Addendum

Shootouts.

I meant to put my thoughts in on this very interesting wrinkle the NHL is trying out this year.

I haaaaaate 'em.

I know, they had to do it, it adds excitement to the game, a tie is like kissing your sister and all that...well, not having a sister, I can't really say, now can I? Suppose my sister was really gorg--

Okay, never mind that. People don't like tie games. Gotcha.

Still, I don't like shootouts. It's akin to deciding a baseball game with a home run derby, or a football game with a field-goal contest, or a basketball game on a series of uncontested three-point shots. Hockey is supposed to be a team sport. Reducing it to a one-on-one battle between goalie and shooter...well, why bother playing the game in the first place? Just have a series of players take potshots at the goaltender. Defense? We doan need no steekin' defense.

Granted, it's exciting. In fact, I can't think of a single sporting spectacle that gets me so het up.
But I can't think a shootout win is near as satifying as a win in regulation...and a shootout loss is excruciating.

When my wife was learning the game, she often seemed to put a huge amount of pressure on the goaltender. Every single goal he allowed was his fault, nobody else's; since the keeper's putative job is to keep pucks out of the net, a goal was a damning indictment. I, by contrast, feel that the defensemen and backchecking forwards are at least as responsible for most goals against as the 'tender is. Even the breakaway goals, where there is no defenseman to be found--well, where are they? Barring the power play, teams play at even strength. For someone to break free of defensive coverage implies a breakdown in that coverage, something for which the goalie bears no blame.

That's all removed in the shootout. Fans welcome the "stripping down of the game to its essentials", as if defense wasn't one of them. Ugh.

My solution? Simple: let the players play until somebody scores, just as they do in the playoffs. You'll never see that, of course--the owners like their money too much to ever condense the season enough to allow that proposal to fly. You'd have to have no more than three games in any week, with no matches on back-to-back nights. Or just allow ties. What's so bad about a tie? It means that on that night, the two teams were evenly matched. I like a game that doesn't have to have a winner and a loser. To me, that's a Canadian game.

And that's how I feel about that.

Non-hockey fans should probably skip this one...

Less than a month to go...
I can't begin to tell you just how much I am looking forward to the resumption of NHL hockey in T-20 days and counting. This has been a summer of frantic signing, punctuated by a few blockbuster trades. Most teams have come out ahead...or think they have.
I'm not sure what category to put my beloved Buds in. They've certainly been active, picking up Jason Allison, Eric Lindros, Alex Khavanov, Jeff O'Neill, Mariusz Czerkawski and Brad Brown and nudging right up against the hard cap. The rookies good enough to potentially overcome coach Quinn's veteran bias and crack the team out of camp will be up and down between the NHL and the AHL all season: every game Carlo Colaiacovo plays for the Marlies will give the Leafs $2800.00 worth of cap room. They may need that wiggle room come the end of the season, for good or ill. Allison's contract is laden with performance bonuses. Should he stay healthy and contribute, these bonuses will count against the cap. Even if the doomsayers' predictions come to pass and Allison and Lindros collide at center ice, concussing each other and ending each other's seasons sometime around game three, the NHL salary cap is unforgivingly tied to league revenues that might not be as expected. The good news: the NHL has a TV deal in the States, which it didn't have three months ago. The bad news: the network involved is not NBC, ABC, CBS, FOX, or ESPN1 or 2...it's the Outdoor Life Network. Oh, how the mighty have fallen. When the New York Rangers won the Stanley Cup in '94, the American media enthused that hockey would soon overtake basketball and join the ranks of football and baseball as America's favourite sports. That was back when you'd find one or two hockey articles a year in Sports Illustrated. Now, hockey has joined tractor pulls and 1000-yard staring contests on America's 423rd-largest network, and Sports Illustrated will shelve its Swimsuit Edition before it dares to print a hockey column.
Well, I for one am ready to shelve all this economic, CBA chattering and DROP THE PUCK!

GAME ON!

John Ferguson Jr., the architect of the Maple Leafs this season, has taken a lot of undeserved flak. There is a certain class of nutjob Toronto fan--oddly enough, fans this stupid are usually Leaf fans--who think we can trade Nik Antropov to Pittsburgh and get Sidney Crosby and Marc-Andre Fleury back. Memo to nutjobs: a Doug-Gilmour fleecing comes along once every thirty years or so, league-wide, and we've had ours.
Ferguson has actually done very well working with reality. The reality is that the Leafs have a lot of money tied up in McCabe, Sundin, and (especially) Belfour. Will the naysayers at least concede that this has been money relatively well spent? Sundin has led the Leafs in scoring eight out of the past nine years, McCabe has led the defense corps, and Belfour has exceeded all expectations, including mine.
The biggest knock I keep hearing is that we should have let Belfour go and signed Khabibulin...to save money. Funny, Khabibulin has cashed in on his Cup win and is now making more money than Belfour. While he arguably represents an upgrade on Eddie, is that upgrade worth the added cost?

Seemingly every day over the summer, the Toronto Sun's been agitating, saying this and that player was 'destined' to be a Leaf. Virtually every big-name free agent was linked to the Leafs at some time or another, largely, I suspect, to sell newspapers. All these rumours came to naught, and people were actually disappointed we only managed to get

• a man only three years removed from being a top-five scorer, League-wide;
• a towering player, gifted offensively, who has always yearned to be a Leaf*;
• a former linchpin of the Carolina offense that put the Leafs out of the playoffs not that long ago;
• a top-four defenseman projected for 20 minutes-plus a night
• a sniper who, although streaky and prone to defensive mistakes, was still a driving force of the New York Islanders, not long ago
• a tough, stay-at-home defenseman who has captained the Minnesota Wild

...all this on what amounts to a shoestring budget.

INJURIES

There we go again with the naysaying. And I'll be the first to concede that Lindros and Allison in particular are high-risk. Kind of like Mogilny was. Or Wendel Clark. The laws of probability suggest at least one of our pickups will miss significant time this season. The laws of probability also suggest that at least one of them will remain healthy and put up better numbers than expected. For the money invested, I say the potential reward is worth the risk. You have to remember that NHL players are likely going to be dropping like flies this year, the bitter fruit of a year away from the game. Any player can be hurt at any time. I for one am looking for a playoff berth and possible home-ice advantage.

* I'll stick this 'endnote' here before I move on to League-wide issues. I am not a Lindros fan and never have been. He has always proven himself in my eyes to be a arrogant and conceited momma's boy who can't even remember how to skate with his head up. However, he appears to have grown up and began thinking for himself...I'll reserve judgement.

THE GAME ITSELF promises to be a spectacle this year. I miss the firewagon hockey of the 1980s, when no lead was safe and no deficit was insurmountable. It appears the NHL has missed the run-and-gun game, too. They've promised for the umpteenth time to call the game by the rules, meaning no hooking, hacking, clutching, grabbing, or 'riding'. You're not allowed to impede another player with your stick--every defenseman in the game is going to have to learn a new way to play. I can only hope that this crackdown persists. I don't care if I never see 5-on-5 hockey for the first three months of the season--the obstruction has to go.

(I have doubts that they'll persevere, when some teams get twenty penalties called against them in a game and lose that game 12-1. But if they do...Just think of it! Some teams won't be allowed to pretend they're as good as everyone else!)

This will be the year of Crosby, but also the year of Phaneuf, a monster defenseman from Canada's world junior team; of Wayne Gretzky as a coach, of edge-of-your-seat shootouts to break ties; of excitement. I can't wait.

It's debit-able...

Do you use Interac?
If you are Canadian, chances are your answer is "yes". Or, even more likely, "hell, yeah!"
Canadians are among the heaviest users of debit cards in the world. As a nation, we purchased more on debit than the United States did in 2001, the last year for which I can find figures. Think about that a minute: they have more than ten times our population.
Having worked in retail for many years now, I have seen the rising use of Interac from the other side of the counter. Well over 90% of our grocery store's sales are paid for using debit cards. With numbers like that, it's not hard to imagine a cashless society, and sooner than you'd think.
I have a love-hate relationship with debit. I love the convenience. I hate just about everything else.

SERVICE CHARGES

It seems hard to believe, but there was once a time--not all that long ago, either, within my lifetime--when banks made money by prudently investing what funds we, their customers, deposited. Not only that, they returned a healthy interest rate on that money. Now, banks make money by charging us for every conceivable "service" they provide. They even charge us for NOT providing service: if your account lies idle for a month, you'll get dinged with an "account inaction fee". And interest? Unless you're rich, forget it: many banks return zero interest on balances under a thousand dollars, and as close to zero as they can on anything above that.
Is it any wonder our banks ring up billions of dollars in profits every few months?
One of the ways they ding you is through the Interac system. There are a couple of options here: you can choose to have money siphoned out of your account every time you use an ABM or make a purchase on debit. Or you can elect to pay x dollars a month for the convenience of accessing your money...but it better be through a certain machine, else you'll pay more. No matter what you do, bend over, 'cause you're gonna be cornholed.
The banks say that service fees are for system maintenance. Does anybody actually believe that? Maybe the kinds of people that answer emails from very sick Nigerian children who have won lotteries and want to share their winnings, but certainly not the rest of us. With literally billions of transactions happening every year, the cost of "maintaining the system", per transaction, just has to be negligible.
If the co-ordinated financial anal rape of Canadians by our big bad banks wasn't enough, they're in cahoots with a whole lot of retailers. I've tried to research the laws regarding retail Interac service charges with little success. It may well be there aren't any: the retailers may well be entitled to charge whatever their market will bear. Evidently their market bears quite a lot. Consider:
In Niagara Falls, arguably Canada's cheesiest tourist trap, some places charge $2.50 to let you spend money in their establishments. One place told me they didn't take debit and directed me to a little one-eyed bandit of an ABM in the corner, which tried to ding me $5.00 to withdraw $40.00. (Needless to say, that place lost my business.)
Just down the street from me, there is a Daisy Mart that has its Interac policy clearly posted: a charge of 25 cents will be assessed on any Interac purchase totalling less than $5.00. Knowing as I do that each Interac transaction costs the retailer 12 cents, I suppose I can grudgingly accept the quarter charge. But:

• milk doesn't count
• bread doesn't count
• newspapers, no matter how many you buy, don't count
• bus tickets don't count
• tobacco doesn't count

The following is a fairly educated guess: the above counts for over eighty percent of that store's sales. Pathetic, isn't it? I don't frequent that store any more--even if I have cash.

If I go well out of my way, I can patronize a Short Stop or a 7-Eleven. Neither charges for Interac use, no matter the size of the sale or what it contains. I've worked for both chains, and I used to mentally roll my eyes whenever somebody bought a Slurpee or a pack of gum on debit. (This happens far more often than you'd believe.) I wanted to charge the customer for holding up the line, but then again, the delay was our fault...we had the slowest Interac connection I've ever seen. Besides, both variety store chains understand that Interac encourages impulse spending: even with all the less-than-a-dollar purchases, the average debit transaction was much higher in value than the average cash transaction. Service charges discourage trade. They certainly discourage me.

There's one last thing about Interac that, as a consumer, I appreciate, but as a retailer, I can't stand: "cashback". I can't begin to tell you how many times people wander into our store ten minutes after we open and expect to get $200.00 cash back. They tend to get right pissy when we tell them we don't have that kind of cash on hand. Ironically enough, we don't carry much more cash at open than I did at Short Stop...at least in part because almost nobody uses cash anymore.

What I want to know is, did we turn into a bank overnight? Does it say "BANK OF PRICE CHOPPER on the sign out there?

Didn't think so.

I Am Ken Breadner

I have finished Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons. For all its flaws (and there were several, some of them major), this novel was an entertaining read. It also had the effect of catapulting me into my past.
The titular heroine is a poor but brilliant girl from Sparta, North Carolina, population 900 and most of them, you get the feeling, inbred. Despite her intelligence, she's fantastically naive about the world beyond. Because of her intelligence, she's got herself a one-way ticket deep into the heart of that world beyond: a full scholarship to Dupont University, the place Harvard and Yale dream of being. Charlotte undertakes an journey of self-discovery in what proves to be an environment entirely unlike anything in her experience or imagination...a place besotted, not with intellectual pursuits, but instead with sex and booze and status.

I was nowhere near as intelligent as Charlotte when I ventured out from my little town of Ingersoll, population 8,000 and most of them, I got the feeling, parochial in the extreme. But I nearly matched her for naivete. A clue to what awaited me was hung from an overpass just before the cut-off to Waterloo. Had my mother been driving, I do believe she would have turned the car around when she saw the sign reading


FATHERS THANK YOU FOR YOUR VIRGIN DAUGHTERS


Like Charlotte, I made a supreme effort to distance myself from my parents the instant we arrived at Wilfrid Laurier University, not out of shame but out of a fervent desire to assert myself. Luckily, I knew my residence room-mate going in...I'm honestly not sure whether I could have handled trying to befriend anyone on top of everything else that day. My brain bobbled. On the one hand, the first music I heard blasting way on campus was You May Be Right, by Billy Joel: not my favourite song in the world but certainly more than tolerable. Big relief: a part of me was expecting something truly vile. On the other hand, my welcome-to-Laurier kit contained some sort of rubbery sheathy thing I'd never seen before. It took almost as much brainpower as I had available to determine it was a condom. Had my parents seen that, I'm certain I would have been yanked off campus almost before I was on it. Oh well, guys, you were the ones bound and determined I get here a year ahead of my high school cohort...
Of course, it wasn't until slightly later that I realized just how young I was. Like later that day, when most of the people on my floor went out and got themselves stinking drunk--for the first of probably a hundred times that year. And Kenny (right about then I felt like Kenny, even though I'd been "Ken" since Grade 6 or so) stayed back...not only because he had no interest in booze, but because he wouldn't be legal for six months.
Laurier had outlawed panty raids the year before, so of course there were panty raids galore that week. It wasn't three weeks later, en route to my dorm room, that I stumbled upon three people having sex in full view of anyone who cared to look. Was that before or after the naked guy in the tree outside my window? I can't remember. Sleep was pretty hard to come by that year.
There must have been thirty or more people doing everything short of jamming alcohol down my throat in the first couple of months, and I did myself no social favours by absolutely refusing it every time. Most of Mac 2 West plotted for a week or two before my birthday about how they were going to get me out of my shell and get me plastered...and knowing that, when the day came, I made every effort to elude them.
I was only Mr. Goody-Half-A-Shoe by then, though: I'd successfully avoided alcohol only to fall into the snares of a few other vices. I'd found a use for that rubbery sheath in January, for one thing. For another, I'd bled money from every pore. It worked out to $16.33 every day from September to Christmas. It was perfectly clear I was in no way prepared for the distractions that university throws at you. But what the hell, I was having so much fun...
Academically, I got by that first year pretty much the way I'd gotten by in high school. Most of what I 'learned' I had already known, and it didn't take much effort to synthesize the rest. I hadn't...quite...fallen out of love with the classroom. Not yet.

In Tom Wolfe's novel, Charlotte Simmons eventually carves out a place for herself somewhere near the very tippy-top of Dupont's social scene, an unheard-of elevation for a freshman. I didn't do that. I couldn't, much as I may have wanted to. Macdonald House was a train wreck of eight months' duration; living right in the middle of it, I eventually developed somewhat of an immunity, but never felt much of an urge to jump in...that way lay a kind of suicide. I envied my room-mate...he'd arranged his classes such that he had Fridays off, and so went home every weekend without fail, thus avoiding the weekly 72-hour party which seemed to be the only reason most of my floor came to university.
My strategy was different: I'd cast my mind out, out from M2 West, out from Laurier, out to my girlfriend at Humber College, my best friend at Queens, and others hither and yon, creating one hellacious phone bill after another. I sent and received more "snail mail" than most of my floor put together. I clung to these lifelines out of Laurier with dogged determination: making friends has never been a forte of mine, and I was quite content with the coterie I'd already made, thanks.

Charlotte Simmons found an identity at Dupont...not one she would have recognized before and certainly not what her parents had envisioned for her. My identity was still in flux when I left Macdonald House, as it was two years later when my university career whimpered out. That wasn't what my parents had expected of me, either. Hell, it wasn't what I had expected. I don't know what I had expected, but it wasn't this.

I left residence with one ironclad certainty: it should be avoided at all costs. I had been steered into "res" by well-meaning people with no idea what lay inside those walls. They felt I'd make social contacts that would serve me well the rest of my life. It's true that my roomie became one of my closest friends, but that was born out of an "our room against the world" mentality. I've long swept my brain clean of everyone else from Laurier.
I still live here in Waterloo. Although I'm in an area where many students live, I'm far enough from the bar scene that I don't have to worry about my house being vandalized on a weekly basis. At this time of year, when students flood back in to the city, the twin thoughts recur: I was once one of them; I was never one of them.
I am Ken Breadner.

New Orleans times 200,000

As aftershocks from Katrina continue to resound, and literally hundreds of people have been made aware of the environmental issues of long standing along the Gulf Coast, it amazes me that I'm still seeing people dismissing them.
I guess it shouldn't surprise me overmuch. No matter how many Manhattan-sized chunks of ice calve off the Arctic glaciers, no matter how many studies show ocean and land temperatures rising, there are those who say that global warming is bullshit.
But there was one whacko writing in the National Post today who went further. I can't tell you his name, because to read the Post online, one must already have a subscription. (Aside: what brain-dead airhead dreamed that policy up? If I wanted a subscription to a newspaper, I'd get one...to a newspaper.)
This whacko, whatever-his-name-was, started off saying that "erosion is a natural process". From there he leapt to the startling observation that environmentalism is a "pseudo-religion"... an "anti-humanist" one. Environmentalists, says the whacko, only care about nature, never about man. He insinuates that Greenpeace won't rest happily until most of the human population of the planet is dead.
This is bullshit in exactly the way global warming isn't.
Those who hold this view believe that Man is superior to Nature. Further, that it is man's sacred duty to subjugate Nature.
More bullshit. As to the first assertion, just ask the surviving New Orleansians whether Man and his works can stand in the face of Nature. And as for the second--
Well, I'm not sure we can. To subjugate, one must stand at a remove...and we are inextricably a part of Nature, not apart from it. Every time we screw around with Nature on a large scale, she comes back to bite us in the ass. Drain the wetlands along the Gulf? No problem...until a Katrina comes along. Deforest the hillsides and plains of the Middle East? No worries...until the ground turns to salt before your very eyes. Burn the rainforests? Happy farming...for a year or three, until the soil just dries up and blows away.
There may be some extreme environmentalists who truly believe that humanity is a cancerous lesion on the skin of the earth, but most of them wish only that humans would learn to walk more lightly on the land. If that means redefining our economies, is that really such of a much? I suppose it is, if you're one of the priveleged few..."few" being the operant word. There are over a billion people on this planet living in some variant of New Orleans--and most of them are seeing their environments raped by large corporations who pay them slave wages and therefore claim to be working in their interest. Yet more bullshit.
The grim reality is that the environment is deteriorating fast. This is not pessimism or whinery; neither is it speculation. Those of us with eyes can see the signs: this has been the -est year in the history of the world. You name a superlative, somebody on earth has seen it recently. The wettest, dryest, warmest, stormiest year on record. And not a one-off, either.
We need to acknowledge these realities and take steps to mitigate them. Not just weaning ourselves off oil. We need a renewed emphasis on local economies of scale, a concerted effort to freely share resources, a concentrated, massive plan to alleviate Third World poverty--giving them access to fresh. clean water would be a start (and that does not mean bottling it up and selling it to them, Nestle!)
There is so much to do...and all environmentalists ask is for recognition of that fact. Is that too much to ask?
Is it?

At the Derby

Spent a good chunk of the day today at the Mitchell Fair.
Now, the Mitchell Fair is not something, I hasten to tell you, that I would normally be clamoring to attend. Fairs, particularly small-town fairs, rank just behind sorting my sock drawer and just ahead of brushing my teeth for sheer excitement. But Eva's brother had a car entered in the demolition derby. Jim wasn't the driver--he was the guy who built the car--but the way these things work, the driver, if he won, would be paid in prestige and Jim would get cash dollars. So we were there to cheer Jim's driver on.
We got to the fair a good three hours before the derby was to start. So we made the grand tour. Over there's the midway: Ferris wheel, Tilt-a-Whirl, Berry-Go-Round, Round-Up, a couple of other rides, none meant for adults. Over here's the community center, filled to the brim with local colour. The Bake-Off entries are right here: some of them look quite tasty...too bad we can't try any of them. This here's the "sheaf competition", right next to the "field crop" competition; the point of either escapes me. And all around are dozens of earnest dioramas that public school students put lots of work into and which no doubt made their mothers proud.
Onward, please.
"Come Down On The Farm!" the sign intones, and we enter to find three prone bovines and a gaggle of hens and geese squawking away, all reeking that peculiar country reek that starts a John Denver clone singing away inside my skull: "Thank God I'm a City Boy!"
I think we've covered everything. Let's check the time: hmmm. Seven minutes have gone by. Only two hours and fifty three minutes to go.
My loving and understanding wife has allowed me to bring a book to kill the time. So I sit on the wooden grandstand bench, slather myself in sunscreen, and immerse myself in I Am Charlotte Simmons. A novel this engrossing can easily overcome a serious case of numbed butt; before I know it they're announcing the first heat, and the car Jim jerry-rigged together rumbles out to take its place amongst its fellows. A cloud of testosterone forms.
This is my second demo derby. The first one was in Elmira two years ago, and I'd had to steel myself for it: in a former life derbies were the sorts of things I would pay to avoid. They actually offended me on some primeval level. I mean, the whole object of these things is senseless destruction...even if there's little chance of driver injury, the point is to seriously cripple the cars. Yes, yes, I know that cars are inanimate objects. But you'd never know that, the way most men treat their rides, would you? They name them, they coo to them, and they react like cornered grizzlies at the sight of a little scratch on the paint. And yet, in derbies, even the winners lumber out of the ring looking like beaten puppies.
(Sometimes, like here, the whole concept of "context" mysteriously vanishes out of my mind. The sight of naked breasts signals dinnertime to an infant...to an elderly cardiac patient it might be fatal. Context, Ken, context...there is a place under the sun where cars go to die...to kill each other. Okay. Let's accept this.)
Today I am able to appreciate the skill involved in piloting these wrecks around. There's a little white car in one of the six-cylinder heats that REFUSED TO DIE. Everybody teamed up against it. Parts of it were flying all over the place, and still it careened around, bashing all hell out of everybody else as if that was its sole purpose in life. Eventually it was reduced to an engine on four rims, and when it finally sputtered out and died after a particularly vicious hit--leaving its sole remaining tormentor the winner--we found out it had merely run out of gas. If a pause to refuel was allowed, I'm convinced this little white beast would still be out there, probably destroying the grandstands. Nobody said what make and model (Sherman mini-tank?) this thing was, which kind of peeved me off.
I seem to have an ability to predict, after about twenty seconds of observation, which car will emerge victorious. I'm right about three quarters of the time, and even when I'm wrong, my bet's among the last things moving. I didn't bet on Jim's car, for two reasons: one, there were bigger cars in its heat, and two, the driver didn't overly impress me, getting himself pinned almost immediately. Sure enough, that car's the third one out...and there's no 'hard luck heat', so that's the last we saw of it.
I have to admit, that was kind of fun. Still not something I'd seek out, but at least it wasn't too much of a trial to sit through. Next one for Jim is in Stratford in three weeks. Hopefully he'll have better luck.

Katrina, Part II

It is widely believed that George Herbert Walker Bush lost the presidency in large part because of his administration's pitiful failure to provide meaningful relief in the face of Hurricane Andrew.
How history repeats itself.
The outrage many feel in the face of an even more pitiful effort to relieve suffering in the wake of Katrina is not the sort of thing voters tend to forget. It's possible to bamboozle your constituents into supporting an unjust war, if you play your cards just right. After all, you can make sure nobody ever sees the thousands of coffins containing what used to be American youth and idealism. And if you talk about weapons of mass des--umm, "liberation"--often enough and loud enough, then hey, some people are bound to listen, aren't they?

But, boy George! it's hard to equivocate your way out of leaving poor black people who didn't vote for you to die.

And let's not gild the lily. That's exactly what Bush did.

Hurricane protection funding to Louisiana has been cut almost in half since 2001. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was once a prominent and very-well-funded government organization, charged with keeping the United States afloat in the event of nuclear attack. After 9/11, it was subsumed into the Department of Homeland Security and it had its funding repeatedly slashed.
Daddy Bush, in a rare concession to the environmental lobby, enacted legislation to protect the wetlands along the Gulf Coast. This policy was bolstered by President Clinton. Bush Junior overturned it all in 2003, allowing developers to rush in and remake the land in their own moneyed image. This is important because every two miles of wetland along the Gulf Coast decreases a storm surge by half a foot. A study came out in 2004 claiming that without wetland protection, New Orleans could be devatated by a relatively mild Category 1 or 2 hurricane. The Chairman of the White House's Council on Environmental Quality dismissed the study, saying "everyone loves what we're doing".

And it's not as if nobody saw Katrina coming. In October 2004, National Geographic did everything but name the storm, saying tens of thousands would die and the city would be completely paralyzed. As my previous entry noted, New Orleans has been the victim of many hurricanes over the years.

But hey, Orleans county was the only one in Louisiana to vote strongly for Kerry. So at least Bush can be comforted by the removal of thousands of Democrat-leaning voters from the rolls.


"I assume the president's going to say he got bad intelligence... I think that wherever you see poverty, whether it's in the white rural community or the black urban community, you see that the resources have been sucked up into the war and tax cuts for the rich." -- Congressman Charles B. Rangel

"Many black people feel that their race, their property conditions and their voting patterns have been a factor in the response... I'm not saying that myself, but what's self-evident is that you have many poor people without a way out." -- Rev. Jesse Jackson

"In New Orleans, the disaster's impact underscores the intersection of race and class in a city where fully two-thirds of its residents are black and more than a quarter of the city lives in poverty. In the Lower Ninth Ward neighborhood, which was inundated by the floodwaters, more than 98 percent of the residents are black and more than a third live in poverty."-- David Gonzalez, NY Times

Don't let anybody try to tell you this isn't a racial issue. The truth is there for all to see, in black and...well, mostly black.

I'm very sorry about this...

...but the buggers have found me. Due to 'comment spam', I've had to enable what's called "word verification" on comments. This means that if you wish to leave a comment, you'll need to enter a random nonsense word first. I AM STILL VERY INTERESTED IN HEARING WHAT MY READERS--the ones who aren't selling something--HAVE TO SAY. I hope you're all willing to enter a few characters and save the Breadbin from being overrun with mouldy spam.

Thanks!

Ken

Katrina

I used to love violent weather.
Back when I was single, you could fit all my possessions into the trunk of a taxicab. I did so, more than once. A few of these had sentimental value, but there was nothing I couldn't, strictly speaking, abandon in the blink of a hurricane's eye. So I would get tremendously excited whenever the weather threatened to...well, threaten. And if somebody else was getting the nasty weather, I'd hover around the Weather Network, picking up vicarious thrills. St. John's got six feet of snow yesterday! Woo-hoo!
I must hasten to admit that when the weather turned truly bad--lethal--there would be an instant and total attitude adjustment. The shell-shocked image of the family emerging from their cellar to find open air where their house used to be has a way of slapping the silly grin off a face.
The really bad weather still fascinates me, and probably always will. But that fascination is muted, now. The excitement has largely leached out of it. I'm uneasy at just how pissed off Nature seems to be of late. Has anybody on the planet seen a two-year run of perfectly normal, unremarkable weather? Droughts. Monsoons. Blizzards. Ovenish temperatures. And hurricanes.

I've followed hurricanes for years. They offer a compelling mix of extreme climatology and human psychology, the latter as interesting to me as the former. What goes through the mind of a human being who builds his home in a cyclonic bullseye, over swampland, and then stays in it, daring the wind and water to do its worst?

As Katrina skittered over Florida, a mere Category One on the Saffir-Simpson scale, it seemed safe to make jokes. 'What a great name for a hurricane', I mused. 'Katrina and the Waves.' Not exactly 'Walking on Sunshine', are we now, South Florida?
Then the Gulf got hold of Katrina and turned her into a bitch-monster. That 80s group had one other minor hit, called 'Do You Want Crying?' Well, crying we got, whether we wanted it or not.

In the hours before Katrina made her second landfall, the newscaster on Global National made a point of saying this isn't the sort of hurricane where pretty-boy newscasters go out and stand on the beach, getting blown around a bit and making stupid remarks. This is a life-or-death situation.' This was shortly followed, of course, by pretty-boy newscasters crouching behind concrete garbage cans, screaming inanities: "This is the wind of a hurricane!" Really? Whodathunkit?

New Orleans was founded in 1718 by a man named Bienville. He must have taken his name--French for, roughly, 'good-town'--seriously, because he ignored the advice of his cadre of engineers, who pleaded with him not to build on the marshy, sunken site. If only he had listened. If only Bienville could have understood how vulnerable his city would be.

The Louisiana coast is no stranger to tropical storms and hurricanes, and several of them have done damage to New Orleans in the past century. Each successive hurricane after 1947 caused an improvement to be made in the levee system. For some reason, though, by the time Katrina came ashore, the levees were only rated for a Category 3 hurricane (max 130 mph winds). This despite Camille (1965) , a Category 5 weather-bomb that narrowly missed the city proper, but still caused over $2 billion (2005 dollars) damage in Louisiana alone...and killed 258.

At practically the last minute, Katrina wobbled off to the east and weakened slightly, sparing N'awlins a direct hit from a Category 5. (This hurricane was officially a Cat-4...just barely...on landfall.)
Little good that did, as it turns out.
-----------------------------------

By now we've all seen the pictures. We've all heard anchors for various newscasts acting so very concerned, and you can just tell they're imagining their nice comfortable bed in the nice dry home that's waiting for them at the end of the day. The mayor of New Orleans dubbed Katrina 'our tsunami' and I must admit, at first that struck me as an incredibly arrogant comment. When your death toll reaches a couple hundred thousand, then you can make that comparison, okay?
Then the images started to leak out.
Damned if they didn't look eerily similar to the horrors that filled the newspapers after Boxing Day last year. And the scary thing was, most of these buildings weren't Third-World tarpaper shacks.

The death toll continues to rise. There have been stories out of New Orleans that have affected me even more strongly than did the tsunami saga. The man, stuck for three days on a roof with his dog, told he couldn't bring his friend along when rescue finally came. (I wouldn't have gone.)The dogs howling for help in abandoned and all but submerged houses. (Who would be so heartless as to leave a pet to die that way?) The poor and infirm, trapped to drown like (and with) rats in houses they were unable to leave. People actually starving to death while they wait for someone, anyone, to do something, anything. Most of these people, needless to say, are black. If a freak hurricane was ever to devastate Boston, do you think the emergency response would be a little faster? I sure do.

The litany of terrors confronting the refugees of the Gulf Coast staggers the mind. Starvation. Dehydration. Heatstroke. The much-enlarged Lake Pontchartrain is now home to industrial and human waste, hundreds of toxic chemicals, poisonous snakes, alligators, and probably ten or more potential deadly diseases. I was naive enough to imagine a death toll in the low hundreds from this. Now I think it likely we'll see tens of thousands of casualties.

Bush was on television, saying all the right things...I wonder if he's even considered bringing his soldiers home from Iraq to help. I wonder how many Southern boys from Biloxi and Gulfport and Baton Rouge and New Orleans itself are tossing and turning in Tikrit tonight. I wonder.

Meantime, survivors are pitching their own little Mardi Gras in the flooded streets, looting anything and everything they can find. I can excuse the food--in point of fact, I'd encourage everyone down there to steal any food, clothing, and medical supplies they can--but what the hell do people think they're going to do with the shiny new plasma TV they dragged home? Plug it in?

I even heard, tonight, that medics are coming under sniper fire. If that's true, I shudder for the human race.
-------------

What to do:

Donate, donate, donate. Give until it hurts, say, one thousandth as much as they're hurting. You can start by cleaning out your closet--there are millions of people on the Gulf Coast who need your clothes more than you do.
I would strongly urge our federal government to take the GST on our Katrina-elevated gas prices and donate it to the relief effort.
I'd strongly urge the oil industry to take some of the record profits they're making on our Katrina-elevated gas prices and donate them to the relief effort. (Not to bitch or anything, but with 92% of our gasoline coming from Alberta, how exactly did Katrina drive our prices up 30 cents a litre in three days? I'd really like somebody to explain this to me. If the money's going to to victims of Katrina, fine. Somehow I kind of doubt it is.)
I'd strongly urge any company with a sense of music, history, or social justice--which should be about all of them, no?-- to donate a percentage of its profits to the rebuilding effort.
I've heard cruise ships are being brought in to serve as floating hospitals. Great idea. More, please. If you had a cruise booked on the Lap of Luxury anytime in the next three months, so solly, Cholly, you've been pre-empted.

And when the streets dry out in about six months, level them. Level them all. Rebuild twenty or thirty miles inland, where New Orleans should have been all along.

As promised...

How to reform education

First of all, what I hope will be (but probably won't be) a succint statement of the problems with the educational system as it stands, teetering, today.

1) There has been a redefinition of 'education' since about 1990 that leaves little room for anything not strictly academic. I'm speaking here of music programs, visual arts programs, drama programs, even (in some schools) sports, all of which have been deemed expendable.
2) While some students, naturally, excel academically, others (also quite naturally) struggle. There is no longer any difference between the two: the struggling student advances through the system (and may graduate) every bit as easily.
3) In many respects, school fails to grab the imagination of its students. They are given no reason to learn material other than its purported intrinsic value, which is not readily apparent.
4) There is not enough value placed on the student and his/her opinions. School, in many cases, is where the teacher dictates the lesson to be learned and the conclusions to be drawn; the student sits quietly and digests it all, to be spewed back later on exams.
5) Far too high an emphasis on knowledge; very little on 'wisdom'.

There are other issues, but correcting these would probably correct those, as well.

1) "What's wrong with that? I didn't send my kid to school so she could tootle her flute or fingerpaint!"

Your child is a being with three parts: a body, a mind, and a soul (or spirit, if you like that word better). What price teaching only the mind? Surely one of the objectives of the educational system is (or should be) a well-rounded individual, wise in mind, body, and spirit?
Arts programs nourish the spirit. They develop creative thinking, encourage innermost expression, and promote self-confidence. They are also a place for the less-academically-gifted student to shine.
Speaking specifically of music programs, which I have some experience with and which always seem to be the first things on the chopping block:

An extracurricular school band--which, to be successful, requires its members to have spent some time learning their instruments in a class setting--is every bit as much a team as the school football squad. From playing together as a group, students learn essential life skills like co-operation, teamwork, fair play, and responsibility--all of which will serve them long after they've forgotten about the square of the hypotenuse. Through the language of music (or of athleticism), pupils connect with each other, join together, and overcome individuality even while expressing themselves individually. This is a powerful and positive experience.
Finally, music, art, and physical education programs may all be related to many academic fields. From analyzing trends in historical music and visual art, one may learn a great deal about a given period. Also, much great art has mathematical underpinings.
Physical education grants an understanding of the body, of its needs and requirements and how best to meet them, with, hopefully, a healthy lifespan as its end result.

2) "But if Johnny stays back a year, his self-esteem will suffer and...well, it's humiliating!"

For whom? Johnny...or his parents?

Johnny is (or should be) required to master the curriculum for each grade level before advancing. His failure to do so has (or should have) consequences, namely, that he be held back. Humiliation is a state of mind. Failure, in and of itself, is not humiliating unless Johnny chooses for it to be. And Johnny's self-esteem need not suffer one bit: in fact, success after failure is probably much more of an ego-boost than success alone.
In a truly sane educational system, it is true, there would be no grades and no grade levels. Students would progress to mastery and 'graduate' when it is achieved, be that at ten years of age or at thirty. But we are a LONG way and many paradigm shifts away from such as that. For now, grades and grade levels serve as an easy reference point for students, teachers, and parents.

3) Back in grade ten geography, we were split into teams of two or three and presented with a huge map. We were asked to devise a proposal for the laying of a power transmission line from point A at the northwest corner of the map, to point B near the southeast. A scale of costs was laid out: it would cost X dollars to build on flat ground, 2x over hilly ground, 3x through marsh, 4x underground, and so on. The map was such that there was no easy way to get from A to B. We were also given environmental impact information and instructed to bear it in mind. After spending a couple of periods forming our proposal, we then presented it and our justification for it. The students sat down and judged each proposed route, with the teacher playing devil's advocate.
What did I learn from that experience? Not much in the way of concrete fact, I'll admit. But the exercise engaged my imagination in a way that few scholastic things had or would. It was truly my first exposure to critical thinking, to juggling a myriad of factors to arrive at what you hoped was the optimum (not the correct) set.
This is the way the world works, outside of pure mathematics. There are no right or wrong answers. There is only what's beneficial and what is not--and the difference between the two may not be immediately discernable. That's an important lesson to learn.
As I recall, our proposal was not approved. It was rejected in favour of one that was slightly more expensive but which had less of an environmental downside. But we were told, afterwards, that everyone's effort had merit and that on a different day, another proposal might well have been chosen. With our ever-important self-esteem thus assuaged, we each felt proud of our work.
4) In my view, the object of education is not to blindly perpetuate the belief systems of one's elders. My opinion is that those belief systems--"survival of the fittest", "might makes right", "God is on our side", and so on--have contributed greatly to the mess our world is in today.
But that is, of course, just my opinion. What's yours? What is your child's? School doesn't even tend to touch on things like this--when the entire curriculum ought to be grounded in them. By all means, get the facts, and learn to separate fact from fiction. But go further. Use the facts to form opinions. Allow for divergent views. Present all sides of the story, not just one. Students must examine their own beliefs. They must learn to accept that others may have different beliefs, and that this does not make them "wrong".
In the grand scheme of things, who cares what the teacher thinks? What's much more important is what the students think.
5) What is wisdom? Each philosophy and spiritual tradition has formed an answer. Oddly enough, when you boil them down, many of them look pretty similar. One piece of wisdom that trancends many wildly different creeds is known as the Golden Rule: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you". This credo is almost universal: it has variants in Islam, Hinduism, Wicca, Shintoism, Native American belief, and so on and so on. Yet aside from perhaps mentioning it, our educational system doesn't explore it at all. What would be the effect on history if the Golden Rule was used at various critical points? How could one use the Golden Rule to solve some of the world's problems? What leads a person to violate such a widely held precept? Are there any exceptions to it?

This is the sort of educational system that would change the world in a positive and profound way. I believe it's the school of the future. And I do hope the future comes soon.

Going through the alphabet...

Assorted items are cluttering up my mental desk of late. I think it's time to purge. To wit:

CBC

My feelings about the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation are decidedly mixed. They can be summed up in four words: radio good, TV bad.
CBC Radio is great. I may take issue with their constant search for minorities to profile--it's the Toronto Star in audio form!--but the documentaries, the music, the news, the music, the variety, and, oh, yes, the music, make listening to the radio a civilizing, edifying experience. My favourite programs include Richardson's Roundup, Definitely Not The Opera, and the Vinyl Cafe. What these share (and what separates CBC from most anything else on the dial) is near-total unpredictability, something I find exhilarating.
CBC Radio is also unifying. They do a national call-in called Cross-Country Checkup. Its host, Rex Murphy, seems truly interested in what listeners have to say. (When our local talk-jock on CKGL wants your opinion, he'll give it to you). Through programs like this, I have heard Canadians from all corners of the country and all walks of life sound off on things that concern them. Through newscasts, I have learned of things that might be concerning my fellow Canadians tomorrow.
The ever-present anti-American bias sometimes pisses me off. But then, that bias usually reflects the considered opinion of a majority of Canadians (including, sometimes, myself!)

CBC television is a different kettle of fish entirely.
For one thing, nobody watches it. (My apologies to Corner Gas fans...just what do you find so funny about that show, anyway?) The only other hit CBC has on its hands is Hockey Night In Canada...something I'd just as soon watch on TSN. From there, it all goes downhill in a hurry. Even the venerable old National gets its anchor handed to it every night by CTV.
For another, CBC-Television can't seem to make up its mind: is it a public broadcaster or a private one? If the former, why all the commercials? If the latter, why the huge waste of tax dollars?
The head of CBC routinely tells us it's "not about the ratings", as most of their fomer ratings 'powerhouses' (a powerhouse in Canada means more than ten people watch the show...while they're awake) grow more and more stale. The Royal Canadian Air Farce, for example, used to be edgy and laugh-out-loud funny. For years now, it's been hit and miss, mostly miss. And given a choice between CSI: Timbuktu and Da Vinci's Inquest, sixty-three out of sixty-four Canadians will tune in Da Vinci just long enough to discover Dan Brown didn't write it.
In the ever-evolving 500-channel universe, CBC-Television is a brown dwarf. Sad to say, since the younger generation increasingly has no time for radio, CBC-Radio may just follow it into a black hole.

G.G.

Let me first say that I have never met Michaelle Jean, our newest Governor General, and therefore have no idea what sort of person she is. I have nothing against the woman personally; having an ardent Quebec separatist for a husband shouldn't really detract from whatever it is Jean brings to whatever it is Governors-General do.
Count me amongst the Canadian Republicans--those who believe it's long past time to throw off the British yoke. Does it not seem odd that our head of state lives and works an ocean away? In this increasingly multicultural country (and we've all been trained by the CBC to accept this as a Good Thing), how does it serve us to bow down, even hypothetically, to Britain?
Adrienne Clarkson showed us just what it was Governors-General are good for: flinging around prodigious amounts of tax dollars. If you're going to waste a few million dollars, why not at least throw it into the maw of the health care monster? Then at least people will believe it will accomplish something.
All that said, if we absolutely have to have a Governor General, if the country will fall apart without one, couldn't it at least be someone who is a citizen of Canada, only? It seems strange to have a dual citizen of France representing the British Crown. Vaguely treasonous.


RRR

The fabled three Rs, only one of which begins with R, an example of irony worthy of Alanis, no?
Gerard Kennedy, our provincial education minister and an N-dipper in Grit clothing, believes that high school students have it rough. Due to a 45% increase in dropout rates that accompanied the Mike Harris-era curriculum, Kennedy wants to dumb down our high schools.
Memo to Mr. Food Bank: Ontario is still producing high school graduates who are functionally illiterate; who have no idea how to parse a sentence or even what "parse a sentence" means; who can't do simple arithmetic without the use of a machine. Robert Heinlein, in his excellent collection Expanded Universe, does a fine job of arguing that a public school graduate, ca. 1900, was better-educated than many of today's high school grads. Thanks to the insane policy that keeps students plowing through the system in spite of failing grades (the better to spare their self-esteem), it's possible to graduate high school with a grade nine or ten education, such as that may be.
The absolute last thing we need is an easier curriculum. If anything, it should be harder still. Every effort should be made to keep students ahead of the curve, of course, but it should also be recognized that some will fall behind, that some people's talents are not academic in nature.

That'll be my next blog: how to reform the educational system. Wait for it.

The Great $1.00 Sale

That should be "g-r-a-t-e", as in what our teeth do every time we hear there's one of these suckers coming.

Look, people. They're chickens. That's all they are. And just because we have whole chickens on for $1 a pound doesn't give you the right to (a) snatch them out of other customers' hands; (b) run your cart into displays or customers out of sheer frustration that they got a chicken and you didn't; (c) engage in fisticuffs to the point where the police must be summoned.

I LOATHE these sales, the ones they put on every six to eight weeks or so, the ones that have some variant of "$1.00" in their titles. (The ones that have titles!) They draw new people into our store--which you'd think would be a good thing--but these new people are usually what we call 'cherry-pickers': customers who buy nothing but flyer items and thus cost, rather than make, the store money.
Even the cherry-pickers would be tolerable if they weren't so effing RUDE.

This was billed as the sale to end all sales. In fact, we extended our hours of operation for this one: we opened at 7 a.m. last Saturday. Head office, in its infinite wisdom, put this information on the back of the flyer, where very few people would find it (not that putting it on the front page would have done much better...in this postliterate world, we get at least one person a week walking right through the sign that says EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY ALARM WILL SOUND). Nobody reads anymore. They read numbers, to be sure: I keep a pocket full of pennies to dispense to the customers who are so very quick to notice when they're being overcharged by two cents. But words? Strung together in sentences like

"WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO LIMIT PURCHASE QUANTITIES TO REASONABLE FAMILY REQUIREMENTS"

--naw. Too many syllables. Wanna look at pictures instead.

Okay, so here's one: a picture of a cart loaded down with Fruitopia chilled 1.89-litre juice cartons--at least 40 of them. Circle the cart. Now put a BIG RED LINE through it.

Look, I don't care what size "family" (store) you're buying this for. They don't MAKE refrigerators that big for domestic use, okay? I've got a fridge over there that'll hold what you think you're going to be allowed to buy. It's a walk-in. We're not that stupid here. And this is not a warehouse. Bitch all you want, it won't change anything.

I don't get people. I know, I've said this before. But really. Our frozen Fruitopia retails for 97 cents...every day. Yet people routinely go apeshit when the chilled stuff is on for $1.00. Convenience, they say, looking at me as if I'm a moron. Oh really. But you have to freeze the chilled cartons if you're going to buy them in bulk like that. How convenient is that, hmm?

Over in dry grocery, one of the specials is Scooby-Doo "cereal" for $1.00. The regular price on this "cereal" is $4.17. Now, head office didn't do us any favours here--for some reason, the damn stuff was out of stock on the second delivery of the ad, meaning we got none beyond our initial set-up until after the weekend's business was over. The chain newsletter resounded with cries of "Scooby-Doo, where are you?" Beyond the first couple of hours on Saturday, we had to constantly remind customers that if we had a choice, we'd have all the breakfast candy in the world for them to feed to their already hyperactive children. (Well, we cleaned that up a bit, but the sentiment holds.) Unfortunately for all concerned, the choice is not ours.

People don't understand this. They think that everything is always within our control, when in the real world, very little is. The retail model has shifted over the past decade or so to "just in time" inventory control. In the name of efficiency, you're supposed to order just enough stock to make it to your next delivery. Everything is built with this in mind: the backroom is just so big, the damned dairy cooler is just so SMALL! If you build in too much of a buffer, you're going to have to deal with the logistics of where to put it all--or you might not get all you ordered, on the basis that head office knows better than you what you're going to sell. If other stores increase their orders beyond what the warehouse has in stock, then the warehouse has to procure more product and find a cost-efficient way to get it to that store--something easier bitched about than done.
By and large, this system works...if everything falls together just right, and if we all know what we're doing. I pride myself on knowing what I'm doing, but I'm human and fallible and I'm really sorry we're out of Eggo waffles for $1.00. More will be in at 2:07 today--at least that's what we're told--but anything can hold that up. Weather. Traffic. Waiting for deliveries at other stores. Improper loading by unionized warehouse workers who don't care whether your product arrives in one piece or not...so it arrives all over the trailer and has to be picked up and repiled. Stuff like that.

We've been circling around the meat department here, stealing glances at the mayhem. Now we'll just wade on in, okay? Don your jock...you're gonna need it.

The chain reserved a whack of chickens for this sale several months ago. The sale was known about only at the highest levels until August 12th or so. The secrecy was so pervasive, you'd think our lead item was the final installment of Harry Potter at $1.00 a pound, but no--it was whole chickens. To better ensure the competition didn't get hold of this and pre-empt us somehow, head office did all the pre-books...and they woefully underestimated how crazy Ontarians are for their chickens.
I'll give you some stats that don't breach confidentiality: one, our store alone has sold 12% of what was budgeted for an 80-plus store chain; two, we've sold not much more than 12% of what we could have sold if we'd had an unlimited supply. To have the kind of unlimited supply we'd need, however, we would have to back a tractor-trailer loaded with chickens up to our receiving door and run it day and night to keep the chickens cold. Of course, receiving anything else (milk, bread, eggs, etc) would be out of the question for a week.
To put it another way, we sold 400 chickens in less than 20 minutes. A middle-aged cunt (sorry, ladies, "cunt" is really le mot juste in this case) grabbed a bag of chicken from an elderly lady's hands--right out of her hands!--whereupon the elderly lady turned and spat "I hope you choke on it!" A deadly serious game of bumper carts ensued whenever a load of chickens arrived. Seriously, your jaws just drop watching this. And the store across town had to call the police when an all-out brawl broke out in their meat department. Over chickens. You're not sure whether you should laugh or cry. Or scream.
Or maybe just sigh in relief as Friday passes and the ad is over. Now we've got...oh-oh, Pizza Premiers at $2.97.

Here we go again.

On guns

Those who know me know how strongly I feel about guns. If there were a National Stifle The Rifle Agency, I'd be its Charlton Heston. I've been forced to re-examine those beliefs in the bloody wake of all the gun homicides in Toronto this year.
Nearly every weekend the gunfire erupts, sometimes only injuring people, but often--31 times this year often--killing them. One death gets a mention in the papers; 31 seems to have had some actual effect on Toronto politicians and police officers.
The chief, Bill Blair, has taken steps: formerly deskbound senior officers will now be out walking a beat. Not sure what exactly that will accomplish: in the gang-banger mentality, they're just (pardon the crudity) more pigs to the slaughter...not to mention that five or ten years driving a desk can't be good for one's street sense.
Blair's 'community policing' initiatives involve such things as police-teenager basketball games in what used to be called 'slums' and 'ghettos' but are now referred to as 'disadvantaged areas'. These are supposed to convince the yowwens that the police are their friends before the gangbangers can lure them in with the MTV lifestyle (live hard, die harder). My sense is the gangstas have a real edge here: they've got popular culture to back them up. The entertainment industry seems to have made a concerted effort over the past twenty years or so to convince people that murder is cool. I can't figure out why, but, what the hell, it's worked.
Perhaps the community policing approach is effective. It certainly seems Canadian, doesn't it?
Inclusive, tolerant, urban peacekeeping. There's no hard data, though. There can't be. How are you supposed to track all the people that might have murdered others, but didn't? The might-haves just don't show up in the records.
I'll tell you what approach does work: 'broken-window' policing. Before 9/11, Rudolph Giuliani was most known for his direction in this area. The basic premise is: if you arrest people for petty offenses (pissing in the street, breaking windows, and so on), you won't see as many bigger offenses (drug dealing, murder). The crackdown on the little stuff has reduced New York City's crime rate dramatically, to the point where I'd feel safer in Times Square on a Friday night than I would at Yonge and Dundas. And I never thought I'd say that.
One problem, though, and it's a doozie. As long as we have appointed, rather than elected, judges in this country, no amount of policing will accomplish a damned thing. I can't prove this, but I strongly believe prospective judges are partially lobotomized. How else to explain the insane sentence fragments? Jared shoots Raul in the head. Raul dies. Because Jared comes from a 'disadvantaged area', he gets a year in jail followed by two years of probation. If Jared also killed Rafar, by all means, slap an extra six months on his term. That'll learn him!
What kind of world are we living in, people? Let's take back our courts! Let's take back our streets!
The politicians have some ideas to that end. Mayor Miller believes that we need to lock up everybody's gun in some central repository, as if criminals had a hard time getting guns in their hands as it is now.
The gun control freak in me loves the idea. Yep: lock 'em all up. Better yet, destroy 'em. Once that's done, you'll stop hearing those news reports about all the break-ins. You know, the ones where people break into homes at random until they find guns, which they then use to go on a shooting ramp...
What was that? You haven't heard any stories like that?
Well, that's because there haven't been any, but let's not let Mayor Miller in on that, okay? The sky is so nice and pink in his world.
Shhh...the guns plaguing Toronto streets are almost all unregistered and most of them have never been in law-abiding hands. Miller's right on one thing, though: many of them come from the States. Several years ago, I read that the going rate was one pound of marijuana for one sub-machine gun.
We have to make a real dent in this river of lead before the violence can abate. I'm not sure how, exactly, to do this. But I would suggest that Ottawa divert a large part of its anti-terrorism budget (or better yet, increase it) to fight this...well, terrorism. Does it really matter if the terrorists use bullets instead of bombs?

Where were you when the lights went out?

I remember where I was.
I had just left work. A good thing for me, too: whenever the power goes out in a grocery store for more than a minute, everyone on hand scurries into action. The tills have just enough backup power to process whatever customer is in line: after that, we shut down, and everyone on hand scurries for huge sheets of plastic wrap to insulate the bunkers, the frozen deck, the dairy wall, the deli wall, and the produce wet cases. It's a lot of work, and I had unwittingly missed it by a matter of minutes.
I'd missed my bus, too, it turned out. No problem: I had to pick up some ears of corn, among other things, from Zehrs down the road on my way home. Groceries in hand, I was to take a cab home from there.
If decent ears of corn were to be had in my own store, I would have been in line at the express till when the dark hit. But our warehouse had (and has) an awful habit of sending us swill to sell, and our corn at that time was markedly substandard. So: Zehrs.
As I approached the plaza, I noted with a mixture of chagrin and great glee that their power was out: a crowd of had-been and would-be customers was milling around the entrance doors, which were propped open. The chagrin was obvious: I now had little choice but to go home emptyhanded, since I didn't have enough cab fare for a detour or a stopover. The glee--well, less than two weeks prior, Glenridge Plaza had lost power for the better part of a day because somebody had dug where they shouldn't have. That had been a Saturday, the busiest grocery shopping day of the week, and we had reaped a good deal of Zehrs Glenridge's business. Now it appeared to have happened again. Ha.
Undeterred, I made for the direct phone in the lobby. It took something like fourteen rings for Waterloo Taxi to pick up. Having worked at 7-Eleven in Waterloo and called them on numerous occasions, this didn't strike me as at all unusual. But what the dispatcher had to say when she finally came on the line certainly did.
"I'd like to send a cab out for you, sir, but I can't...our radio systems work on electricity and our power's out."
Hmm. Waterloo Taxi's call centre was downtown, several klicks from here. Well--with no groceries to lug, Plan B as in "bus" was still feasible.
The bus, by my sense of time, was several minutes late...and packed. I picked up snatches of conversation right and left.
"...mom says her power's out in Cambridge, too..."
"Ellie? Hon? I'm on my way home but this damn bus is running late..."
"blackout..."
At every stop, people and rumours crowded on, until the air was thick with the overlaid reeks of summertime armpit and rampant speculation. Somebody had called their dad in Detroit: his power was out. Somebody else said her cousin in New York was in the dark too. It took less then four stops before the word "terrorists" had been uttered. In the wake of 9/11, anything bad was obviously the work of terrorists, right?
I have to admit to a sense of trepidation at the thought that al-Qaeda had somehow masterminded this. It was a brilliant opening salvo: deprive people of the one thing they can't survive without, then...
What?
What next?
It took me almost two hours to make the half-hour trip home...I could have made it faster on foot, but I'd already walked a fair piece and it was, as usual, hotter than the hinges of hell outside. I couldn't give up my seat, even if the guy next to me smelled like candied skunk and every word out of every mouth was unnerving me further.
After greeting Eva and explaining my tardiness and lack of groceries, I made a mad dash for our car out in the parking lot...more specifically, for the radio in it. As always when confronted with the unknown, I turned to 680 News in Toronto. Within ten minutes, I was up to speed. No terrorist attack, thank God. No idea when the power would come on again, either.

The rest of that evening passed in a sweltering misery. No way to cook; no Web to surf; no synthesizer to play...not even any light to read by, after a time. Most unpleasantly, no fans. The one thing we had in abundance was sweat. I entertained thoughts of frying up a few eggs on my wife's back. The hard realities come back when the lights go out: we were hooked right through the bag to our electricity habit, just like everyone else. True, Eva could survive indefinitely without power--Eva can survive just about anything short of a direct hit with an H-bomb. Her breadth and depth of knowledge about anything survival-oriented is legendary. But much of the enjoyment would leach out of life right quick if this went on.

Unbeknownst to us, there were places not all that far away that had power. Much of the Niagara region was only out for two hours; Listowel, half an hour northwest of us, got their power back at 9 p.m. Our lights came on at 4:00, waking us out of a thin sleep populated by sweaty demons.

Work the next day was not fun. $35,000 worth of product was tossed. Thanks to well-insulated fridges and freezers, we were lucky that's all we lost. It wasn't covered by insurance, of course. After nearly a year, it was decided that since the blackout was caused outside Ontario, they didn't have to pay up. Big shock there.

We've since come whiskers away from another blackout on more than one occasion. It will happen again: what with our aging transmission grid and our ever-increasing energy gluttony, it has to. Within the next year, we plan on picking up that solar-rechargeable generator Canadian Tire sells. It's the kind of thing that might sit for two or three years, unused and almost forgotten, and then become suddenly indispensable.

We do not inherit the Earth from our parents: we borrow it from our children.
--Saint Exupery

Nukes.
They scare me.
Well, they scare anyone sensible...or at least they should.
The skyrocketing price of oil has not affected us overmuch as of yet. Our Toyota Echo, at today's prices, costs less than $35.00 to fill from fumes. I saw this coming, you see.
Oh, but it will affect us. It will affect us all. If I'm right, you're going to see grocery prices next year that will turn your hair white. Because nearly everything is shipped by truck...and trucks use gas.
Why is oil going up so fast?
Oh, a whole variety of reasons--it seems they can manufacture reasons to line their pockets faster than they can manufacture oil itself. But this time, at least one of the excuses is a full-fledged reason...and a frightening one.
Iran has decided to restart their nuclear program. If anyone objects too loudly to that fait accompli, well, they'll just shut off their oil.

Our oil addiction: it scares me. Almost as much as nukes do. Combine the two in any way and you have a recipe for a nightmare.

Now, I'd love to call Iran's bluff: advise them to cease and desist, and warn them of the following consequences if they don't: they would receive forty-eight hours notice to evacuate their nuclear facilities and surrender any fissionable material, after which point a bomb would be dropped.
Unfortunately, we're still in the oil hammerlock and we need every spare drop the world, including Iran, can supply. In fact, we may need more than that: we may have reached what's called Hubbert's Peak.
Dr. M. King Hubbert (1903-1989) predicted, along about 1956, that American oil production would peak in the early 1970s. People laughed at him until his prediction came true.
He also predicted that world oil production would peak in 1995. He was off by at least a decade, due to technological advances that allowed extraction of oil it had once been impossible to see, let alone reach. Barring a deus clambering out of some unforeseen machina, though, Hubbert's Peak is surely drawing very near. And once we reach it, all bets--except that of rapid and explosive world change--are off.
I'd like to think--and I'm nearly cynical enough to believe--that the oil companies have our salvation buried in some vault someplace and are simply milking every last penny they can out of 'black gold'. I would not-so-respectfully suggest that if there's a cat in the bag, now would be about the time to let it out. It will take time to perfect whatever's going to replace oil.
In the meantime, George W. Bush has said that 'nothing is off the table' as far as dealing with Iran's intransigence. Please, God, let this be resolved peacefully and quickly, because if, heaven forbid, America attempts to engage Iran while still embroiled in Iraq, it will very quickly find itself fighting a Hydra. If they thought terrorists rallied to Iraq, they ain't seen nothin' yet.

In the 1950s, it was widely believed that World War III, involving at the very least a limited nuclear exchange, was five or at most ten years off. It was a given: people developed a fatalistic attitude about it. The 1960s brought an evolution in mass culture which people look back on now with amusement...but which probably played a large part in postponing Armageddon.
Mission accomplished, we grooved through the '70s and indulged ourselves in the '80s. The '90s saw a return to nihilism, most notably expressed through popular music. We've now come full circle.
The younger generation courts death in a myriad of ways with full foreknowledge and a wink in its eye. The nuclear boogeyman has shambled back into his closet, occasionally pushing the door open a crack but mostly staying hidden. He's been replaced by a whole slew of boogeymen, most of them products of our own ruinous behaviour.

It would benefit us all to recognize these boogeymen, and take responsibility for them.

If we continue along this path we are making for ourselves, we shall soon find its end...and I don't think we'll like the view from the top of that particular cliff.

Is it really only Wednesday?!

Stop the world, I wanna get off!

Last Friday--only six days ago!--we got the call. Our air conditioner was FINALLY in.

Yes, I know, not all that long ago I wrote that the mere act of using an air conditioner smacked of selfishness. And it does. However, this summer has smacked us in the face...forty-seven times now. That's the number of nights the outside temperature has failed to drop below 20 degrees. And we've had about enough.
We have been waiting six weeks for this portable air conditioner. The demand is so high that they had to make more of them. In fact, we've visited Wal-Mart and Canadian Tire and even stooped so low as to go into a Zellers. No air conditioners. No fans, either, in two of those places.
The Brick had what looked like a good one online, so we went in to buy it. As the signature hit the sales receipt, we were informed of the (ahem) four week wait.

Nice.

Four weeks passed, wiltfully. With two days to go and us sweating out the minutes, the call came: they weren't ready...it'd be another two weeks.

Nicer.

That brought us to last Friday. And on Saturday, we went to pick it up.

It's a behemoth...the warehouse workers are quite certain it won't fit into our Echo. Harold, not for the first time, proves them wrong...although it *is* a very tight fit.

So we get it home and put it in our library Once it's in place, setting it up is actually much easier than setting up a window one. You still need an intake and exhaust vented to the outside. These are big monster hoses along the lines of a dryer hose. They connect to a vertical slat that rests in your window, with the exhaust hose venting to the top (so the heat rises away from the intake.)
It's very powerful, and has dehumidifier and fan settings.

It also leaks.

Yes, I know, all air conditioners leak, especially if you set them too high and they freeze up. But this one is leaking from someplace it shouldn't: the back right corner, at a join.
I first noticed something wrong about two hours after we turned it on. I went up to check and see how cool it was. It was blessedly cool...a far cry from the 29 degrees that the display was reading. (When I'd first turned it on, the room temperature was 23, and it felt decidedly cooler than that.) So I looked at the thing a little more closely and noticed a big wet spot underneath it.

Oh, joy.

There are two tanks, an internal water tank that functions to keep the coils cool and the external tank at the back that you pull out and empty. Both tanks were bone dry--which I figure may explain the "thermomistat" malfunction. But I have no idea why it's leaking, except Murphy's Law and the knowledge that everything you buy involving water in any way at all leaks. (I've yet to hear about anyone installing a dishwasher without creating at least one lake in their kitchen in the process.)

I was actually surprised they didn't make me bring the damn thing back. They're delivering a replacement this Friday.

I would have told you all this Monday night, dear blog, but my computer died.
It's all of four months old: the last thing I expected it to do was freeze solid...and upon a hard reboot, inform me my hard drive was missing. But it did just that, and with a smirk on its face, too. Tech support told me my hard drive was defective (d'ya think?) and I should bring it back for a replacement.
So off to MDG it went. Of course, after a day's testing, they called me to let me know that nothing was wrong. Everything checked out fine. They had no problem booting it up. I explained to them--again--what had happened to me...we hemmed and hawed, and they allowed as how a connection might have been dodgy.

Fixed now.

We hope.

In between all that, a very successful yard sale (which in itself entailed a lot of work). Eva got a fairly large dragon tattoo on her right shoulder: a grey dragon with blue eyes, gaurding a clutch of four eggs. One egg contains a lightning bolt, to symbolize me (my love of weather); the second contains a paw print, which denotes Eva's love of animals; the third has a drop of water because Eva would live in the water if she could. The fourth egg is empty, symbolizing the child we almost had.
She had it done at Tora Tattoo (www.toratattoo.com) --and they did a magnificent job.

That's just our week. Several friends of ours have had weeks much, much worse.

And I have to work this Saturday because we're running the biggest ad in the history of the chain. Details on that later--they won't be pretty.

It's do or diet...

It has begun.
For several years now, we've gradually 'healthied' up our diet. In my case, when Eva met me, it couldn't have been much worse. We took things slowly, figuring that a shock treatment would be actively unpleasant. First we eliminated white bread. After about a week, I no longer missed it; after a month I found myself preferring whole wheat (and try telling that to me as a kid!) Now, I find white bread pasty and tasteless.
We've veered back and forth on margarine and butter, following conflicting advice. Yes, butter is fattier, but at least there are only two ingredients in it (one if it's unsalted) and both of them are simple monosyllables that don't require a degree in chemistry to decipher.
I joined the crowd in stepping down from 2% to 1% milk. Ten years ago, 2% outsold 1% by more than two to one; now, they're nearly equal sellers. Then I took it one step further and tried skim. Well, one has to draw the line somewhere, and I draw mine at milkwater. Luckily, there's Natrel filtered milk: the skim tastes just like 1%.
We added vegetables. Now, don't get me wrong: a produce manager I am not. If someone lined up ten vegetables at random out of a good-sized produce department, I'd be lucky to correctly identify half of them. But simple salads became a regular part of our suppers. Granted, head lettuce is pretty much empty calories...but not many of them!
All of this combined healthy eating, coupled with the moderate amount of exercise I get--mostly, admittedly, at work--did its job. I stopped gaining weight.
But didn't lose any.
Nope, excepting the daily vagaries of--how does one phrase this in a genteel fashion?--the bowels, I've maintained the same damn weight for going on five years. And that weight, sad to say, isn't exactly healthy.
"Hey! I'm in shape! Round is a shape!"
Except I'm not in shape, and haven't been for about fifteen years now. I've never had flexibility and likely never will, but even so, I don't recall tying my shoelaces to be such a...gasp...gasp...chore when I was in my early teens. You know it's time to do something when you're out of breath from hardly moving.
"I've got the body of a god...too bad it's the Buddha."
It came time to re-examine our eating habits. What we realized was that we were eating portions far too large for our routine...particularly of carbohydrates. Mmmmm, carbs. Potatoes and pasta and rice and bread and--is there anything out there carby I don't like?
Eva has been advised by our doctor that for a woman of her size and metabolic rate (that being: "very large" and "in reverse") , a low-carb diet is the way to go. She's toyed with it before, but never really dedicated herself to it for any serious length of time. After awhile, you starting dreaming of spaghetti and waking up on a vast and scrumptious pillow of mashed potatoes. Eventually, you give in to temptation and poof! there goes your diet.
Now, we're trying again, on a modified Atkins plan, and we're adhering strictly to it for two weeks. (Well, Eva's thinking beyond that--like forever--but I'll forego my french fries two weeks at a time, thank you...) I figure if we notice results in that time--and the opinion of medical science is that we certainly will--then we'll be motivated to stay the course and skip the courses.
Eva announced her intentions at her work, and added that I would be joining her on this diet. From what she said, I've become something of a wonder around her office. I can't think why.
She reports the general consensus to be 'if I went on a diet, I'd be lucky if my husband didn't specifically demand I cook him all the foods I'm not supposed to eat, and then smack his lips over them. Join me?! Never!'
Yup...sounds like some people have shitty husbands.
Okay, first of all, it's not like I'm one of those people who goes to gyms. (Those people, in case you didn't know, are defined as "people who do not need to go to gyms.") Seriously. You ever seen anybody truly fat at Expressfit? They kick you off the weights, and never mind that you used to be a bodybuilder and you can still bench-press two of the human twigs they use for instructors.
So--hey, I've got weight to lose. A good fifty pounds of it. There's a good reason to join my wife right there.
And even if I was whipsaw-thin and had a 12-pack of abs, am I so callous and cruel as to (a) eat all the stuff my wife can't; (b) in front of her; and (c) force her to cook it for me? No, sir, no, ma'am, I am not.
Not to mention...I'm lazy. I don't want to cook all my own food. Hobson's choice: I go on this diet and reap the benefits.
One final note. There must have been ten people at my work who gleefully announced that Atkins has gone bankrupt...due to the fact the low-carb fad has passed. I'm supposed to derive from this that low-carb diets don't work and that I'm doomed before I start.
It's true that the Atkins company has declared bankruptcy, but it does not follow that the diet itself is somehow bankrupt. Fact is, there remain many low-carb diets out there: the G.I. index, the Zone, South Beach, SugarBusters, Protein Power...all of them variations on a theme by Atkins.
I'll tell you what's really happened: a whole host of companies jumped on the low-carb bandwagon, came out with a whole host of low-carb products...all of them cheaper than Atkins. (Which isn't to say "cheap".) Atkins couldn't compete.
And while it is true that fewer people are on a low-carb diet now than were a year ago...to me, that merely points out that people love their carbohydrates. Nobody ever said this would be easy. But the doctor says it will be worthwhile.
That's good enough for me.