Random Wednesday thoughts

1. One thing I forgot to put in my post from last night/this morning on Plan B (which was a touch rambling, I confess) is what happens if Williams partially succeeds in his grand plan? Not so much in ousting Prime Minister Harper, because I don't think that will happen. But what if he actually manages to convince the populace of Newfoundland to not vote for a Conservatives and then that party goes on to form the government.

Well, won't that be an interesting spectacle. Newfoundland would likely experience something like what Nunavut got the other day. The federal government wanted to announce some money for airports in the territory. However, since the territory's sole MP is a Liberal, they actually had a Conservative MP from Alberta fly up and make the announcement.

Boy, won't that be fun if that happens in Newfoundland. There would be a delicious sense of the absurd if the MP representing Newfoundland came from Alberta. If you could make that MP an ex-pat Newfoundlander – who moved to Alberta because there are no jobs in back home – it would be perfect. He could fly in every couple of months to make announcements on behalf of the federal government. Especially if it were something staggeringly ironic like money for a job creation program.

My God, I almost hope Williams succeeds now, just so I could witness that particularly bizarre spectacle.

Yeah, this whole "I want Harper gone" scheme is a well thought out piece of brilliance, isn't it?

2. Is this a sign that Loyola Hearn is getting a bit fed up federally? I really am curious to see if he's going to run again. I suspect he doesn't want to, but might anyway.

3. Sad, but not entirely unsurprised, to see that Greg Locke has packed it in, given up on Newfoundland and is heading west. This isn't a dig, by the way. I'm out west, well, north-west, so who am I to criticize. Besides, Greg dropped me a line several weeks ago wanting to know what it was like working up here. (for the record I'm always happy to answer questions about living and working in our small part of Nunavut).

His idea of photographing and doing a documentary on the Newfoundland diaspora, by the way, is dead clever. I wish him luck with it and look forward to seeing his pictures. Pity he isn't come up here, though. I was really looking forward to bugging him for photo lessons.

4. Is this, or is this not, the greatest headline so far of 2007? And how many of us, upon reading the story, went, "Well, of course you did. You're bloody Keith Richards." Frankly, I would have been more surprised to discover he hadn't done it.

And sadly, it appears he didn't. Then again, it is producing wonderful copy, like this lede from The Scotsman:

IT'S NOT where most people would hope to spend eternity - up Keith Richards's nose - but in an interview with NME the Rolling Stones' lead guitarist suggested that this was the unfortunate fate that befell his father Bert: Richards cut his ashes with cocaine and snorted them.

Funny, funny stuff.

5. At some point in the next couple of days I will have the 50,000th unique visitor to my blog. By coincidence it will fall about 18 months after I started using Statcounter to keep track of who visits the blog. Fifty thousand in 18 months isn't setting the world on fire, but I'm quite pleased. Especially since my numbers have been increasing steadily. Thanks for coming.