Of ice and men.

(Ooh, clever title, Cheryl! Yes, yes, very clever. Get on with the post.)

I think I have mentioned before that I am somewhat obsessed with the doomed Franklin Expedition and have been ever since photos of the frozen corpse of one of the sailors from that expedition were published in the mid-1980s.

Last time I was in the Wax Museum I took a photo of John Torrington (the aforementioned sailor) and it is one of my most-viewed photos thanks to Google and Yahoo searches:

At least I know I am not the only curious one out there. Late last summer the Canadian Government, through Parks Canada, launched a search for the sunken ships (as part of our claim to the Arctic lands). There's also a piece on PBS's Nova this week discussing the provisions carried for the men on the two ships and how those provisions doomed the expedition.

If you want to read more, there are good articles (student essays, really) on the Victorian Web and Mysteries of Canada websites or you could try to track down a copy of Frozen in Time: The Fate of the Franklin Expedition.

whoop-de-doo.

Well, that was as lack-lustre as elections get, frankly. The Conservatives dissolved parliament as a minority government and still come out of it a minority, albeit with a handful of extra seats. (I love the "Bigger minority" headline on the Times-Colonist today.)

The only good thing is that Dion will hopefully realize no one wanted to vote for him and he will hand the reigns of the Liberal party over to someone more ... appealing.

Locally, our three incumbents kept their seats -- Savoie handily won her Victoria seat, Lunn's win was less decisive (and there are more than a few questions about how things played out in Saanich and the Gulf Islands), and Martin's results were down to the wire (I expect a full recount for Esquimalt-Juan de Fuca).

For comparison to the 2006 election; Conservatives moved from 124 to 143 seats; Liberals from 103 to 77; the Bloc from 51 to 49; NDP from 29 to 37 and "other" from 1 to 2 but the one lone Green Party member (who was not elected as Green but crossed to the Green party shortly after being elected) was not re-elected. That's going to make life pretty hard for the Greens in the next election. [Interestingly, Wikipedia lists a slight variation for the 2008 results with one fewer Liberal and one more Bloc member.]

We have to wait a few more weeks to watch the U.S. election outcome and then we limp into the late fall Municipal elections. The City of Victoria is overrun with candidates with 8 people vying for the Mayor's seat and 35 fighting for the 8 council seats. Included in that batch are a bunch of people whom one member of Vibrant Victoria said he wouldn't "hire to serve coffee" -- the kind of candidates who give "fringe" candidates a bad name.

After November I think I will be all electioned-out.

If you are in Canada....

You'd best be casting your ballot today! Polls are open 7 am to 7 pm.

(I have to wait until after work, but I will definitely be putting an X next to someone's name.. and yes, it will be the Not Boomer candidate in my riding.)

Yarrrrr!

Apparently, Canada is a hotbed of film piracy! According to The Star,

An enforcement expert at the Canadian Motion Picture Distributors Association (CMPDA) estimated that as much as 40 per cent of pirated DVDs originate from Canada, and the bulk of those were made in Montreal.

Who knew?