What is their deal anyways? Their staff really have ill tempers and the worst attitudes ever. Service both in terms of the people and the flights themselves suck.

The last straw for many people is this holiday season when they cancelled many flights and delayed many others with a “sorry you’re screwed” attitude towards the customers.

I’m surprised at the fact that one flight was kept on the tarmac grounded for 12 hours with them rationing the “food” and water. Many starving and hungry and worried about their health.

It’s funny reading articles like this from News 1130.  Amazing how 3/4′s of the calls to the Consumer’s Association of Canada has been complaints about Air Canada and the other 1/4 has been praise to their competition Westjet.

Westjet has done an exceptional job with their staff and customer service training. I’ve always had great service from them even when things were bad or not even Westjet’s fault in the first place. This really shined through this holiday season apparently.  Westjet was helping out all their own customers and even going above and beyond and taking care of stranded Air Canada passengers where they could.

I don’t understand how Air Canada can make such a bumbling customer service / PR move time and time again. Do the people in charge there never fly their own airline? I’m not sure how one can fathom treating others the way they do.  I hope all these complaints and situation this Christmas gets them to make some solid changes in their policy and improve their service. They definitely need some brand repair.

I’m liking the outlooks for the US. With Clinton / Obama / Giuliani that’s more than enough options for the American public over Bush. That’s my two cents.

I just hope that people heeded the warning early and kept enough to brush their teeth with.  You would think Vancouver would be slightly more prepared for something like this.  Especially with previous year’s mudslides that evacuated some people from their West/North Vancouver homes. This year again there’s numerous floodings and people evacuated until their homes can be deemed safe.

I sure hope we learn from this one and have better water contingency plans.

When Harper become elected as our current Prime Minister I was thinking that there could be some real chances for him to make some vital changes and in general be a Prime Minister that isn’t overly made fun of…like Paul Martin. There is one thing in common that Harper and Martin share, and that is their stance on Canada’s involvement on the war.

“If I were prime minister, we would not be involved in Iraq. I would encourage the Americans and hope they’re successful, but our government would not be there.” Conservative Leader Stephen Harper, Dec. 13, 2005 at a press conference in Trenton, Ont.

Ok somewhere along the way that totally changed. In May of this year the mandate for Canada’s limited mission involvement in Afghanistan was expiring. However, the Harper government pushed a motion through the House of Commons with very minimal debate which extends Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan until February 2009!

When Harper came to office it was the first time in 12 years our government was not run by the Liberals. I thought it would be nice to have a Conservative leader, if for anything just to see what they could do for the country. Now that it’s been pushing 2 years now I’m not so sure I’m liking any of it.

The Vancouver Art Gallery steps is constantly a host to numerous marches and protests. Saturday Oct.28 will be no different. There’s a meetup at the Waterfront Skytrain Station at 12 Noon with the march commencing at 1pm and a rally at 2pm at the VAG organized by the StopWar effort.

There were 7 bombs in total, one each at 7 seperate train stations that all went off during rush hour traffic within a 30 minute period. There were initially 135 deaths and 200 injured reported, but that number is steadily increasing it’s unreal.

More can be read here.

Yesterday the judge of the case Weber McCraw set the written order for bail at $750,000. The defense lawyer stated that the bond essentially equates to “no bond at all”, since Mary is very unlikely able to be able to pay that amount. In various news sources the lawyer Steve Farese Jr makes similar statements.

“I certainly don’t think she’ll be able to make that. I’m just surprised in the amount, but he’s the judge and he makes those decisions. To us, right now, that’s paramount to no bond at all.”

I know the judge must pass unbiased judgement, but I can’t help but think that perhaps that is the point. For the bail to be set so that the court can go through the proper legal actions without necessarily permitting bail.

Well if she or her family is able to post the bail, then she’ll end up staying with Rudie and Kathy Thomsen in McMinville, Tennessee. Apparently Matthew Winkler had spent a stint of time in that town for work. Mary still has many close friend there and should have no problem finding work.

The prosecutors of the case haven’t said whether or not they will pursue the death penalty yet, however the case is eligible for that punishment according to Judge McCraw.

“The court finds that although the state may elect to treat this charge as a death eligible case, it has not made that full declaration. Therefore, the court finds that the law requires the setting of a reasonable bond for the defendant.”

I guess now everyone will be obsessing over the media coverage of whether or not she will be able to post bail as opposed to what her motives for the murder were.

I’m not surprised that it’s going out of print.  The paper was certainly more show than go. They probably spent a lot more on the hip advertisements than on decent news content in the paper.  I think it lacked enough important news.
The other commuter two commuter papers 24 Hours and Metro News are still going strong.  I personally think that 24 Hours is a better paper with a good balance of prime articles and presentation.  From reading Dose from time to time I often got the sense that it underestimated the intelligence of it’s target demographic.  24 Hours doesn’t specifically target 18-34, however it does target the person on the go.  I find it provides all the vital news in a compact 10 – 20 min easy read.

More details here.

Here’s the blog for explorAsian

The big kick off will start tomorrow and the 6th with the Canadian premiere of Welly Yang’s “Finding Home” a broadway play featuring an interesting mix of songs from Elton John, Lee Ann Womack, Tim Rice, Dan Hill, Luther Vandross, Billy Joel and more. It’ll be at the Alcan Theatre.

Another one to watch for is Cheuk Kwan’s Canadian premiering “Latin Passions” which is part of his long running “Chinese Restauarants” series of docu-dramas. If you’ve seen any of his other Chinese Restuarant pieces, you’ll probably agree that it’s quite a genius way of exploring the cultural impact of the Chinese diaspora worldwide. This particular piece “Latin Passions” as the name suggests takes a look at places like Peru, Brazil, and Argentina. All his other documentaries that are part of this series will be showing throughout the month as well.

Not only are there events every day but there are also multiple events, so I’m sure there’s something for everyone.

The tower will be set up at ::wikipedia(Ground Zero, Ground Zero):: along with the museum, memorial and a few other towers.  The Freedom Tower will be at an exact height of 1776 feet to match the year the American colonies declared independence from Britian.  Although this may change by the time it is completed in 2011.
Aparently it was already designed once since previously the NY Police determined the old design was vulnerable to truck bombings.  The Freedom Tower will now have a 200 foot base coated in titanium and steel plates that can withstand a bomb blast. There’s also reports that the base may have glass plates instead to give it a shimmering quality since it’ll be mainly windowless for the first 20 floors essentially.  Either way it’ll withstand any vehicle bombs.

It seems like there still may be the possibility of more changes to the design by the time any actual “building” gets erected. It has already changed from the spiraling / rotating look to a more simplified and sleeker appearance.