in the galleries section of the site. In a major procrastination effort, I just uploaded about 600 new photos. This is probably my favourite of the whole lot. Thanks, Becky!

Yesterday I went to see a speech by Jack Layton. I had to walk quite a way to get there, but I knew at least that I was headed in the right direction since the frequency of his campaign posters stuck onto the streetlights kept getting higher and higher as I neared. The thing I hadn’t taken into account was that I’m in Quebec, so most of the speech was in French. I laughed and nodded and clapped along with everybody else though. He was wearing an orange tie (it always disappoints me when the party leaders wear a colour of tie other than their official colour) and his entrance music was an upbeat celtic jig of some fashion. “He’s giving props to the east coast,” I thought, and wanted to vote for him more because of it.

Somebody held the door open for me today when I walked into the Leacock Building, so I said “thanks”. She said “you’re welcome” back, and that made me happy.

Favourite quote of the campaign so far:

Reporter: Is it a Christmas wreath or a holiday wreath?
Paul Martin: It’s a 240 dollar wreath.

Does anybody want to come see Jack Layton with me on Tuesday evening?

PS. Here’s a tip for all of you winter warm drink lovers who are just a little sick of their orange pekoe… I’ve just discovered warm maple milk. Well really it’s just a modification of my long lover maple milkshake, but it’s still new and I love it.

Well, it looks like the Liberals have the best campaign website. The blackberry blog is refreshingly casual, although without any real meat, their TV commericals have good background music (very important in my book), and there’s a lot of other multimedia as well.

Meanwhile the Conservatives‘ site looks like an overgrown high school Broad Base Tech project. Especially the TV ads. I mean, Stephen Harper looks awkward enough to begin with, why do you have to try to make him act? On talk-tv spoof? It gives me the willies.

Now I hate to say this, but the NDP site sucks. I suppose it’s ok (it looks better than the Conservatives’ anyway) but the two biggest links are for finding your candidate and then campaign wallpaper. Is that really a priority for Canadians? I appreciate that they did choose my hometown Saint John as the subject of their New Brunswick desktop, even if they did choose a really weird angle for it. Sure, they got the old barber shop (or was it a general store?) and loyalist circle thing, but the camera is pointing directly away from the main skyline. That’s like taking a picture of the south shore (instead of from the south shore) and saying that’s what Montreal looks like. And then I love how the PEI one features the only road to get off the island. But I suppose everybody does that. Poor islanders.

I’d like to be able to say that all my assignments are in and my paper done and everything is all wrapped up nicely for the end of the semester, but they aren’t, so I can’t. Apparently my prof for E&M gave us an extension for our term paper, which of course I have to take advantage of. But that just reminded me that I still have a computer programming assignment also due on Monday. That brings us well into the exam season, so I can’t even take a day or two off like I normally would like to. Well who am I kidding. I’m doing that anyway. I actually did work this morning, when I thought my paper was due at 5:00, but since I got word of the extension I’ve done nothing productive. Unless you think, as I do, that listening to a Harry Potter audiobook is productive.

It’s weird still having assignments to do after classes have ended though… I think the greatest “oh-my-god-the-semester-is-already-over” moment this year actually came from my comp prof. With ten minutes left to go in Tuesday’s lecture, he made some passing comment like “and we’ll look at this in more detail next class” at which a few people yelled out “today’s the last lecture!”. He just kind of stopped. Looked at us. Blinked a little. “Today’s the last lecture?” he asked. We confirmed. He blinked a few more times. “I thought there was another week…”

The election is pretty fun so far. Stephen Harper wants to buy votes with the GST and will try to take away same-sex marriage. Meanwhile Giles Duceppe is making no secret his intention to tear apart the country… if fact he’s making campaign promises about it. Mostly right now I’m excited about two things in this race:

(1) As I’m from Saint John (ish) but studying in Montreal, I get to pick which riding to vote in. It’s not much of a choice, though, seeing as how Westmount-Ville-Marie is solid Liberal territory, whereas Saint John (home to the famously homophobic ex-MP Elsie “If they are going to live together, they can go live together and shut up about it” Wayne) can go either way.

(2) I want to find out who’s writing campaign confidential. I’m afraid it’s going to be a big disappointment (some intern or something), but it might also been the Queen… so we’ll see.

I’m glad at least that now, it officially being December, I can start playing The Muppet Christmas Carol and A Christmas Together with John Denver and The Muppets all day long. Time for a singalong!

? Christmas is coming the goose is getting fat
Please to put a penny in the old man’s hat
If you haven’t got a penny a haypenny will do
If you haven’t got a haypenny then God bless you ?

PS. I love Ms Piggy.

I like how Layton looks like some kid trying to be nice in church, Duceppe looks like he’s thinking “don’t fucking mess with me”, Harper looks like a proper little 7 year old girl, and Paul Martin has been distracted by something shiny.

In the midst of all my diligent hard working (obviously), I came across this pic in an article about image makeovers for the four leaders on CBC.ca.

I like the comment about Layton’s moustache too; “Does it scream firefighter macho, or Village People disco? Only the voters can decide.”