The warrantless IP snooping bill dies, Byron Sonne is acquitted on all counts... did I wake up in Bizarro World this morning, or has the past decade-plus been such a seemingly unending avalanche of shitty news that a couple of small victories against creeping authoritarianism can so brighten my day?

Besides the basic ethical violation of an entity ending a person's life without that individual's consent, the problem with the death penalty is that when the system fucks up and convicts the wrong person for a crime penalized by execution - and, since we're talking about a system composed of fallible humans, it will fuck up - it can't later turn around and resurrect the legally murdered individual. The victim's family and friends must then put up with willful ignorance, increasingly convoluted excuses, and outright denial of the reality that the state killed a person without cause by its own notoriously uneven standards of justice, that the people making up the state themselves directly participated in a crime. The perpetrators find themselves unable to acknowledge reality, because it would involve admitting they were wrong, and by extension that they can't be trusted with the power to order others to end people's lives due to the proven-inevitable chance of a very unrecoverable error.

a.k.a. Doing All The Touristy Stuff I Didn't Do Earlier This Week

( The cameras got a workout )

That's it for the trip. I'll hammer out some notes on the trip home, post a metric assload of pictures, and get back to OUTRAAAAAAGE!!! once the mood strikes me.

I'm over halfway through my vacation.

( And I'm still underslept )

I typed up some notes about my last two full days on Vancouver Island, but won't have a chance to convert them into full posts until tomorrow evening, during our flight home, at the earliest. Frankly, I'm surprised I managed to crank out three days' worth of travelogues; my attention span usually doesn't last this long.

Until then, enjoy a photo from within Goldstream Provincial Park, where I spent Thursday morning hiking with my parents.

In which I leave the city for trees 'n shit.

( Hello, mountains and sea )

I'm going to fix these spelling mistakes when I return to Toronto. I can't be arsed to edit properly on this screen.

So, I'm here, I've seen downtown... now what?

( And where? )

Hello from Coast Salish territory.

( Stranger in a (not-so) strange land )

Apologies for the spelling mistakes; that's what I get for pounding this glurge out on a phone screen.

What have I done?

I'm in Coast Salish territory!

The flight from Pearson to Victoria was tolerable; an unacknowledged climate control problem caused discomfort during the latter half of the trip. I think the in-seat entertainment systems throw off enough heat to overwhelm the cool air inflow from above the seats in A320-type planes. I don't know if this is correctable, but we encountered a similar problem on at least one prior flight on an A320-type plane. Minor turbulence over the Prairies gave way to smooth skies over the Rockies and a beautiful landing at sunset, the strait-reflected sun broken up by islands.

This island is beautiful. Even the downtown of the provincial capital is covered in evergreen trees. The hotel room we're staying in is cozy and comfortable, except for the poor hornet that wandered through an open window and fell victim to our intolerance for stinging insects. An interesting and welcoming smell permeated the lower floor of the hotel.

We awoke at ten to six. My fiance's class begins, as does my vacation.