Here's a set of photos I took in St. John's a couple of winters ago. Click here to see them all.

I'm playing right now with Google/Picasa Web Albums. So far ... it's cool that it's integrate with Picasa (my desktop photo album), but beyond that it's somewhat craptastic. It's ignoring my crops, clicking on the "view" link is bringing me to 404 pages and there doesn't seem to be very good control over what the size or dimensions of the uploaded files.

Loyala Hearn gives credit to Danny Williams for breaking up Paul and Heather, poor dears:

Hearn said it all started with McCartney's famous appearance last spring on the "Larry King Live" CNN show. McCartney, an animal rights activist, was debating Williams, the Newfoundland and Labrador premier, on the merits of the seal hunt.

Hearn said McCartney showed respect for the points Williams made in defence of the hunt, but his wife - apparently a more zealous anti-sealing activist - was "not so gracious."

McCartney saw a different woman that night, Hearn said, and that may have changed his view of her.

"And we'll take some credit for that," he joked.

I heard William's appearance on Larry King and I think it's a shame that he didn't take the opportunity to tell Mills that as a person of no accomplishment (except living of someone else's decades old work), she should really take the opportunity to keep her mouth shut about telling hard working people to go on welfare.

BTW: Mills is claiming Paul used to beat her senseless, or something.

CBC has a story on the report on Zachary Turner's death. Shirley Turner murdered her boyfriend Andrew Bagby in Pennsylvania in 2001, fled to Canada with their baby Zachary, and was awaiting extradition to the United States. When the extradiction was granted, Turner took little Zachary for a swim in Conception Bay and drowned them both.

You won't be surprised to find out that because "child services" was involved, the batshit-crazy Turner was allowed to keep custody of Zachary because, like most radically-captured "child services" organizations, they really couldn't give a flying f*ck about children:

[Darlene] Neville [Newfoundland and Labrador's child and youth advocate], who said she is concerned that other children in the province are in similar circumstances, described the results of the investigation as shocking.

"The fact that a whole organization could be so out of touch with the reality everyone else was wondering about is baffling," she told reporters.

Neville said two things were evident from reading the report. "One: Zachary Turner's death was preventable. And two: Zachary was in his mother's care when he should not have been."

Markesteyn found that officials, who were working on the presumption of Turner's innocence, were more concerned about the welfare of the woman than for her infant.

Turner frequently asked for, and received, help from social workers, with dozens of visits made on her behalf.

Neville said she found it difficult that no one was putting Zachary's interests first.

"Given the amount of resources that were put in to meeting Dr. Shirley Turner's needs and demands, and what she identified as necessary, if those same resources had been taken and put in to assessing what Zachary's needs were and how could his rights would be best protected, I would suggest there would be a strong likelihood we would have had a different outcome," Neville said.

This is not a unique problem to Newfoundland.

Alas, after travelling all the to St. John's, in part to bring Trinity-Anne to this year's Regatta, we never got to see it: rain and wind, wind and rain.