Banished to the back seat?

Two nights ago I was in traffic behind this blue car, and was a little bewildered to see that a woman was in the backseat while a man was driving; there was nobody in the front passenger seat. I tried to guess if the man was just dropping people off on the way home or something.

Then while overtaking (safely and wisely, of course), it seems that the front seat was occupied after all... by a dog!

Cue joke about man's best friend or who was a 'good girl' here.

Pointless local websites

Why is the PTech website nothing but a glitzy Flash presentation? I mean, when I go to a tech site looking to find out about products or see prices, etc., I should get more than a sound-laden visually-overspun, browser-abusing (they open up a freakin' new window at max size!) page that only tells me the brand names of products. Not the actual products, or the prices. They just say that they have Fuji, RCA, Sony, etc.

Fail.

Let me just go back to ComputerCity or RedLaser, no glitz but I can find actual products there at least.

Planning overload

As you may know, there's a wedding in the very near future. Add the complexities that go along with getting a home, in addition to having a regular 9-5 job and it can be a daunting task, especially when personal time management (well, at least execution of the time management) isn't your strongest area.

You may have seen that I added a new bit to the blog showing how long it's been since I got to do some of my favourite activities. No, seeing my site get hacked into isn't a hobby, but I've had little time to try to get the site moved from this stupid host (Blogger is fine, but the site hosting BeachLime proper is terrible) and may not get a chance until mid-May at best. But I'm pretty sad that I haven't gone bowling (Wii bowling or the app on Facebook doesn't count) since August of '08.

I can't even remember the last time I picked up a tennis racquet, either. Groan.

What really bites is the fact that no matter how well I may be dealing with all the things-to-be-done, the fiancee has an even bigger workload (and won't let me forget).

'Gaming' on cruise ships on hold

This is a little surprising, that a Government proposed bill amendment didn't go through for once. This bill was to allow cruise ships while in port to have their casinos open late at night, but it was met with opposition from both the Opposition and Government backbenchers.

Here's the money quote from one backbencher:

"Hamilton was already a ghost town at night and tourists were staying at home at night."

I think this is what it comes down to. Nightclubs and other avenues for entertainment aren't too plentiful, so allowing tourists on cruise ships to stay aboard is a pretty self-defeating purpose as far as raising revenue is concerned.

So instead of finding ways to revive the local product and try to get money into the hands of Bermudians, the powers-that-be are choosing to appease the cruise ship lines (and most likely take a small slice off the top to fill Government's coffers).

(Edited to add a link to the Devil Island post that puts things in a better light; but like I said above perhaps the initiative is to just get more cash into Government)

Not even a dumplin'

I think that many people in Bermuda enjoy Jamaican Grill restaurant. It's been in business for quite a while and recently opened a new restaurant in Somerset that's pretty popular. You could argue that they are the top restaurant for West Indian cuisine on the island.

That said, they don't seem to always have available certain menu options. Usually it's the beef patties that are hard to come by, but the other evening I was a bit surprised to walk in to place an order when I was told that they were out of jerk chicken, brown stew anything, and even dumplings!

Not even a li'l dumpling. Ouch. Go figure, that evening they had patties galore.

I was thinking that they may as well have closed the place down, but this is "the iiiiiiisland (tm Beyonce)" and some places just continue on because after all, it's not like there's any competition around.

Come on, Jamaican Grill. You put out a decent product, so let's try to make it more available, please.

Sports Awards chosen by... politicians?

Was off-island for a few days and apparently a whole bunch of things happened including a government bailout and another unfortunate road fatality, but I want to first take notice of what happened with the local Sports Awards issued out, that I found totally amazing.

Basically a panel chose a swimmer who made the Olympics to win the Male Athlete of the Year. However the Minister of Sport who apparently has the final say, went in another direction. The Gazette, TalkSport and Catch-a-Fire have each published their views of the hows and whys.

But my main question on the Sports Awards is why a politician is determining the winner and not the appointed panel of persons who presumably have knowledge, experience and insight into the athletes and their chosen disciplines?

It would seem that the Sports Awards have suddenly lost their worth in a big way. Will the same happen to the Sports Hall of Fame as well?

Stop sign means stop

Well, the Police are taking a different approach, it seems. I suppose the whole "don't speed, don't make a third lane" motto was finally losing steam after a most-successful two years of constant usage.

So we have a new press statement, whoo-hoo! This time, it's something that looks promising. The Police want to focus a little more on people who fly through stop signs at certain junctions (they give three examples; there are several more out there). They're even threatening to ticket people. It's sad that the Police have to announce these kinds of things to the public, but I think the public honestly either don't know or don't care. But if they at least see a Police officer watching (or heck, a scarecrow dressed like a cop would probably do the trick these days) they may pay a little more attention to the road signage.

Senator David Burch made a good point the other day when commenting on Police deployment (it had to do with budget cuts, which I won't bring up here), that is, that the deployment has to be improved. It seems that there aren't enough officers patrolling normally, and when they do, it's in groups of three or four when one or two would suffice in the particular situation. Not sure if it's due to training or something. But it's a proven fact, one that does not require any surveys or studies, that when police are known to be around, people will be more cautious on the road and more obedient of traffic laws. This also cuts down on other activities like malicious behaviour (e.g. teens wanting to throw bottles at passing vehicles).

Again I'll ask the Bingo question

To Quinton Edness and everybody else who has come out and denounced gambling as being bad for Bermuda, I only ask, does the TV Bingo programme airing on local television, where people purchase cards and essentially hope that random numbers come up to match what their cards say, with the chance to win a big jackpot prize, fall into that category?

And why or why not?