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There is not a computer in existence that is powerful enough to translate "stupid politician" into "English" or "French", or even any other human language. I simply cannot be done.

We can't go that way, but how about an English to Chretien translator instead? :-)

Coming where it comes from...

Marc Garneau's former wife was found dead, along with her lover in a car whose windows was cracked open and a hose was run from the exhaust to the window...

And another can-adian ass-tronaut, a medical doctor, failed to take care of her wife during her pregnancy. So she skipped important tests, and the offspring is retarded. Nothing unusual here, except that the fucking asshole, upon hearing the bad news, squarely put the blame on her and cancelled the shower party.

Even worse, when the family was posted to Houston so the ass-tronaut could do his training, the canadian space agency refused to pay for the special care the baby needed. Needless to say, their salaries were insufficient to pay for this, so the ass-tronauts had to go on strike until the agency funded the special care for the baby.

And, lastly, the second canadian woman in space, Julie Payette, caused an american astronaut's wife strike: since the hot bitch screwed her way to the top, there was no way the chaste american astronaut's wifes would trust their beloved husbands along with that slut, so they went on strike, too, and NASA then said that the hot bitch wouldn't go in orbit.

But, politics being politics, since she is french and a woman, she had to go and the canadian ambassator to the US (the brother of canadian prime sinister Jean Chrétien) personally asked Billy Boy (this was before Dubya?) to override NASA's concern for the chastity of their crews.

So, the hot bitch finally went up...

Ain't canadian space politics fun???? (but the baby's doin' fine, though).

Get involved in the discussion on this issue on buzz.ca!

(A Canadian Slash site)

Canucks would do well to check out buzz.ca, which is also based on slashcode. Well, at least it is place for all of those Canadian interest stories that were rejected by other sites. Buzz.ca is a tad more balanced than Naomi Klein's slash-based nologo.org, which is so left-leaning that it's about to fall over, bless her heart.

Kuro5hin.org, another fine community site, has a completely different tone. Ditto for smokedot.org, metamuscle.org, and countless other sites based on the same model.

The fact that Plastic has survived out of the group of three reinforces the strength of the slash-like model.

With the price of publication at near zero dollars, is it any wonder why conventional sites aren't working? The dot-bomb era has reduced commercial interest in web sites that rely on intellectual property for revenue. The pendulum has swung the other way, back towards a volunteer-run website model. The truth of the matter is that intellectual property is essentially free to distribute, but very expensive to produce.

One problem remains: What are Plastic, Slashdot and others going to link to once quality content producers such as Feed, Suck, and Salon dry up and become scarce?

[additional shameless self-promotion follows in .sig]

FYI -- slash sites abound thanks to Slashcode. Some of the more interesting include ...

Buzz.CA, EarthDot , and GoSports (mine). A full list exists here.

What about a slash newspaper. All news, all dot ... maybe a tech, international news, sports, lifestyle, and money sections to start. I guess if you customize enough you can get there with slash itself by picking up headlines off of others.

I am reading this discussion with a great deal of interest, because I'm in the process of starting up a Canadian news/discussion site at Buzz.CA, based on the Slashcode software.

I've done a lot of thinking about how to present the stories, and the result is that we're more likely to present our own views instead of pointing to existing stories from The Globe or The National Post. There will be times when we'll link to them, of course. However, content will be more along the lines of the entertainment weekly rags found in the big cities, such as Eye and Now in Toronto. Those papers tend to uncover interesting stories that the mainstream press doesn't cover. Also, there won't be any banner ads! (at least, not as long as I can afford to continue funding it from my own pocket).

Still, there will only be at most five or six stories posted a day. I want to unearth the controversial topics and let the site visitors add in their own tidbits.

A number of those helping to run the site are either writers or journalists, or are taking journalism classes. Accountability is important. The discussion that follows each article provides an natural incentive for the person writing the article to get things right. Otherwise, they'll be publically slammed and will receive many e-mails - something that doesn't happen on traditional news media sites.

David