Playing pool and living in a parlamentary constitutional democracy

Coalition

Wow what an exciting week in Canadian politics. People with Conservative leanings and little to no understanding of the Canadian constitution and parliamentary process are losing their freaking minds.

Prime Minister Harper whom I prefer to call Mr. Shrub because in my mind he's the mini-me to Mr. Bush, has decided that he wanted to put ideology and partisan politics in front of the economic survival of our country.

Instead of pledging a multiple billion $ injection into the economy like the majority of governments in the world are scrambling to do right now he's proposed less spending and budget cutbacks.

This is the Conservative Government that has for the last couple of years managed to quietly outspend the Liberals by leaps and bounds. Yes Mr. Shrub has promised "tax cuts", forgive me if I'm less than excited. When was the last time any of you has seen the difference on how far your paycheck goes because of tax cuts. I'm willing to bet never, this is because the cost of living has by far out striped any tax cuts the government has decided to give us.

Part of the budget cuts the Shrub government has proposed is eliminating the $1.98 per vote subsidy that political parties get in order to communicate their platform to voters so that people can make an educated choice at election time. Taking this away erodes the quality of democracy we have in Canada. This effects the opposition parties way more than the conservatives as they get a lot of their funding from corporations (legally and illegally).

Now Mr. Shrub has suspended Parliament until January 26, 2009. His efforts to evade democracy have made it impossible for the people of Canada see any real plans to mitigate the current economic crises put into place until at least the end of January. That will be little consolation to those losing their manufacturing jobs, those currently unemployed and unable to find a job and put meals on their table.

Ughh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Playing Pool

Ok, in the hopes of elevating the level of play of our matches I've instituted a every second Sunday practice. I had been asked by certain people on my team to help them with different aspects of the game so this is what I came up with.

Did it work? I don't know, but on Tuesday we did quite well and were able to take 5 of 6 round points available. Mind you this is the league where round points only count for where you're seated in the year end tournament. The bonus is we scored a pile of ball points as well which counts towards 1st place.

The above is the table we practiced on. Exciting eh?

Peace and pool we play tonight yay.

Greedy Bankers and the Middle East a two for one post

Greedy Bankers



The below is something I wrote a little while back. Since I didn't have a spot on this fancy blog site back then I thought I'd paste it here because with the "Financial Crisis" that's been put on us by well greedy bankers it thought that this was more than relevent.









Well, I've often been offended when some one says to me, "you work for the government you must make lots of money" or imply that they think since I work for the government I must make too much money. The truth(or so I thought) was that Government workes are underpaid when compared to what is available in the private sector.
I was dismayed today to find out that a government worker was bringing home an annual paycheck of $1.2 million. I'm fairly confident that even the Premier doesn't make a 1/4 of that(and so he shouldn't). What does this guy do to earn $1.2 million you ask. He's the CEO of the Albert Treasury Branch. Ok he runs a bank, but not any bank.
This bank is owned by the Alberta Government, therefore Albertains. I don't give a rats rear end how much money he is responsible, he shouldn't be making that kind of money. It's ironic that the person he reports to, Shirley McClellan probably only makes %20 of his salery.
I tend to think that the CEOs of Private banks make way to much money as well, but since I'm not paying thier wages through my taxes(just my bank fees) I can't say too much about it. Hey, wouldn't it be great if the Government stepped in to protect our money from the greedy banks? Isn't that what they're there for? Thier job is to represent and protect the people who are in thier constituency or something like that.



The Middle East

Should Israel get a free pass?

Should Mr. Harper shove his softwood deal up his ………?

Should they bring back the cartoon Batfink?


Most people in the western world are pretty apathetic about the situation in the Middle East. Which situation? Pick one. No matter which one you pick, Israel is involved in one way or another. Nobody likes a bully, but for some reason Israel gets a free pass when ever they act with aggression against one of their neighbors.

Self defense? To a small degree yes Israel can use this as justification for it’s attacks on Palestine and now Lebanon. But lets take a step back for a second and look at the Palestinian situation. When you mention something about this the usual reaction you get in North America is oh they’re always fighting, there’s nothing you can do about it.

So lets look at this perception about why it seems they’ve been fighting for ever. In 1947 the United Nations passed resolution UN Resolution (GA 181), owing to support of both the US and the Soviet Union, and in particular, the personal support of US President Harry S. Truman.
This effectively divided Palestine into an Arab State and a Jewish State (Israel). This of course was not well received by the Arab Palestinians and the neighboring Arab States.

The Arab League, at the lead by Haj Amin Al-Husseini, declared a war to rid Palestine of the Jews. The Arab countries each had separate agendas. Abdullah, king of Jordan, had an informal and secret agreement with Israel, negotiated with Golda Meir, to annex the portions of Palestine allocated to the Palestinian state in the West Bank, and prevent formation of a Palestinian state. Syria wanted to annex the northern part of Palestine, including Jewish and Arab areas.

In 1947 before Israeli independence was declared, Arab volunteers, let by Haj Amin El Husseini in the Jerusalem area, and by Fawzi El Kaukji in the Galilee, placed their fighters in Arab towns and attacked Jewish towns and villages. Kaukji and his arab volunteer armies were allowed into Palestine from Syria by the British, with the agreement that he would not engage in military actions, but he soon broke the agreement and attacked across the Galilee.

Are you bored yet? Wait it gets better (or worse)

In Jerusalem, Arab riots broke out on November 30 and December 1 1947. Palestinian irregulars cut off the supply of food, water and fuel to Jerusalem during a long siege. Fighting and violence broke out immediately throughout the country, including ambushes of transportation, the Jerusalem blockade, riots such as the Haifa refinery riots, and massacres that took place at Gush Etzion (by Palestinians) and in Deir Yassin (by Jews). Arab Palestinians began leaving their towns and villages to escape the fighting. Notably, most of the Arab population of Haifa left in March and April of 1948, despite pleas by both Jewish and British officials to stay.

On May 14, 1948, the Jews proclaimed the independent State of Israel, and the British withdrew from Palestine. In the following days and weeks, neighboring Arab nations invaded Palestine and Israel. The fighting was conducted in several brief periods, punctuated by cease fire agreements ( truces were declared June 11 to July 8, 1948 and July 19- October 15, 1948).

Sot that’s the beginning anyways. It’s way to long and convoluted to recount the entire history of the conflict. My coles notes version goes like this. After Israel was declared a nation, they fought back and forth for a number of years with the arab nations surrounding Israel. During that time there were numerous cease fires leading up to the 6 day war in 1967. At the end of that conflict Israel found it self in possession of territories belonging to Syria and Palestine. Large numbers of Palestinians were forced into refugee camps(where a lot of them still live). This explains the plight of the Palestinian people. They have lived under the control of Israel for 40 years now. They have very little in the way of modern weapons, where Israel has tanks, jets, a navy and nuclear weapons.

Can you imagine living your life in a refugee camp? I’m not in anyway condoning the terrorist tactics used by the Palestinian people, but perhaps you can understand the hopelessness that has driven them to this. In effect the world has forgotten them. Israel doesn’t want them as neighbors and regularly bombs and attacks them, but for some reason this isn’t called terrorism.

There needs to be some concessions on both sides. Israel needs to return all of the occupied territories and leave the governing of Palestine to Palestinians and the Hamas led Palestinian government needs to recognize Israel’s right to exist. They both need to stop shooting at each other.

Soooooooo…… Where am I going with this? Well, I’ve been pretty sneaky at hiding this so far. It’s time to expose my grand scheme. We all know how opposed I am to having Canadian Troops in Afghanistan. Our troops are traditionally peace keepers. Well there’s some peace that needs keeping in the Middle East. It’s time to put some maple leafs between the Palestinians and the Israelis.

So in conclusion, no Israel shouldn't get a free pass. They are acting like bullys, it's time for that to stop, it wasn't all that long ago that they were the persecuted, is this the lesson they learned from that?

It’s also time to bring back Batfink. Now that was a cool cartoon.



Peace

Success and Failure

Success



Tuesday night my team did extremely well, we won all the round points available. What does that mean? Depends on how you look at it. If you're going for first place it means Jack Squat. If you're not in the running for first place it means a little bit. If you come in Second or Third you get a little bit of cash.



The big thing about ranking is where you're seated in the year end tournament, the higher you place the weaker the team is you have to play(supposedly)



Failure


Thursday night, failure, the best any of my team did was 2 games out of 5. We earned 1 round point out of 6. What does that mean? Everything, this league ranking and 1st place is determined by round points.

We played the second place team, they had 2 "Open" AA players, vs our um 1 A player. I'm not happy with mediocrity however, I'm glad we did take 1 round point off of them. This just means when we play teams more our calibre we'll have to strive to utterly destroy them.

You'll see I've posted 2 pictures of pool players, these are my team mates, I have others and plan to photograph them in the future. I'm not going to give you thier names, but I will try and come up with some sort of flattering nick names for them as I'll be referrencing them in the future.

Hope the rest of your week goes well, perhaps I'll have some material tomorrow or Friday to entertain you all with.

The shark has spoken(or typed in this case)

Banks and Politicians

OK, I'm curious, no, scratch that I really don't want to know. It's like a scab you can't stop picking. The only thing sure in life is taxes right? Wrong, the 3rd sure thing in life is a bank is going to take your money giving back nothing in return.

If you're Canadian this comes in the guise of Canadian Banks lining up in Ottawa to dip into our tax dollars. As if they don't make enough off of us accessing our own money from machines. Machines first invented to put people out of work. Not anymore of course they've become such a part of our society that they've spawned whole trades for servicing the things. Off topic though.

Back to banks begging our tax dollars off the government. What's up with that? I mean just last year I seem to remember hearing on the news that ALL of our major national banks were bringing in multiple billion dollar profits.

I can't see why it's our obligation as tax payers to pay to bail out fat cats that have been living off the fat of the land and got their fingers burned investing depositors money in magical mortgage grab bags that unscrupulous American bankers gave out by the fistful to unqualified buyers.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong so far. Banks last year announce yearly profits in the billions and this year they claim to be in trouble of failing if they don't get a hand out from the very people they're supposed to serve (the working or otherwise money generating people and corporations) in the form of tax handouts.

I was right, I don't want to know, I already know about the 3 sure things in life.

Have a great weekend.

Q Club double death match

Well, there was no death involved. Last night my team played 2 matches and while I played up to and above standard, my team unfortunately did not. It seems a couple of my players have been going through a bit of a slump.

How does one help someone else get out of a slump? I haven't a clue, so I did the best thing I could think of. I kept my mouth shut.

One of the teams we played was the 1st place team. I'm happy to report I beat 4 out of 5 of them. I would class at least 2 of these players as Double A ranked. It's always nice to know you have a chance against these guys.

Anyways, that's all for now. I know not very exciting but what can I say? Not everything in the billiards world is remarkable. Till next time you can entertain yourselves by looking at this picture of people playing pool in somewhere in the world outside.

Free Jasmine

I just wanted to make a brief comment on the situation going on right now with the WPBA and Jasmin Ouschan. Jasmin chose to compete in the World 10ball Championship instead of the WPBA tour stop that occurred on the same date.

You have to admire her for stepping up and playing with the "boys", she certainly has the talent to compete at that level and made a good effort.

Her match against Thomas Engbert was televized by ESPNAsia to millions of people. She showed once and for all that women can compete at the same level as men. For this she's been suspended for 2 tournaments on the WPBA Tour.

Punishing Jasmine for playing in a event without the WPBAs permission seems to be a little over the top. After all, they aren't a pimp and she's not thier "girl". The WPBA should realize they are hurting themselves more with the suspension than they are her. Jasmine brings in the crowds, I'm sure some come just to see her play.

WPBA drop the suspension.

Peace,

The Slough Shark

Image found on Azbilliards.com

Walmart league

Last night I played in my Walmac Supervegas League aka walmart league as my girlfriend affectionately calls it. My team played a team called the Lethal Parts. The team consisted of 2 men and 3 women and as such I'm not sure which parts they considered lethal.

What ever parts they are, they did seem to work, this team is in first place and although they got off to a slow start allowing us to win the first round they showed us who was boss the remaining 4 rounds.

It was a good introduction to the league for our newest teammate whom I shall call Young Gun. Young Gun is in his early 20s and in my opinion has a promising future in pool. I like to pick up a player every once in a while that shows promise and could use some mentoring. Young Gun meets all the criteria. Unfortunately for him, he didn't play all that well last night. No big deal, I know he'll do better in the future, he just had a case of the nerves and possibly may have underestimated the skill of his opponents because they were female.

It's quite easy to make that mistake when you're young and foolish. Me, I've learned that lesson a long time ago and go out of my way to beat women players at any cost. (pssssst we won't mention my only loss last night was to one of the women.)

I actually had a bit of a rivalry last year with a women. A woman from the team that ended up on top last year came up too me half way through the season with a copy of the stats in her hand. I had played her a couple of time, and I think we had split our games up until that point. She proceeded to show me the player standings and point out to me that I was number 14 and she was number 13.

WOW..........

OK, it's not like she's a total stranger, but up to that point I probably couldn't remember her name. I did for the rest of the season. I also stepped up my game a few notches because of it and ended up in the top 10 at the end of the year. Yay me.....

BTW she wasn't in the top 10.

I also have a friendly rivalry with one of my team mates. This is good for the team most of the time as we try extra hard to do well. Looking at the player ranking last night I pointed out to him that he was Number 2......

He looked at the stats and said nope, I'm number 3, you're number 2. With the most innocent face I could muster I said "really, I can't see how I couldn't possibly make that kind of mistake".

Hopefully after last night he hasn't dropped too much in the standings.

So, anyways, that's it for Walmart league. Other than getting beat, it was an relatively uneventful evening, I played well but alas, as a team we couldn't pull it off.

Better luck next time.

Perhaps I'll report back on Friday with the results of our double match agains the team we played last week and Trouble. Yuck!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The Beginning

Hi, welcome to my inaugural post. The primary purpose of this blog is to records random observations I have while making my way through life primarily as a pool player. I will from time to time make comments about current events and other things that have captured my interest. It's my blog, I'll write what ever I want OK?

Note to self: perhaps it's time to start carrying around my little digital camera to help with my observations.

While I don't often admit it, I run a pool league. Well, I'm the president, I didn't ask for the title, it was just hung around my neck. We have a few other directors that assist in the operation of the league. There's nothing like running this sort of organization to find out what people are really like. Enough... on to this weeks observations....(oh yeah, I'm going to try posting on twice a week / weekly basis)

In case you haven't figured it out yet, I play pool. Ask one of my friends what I do in my spare time and I have confidence each and everyone of them will say "Oh, the Slough Shark, he plays pool".

Last night I was at the pool hall with my team playing a match, we have an odd number of teams in our division so instead of teams getting a bye and having to sit out one week we've arranged the schedule so that one team in the division will play two teams in a night. The rest of the teams will only have to play one team. It turned out that last night we played the team that had to play two matches last night, this is the first time this season that this has occurred so it was a bit of a gong show. In the end everybody played everybody they were supposed too and it all worked out. I found it amusing that some players on the other team that was playing the team we were playing were in quite a hurry to get things started as they figured this would be a long night. This was not to be the case, we had arranged for 4 tables to be used for this double match and things went along quite smoothly.

Anyways, I played and won my first game, then went and sat down with my buddies to eat a very fine buffalo chicken wrap prepared for me by the chef at the Cue Club. Things are moving along quite quickly and everybody seemed to be in a good mood until I heard my buddy whom I'm going to call from now on The Official Score Keeper state " you guys better pick it up, we're getting smoked". The Official Score keeper is thus named as he is very enthusiastic when it comes to keeping score. So enthusiastic he won't let the team captain or myself anywhere near the score sheet so as we won't F_ck it up.

This came as quite a surprise to me as I had won my game and had assumed everybody else on my team was doing all right. I decided that this was a good time to get up and take a look at the score sheet. I discovered much to my dismay that I was the only one that had won my game in the first round. YUCK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I knew that we were going to have to play our best tonight in order to gain some round points. The team with the most round points at the end of the season is the winner.

I said to anybody that was in the immediate vicinity "Hey, don't worry about this round, we can always win the rest of them". Ha ha, that's a good one. It was after discovering our dismal score that I took a good look at the team we were playing. We've played this team before and it's always been challenging, but I'd say we've been pretty evenly matched in the past. Not anymore!!! They had picked up a couple of new players and one of their younger players has improved quite dramatically. Of the new players they had picked up I recognized one, while not being the best in the city, he certainly could be numbered in the top 5%. I took a few minutes after that to watch the other new member of their team.

I've never been the type of person to judge a person by his cue, any D player can go out and drop a couple of grand on a new cue, that won't make them a better player. The first thing I noticed about this player though was that he did indeed carry a high end cue. The problem was, he also knew how to use it and was using it effectively against my team mates.

OK, a little background. At the start of this season we (the directors) had decided that there was a Grande Canyon sized gulf between the level of players in our league. Because of this we had decided that we would run 2 divisions, one labelled the Rec Division, and the other labelled the Open division. My team plays in the open division. Technically we have one "open" player whom I'll call The Tiger on our roster, but because of personality issues I extremely doubt he'll be playing for our team again. I'm not sure why, but The Tiger had expected my team to pick up his registration and weekly dues. Ok, the first week he played we knew he was a bit short on cash so we as a team figured we'd put the money up. The problem started when The Tiger scored an ERO (an 8 ball run out, meaning he broke and ran all 8 balls). My team has a policy that when a player gets an ERO the remaining team members all pay him two dollars. This is just our way of saying good job!!!

So, The Tiger gets an ERO and therefore receives $8 (which just happens to be the amount of our weekly dues). Our captain asks him for the dues. The Tiger then states he doesn't have it. WTF!!!!! Thus The Tiger is person nongrata.

Back to yesterday. The captain of the other team comes over and talks with me. Him and I have known each other for a long time and are friendly towards each other. He states that his new player whom I'll call The Mini Tiger wants his team to pick up his dues and membership fees. I ask him why The Mini Tiger would be so brazen. He states that The Mini Tiger was talking to The Tiger and The Tiger told him that his team was paying his way.

Wow!!!!! This left me speechless. I told my friend that this was not the case and that The Tiger would no longer be playing with us as he didn't share the same idea of what a team was the rest of us had.

Anyways, the night progressed, we got our asses handed too us by our new and improved opponents but we ate some good food and had a good time.

That my friends is what it's all about.

I suppose you can expect my next post on Wednesday unless something happens between now and then. Cheers and good health.

The Slough Shark