The Daily Bits

I came across this today:

European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility.

As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5-year-phase-in plan that would become known as ‘Euro-English’.

In the first year, ’s’ will replace the soft ‘c’. Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy.

The hard ‘c’ will be dropped in favour of ‘k’. This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter.

There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome ‘ph’ will be replaced with ‘f’. This will make words like fotograh 20% shorter.

In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible.

Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which always ben a deterent to akurate speling.

Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent ‘e’ in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away.

By the 4th yer people wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing ‘th’ with ‘z’ and ‘w’ with ‘v’.

During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary ‘o’ kan be dropd from vords kontaining ‘ou’ and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensi bl rit n styl.

Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru.

Und efter ze fiz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey vunted in ze forst plas.

Zats al for today.

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Some background info:
Stephane Dion: Liberal leader, elected last December as leader of the federal Liberal party of Canada. Can’t speak proper English.
GST: Goods and Services tax. Instituted originally at 7%, right now 6% going down to 5% January 1.

I find these ads enjoyable seeing as the Conservatives feel the need to put these kind of ads out. The Conservatives have a minority government right now which means that with every vote there’s a chance of the government being taken down. I suspect the point of the ad is to raise awareness that taxes will go up if a Liberal government were to get elected, this is probably true.

Anyways I got a good laugh out of that

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This past weekend I watched two leadership races for the Alberta PC party and the federal Canadian Liberal party. Even though I am not a Liberal it was still interesting to watch. I also voted in the PC leadership race for the Alberta premier. (Premier is like a governor in the US)

The new liberal leader (Stephane Dion) is from Quebec, so this would probably help the Liberals in Quebec. This worries me though as we’d be back to a situation where the needs of the west get neglected. I’d be surprised if the Liberals were able to win a government they’re disorganized and plagued by past scandal. I’ve lost all my trust for them and I’m sure many others have as well.

It was early morning before we had a final result on the new premier of Alberta. Ed Stelmach who won is from a small town north east of Edmonton. This is a big change as Ralph Klein was from Calgary (big city south of Edmonton).

So definitely some change coming for our province. Should be an interesting up coming few months federally and provincially.

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