Province sees drilling revenue plummet

Province sees drilling revenue plummet:

"Low natural gas prices have had a disastrous effect on revenues the province earns from selling drilling leases to energy companies, new figures show.

Sales to date are only a fraction of what they were for the same period in previous years.
So far this year, the province has taken in$46.2 million in petroleum, natural gas and oilsands rights compared to more than $247 million in the same period last year.

A May 2009 Alberta Finance report on industry performance and prospects warns of bleak days ahead.
'Plunging oil and natural gas prices have forced companies to rein in exploration and development spending,' says the report."

Alberta acknowledges changing energy environment

Alberta acknowledges changing energy environment: "

Ed Stelmach was elected leader of the Alberta Progressive Conservative party, and thus premier, in December 2006, and he moved quickly to meet a campaign promise to fully review Alberta's oil and natural gas royalties.

In February 2007, the six-person Royalty Review Panel was formed and the members were portrayed as industry experts. The oil industry quickly discovered that the panel was stacked against them. Headed by a former forestry executive, a natural foe of oil companies, the panel included two academics, an economist, a retired petroleum manufacturing executive, and a technology executive.

Concerns about the panel membership grew stronger when major companies were allowed as little as 10 minutes to appear before the panel with 20-page reports."

Twitter Observations

Holy shit I haven't written on here in a long time. I guess it has something to do with the weather & my extracurricular activities.

I have been posting on twitter quite a bit lately. I cannot believe some of the events in the world that have been covered or broken on twitter.

Last week after the Iran elections, the foreign journalists got kicked out of the country. Riots ensued when the Reformist leader was beaten by something like 14mm votes. Iran claims the election was legit - but the grassroots, younger reformer movement disagreed. There has been riots daily, even deaths in Iran stemming from this election. With twitter & youtube, the everyday Iranian has been posting tweets or videos of the stories unfolding during these riots. Pretty heavy shit, stuff the government would not be telling the rest of the world. The Iranian spin machine is making it seem like everything is normal & these are a few isolated events by citizens brainwashed by western media. Twitter tells a different story.

Yesterday was a pretty big day for the evolution of Twitter as well. Michael Jackson was in some serious medical trouble around 1 or 2 yesterday afternoon. Tweets were flooding the twittersphere updating his condition. Eventually one came across that he died. Earlier in the day Farrah Fawcett died as well after a long cancer battle. These were big stories that dominated most of the posts. Although rumours can spread like wildfire on Twitter as well. One Tweet mentioning that Jeff Goldblum had perished after a fall from a cliff in New Zealand during a movie filming was found to be bullshit.

Another big story was the Perez Hilton story. After telling Will I AM what he thought of his band The Black Eyed Peas, Hilton was tweeting for help after an alleged assault. Not the way I would handle a situation like that, but I guess it is a new communication method - although a telephone probably would have been more effective.

In Alberta, a Conservative Back Bencher was hung out to dry for some sexist comments. Doug Elinski - a politician from Edmonton said some 1950's sexist comments about women. Little did he realize when he posted this on Twitter it would get the reaction of rage that ensued. He was doing some major damage control after the shit hit the fan.

Now the good news story. Over at Oilersnation, a movement started to send Robin Brownlee to the NHL Draft in Montreal today. To make a long story short, us readers donated money to help our journalist attend. Any extra money raised would be donated to the Stollery Children's Hospital in Edmonton. Well news of this spread to Twitter where Lynda Steele of Global TV Edmonton caught wind of this & arranged an interview with Jason Gregor (who is attending in lieu of Brownlee) & Adam "bingofuel" Rozenhart. It's hilarious that a bunch of rabid hockey fans did something like this for their own benefit & the guys at OilersNation can give some back to a quality children's hospital & get some mainstream media pimping as well.

So as I said earlier it appears twitter is really going into a transformation. From breaking up to the minute news stories - to local interest stories it appears that Tweeples are becoming the new media.

New England Hockey Journal | Special Reports | | Alberta deja vu?

New England Hockey Journal:

Alberta deja vu?

"No player from the Alberta Junior Hockey League was selected in the NHL Entry Draft’s top round in the Junior A circuit’s first 34 seasons, but rugged defenseman Dylan Olsen is positioned to be an opening-round pick from that league for the second consecutive season -- following his Camrose Kodiaks teammate, Joe Colborne, who was taken 16th overall by the Boston Bruins in 2008."

Christina Aguilera & Banned Sketcher Shoe Ads

Wow - I have learned another thing watching BNN in my boredom today. Apparently these shoes ads (featuring Christina Aguilera) were too racy in 2004.

I am going to go crawl under my rock again...

2010 Olympic Torch drawing attention.

So what if the newly designed olympic torch for Vancouver looks like a joint. Obviously the Americans don't realize that one of the biggest exports from BC is Hippie Lettuce.

Jim Rome's take from 'Rome is Burning' which I found on Burn Monkey Burn.

Maybe this could boost our weak inmune systems?

Another industry is battling back against the green push. Now the Canadian Plastic's Industry Association is putting the fear of god into people trying to save a few nickles or just trying to be "green". Grocery Clerks & consumers have been mishandling food for years & nobody cared when they were using plastic bags.

The Canadian Press: Study commissioned by plastics industry says reusable grocery bags dangerous

"The growing popularity of reusable grocery bags could pose a health risk to Canadians by increasing their exposure to dangerous bacteria, says a study commissioned by the plastics industry released Wednesday.

The Canadian Plastics Industry Association hired two independent labs to conduct what it said was the first study of so-called eco-friendly grocery bags in North America, and found 64 per cent of them were contaminated with some level of bacteria.

Forty per cent of the reusable bags tested had yeast or mould, and some had detectable levels of coliforms and fecal intestinal bacteria when there should have been none, said Dr. Richard Summerbell, who was commissioned to evaluate the lab findings."