side note: Did you wake up Canadian?

By PHRED DVORAK

Thanks to a new law, Canada will bestow citizenship Friday on what its government believes could be hundreds of thousands of unsuspecting foreigners, most of them Americans.

The April 17 amendment to Canada’s Citizenship Act automatically restores Canadian nationality to many people forced to renounce it when they became citizens of another country. It also grants citizenship to their children.

The Canadian government doesn’t know the precise number or location of individuals affected by the legislation. But it believes most are U.S. citizens, a spokeswoman for Canada’s immigration office said. U.S. Department of Homeland Security records show 240,000 Canadians were naturalized in the U.S. from 1948 to 1977; the new law fixes problems that occurred during those years.

To reach that amorphous group of beneficiaries, the Canadian government has turned to YouTube. It’s running an ad there titled “Waking up Canadian,” in which a man awakens on April 17 to a room festooned with red-and-white Canadian flags. He’s met by a welcoming committee consisting of two stuffed plush moose, a hockey player, and a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Eligible individuals automatically become Canadian citizens. But they don’t get proof of that citizenship unless they apply for it, meaning other countries — including those that allow people to be citizens of only one nation — won’t be alerted, according to the immigration office spokeswoman. Those people also may renounce their citizenship rights, she said.

The citizenship bonanza is the byproduct of a decadeslong struggle by a motley group of people who claim they were unfairly denied or lost their Canadian nationality. Canadian families who crossed the border in 1947 to 1977 to have their babies in a U.S. hospital found those children weren’t recognized as Canadians unless the families registered them with the government. Some foreign brides of Canadian World War II servicemen lost their citizenship if they stayed out of the country for a decade or more.
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side note: Thanks Denise! The NT crew went and saw Franti and Spearhead when they were in Chicago a week after the election. When they broke into this song…….we were all blown away! A moment that I’ll remember for a long time!

side note: this is the greatest thing I’ve ever seen.

side note: If you don’t follow pop culture, Batman’s Christian Bale was recently recorded blowing-up at a lighting designer on set. Someone did a mash-up with the infamous Bill O’Reilly explosion. Who do you think wins?

this is Grey Area, a tiny coffeeshop owned by an American. Definitely has some of the strongest and best varieties of marijuana. notice the “Obama Haze” in the top right! It reads: “A beautiful Hawaiian sativa cross-extreme cerebral effects-change!”

side note: when i first went to Amsterdam, i spent hours researching coffeeshops. how early did the open? how many different strains did they carry? what’s unique about this one, about that one? i have to admit, it was a lot of fun. and believe it or not, i still do this. what i like to check out now are photos of the menus that have been taken recently, since menus change often. i hope to post a few throughout the day. so for all of you you’ve been to the Dam, enjoy and for all of you who haven’t, now you have a reason to go!

this is from Carmona, which is one of my favorites. it’s also far from the center of the city.

side note: Another lie unearthed! This is why it’s so important to talk to everyone you know. Even if you are talking to a co-worker who agrees with you…..it doesn’t matter, odds are that someone close by will hear you and pay attention to your conversation. It can sometimes be difficult for people who don’t pay attention to speak up and ask questions b/c they don’t want to look uninformed…..keep talking, keep pushing the fact that McCain is a fuckin liar and has put around him lobbyists and ex-CEO’s who helped put this nation into its current predicament. He hired all bush people, even Karl Rove, to help run his campaign. He decided to choose that religious nut Palin, who did nothing good in Alaska…..she is a petty politician who used her power to deal with personal problems. She billed the government for time spent at her house…..the politicians in Alaska started wearing “Where’s Sarah” buttons b/c they were disappointed in palin’s bush-like secrecy and lack of responsiveness to dire issues. McCain pushed for all this deregulation that helped get us in the mess we’re currently in……there is enough out there to make even the strongest McCain backer feel like a fool….there’s no nice way to say it. McCain could end up being a worse President then dubya…..there’s not much time between now and the election. Individuals can make a difference…..reach out to everyone you know!

Huffington Post

Two reports tonight, one from the New York Times, and the other from Newsweek, contradict John McCain’s earlier statement that his campaign manager Rick Davis had no involvement with mortgage giant Freddie Mac, one of the companies at the heart of the current financial crisis, for the last several years. The Times reports:

One of the giant mortgage companies at the heart of the credit crisis paid $15,000 a month to a firm owned by Senator John McCain’s campaign manager from the end of 2005 through last month, according to two people with direct knowledge of the arrangement. The disclosure contradicts a statement Sunday night by Mr. McCain that the campaign manager, Rick Davis, had no involvement with the company for the last several years. Mr. Davis’s firm received the payments from the company, Freddie Mac, until it was taken over by the government this month along with Fannie Mae, the other big mortgage lender whose deteriorating finances helped precipitate the cascading problems on Wall Street, the people said…

…On Sunday, in an interview with CNBC and The New York Times, Mr. McCain responded to a question about Mr. Davis’s role in the advocacy group through 2005 by saying that his campaign manager “has had nothing to do with it since, and I’ll be glad to have his record examined by anybody who wants to look at it.”

Newsweek confirms the story:

Freddie Mac had previously paid an advocacy group run by Davis, called the Homeownership Alliance, $30,000 a month until the end 2005, when that group was dissolved. That relationship was the subject of a New York Times story Monday, which drew angry denunciations from the McCain campaign. McCain and his aides have vehemently objected to suggestions that Davis has ties to Freddie Mac-an especially sensitive issue given that the Republican presidential candidate has blamed “the lobbyists, politicians and bureaucrats” for the mortgage crisis that recently prompted the Bush administration to take over both Freddie Mac and its companion, Fannie Mae, and put it under federal conservatorship. (more…)

When quarterback Jeremy George entered the Piedmont (Calif.) High School football coaches’ office to talk to Kurt Bryan, he noticed an unusual formation on the dry-erase board.
At first, George thought the formation was meant for the punt team.

No, Bryan said, that’s our new offense.

George looked back to the board and was a little confused.

“Initially, the first thought I had was, ‘I’m pretty sure that’s illegal,’ ” George said. “I’ve got to admit I thought it was a little crazy. I think most of the players thought it was crazy. A lot of people were a little skeptical.”

And for good reason.

Bryan, Piedmont’s coach, and Steve Humphries, the director of football operations, had developed an offense in which all 11 players on the field potentially are eligible to catch the ball. Though they weren’t certain it was legal when they first concocted the idea, they were willing to implement it for the 2007 season.
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side note: good stuff

side note: i’ll take 3!
http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com

Photos from South Korea’s Ministry of Science and Technology show cloned cats
that have a gene for producing red fluorescence protein. The cats appear normal in
visible light, at left, but their skin glows red under ultraviolet light, at right.

South Korean scientists say they have cloned cats whose genes have been altered so that they glow in the dark – taking advantage of a technological twist that could someday be used to make more dramatic genetic changes in all sorts of creatures.

A research team at Gyeongsang National University, headed by Kong Il-Keun, produced several kitty clones in January and February, the government-managed Korea.net news service reported Wednesday. This week the scientists showed off the cats, which now weigh about 7 pounds (3 to 3.5 kilograms) and glow a dull red under ultraviolet light. (more…)

http://food.yahoo.com

Columnist Jeffrey Steingarten attached his obsessive, fertile food brain to the hamburger in this month’s Vogue magazine, and the results were mouthwateringly insane. Since Vogue doesn’t put Steingarten’s pieces online, I am going to share his findings.

Nearly Universal Truths
Some of these AHT readers know well (but I digress):

1. Chill Out: “Before grinding chunks of beef, before forming a hamburger, and before cooking a hamburger, make sure that the beef is ice cold. Otherwise, the fat may melt and separate from the lean.”

2. Grind or Else: Steingarten concludes you must either grind your own meat or have a trusted butcher grind it for you, for reasons of taste and safety (or, perish the thought, be sentenced to a life of consuming well-done burgers). “Never buy supermarket ground beef unless the butcher there grinds it specially for you.” He explains in painstaking detail all of the ways supermarket ground beef can be contaminated. His solution, if you have any questions about the chopped meat you’ve just bought: “Drop the meat into a pot of boiling water for a minute, fish it out, and pat it dry. Yes, it’ll turn gray, but only on the outside, and this will get ground into the rest of the meat and vanish.” (more…)

/>Side note: Thanks MM for sending my way. If you don’t know who to go as this Halloween, try going as this guy:
Sen. Larry Craig! You can check out the website here, and it gives you everything you need. All you need is a printer and paper bag and you’re good to go!

side note: Not news worthy….but even though there’s a few depressing parts, it’s still a good read with a few laughs. Well written!

By Peter Kurth
Salon.com
HIV-positive since the ’80s, I never expected to grow old — and I really didn’t expect to end up with a crooked penis.

Sep. 28, 2007 | In 1968, when I was 15, my best friend and I swore to each other that we would never grow old. We even pricked our fingers and exchanged blood in the pact. True to his promise, Jon died at the age of 41.

Yet here I am, still. I jumped about 5 feet in the air the first time I stepped out of the shower, reached for the towel, and — looking in the glass — saw my 83-year-old father’s body staring back at me: the same narrowed face, the same pigeon chest, the same skinny legs.

Aging is a bit more shocking to me than it might be to someone else, because I was never supposed to live this long. I’ve been HIV-positive since the AIDS epidemic “officially” began in 1981 — although those of us who were first hit by it know that it started some time before then. In 1980, already, I was worried about what I’d read in the New York newspapers about “the gay cancer,” which mystified everybody and seemed to have no origin or solution. I remember being alarmed because, in 1981, I burned my fingers on a cigarette, and the burn took forever to heal — weeks and weeks, it seemed. From that time on, I haven’t had a single day that wasn’t lived at some level of trepidation, and, for many years, in a state of acute anxiety and fear.

Suddenly, in 1996 — when my “clinical profile” was sinking swiftly to the grave — medications came along that could, if taken properly, as prescribed, save your life, or at least prolong it. For all the relief I felt to be “saved,” it was still a shock; after all, I had grown used to expecting an early death. Before the miracle of protease inhibitors and the “AIDS cocktail,” I was on my way out. Then, in a split second, I was “Lazarus” (literally — I was “Lazarus” columnist for Poz magazine). (more…)