It has been five years since Dangermouse and I had the idea of starting a political blog for Medicine Hat.  In lieu of this special date we thought about trading wood or silverware. As romantic as that sounds, we instead settled on redesigning and relaunching the site.

Sometime in the next couple weeks, we will have a whole new website separate from this one.  You will still be able to access this one at www.medhatblog.com/old.

I have turned comments off on this one, as it has become over run with spam.  I spent about 6 hours deleting all the spam, and we shouldnt see anymore.  If you would like to comment on one of the existing posts for posterity sake, make a comment then email me: medhatblog@gmail.com and I will approve the comment.

Thank you for sticking with us over the years, and I look forward to another five years.

Skeet

for those of you who checked yesterday afternoon, we experienced some technical difficulties, which for a website managed in our spare time can take a few hours to fix. Not sure the cause yet, but we had all the comments and articles backed up - so we are now back in business.

Too bad too because I was just sure yesterday was the day Ted Grimm was going to answer questions from voters.

Anyways thanks for your patience, please continue the campaign discussions.

Also - if anybody has video of the MHC forum - let us know.

I knew before I started that this would be a pretty substantial topic to tackle for a blog, but in the past year it weighed on me more and more. I took what I wanted to say and basically split it into 4 parts. So this is my feeble attempt to explain and simplify a phenomenon that is fairly complex, but one that I feel is grossly misunderstood by many of the parents in our community. I guess this helps me through my “what if” shock about the terrible crimes. I didn’t know the Richardson’s, but since the events happened I have always wondered if Marc and I could have only met – maybe I could have help him avert this tragedy before it spun out of control. I am sure that’s just wishful / sorrowful hindsight on my part, but I wonder it all the same. By some fluke of social networking I seem to have this soap box, so I am filled with this compulsion to spill my thoughts now – maybe they are helpful and interesting, maybe they are way off base. No harm in posting them I guess.

I tried to establish in the previous article that curious children and youth can move through the Internet unchallenged and explore content and information that most would consider inappropriate for their age. I tried to emphasize just how bad the content was – and walk the fine line between explaining something important and exposing you all to something icky. I hope I did that, but without being too alarmist /chicken little sounding, I wanted people to wake up to the knowledge that there is content so much more disturbing than they could have ever conceived of on their own. What I am working towards is specific answers, but before I can explain some straight forward solutions I need to properly explain the problem at hand – otherwise my answer won’t make much sense. Read the rest of this entry »

The evidence is public and the story has been told. Still Hatters here are left with some discussion and some questions. One odd observation I would like to make is that for some reason the most controversial topic at the time of the murders seemed to have been forgotten by the time of the trial – why is that? To me it’s been the elephant in the room all month.

For some time I felt compelled to write this post. I wanted to wait until we knew what happened to the Richardson’s. Some of you might find my thoughts alarmist, some think I am way off base, but there are some parents who need to know this information – and so for them I will craft in a series of posts – information and education to spill the beans on a topic that parents are frustratingly naive about – The Internet & Our Youth.
Read the rest of this entry »

If you haven’t been lately, check out the Medhatblog forums.

We have had some very active discussion about religion and freedom:
http://www.medhatblog.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=503
The arena is always a hot topic:
http://www.medhatblog.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=453

And make sure you check out the free classifieds, including job postings, guitars and fifth wheelers:
http://www.medhatblog.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=11

For those of you lucky enough to have Chat TV, I will be on Dustin Dion’s “Entertainment minute tonight” during the local news. It was a blast shooting with him, but it was freakin cold. I will see if I can get permission to post the video here at a later date.

I just do not have the time to dedicate to this site as much as I would like. Mad Hatters has grown fairly popular in the last year and I would like to keep up the momentum. Myself, Dangermouse and Longshot are the main contributors, and being that this is a non-profit, for fun venture, some days we dont have the motivation and/or time that is required. I have seen a few local websites that are based on readers contributing that may work here.

I like the concept of this site. It is alberta based I believe, and any registered, authorized user can post to the front page. It seems to work very well and I think would be good model for medhatblog

http://www.wednesdaynight.ca

Our friend in Brooks has a great website also. community based porthole.

http://www.pissed.ca

This site I dont think I have the ambition to emulate, but it is quite cool and popular. It is a calgary local website

http://www.veronicapalace.ca/1.0/vp4.php

Happy belated turkey day.  Due to family commitments, and the fact that it is just me running the blog, I haven’t had a chance to post obviously.  I am working on a few things that I should have up shortly.

Thanks for staying with me.

skeet

Alice has some “almost” front row Rolling Stone’s tickets for sale
Stones Tickets

melkitten is looking for a roommate

pat is one of the applicates for a new radio station here, and to quote him: ” As far as I can tell, I am the only applicant who is proposing to be LOCALLY OWNED AND LOCALLY OPERATED.”

chaunep always has inside information on Costco

Every Saturday I am going to mention a feature of the website.  As some of you just come to see the latest posts, you may not notice some of the other things that this site offers.

I will start with one of my personal favourites, the Medicine Hat pictures.  I try to have both old and new pictures of The Hat and I am constantly updating them.  If you have any pictures, feel free to email me and I will give you full credit.

And a big thanks to “pumpkins” for many of the old pictures!