Ben Co. is dead. Long live Ben Co.

That’s right, folks. After an extremely extended break I have finally found my muse. All thanks to a jerk in a PT Cruiser (more on that in a while).

In any case, for anyone still out there, Ben Co. will be going through a metamorphoses. We’ll be cocooning for a little bit while we update the site and develop some new material, but will emerge as a glorious, focused, slightly (very slightly) more mature site: Third Rail Repository.

So, dust off that RSS feed and get ready for some new tasty bits from your favourite contributors.

Public Service Announcement #4

To the young woman crossing Broadway Ave. just east of Yonge St.:

Please note that if I ever come across you using the letters “O – M – G” in a sentence in the place of “oh my god” or even “oh my gawd” I will be forced to report you to the province, which will then perform a court ordered hysterectomy on you in order to ensure that your obviously flawed DNA will not be passed on to future generations.

To all others who might consider using texting shorthand in your speech, this serves as a general warning.  These abbreviations shouldn’t have a place in text, let alone speech.  If I catch you saying “L – O – L” instead of actually, well, laughing, the same sterilization awaits you.

End PSA.

Michigan Playing Ping-Pong with Public Health

It’s been roughy a decade since the effort to ban smoking in Michigan’s places of business has begun. Now, it seems that the state’s Senators and Representatives have finally been given the cash vision to see that banning smoking will not harm businesses and could actually be good for the economy in both he short and long term. In fact, both branches of government have already passed bills to ban smoking and Governor Granholm seems poised to sign a smoking ban into effect.

So…….what’s the hold up?

Apparently, the Senate and the House can’t seem to agree on some of the finer details of the bill. While the Senate passed a straight ban across the board, the House feels that a gentler, semi-ban would be more appropriate. Their version includes exempions for casinos, tobacco shops, casinos, cigar bars, casinos, bingo halls, casinos, horse tracks, and casinos. It’s fairly obvious that the states bingo halls have gained enough wealth and influence to lobby the House into stalemating this bill for as long as possible.

And so the match continues. The Senate passes one version and sends it over to the House. The House changes it, passes it and sends it back to the Senate. In the meantime, Michigan is at risk of losing her chance to show her progressive nature by becoming only the 35th state to pass a full/partial ban on smoking.

Thanks a lot checks and balances.

Goodbye, Gardiner?

On Friday the Toronto Star led with a report that Mayor David Miller has finally gotten behind a plan to start tearing down the god awful Gardiner expressway along the Toronto waterfront. While the proposed plan doesn’t remove the entire expressway, it is a promising start.

The proposed plan (which is light on details) suggests tearing down the 2.5 kms of the Gardiner, from the Don Valley Parkway to Jarvis street. The stretch is highlighted below (click for larger image).

Americans Driving At Historic Lows

The U.S. Department of Transportation is reportingthat Americans are continuing their downward trend in driving, with estimated vehicle miles traveled on all U.S. roads in March 2008 falling 4.3 percent compared to March 2007.

Hand in hand with these posts (here and here), there was a nice op ed piece I wanted to share from the NY Times.

Basically, the author, Thomas Friedman, says that whomever becomes president (he seems to be leaning towards Obama) needs to have enough will to actually tell the American people what they apparently don’t want to hear: High gas prices are not going away and the country needs to change its habits.

A couple of points really jumped out at me.  Most of us have probably seen the Dodge ads where they are offering cheap gas for 3 years – Friedman compares this to tobacco companies offering cheap smokes to kids.  Essentially Dodge is acting as a drug dealer, pushing big old SUVs down the throats of addicts.

I’ll leave you with this bit from the article:

I can’t say it better than my friend Tim Shriver, the chairman of Special Olympics, did in a Memorial Day essay in The Washington Post: “So Dodge wants to sell you a car you don’t really want to buy, that is not fuel-efficient, will further damage our environment, and will further subsidize oil states, some of which are on the other side of the wars we’re currently fighting. … The planet be damned, the troops be forgotten, the economy be ignored: buy a Dodge.”

He’s right, too…Obama did have the guts to point out that the McCain/Clinton gas tax holiday proposal was worthless pandering.  Let’s just hope he has the guts to do a big time intervention to get us off our car addictions, as well.

Thanks to Jimsey for the tip on this one.

Cross-Canada Shenanigans – Kenora to Rossport

Right, so we wake up in Kenora, after blowing off Manitoba, to this view from our hotel window:

Alas, we must move on, so after loading up on Starbucks we head east. Destination: Rossport, ON.

I’ve been around the north shore of Lake Superior a few times now, but there are two things I am constantly struck by:

1) The sheer number of small motels. I mean, can these places really survive? How much money can these places really make? And is space at such a premium that desperate families will stay at some of these dumps?

2) People traveling around here must go nuts for amethyst. I mean, there are amethyst shops, amethyst mines, amethyst themed hotels…everywhere! Is amethyst even a rare mineral?

Cross-Canada Shenanigans – YEG to YYZ

As some of you know, Ben Co. HQ is relocating to Toronto, ON. Now, I’ve written all sorts of fun things about Edmonton, AB over the past year and a half that we’ve been there, but it is time to move on to bigger and better things.

What does this mean?  Why, another cross-country road trip.  Yep, nothing but me, my wife, our cat, and kilometer upon kilometer of prairie.  So, to share my pain fun, we’re gonna be blogging all across Canada.  Keep your eye out, as we’ll update when wireless access permits!

See you in 3,419 kilometers!

Flickr vs. Picasa

In an earlier post I had mentioned that I was switching my photos over to Flickr versus Picasa. There were quite a few things I enjoyed about Picasa. I think the biggest benefit was having so many different of my online tools running through my Google Account, (gmail, documents, calendar, etc.), that it made a lot of sense to use Picasa. Most of my other friends have a google account, so sharing and commenting on photos was easy enough.

Now, a decent deal of my photos are hosted on UrbanOhio’s servers, then hotlinked elsewhere. Picasa was good for non-UO photos and quick uploads without having to meander through FTP world. So for the random image, or the random post, I’d throw the image up on Picasa, then hot-link it here. However, during my last post, I was seeing a lot of loss with image quality. When I upload photos, I generally upload at a high resolution, generally around 3000×2300 because that how my camera shoots (and unless storage size is an issue, I’m not going to bother with resizing). Picasa and Flickr both take it upon themselves to resize the image, while keeping the original in tact. Unfortunately, Picasa does a piss poor job of this. I don’t know if its some weird algorithm or whatever, but its clearly a case of everything Google touches does not turn to gold. Below are two exhibits.