As promised last week, here's a pic of the cast I got last Friday to replace the one I've had since I broke my leg a month ago.
When the cast technician asked what colour I wanted, I said “Red or green would be festive” and he goes, “You know, I could probably do both…” (How can you tell that cast techs probably don't get to stretch their creative muscles very often? )
Plus the white part is glow-in-the-dark so if this liberry thing doesn't work out, I can hire myself out as a nighttime Christmas decoration!
“The idea for the contest started with a series of questions, foremost
among them: How hard is it to vanish in the digital age? Long
fascinated by stories of faked deaths, sudden disappearances, and
cat-and-mouse games between investigators and fugitives, I signed on to
write a story for Wired about people who’ve tried to end
one life and start another. People fret about privacy, but what are the
consequences of giving it all up, I wondered. What can investigators
glean from all the digital fingerprints we leave behind? You can be
anybody you want online, sure, but can you reinvent yourself in real
life?”
As part of the contest, he allows his editor to dole out the same type of hints that a
private investigator would likely be able to uncover – recent credit
card purchases, online handles, etc.
The contest generates a great deal of interest from people across the web: “When I flipped open my laptop and saw my private information spilling
onto the Web, however, I got my first taste of a soon-to-be-permanent
state of fitful anxiety. I’d signed up for it, of course. But actually
living the new, paranoid reality felt different. Absurd ideas suddenly
seemed plausible. They’d contacted my cat sitter; would they kidnap my
cat?”
In the end, he makes it almost to the end of the month but not quite:
“And what of our original questions? Had I shown that a person, given
enough resources and discipline, could vanish from one life and
reinvent himself in another? I thought I had, though only up to a
point. Obviously the smarts and dedication of the hunters had
overwhelmed my planning and endurance. Along the way they’d also proven
my privacy to be a modern fiction. It turns out that people — ordinary
people — really can gather an incredible dossier of facts about you.
But a month later, life was back to normal and no one was taking any
interest.”
The story's a long read but worth it if you're interested in the idea of digital footprints, privacy and the ubiquity of technology in today's world.
Now, whether your political colour is orange or green, blue or red, purple
or pink, if you put aside the partisanship from either side of the political spectrum for a sec and just look
at those numbers in isolation, it has to be pretty obvious that
something is massively wrong for a projection to be out by that much. (To put it in real-life terms, it'd be like a buddy promising he'll pay you ten bucks as soon as he gets paid then saying he didn't get as much as he thought but hey, here's fifty cents.)
So anyhow, after some jiggery-pokery to raid the province's rainy day fund, use proceeds from the sale of government assets and cancel some spending (including money for new long-term care facilities – ouch!), the Sask Party government has created a billion dollar deficit only a couple years after taking power and having been left with one of the largest surpluses in the province's history by the outgoing NDP government.
For me, this is pretty sad but not unexpected. Does anybody else see the irony in the fact that “conservative” governments tend to be anything but?
“The lesson we've learned from this experience is we have to be more
cautious and more prudent than we've been in the past,” [Finance Minister Rod] Gantefoer said.
I thought about posting a picture I snapped of what my foot looked like underneath the cast but it's kinda gross – still some bruising and a really ugly blister on my heel. Anyhow, I'm now into a walking cast for the next 2-4 weeks and then hopefully I'm walking like a normal person again. Next week, a photo of my new walking cast – I think you'll be impressed with my design choice!
