Election follies (I)

The Ontario election campaign is in full riot mode all around me. I know negative campaign ads work, but boy, I wish they didn't. McGuinty's getting hammered left and right (on the right, it's a literal hammer: every Conservative commercial features at least three panes of glass breaking, each symbolizing a broken promise).
The thing is, I knew long ago that I wouldn't be voting for Dalton McGuinty. I almost voted for him last time. He seemed so sincere when he said "I won't raise your taxes, but I won't cut them either. Our schools and hospitals need every penny of that money." Wow, I thought. That sounds so honest! In an election campaign! That's probably the first honest statement I've heard since Kim Campbell's infamous "An election is no time to discuss serious issues."

(Incidentally, the same John Tory that's currently running for the Premiership of Ontario ran that campaign for Campbell. He was behind possibly the most notorious attack ad in Canadian political history, making fun of Chretien's facial disfigurement. That alone probably cost Campbell the election: as it was, she ran the Conservatives into the ground.)

As I was saying, I won't, can't, vote for McGuinty. To do so would be to ignore countless broken promises, not the least of which was the biggest tax hike in this province's history, enacted almost immediately. I could almost hear the guy laughing. Suckers. That'll teach ya to listen to politicians!

There are (or at least I'd like to think there are) a few million more like me out here. And all of us would like to know where to park our vote. We don't need to be reminded that Norman Bates (he really does look like Norman Bates) lied with nearly every word. What we, the electorate, need is a reason to vote for somebody.

I, personally, will not vote NDP. Probably ever. While I agree with their outlook on many social issues, I'd honestly like to keep my job. You want a reason not to vote New Democrat? Toronto's city council is run by a bunch of dips, er, Dippers. The city's nearly bankrupt and all they can do is whine and moan about all the money they're not getting from other levels of government. God forbid they'd ever look at trimming the obscene amount of fat clogging their administrative arteries.

Normally, I'd vote for Tory's Tories, but the only plank of their platform the media's seen fit to show me amidst all the McGuinty bashing concerns funding for faith-based schools. Separation of church and state, anyone? I don't even think the Catholic school board ought to be publicly funded. At least one Catholic agrees with me: there was a letter to the editor of the Kitchener-Waterloo Record the other day basically stating that parents shouldn't be expecting schools to teach religion...that's what parents and churches are for. How many kids attending Catholic school go with their parents to a Catholic church every Sunday? Not a whole hell of a lot.

Does Tory have more to offer? Probably. But where is it? I want to see his mug on my TV telling me what he'll do for the province, not what McGuinty failed to do. (Then again, given that Dalton laid out some two hundred promises, then did his damnedest to break every one of them (hell, he broke his promise to close our coal-fired electricity generation stations, what, twice? Three times?--maybe it's not a good idea to promise anything at all.)

Anyway, since the media have been rather remiss at letting me know where everybody stands, I've had to go a-hunting. Behold, the fruits of my labour:

Liberal Party platform


Conservative Party platform

The NDP platform does not seem to be out yet. For reference, their site is here.

Finally, the Green Party.

As I've said before, I'm pretty sure I'll be voting Green. It's admittedly a wasted vote, as they have no hope of forming a government, but I like much of what I've seen from Frank DeJong. His campaign vehicles are a bicycle, a Prius, and public transit. That may smack of gimmickry to you. To me, it says this guy puts his money where his mouth is. I would urge everyone, even if you have no intention of voting for this party, to at least go look at what you're rejecting. Because unlike the other two parties running against McGuinty's Liberals, the Green Party has next to no budget and is again being shut out of the televised debates. This last is criminal, as far as I'm concerned...and I'd say that even if it was the Communist Party of Ontario that was garnering ten percent of the vote each election. Trust me, the day this party's allowed to play with the big boys, their popularity will spike.

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We're not just having an election here in Ontario, we're having a referendum on how future elections will be conducted. Details, for those who care, are here.

In brief, we're being asked to consider whether we should stick with our first-past-the-post system or move to something called Mixed-Member Proportional. This would give you two votes in any election: one for an MPP, conducted exactly as it is now, and the other for a political party. This second vote would basically ensure that each party's percentage of the seats more or less lines up with their percentage of the vote, something that never happens now.
One reason I like this system is that it allows me to elect a local member whom I feel is doing (or would do) a good job...and vote for a party which may not be the same party my local member represents.

Anyway, I know all this stuff is fantastically boring to non political junkies. And completely irrelevant to those of my readers outside this province. Please forgive me, folks. I promise to write on something more universal next time out. And unlike a certain Liberal premier, I keep my promises.

On Racism

I'm racist.
I suspect most of us--probably close to all of us--are. As the musical Avenue Q so trenchantly points out,

Everyone's a little bit racist, sometimes.
Doesn't mean we go around committing hate crimes.
Look around and you will find
no one's really color-blind.
Maybe it's a fact we all should face:
Everyone makes judgments based on race.
Not big judgments, like who to hire or who to buy a newspaper from...
No, just little judgments like thinking that Mexican busboys should learn to speak goddamn English!

I got to thinking about this early this morning as my wife was doing her monthly Snopes run....checking out all the various hoaxes and urban legends that have cropped up lately, the better to debunk all those people who go around believing everything they see on the Internet.
Anyway, she found a reference to the Jena Six.
If you're American, I imagine you've heard all about this incident. I'm Canadian: this was the first I'd ever heard of it.

A rough and dirty synopsis: a black student asked permission from the high school principal to sit under "the white tree"--a place at Jena High School unofficially reserved for whites--which was granted. The next morning, three nooses were found hanging from the tree. The white students who had placed the nooses there were recommended for expulsion, but received three days' suspension instead. Needless to say, this inflamed an already delicate situation. Racial tensions mounted, culminating in several fights.
In one of these, a gun was apparently pulled by a white student. He was immediately disarmed by several black youths, who refused to return the gun; one was charged with theft, robbery, and disturbing the peace. No charges were laid against the white youth.

Three days later (December 1, 2006), a white student was heard 'bragging' about the previous Friday's events. Five or six black youths converged on him, punching him, throwing him to the ground, and kicking him repeatedly. The white student suffered a mild concussion but was able to attend a school function that evening. Six black youths were arrested. Their charges started out as aggravated assault, were subsequently elevated to attempted second-degree murder. So far, three of the six accused have had their charges reduced to aggravated battery and conspiracy to commit aggravated battery. In American law, this charge requires the use of a deadly weapon. The prosecution argued that tennis shoes fit that bill.
As of today, one of the youths has been found guilty and faces up to 22 years in prison. This despite conflicting eyewitness testimony as to whether he was even involved. Also, his public defender didn't call a single witness in his defense.

I meant to keep that short. But it's hard when nearly every sentence exposes such sickening, vicious racism.

Like I said, I'm racist. I have a racist streak in me that's been known to mutter to itself whenever it's confronted with stuff I find foreign. Urban music. People yammering away in front of me in languages that aren't English or French. That cloying curry scent in Pakistani grocery stores. Anything can trigger it, really.
But mutter is all it does, and never aloud.
Most of us here in Canada are similar, I think. Immigrants will tell you racism exists here in spades, but it's covert, rarely in-your-face. The kind of virulent racism that, judging from the Jena Six fiasco, still seems to be endemic in certain parts of the United States, is almost unheard of here. (Almost: Montreal has a recurring problem with anti-Semitism that occasionally flares up into violence.)
By and large racism in Canada has been socially engineered down to manageable levels. I'm not sure it can be weeded out entirely; it's almost as if there's a gene that reacts unfavourably to foreign people and practices. But I'd like to think that pretty much every Canadian would read that account of the Jena Six and recoil in disgust. Certainly I'd imagine our justice system would deal with this case entirely differently.

In some ways, it might be argued we've gone too far: any attempt to quantify, let alone control, the crime wave in certain predominantly black areas of Toronto is met with accusations of rampant racism. Even mentioning that a suspect is black is cause for concern to some people. I've always felt that crime is crime, whether its perpetrator is black, white or polka-dotted...and I'd go so far as to say that any polka-dotted group of people committing a large number of crimes is doing its fellow polka-dots no service.
For this I'd be castigated as racist in some quarters, which I find ridiculous: I'm not the one committing the crimes, after all.

This whole issue ties into that topmost of Canadian values: tolerance. Christian fundamentalists (we have them here too: thankfully, in much smaller numbers) have been known to say Canadians as a group are tolerant of all but the intolerant. That's not entirely true: we're tolerant even of people who believe we should be dead. If we ever see a successful terrorist attack on Canadian soil, the sense of betrayal from all those uber-tolerant individuals will suffuse the entire country.

What other country besides overly tolerant Canada would accept the Bloc Quebecois forming "Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition"? In some places this political party would be hung for high treason.

(I've become convinced over the years that Quebec, aside from a few hard-core sovereigntists, has no intention whatever of actually separating. The threat--at ebb tide now, but it'll return, mark my words--is merely an extraordinarily successful tool for political blackmail. Certain other provinces are beginning to pick up on this. Alberta's known it for a while now; Newfoundland has discovered it over the past few years. None of this bodes well for our Confederation.)

Naw, we're tolerant even of intolerance...to a point. We've made allowances for our petty racisms, homophobias, sexisms, and whatever else might be fogging remote corners of our collective brain. But the minute that intolerance is given official sanction, be it by Church or State, the vast majority of us recognize it and rebel.

We're certainly, as a group, not prepared to tolerate abuses of justice like we're seeing in Jena, Louisiana.

School Daze

Teacher, teacher, listen well
My lessons all to you I'll tell
And when my day at school is through
I'll know more than aught I knew.
--Anonymous

Today's the first day of school for many children of all ages. I'd know this just from a look around our neighbourhood, which has shed its summer torpor and become a bustling hive of activity and garbage generation. There are many tradespeople who live by this time of year (notably bread salesmen) and just as many who loathe it (at least I would if I had to stuff all this garbage into a truck!)

So begins another nine months of our driveway being used as a turnaround point for those parents who drop off their little darlings up at school and pick them up later, which is pretty much all of them. One of the things we hadn't bargained on when buying this house (and remember, this house was bought with children of our own at top of mind) was the sheer number of cars on this street at the end of every school day. When your arrival home coincides with the arrival of a long line of cars, some of which park so as to block any hope of entering your driveway, and whose drivers resort to middle-finger waving if you make any effort to access what is, after all, your property...well, it gets old pretty quickly.

We have only ourselves to blame, of course. It never fails to amaze me when people move next to an airport and then bitch incessantly about the noise from the planes. Did you, uh, look around at all before you moved in? We hadn't thought it out, true, but in our defense, we grew up in an age when a kid being picked up at school would have been called a mama's boy to start with and beaten up shortly after. Sometimes--well, okay, often--we forget that time has passed.

As early as grade four, I was walking about a kilometer (a little more than half a mile) each way to school. And yes, it was uphill both ways and barefoot through ten feet of snow. Seriously, though, in high school, that walk nearly doubled in length and I don't remember ever once complaining. No, wait a second, that's not true. The first time I ever had to walk to school--grade four--we took a long, meandering walk through the neigbourhood one evening before school started. My feet were killing me when I turned to my stepdad and asked if I had to do this every day. He laughed and said no, there was a much shorter route, which he then detailed out (walk down here, turn left, then turn right, then turn left again, turn right and you're there. "Picture it like stairs you're going down," he said. I've never forgotten that. To this day maps turn themselves into flights of stairs.
A ride to or from school was a rare thing indeed, and I wouldn't have had it any other way. There were times (when a girl was on my arm) when that walk was entirely too short.

At least the public school across the street from me still has recess, or the generation of kids coming up through the system today would be getting no exercise at all.



Last weekend we had a lovely time at our friends' cottage in Wasaga Beach. We got to talking about their child, who's entering grade two this year and who loves school. "Of course, the homework got to be a little much last year," the mother said. "We'd deal with it right away, as soon as he got home, so we could get on with the evening."

"Back up," I almost shouted. "Homework?! In first grade?!"

"Yep," she said. "He had to read a book a night. Now these were little eight-page jobbies, not War and Peace. But still, between that and the math problems and what have you, it could take up to an hour."

If my jaw had dropped any further I do believe a Mack truck would have come rumbling out of my mouth. I tried to remember the first time I had homework. I'm pretty sure it was grade four--and that wasn't a daily thing, not even close. It was more like occasional research projects. The first one I ever did was on Toronto and its history. Jeesh, but I was a little geek. Daily homework? Probably grade six or so. It wasn't until high school that an hour's worth of homework became unremarkable.

"It makes you wonder what they're doing while they're at school," I said, "when first graders are getting an hour of homework."

What they're doing at school is more of the same. I really do expect to see a large number of kids exhibiting all the symptoms of burnout before they graduate high school.

Here is an interesting article concerning, in part, a school in North Yorkshire, England that has abolished homework altogether. Neither the students nor their parents seem to have noticed an academic decline when homework was replaced with various clubs and activities.
This remains a minority view, however. According to the article, the British goverment deems homework "the equivalent of an extra year's schooling" and "an important home-school link."

To which I say, bollocks and poppycock. Homework may indeed equal an extra year's schooling (I had about that much in OAC Geography alone). But is that really such a good thing? As for the home-school link, point taken, at least for those few parents (bless you) who still care what their kids are doing in school. These days, it seems the only thing many parents of even university-age children (and I use that word deliberately) care about are their final grades, which are to be automatic A's, of course.

There is a widespread latent feeling, exploited quite successfully by the Mike Harris government in Ontario several years ago, that teachers live on easy street, what with their summers off, their supposed 9-3 workdays, and a "cushy" job, to boot. It's fair to say that people who feel this way are not, and do not know any, teachers and have forgotten any decent teachers they ever had.
If you think it's so easy to be a teacher, go try it for a week. You're in for a rude, rude awakening. Odds are better than even you'll be sworn at, possibly even assaulted, before that week's out. You'll find that cushy 9-3 workday is just the beginning. You'll discover that legions of parents demand you assume the roles of psychiatrist, mediator and, not to put too fine a point on it, parent while still making sure their little Johnnies can read and write. And you'll very quickly realize that most of those little Johnnies have not the slightest interest in reading, writing, or anything else you might have to say. That doesn't excuse you.

It is my view that teachers are in fact drastically underpaid, and should be compensated on a level similar to that of professional athletes. (I feel the same way about doctors, police officers and firefighters). In a sane society, your job would be called your 'contribution' and I must say teachers contribute a great deal.

Finally, slightly tangential to this topic is the whole 'back-to-school' commercial frenzy. There was one shoe store manager on television last night saying that the Labour Day weekend was the busiest time of the year for them. It's reported--with a straight face!--that parents spend somewhere between $800 and $1400 per child on back to school items...creating the expectation that all parents should spend that much.
I get the clothes, I guess--kids, especially younger kids, have outgrown last fall's apparel. There are ways to cut your clothing costs significantly. If they were my kids, they'd either be spending their own cash, or they'd have an intimate acquaintance with Value Village. The law says I'd have to keep them clothed. It doesn't say anything about Tommy Hilfiger.
And nowadays I understand kids have to buy all their own school supplies, even in primary grades. I'd really love to know how that came about. We used to get our own notebooks and pencils and I don't know what-all else. But okay, there's another cost.
But a new knapsack? If last year's is so worn out, you really have to get on your child's teacher's case about excessive homework. A new cellphone? Hello? Count me among that number of people who don't think children should have cellphones until--well, at this point I can maybe make a case for them in high school. Maybe. Generations of people survived without them, as far as I'm concerned, and there's no need for them in class--which is where your child is going, right?

Hide in your big house while ours falls down...

I ran across a reference to this over at author Dan Simmons's site. If you don't choose to follow the link, in brief, it's an article from CNN about a new home in West Hartford, CT.
This newly built home is 50,900 square feet (4729 square meters) in size: only slightly smaller than the White House. It has, among many, many other things, a 103-seat movie theater and a 4900 square foot (455 square meter) games room.
I had surfed on over to the Simmons site immediately after perusing the weekly jeremiad over at Jim Kunstler's space. Kunstler is also an author (his books include The Long Emergency, and he's always good for a pull-me-down to start your week. Lately, what with the ongoing financial crisis in the United States, you can almost see him rubbing his hands together in glee. It's pretty clear from even a perfunctory reading of his blog that he hates our so-called "civilization" and hopes it collapses soon.
He may get his wish: between Peak Oil, environmental catastrophes and geopolitical upheaval, life as we know it on this planet may be in jeopardy. He certainly thinks so, anyway, and as the saying goes, you're not paranoid if they're really after you.
I was going to respond on Dan Simmons' forum to the article about the enormous house, but stopped short when I saw what others had written. Many of the respondants castigated the sociologist quoted in the article, Susan Eisenhandler, for saying what I (and I'm sure many others) are thinking:

"Do you actually need to have that amount of space to live a good life? There are homeless people. There are impoverished people. There are serious social concerns, and we're not addressing that."

So what? ran the prevailing wind of thought on that forum. As long as the guy's not a crook (and Enron, Tyco and the like nothwithstanding, most rich people aren't), who cares what he does with his money? The guy probably gives more to charity than you'll ever earn.
And who's this we? Since when are "we" responsible for every sad-sack homeless person?

There was exactly one halfway decent argument for such mega-mansions, advanced by someone calling him (her)self "goldston": that the super-rich, craving the anonymity denied them in the wider world, must create their own worlds within their homes.

Fair enough, I suppose. I don't wipe my ass with hundred dollar bills, nor, frankly, do I aspire to anything like that level of wealth, so I imagine I can't possibly understand the stresses and impulses governing the rich.

Eventually, I decided I couldn't let this go, though. Despite my inner coward yammering away, I responded to the thread.
This is what I wrote over there, while donning an asbestos suit:

This article and the reaction to it really set my teeth on edge.
There is nothing wrong with being rich. There's nothing wrong with being VERY rich. There is everything wrong with being ostentatious, with flaunting your wealth at every turn. And if building such a behemoth of a house isn't a blatant example of flaunting one's wealth, I don't know what is.
Eisenhandler, as far as I'm concerned, made a perfectly valid point which many here were quick to ignore while they bashed her quaint, oh-so-un-American conceit that we are our brothers' keepers. And her point was this: "Do you really need that amount of space to have a good life"?
Would you, any of you, say you have a good life?
Do you, any of you, live in a house even remotely close to that large?
Didn't think so.
The average size of an American (and Canadian, so people don't think I'm Yankee-bashing) home has increased by more than twenty percent in the past ten years. For what? Most of us are moving further and further out into the suburbs, seeking those wide open spaces, insulating ourselves in our own cocoons, disavowing the whole notion of community--let alone the "deep community" discussed (and held as an ideal!) elsewhere on this forum. The Chase house is only an extreme example of this.
Who am I to say what Chase can do with his billions? Nobody. He can do whatever the damn hell he wants. If building such a house makes him happy, hey, great. Maybe he'll be one of those alien rich people who's actually happy with what they have, who doesn't hear a voice whispering "more...more...more" twenty four hours a day.
Maybe. But I doubt it.

After posting that, I got to thinking about what I'd read at Jim Kunstler's site. Now, Kunstler is, as I have noted, strong medicine. He's not the most pessimistic person I've found when it comes to the state of the world and its imminent demise, but his views are apt to stick in most folks' craws. He believes, for example, that

we'd better drop the idea that there is any way whatsoever to preserve our system of happy motoring. The car as a mass market phenomenon, and enabler (dictator, really) of all our daily life arrangements, is finished...[he is] hugely worried (obviously) that even the intelligent-and-educated fraction of our society cannot focus on anything but how to keep all the cars running.

What's so bad about cars, especially if some way can be found to run them on renewable energy? In his view, the car is nothing less than the scourge of civilization. All by itself, it has prompted endless waves of suburban sprawl (destroying what used to be closely-knit downtown communities, not to mention untold amounts of arable land, in the process). It has encouraged drive-thru everything, which in turn is a net contributor to the national epidemic of obesity and all its attendant health issues. It has homogenized the national geography to the point where one place looks pretty much like any other place. And it has an incestuous relationship with the culture of material wealth that is sucking the soul out of the country. A car is the pre-eminent status symbol, even to people like Chase building megamansions: no matter how palatial your estate, it's stationary. A Maserati will go anywhere, allowing people far and near to see what a small penis (excuse me, what a large bank account) you have.

On my bad days, I agree with him on every particular. Then I hop into the car and go someplace, often someplace I probably should have walked or cycled to.

There is a storm coming, on that Kunstler and I agree. Whether that storm arrives in earnest by the end of next year, or decades from now, it will come. There is a vast library of informative books on Peak Oil and its ramifications, and I encourage everyone to read up. While you're at it, it probably wouldn't hurt to learn how to grow your own food. I hate to sound like Chicken Little, but...well, according to the BP (British Petroleum) Statistical Review of World Energy,
"It's no secret anymore that for every nine barrels of oil we consume, we are only discovering one".
If there's one thing that meandering through various books on Peak Oil has convinced me, it's that I have been understating our addiction to oil. I've said before that if your eyes are open, it's a very good bet you're looking at something either made of oil, or made with something made from oil. At the very least you transported it to its present location using oil. What I left unsaid (because really, it's just too frightening to contemplate for long) is that it isn't just the material things. My professional and even personal security rests on the assumption the supermarket shelves will always be full. (Any large city is three days of starvation away from mass civil unrest.)
By no means am I suggesting everyone head for the fallout shelters tonight. But I feel it's very important to keep a close eye on world events, especially when so many potential crises are linked to each other and can manifest in a heartbeat.

The rich, like Arnold Chase, will use their money to insulate themselves from the coming storm. It has always been thus: the elite create the conditions for a depression, then run from them.
If Kunstler's right, there'll be no running from this one.

In the meantime, I really do feel there are better uses for millions of dollars than building another monument to profigacy....

Long weekend scuttled: Forty Words for Sorrow

It turns out that I'm not getting a long weekend this time, either.
I work Sunday night into Monday--which I had thought was a stat holiday. I called Head Office on this, in the guise of caring about unnecessary labour dollars spent (why pay people time and a half when you don't have to?) and was cheerily informed that no, as far as they're concerned, if the shift *starts* on Monday it means time and a half. If it *starts* on Sunday and goes into Monday, nope, that's regular rate.
I still think they're full of shit on this point. Every collective agreement I found on the Web yesterday took my side. (Never thought I'd say this, but I regret not being at one of the unionized stores right now.)
When I worked at 7-Eleven (and believe you me, I worked a lot of stat holidays), their policy was a shift starting at 11:00 p.m. the day before the holiday and going into the holiday itself was paid at time and a half.
But I won't argue it any further: I'd lose.

So I'm working Sunday night and off Monday night. Which bites, not just because hey, no long weekend! but because it means I work one night and am off for one. Why is that bad? Because I pretty much have to keep the same schedule on my one day off: sleep during the day and stay up all night. I'll "flip" for two consecutive days--and was really looking forward to three--but a single day off isn't worth the effort. I'd probably get sick.

I guess I shouldn't bitch overmuch. After all, I don't generally work weekends, which is all but unheard of in retail. Even getting two consecutive days off at any time is an extreme rarity: you office types have no idea how lucky you actually are.

So our condensed weekend involves plenty of relaxation. We haven't had a weekend alone at home together with no obligations for what seems like a year or so.

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Went to Value Village yesterday. I used to be more than a little leery of even going into stores like that. Somehow I'd gotten it into my head that all those clothes belonged to the recently deceased. Even when that misconception was corrected, I still had a case of the yuckies at the thought of wearing clothes that somebody else had worn.
Stupid of me. You go into any clothing store at all, even an upscale one, and chances are good to excellent anything you try on has been tried on before. Possibly by somebody with serious hygiene issues. You never know, right? What's more, none of it's been washed since.
Really, you can find some amazing deals. I got a suit once, an almost perfect fit, for $25; it probably originally retailed for at least ten times that.
Then there's the books. You never know what you're going to find. I just finished an excellent Canadian crime novel called Blackfly Season--easily one of the best police procedurals I've ever read. Unfortunately, I discovered after I started reading it that it was the third in a series. I've made that mistake before, picking up Kelley Armstrong's Dime Store Magic on the strength of stellar reviews, only to find out it was the third in a series. (Eva's since collected the whole set).
Anyway, Blackfly Season stands alone quite well, but hints at character development in the other books. Blunt's writing is phenomenal, and I like to reward Canadian writers when I can. We were actually planning a Chapters run today. Lo and behold, sitting on the shelf in Value Village was the first novel in the series, Forty Words for Sorrow. My hand shot out like lightning and grabbed it...the cashier couldn't find the price, so I ended up getting a $10.99 novel, one for which I was more than willing to pay full price...for 99 cents. My inner miser was doing a happy dance for the rest of the day.
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The fall election campaign in Ontario is cycling up and unless something comes out in the next few weeks that blows my socks off, I'm probably not voting Tory for the first time in my life. The more I look at the Green Party platform, the more I like it. They're really not just a one-trick pony. I don't like everything in it: they're in for a rude awakening if they think they can rely on solar and wind to meet our energy needs, for instance--but I'll never like everything in any party's platform unless I create the platform myself.
The only thing still tethering me to the Tories (well, two things, really): our MPP, Elizabeth Witmer, who really has done an excellent job. Also, the Conservatives have the best chance of defeating Dalton "Pinocchio" McGuinty and I really don't like the thought of four more years of broken promises and outright lies.
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Macleans this week has a great article about mediocre students and how they tend to do better later in life than the academic dynamos. Teachers, it says, are "former A students teaching mostly B students how to work for C students". I recognized myself several times along the course of that article. I was an Ontario Scholar, which just means I got an A average in my final year of high school. I used to brag about that, but long ago realized it meant diddly-squat. I had, and still have, a drive to learn things. I've never had much of an urge to do anything with the stuff I've learned. According to this article, that's pretty common amongst A students. The C students (and even the dropouts) have a different skill set, one that's often more in tune with getting ahead in the world. For instance, C students are often social climbers, which translates into people skills that reward them in their careers. Also, many of them simply find school boring and irrelevant. Their grades have little or nothing to do with their intelligence. Once they find something that interests them, they can attack it with determination and diligence. (That's Eva, right there...her high school record was no great shakes, but she's gone on to get diplomas and designations galore, and has been a raving success in everything she's tried. You look at her marks in high school and you might make the mistake of thinking she's dumb. My wife is smarter than I am.
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Seven in the morning. Time to go back to bed. That's another pitfall of working nights...even if you stay up most of the day trying to flip your inner clock, as I did yesterday, and go to bed utterly whipped, odds are you'll pop fully awake sometime in the wee hours. Ah, well, all together now, weekends are for napping.

It's Coming....

Time to Rock

I find time is at a premium lately. I get home from work at 6:30 in the morning, have breakfast/supper, spend an hour or so reading the paper/people's blogs/various sites of interest to me, and then I go to bed. I get up in time for supper/breakfast, clean up after that (how two people generate quite as many dirty dishes as we do is a mystery I'd dearly like solved). After that there's maybe an hour or two to relax before work. Not much time to blog. In fact, it's a fair bet that if you see a blog from me during the week, it's written at a time I should be sleeping, and therefore is substandard.
I do find with this Sleep Number bed I'm able to get by on less sleep. I'm averaging 6.5-7 hours a day, where I used to need 7.5-8. Pretty happy with this bed so far. I knew I would be: the kicker is durability. If it lasts eight years or so (it's rated for twice that), I'll be overjoyed. If, however, we're replacing it in four like we've had to with our last two mattresses, I'll be pissed.
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A song from way back that periodically runs through my brain:

"The Rock" (Harry Chapin)

The rock is gonna fall on us, he woke with a start
And he ran to his mother, the fear dark in his heart
And he told her of the vision that he was sure he'd seen
She said: "Go back to sleep son, you're having a bad dream!"
Silly child--Everybody knows the rock leans over the town
Everybody knows that it won't tumble to the ground
Remember Chicken Little said the sky was falling down
Well nothing ever came of that, the world still whirls around

"The rock is gonna fall on us," he stood and told the class
The professor put his chalk down and peered out through his glasses
But he went on and said; "I've seen it, high up on the hill
If it doesn't fall this year then very soon it will!"
Crazy boy--Everybody knows the rock leans over the town
Everybody knows that it won't tumble to the ground
We've more important studies than your fantasies and fears
You know that rock's been perched up there for a hundred thousand years

"The rock is gonna fall on us," he told the magistrates
"I believe that we can stop it but the time is getting late
You see I've done all the research, my plans are all complete."
He was showing them contingencies when they showed him to the street
Just a madman--Everybody knows the rock leans over the town
Everybody knows that it won't tumble to the ground
Everybody knows of those who say the end is near
Everybody knows that life goes on as usual round here

He went up on the mountain beside the giant stone
They knew he was insane so they left him alone
He'd given up enlisting help for there was no one else
He spent his days devising ways to stop the rock himself
One night while he was working building braces on the ledge
The ground began to rumble the rock trembled on the edge...

"The rock is gonna fall on us! Run or you'll all be crushed!"
And indeed the rock was moving, crumbling all to dust
He ran under it with one last hope that he could add a prop
And as he disappeared the rock came to a stop

The people ran into the street but by then all was still
The rock seemed where it always was or where it always will be
When someone asked where he had gone they said: "Oh he was daft.
Who cares about that crazy fool." And then they'd start to laugh.

But high up on the mountain
When the wind is hitting it
If you're watching very closely
The rock slips a little bit

Sometimes I feel like the silly child, the crazy boy, the madman. Actually, to be honest, a lot of time that's how I feel. My view of the world and most people in it runs towards the negative, and I often think I see whole regiments of rocks poised to fall on us.

But, you know, this ol' race called Human has dodged bullets before. More than once we've come within hours (minutes?) of blowing ourselves to Kingdom Come. So far, humanity's sanity has prevailed. There's no doubt we have the collective ingenuity to solve just about any problem that confronts us. The only kicker is, we have to recognize the problem. And that's where I think we often fall flat on our faces.

More as time permits...

A Streak of Tears

The woman who was to be my wife came with two cats. My eyes lit up when I first saw them, which probably earned me some points. It certainly raised my already sky-high estimation of Eva. Simply put, I've never met a cat lover I didn't get along with.

Nor have I met a cat I didn't love, or who didn't love me. Admittedly, sometimes it takes some time for the cat to realize it loves me. But give me two days with anything of the feline persuasion and I'm golden.

Eva's two cats couldn't be more different. B.B. (short for "Bug-Butt", because she used to run around like she had one up there) was an undersized kittenish cuddle-slut embodying absolutely everything cute about cats. Streak, named prosaically for her markings and her tendency (as a kitten) to move like lubed lightning, was an altogether different beast: regal and aloof, she doled out affection on her own terms, and only if she judged you worthy of it.

I was not worthy, at least at first. A previous boyfriend of Eva's had played more than a few rounds of "let's scare the cat", which gave Streak a surly disposition, particularly towards anything male. With Eva watching, I got down on hands and knees and ever so slowly approached, holding out a hand for Streak to sniff. She stood there stoically, consenting to let me pet her for a few strokes before lashing out with a barbed claw. I withdrew hurriedly and tried again later. And again. And again. Before too long, I'd won her over and was rewarded with the kind of deep-throated purr normally heard on more mechanical objects. Like Harley-Davidsons.

Another conquest. Two of them, actually, because Streak was a long-standing litmus test for relationships with Eva. (I don't count B.B: you win her affection by looking at her.)

Eva's not a hundred percent sure when Streak was born. It was either 1989 or '90, she thinks...well before she was transferred to Vancouver. It was on the left coast that Streak proved herself a devoted mouse-ripper and connoisseur of cockroaches. I hasten to add the vermin were not a result of sloppy housekeeping but rather a function of piss-poor pay: to live in Vancouver on what Eva was making automatically relegates you to the Downtown Eastside, one of Canada's least charming neighbourhoods (unless you consider underage whores and endemic drug use charming). At any rate, for some time it was Eva and Streak against a hostile world.

Then came B.B. Eva rescued her, pathetic and tiny, from a shady pet store-cum-kitty mill and brought her home. Her arrival activated Streak's every motherly instinct: despite having been spayed years before, she let the kitten suckle. The two have been inseperable ever since. Streak served as mentor to the kitten (I still think of B.B. as a kitten, even though she's fifteen or so herself now), teaching her many things, some of which she'd have been better off not learning.

For instance, Eva had one of those touch-lamps next to her bed. You know the kind, with three settings: dim, bright, spear-your-eyes-out-of-your-head-Mommy-wake-up-and-feed-us. Streak knew, and taught B.B., the power of three...tap...tap...tap. Mommy would wake up, tap the lamp off, and a few minutes later: tap...tap...tap.

Streak would only drink water out of a glass on the coffee table, and that glass had to be pink. Put water on the floor and she'd splash it around contemptuously; put it in some other colour of glass and she'd die of thirst before she'd deign to drink.

Shampoo intoxicated her. Freshly cleaned hair was a Streak-magnet...you'd be inundated with tiny ticklish kitten-kisses.

Her biggest culinary joys were limp French fries and vegetable thins.

Intelligent she was, eccentric she was...the final adjective to describe our grey elephant has to be tough. She had tough skin, for one thing; in her younger years she actually enjoyed light to moderate whack-a-cat. But more than that, her demeanor shouted toughness: don't mess with me, you. Don't mess with my B.B., either.

Streak seemed ageless, eternal, unchanging. Until the last few months. Tux was the first to sense something: he whined piteously at us every time Streak appeared. I don't speak Dog, but it sure sounded like Mommy/Daddy, a member of the pack is hurting. For her part, Streak--who has always hated dogs--actually would let either of ours get right in her face without the slightest reaction.

Things devolved from there. Lately, Streak gad taken to spending pretty much all her time curled up in her chair downstairs, hardly eating or drinking. When she seemed to forget how to use her litterbox--when we observed her jumping off the coffee table and landing with a horrible awkward thump--we were certain it was time to send her on.

We didn't want to. What we wanted to do was to turn back the clock a few years. Sadly, we don't know how to do that. And so we gathered our Streaky-cat up today and took her for a short car ride to our vet's. She miaowed pathetically, but beyond that there was next to no fight in her. The same cat that would have made you pay for putting her in a car a couple of years back just laid there, trembling slightly. I could have done without the miaows...every last one sent a jab of guilt straight down my gullet, not to mention Streak's huge eyes fixed on me, imploring. Where's my house? Where's my B.B.? Where am I?

Eva got out of the car on shaky legs and went in to make sure they were ready for us. They were. She came back out, gathered Streak up by the scruff of the neck, carried her in and put her on the table. Streak gave one last little scratch, then simply laid still. The vet came in and explained the procedure: a sedative injected first, then, when Streak was "beyond knowing her circumstance", the actual lethal injection.

Streak didn't even seem to notice the injection. Or the vet, for that matter. My heart broke a little then. This wasn't, couldn't be the same Streak. Our Streak would have torn this guy a whole new throat.

While we were waiting for the sedative to take effect, we asked whether B.B. would likely follow her life's companion anytime soon. The vet softly told us that many people wondered that, and it had been his experience that on the contrary, the surviving cat generally flourished. "Cats are not sociable by nature," he said, "and there are often little frictions between cats that you don't see."

You haven't seen Streak and B.B., I thought but did not say. The only friction between those two happens when they're cleaning each other.

After several minutes, the vet affixed his stethoscope to Streak's chest and listened. Her heart beat remained strong, and she was still looking around a little. We petted her. I thought I detected the tiniest purr, but that was probably wishful thinking. Still, she seemed a long way from sleep.

The vet injected her again. Within a minute, she vomited--very hard to watch, let me tell you--and almost immediately after that she fell asleep. Another needle.

Streak died as she had lived: tough to the end. The vet actually had to go and get a second dose of that lethal concoction because after ten minutes or so Streak's heart was still beating. "Strong heart in this old girl", he said. How could I tell him that her heart was the only thing still strong? How could I tell him that it would remain strong even after it finally stopped beating? How could I tell him it was my heart I was worried about?

After some interminable time, our Streak gave up the ghost. I actually felt a little better after she'd gone--the kind of better you feel after you've done a hard but right thing. But that's only on top. Underneath, I'll be mourning our plushtoy for a very long time to come.

R.I.P. STREAK BREADNER 1989(?)-2007

BEAMED FROM THE BRIGHT CATTERY IN THE SKY

(Michael Hatwell, The Cat Magazine)

"praedilecta Sappho ibi nuper ascensa sic loquitu"

In case you have been wondering

Just how I am getting along

In my new surroundings

Or worry whether I have learned to cope

With the easy rhythm and pace

For which this place is renowned

Then listen: I have been chasing little mice again

Sweeter, lighter, infinitely more fragrant

Than any I ever brought into the bedroom

For your pleasure

In the old days.

That having been said,

I wouldn't for all the world wish you to infer

That they stint the grub up here:

Admittedly

The celestial fish are not especially exciting

(Their natural zodiac ripeness has had to be homogenised for the general run of feline palates)

But on the plus side

The nice cat-lady who comes round,

All gowned in blue (my favourite colour)

And with glory crowned,

Pours out a warm and creamy whiteness

That is literally

Quite heavenly.

Someone usually remembers

To cut my claws

And tickle my ear

So that side of things is catered for,

One might say,

Adequately enough.

I think of you sometimes

Certain that you will come one day

To take me on your knee

And talk to me the way you used to.

When that day comes I shall let you know

Loudly and unambiguously

That things round here have finally begun to go

Really very well indeed:

I shall add to ordinary space and time

My own particular dimension

Of thick, soft-throated sound.

Prejudice Aborted

I read Michael Coren every Sunday, usually as an exercise to see just how high my blood pressure can go before I explode. About four times a year I find myself agreeing with what he's writing and invariably at those times I'll think 'even a stopped clock is right twice a day'.
You see, Mr. Coren is a devout Catholic, with all that entails. He rails against the secularization of society in some form every week, usually finding a way to work gay marriage into the mix. While I certainly don't believe our society is healthy, I just as certainly feel his prescription is worse than the disease it purports to cure.
Imagine my shock, therefore, to read his column this past Sunday...on the hot-button topic of abortion, no less!...and come away from it with my mind reeling, thinking you know, he's actually got a pretty good point there.

Now, I've always maintained that, as a man, I have no right to an opinion on this issue--which should tell you in a nutshell what my opinion is. If pressed, I'd say I'm pro-choice, with some reservations. I don't think abortion is a legitimate contraceptive device, for instance, nor do I believe third-trimester terminations are acceptable (save in cases where the mother's life is threatened), on the grounds that the child would probably survive outside the womb and therefore ought to be given the chance. But other than that, I'm pretty much pro-choice. I've always felt Spider Robinson had it right when he said "I routinely ignore...any Pro-Life advocate who has not adopted and raised at least one unwanted child, to adulthood, and through college. No excuses for economic hardship: no excuses, period. Put up or shut up."

Your ardent pro-lifer will say that I'm basically pro-infanticide, which I've always thought was patently ridiculous. I don't believe life begins at conception, not any life worth living, at any rate. Whenever I'm confronted with someone who does believe this, I ask them if they'd like to go back and live in their mother's womb for awhile. After the obligatory Hollywood Squares answer of "heck yeah, who wouldn't", I've yet to get a positive answer out of anyone.

So here's Michael Coren along to demolish my construct. His argument, summarized, is that some people--normally pro-choice--have got their knickers atwist because of the cultural practice of aborting unwanted female fetuses. Oh ho, says Coren, abortion's all fine and dandy until sexism enters into it. Then all of a sudden it's not a fetus in there, or excess tissue, or what have you, it's a little girl being killed.

Now as I'm reading this, I'm frantically adding "abortion as gender selection" to my little list of unacceptabilities. Having added this thought and patted it into place, I figure I'm done, I've patched up that little hole in my mental dyke.

It started leaking immediately. It was the image of that little girl that did it. Because no matter what your reason for having an abortion (and you may feel you have a very good one), that little girl's still in there. You may not be killing her off because you don't want a girl...but you're still killing her off.

The only remaining defense I have for abortion is overpopulation and its attendant poverty. I still think it's a handy one to keep around--especially since it's something most North Americans, with their precipitously declining birth rates, rarely think about or consider a problem. I still don't think it at all humane for a child to be born into extreme poverty...but then again, as I'm always saying in my law and order posts, poverty never made anyone a criminal. Many people have risen out of the depths of poverty, single parenthood, or any other argument I can make for the sanity of abortion to make vast contributions to their world.

In short, much as I hate to admit it, Michael Coren's right and I've been wrong.

Don't worry, folks, I'm not on my way to murder an abortionist. I haven't crossed over to the dark side...I'm not ready to prosecute any woman who dares to have a miscarriage. In fact, this whole idea of being pro-life is rather new on me and my brain is still trying to formulate defenses for old prejudices. That none of them have held under scrutiny doesn't mean one or more of them won't.
But in the meantime I really must give Mr. Coren some credit. He's not just made me think, but made me think hard thoughts and come to surprising (to me, at least) conclusions.

Throw the Dog a Pun

It truly is the dog days of summer. Siriusly. I'm pooched for blog ideas, and when one does come along, I lack the energy to pursue it. What can I say...I'm a Terrier.
Been Shepherding my wife around to various shops. I tend to stay in the car and Rottweiler Highness conducts her business. Sometimes I actually have to go in and Springer loose. I just want to Pinscher (my nails, they're Shar-pei?) because Mastiff back acts up after awhile. Just not used to sitting still over that kind of time Spaniel understand.
Enough of that, Ken. Whippet.

On the reading docket right now: Perdido Street Station, by China Mie'ville. This book started out a bit slow, but it's rapidly ascending through pretty good into holy crap this is freakin' amazing.
Offhand, I don't think I've ever read anything so dark. This novel gets under your skin and lurks there, caressing your brain in profoundly disturbing ways. Mie'ville plumbs his thesaurus at every turn describing the filth of his city, New Crobuzon, until you can actually feel its grime and rot and smell its decay. He populates his city with the weird, the fantastic, and the utterly terrifying (one creature is so menacing that demons run in fear from it!) And wonder of wonders, he actually gets you caring about these things. I never thought I'd find myself connecting emotionally with a character who has the body of a woman and the head of an insect, for instance. Not to mention accepting her fully human lover. Mie'ville introduces themes of abandonment, bigotry and political corruption without treading on the toes of his plot. Truly phenomenal: I just hope it ends well.

Nothing else of note to write: just thought I'd better check in to this here Breadbin and let you know we're still kicking.

On this long weekend that isn't...

I hope all you people out there are enjoying your long weekend. If you can find it in your heart, please spare a thought for those less privileged...those of us in the retail industry, by and large.

As I wrote a couple of years ago, this one doesn't count. Pretty much every store is open this Monday, for reasons that escape me.
For the most part I love living in Canada and consider this country to be one of the world's finest. But that doesn't mean it's perfect, and one of the ways it falls woefully short of perfection is its paucity of paid holidays. We just don't get enough of 'em. Not only do we have to go all the way from New Year's Day to Easter without a break, we only get two real holiday weekends in calendar summer.
Business types fret about our declining productivity vis-a-vis the United States, and occasionally you hear about our deficient standard of living (everywhere but in the Calgary-Fort McMurray corridor, where the average income is ten percent higher than America's average). I just want to slap these people senseless. So what if people here in Canada are much more likely to buy a Civic or a Corolla over an Accord or a Camry? Our smaller cars are better for the environment, especially given the distances many of us drive. (I know, I know, commuting is evil...but we have counties in Ontario the size of some U.S. states, and our country is so vast we usually measure distance in driving time.)
And it's not as if compacts and subcompacts have tramp chairs or something. Our Echo is quite comfortable, even over long drives.
There is an unhealthy emphasis, in my opinion, on materials over experience and environment when we rank standards of living. I could easily live in a double-wide trailer, so long as the view out its window included water. Most of the "stuff" I have I don't need and wouldn't miss overmuch if suddenly I didn't have it. This attitude is utterly foreign in many areas of the U.S., where, let's not forget, the first order of business post 9/11 was to spend! spend! spend! "or the terrorists win".
Debt is now a status symbol, not just in the United States but increasingly here in Canada, too. When did this happen, exactly, this going out in public with your financial fly down and bragging about how well you're hung? Let me tell you something, when the interest rates start to go up a lot of people will find themselves well and truly hung.

...And they will go up, trust me. The recent volatility in the stock market is a precursor of things to come: indeed some economists are forecasting that recession is not just possible but imminent. Granted, the same economists have been forecasting imminent recession for years now, and that wolf hasn't shown. But they keep on about it not out of some perverse desire to frighten, but because much of the economy, particularly in the U.S., is built on sand. Don't think them insane just because they natter on about insanity.

It may appear that I've wandered far away from where I started this post. Not so much. I work in retail, an industry that's inextricably tied to the wider economy. When food prices soar, disposable income (already at a premium) is reduced even further, an ill economic wind. But I'd argue that we could all do with a little less spending and a hell of a lot more saving. I won't mind: I work in a discount grocery store...my job is fairly recession-proof.

No, I'll go further: I'd like to see us redefine the economy. I'd like to see a decline in productivity (within reason) as cause for celebration, not alarm. In France, all workers are guaranteed 30(!) paid holidays a year. How many days are guaranteed in the United States? Zero. And in Canada, while at least we get some paid vacation, it's nowhere near what France enjoys.

Why? The article linked above makes a convincing case that it's because of rampant consumerism. People may claim to highly value their time off, but their actions show they're more concerned with one-upping their neighbours: bigger house, bigger SUV, bigger wide-screen TV...For that, they need money, and to get money they need to work. A lot. The average American male works 100 hours more a year than his father did; the average female, 200 hours more a year than her mother. The entire culture is geared around spending ever-increasing sums of money: it is widely reported, for instance, that it costs over a quarter of a million dollars to raise a single child from birth to age 18. There are families that barely make that much money in eighteen years, yet they manage.

If we really valued our time as we claim to, we'd have no problem, for instance, taking a 20% cut in pay in return for a three-day weekend every week. Nearly all of us could save 20% of our monthly expenses if we were honest with ourselves.

The coming market correction will restore some sanity to the economy. How's about we restore some sanity to our lives?

Songs About Me?

I used to want to live in Toronto. What was I, nuts?

I spent the first nine years of my life in Bramalea, a suburb of Brampton, which used to be a city in its own right and is now pretty much glommed on to the whole Greater Toronto Area. We moved to London when I entered Grade IV, and after living in what seemed like every neighbourhood on that city's west side, we eventually relocated to Ingersoll for my final year of high school.
Ingersoll was my first exposure to small town life and I vowed within a week of moving there it would be my last.
I still remember touring the pitiful downtown area on one of my first days there. Cool, there's a music store!...wait a second..."Open 10:00-4:00, closed Mondays." It was the kind of town where the sidewalks rolled themselves up shortly after dinner. Nothing made a point of happening pretty much daily, so by way of counterpoint, the local teenagers would populate the weekly police docket in alarming numbers. Nothing serious, so long as it wasn't your car that got bashed or your house that was robbed. Surveying that docket over the first month or so, looking for patterns, I quickly counted myself lucky to live where I did: the petty crime never got within four blocks of me.
Once I started in at the local high school, I found another thing about small-town life to detest. There being nothing ever going on (see above), those not disposed to illegality instead concentrated their efforts on finding out every last detail about everyone around them. What they couldn't find out, they'd make up. The grapevine was relatively fast...relativistically fast, I'm trying to say: news had a way of spreading across town before it happened, by some process still unknown to science. It was unsettling, especially since I'd just come from the kind of high school that let everyone pretty much be themselves...no nosy questions, very little psychodrama, next to nobody ostracized.
It took me months to fit in at all, and secretly, I always wanted out. Back to the big city, where all the action was.
I harboured that dream right up until just before I met the woman I would marry. By that time (1999), the crime rate in Toronto was starting to get worrisome...the "action" tended to be the pump action of a shotgun. Also by that time, I had seen several lifetimes' worth of university students majoring in drunkoholism with a minor concentration in rude, obnoxious barfery. It slowly began to dawn on me that most of these "people" (and I'm using that word in its loosest sense) were bound for the Big City themselves. Whatever way they were headed, I told myself, I would go in precisely the opposite direction.
Settling down into married life, I slowly realized: not only am I not the urbanite I always thought I was...the thought of subjecting myself to the tension of big city life actually frightens me a little.
My friend Jay worked, at one point, in one of the highest skyscrapers in Toronto. I'll never forget the day I bussed into town and met him for lunch. Noon. Entire regiments of officepeople were letting out, cascading down the escalators in a flood tide. The very air hummed with stress: it was palpable and deeply disturbing, raising the hairs on the back of my neck. It was the first time I understood the truth behind the cliche: sometimes you can cut the air with a knife.
Five whole minutes of that left me slightly nauseous. Imagine a lifetime.

When we drove down to my Dad's winter home in Destin, Florida this past February, we went equipped with about twenty hours of comedy routines I'd burned, as well as a CD by Trace Adkins, given to us by our friend Sue. Trace has the deepest voice this side of Crash Test Dummy Brad Roberts, and he sings a mix of boozy ("Honky Tonk Badonkadonk" being his biggest hit) and soft, introspective ballad "Metropolis", "My Way Back"): the music resonated with me the way nothing had for years. The very first track ("Songs About Me") is a justification of country music, and seemed to be tailor-made for a skeptic like me. Long story short, I found myself enjoying pretty much every track on the album. In the days of the downloadable single, you have to admit that's pretty much unheard of.
Halfway through Alabama, tired of talking (we saved the comedy routines for the trip back), I asked if I could turn on the radio. Spinning the dial, I was faced with a choice: get SAVED! BY! JEEEEEE-ZUSSSSSSSSSSS! on a dozen stations, or listen to country music on the other dozen.
I've been saved before: eventually you go moldy. So: country. The very first song I heard in its entirety was Me and My Gang by Rascal Flatts (first line: "Way on down to Southern Alabama with the guitars jammin', that's where we're headed")
Well, yup, that's where we were headed. About ten bars in, Eva said "turn that up, I like this song." No problem: I didn't just like this song--the last time a song had turned me into an instant goofy pant-drumming fool was "Joyride", by Roxette, way the hell back in first year university.

Once we were home again, I threw myself into this unexplored genre of music with a will. I've since found several more artists I love, most notably Brad Paisley. Here's a guy who does it all: hilarious songs like "Online", uplifting songs like "The World""...and instrumentals like "Throttleneck" that show this guy can flat out play guitar.

It took me a while to figure out why I've fallen in love with this music. After all, the standard country lyrics don't describe me well at all: I don't drive a car, let alone a pickup truck; I've spent next to no time on farms; I'm anything but a cowboy. I'm definitely not "Rough and Ready" (Trace Adkins again):

Mudgrips - white-tip
Cigar stickin' out of my face
Earnhardt racing sticker on the window
Banged up fender
4x4 - straight pipe roar
Primer and rust all over the door
Scarred up knuckles, Mack belt buckle
White t-shirt - Ain't afraid to work
Got a "what-are-you-looking-at-asshole" smirk
Cold beer, hot wings
Wranglers, Skoal ring
Get just what you see
Gun rack, ball cap
Don't take no crap
Ain't a pretty boy-toy
I'll rock you steady
Rough and ready

But even though I don't fit the country-boy mold to the letter, I am one in spirit. I do have a very strong streak of independence, of not caring what the world thinks, of going my way. I also have a great deal of respect for people and things that came before me, a trait I see mentioned over and over again in country music. Many songs make a point of referencing other artists: I like that sense of camaradarie.
And I like a story well told...which is what a lot of country ballads are. (I defy you to listen to this one without tearing up a little).

Don't be surprised to see me out in the country by the time I retire. I'm countrifying by the day, and I'm glad.

Tory, that idea stinks.

.

I'm a lifelong Conservative. Raised in the Reform school, I've been getting progressively more, well, progressive the older I get. I almost voted for Dalton McGuinty and his Liberals last provincial election.

Almost. His platform looked pretty good, if I could get past that icky Liberal thing. What really impressed me was the (now infamous) quote "I won't cut your taxes. But I won't raise them either."

I can't tell you how shocked I was to be impressed by such a thing. I jerked my political knee right out of its socket a long time ago repeatedly calling (screaming, whining) for lower taxes. Now here was a politician actually announcing he had no intention of cutting taxes (at all! at all!) and I'm thinking of voting for him? That's like a quintessentially straight guy suddenly contemplating a gay lover.

In the end, I voted Conservative, but not out of any great love for Ernie Eves: I was really casting my vote in favour of my MPP, Elizabeth Witmer, who had done what I considered to be a commendable job. But to this day I remember my hesitation in the voting booth.

You see, McGuinty seemed so honest...

Cue guffaws of laughter. Has there ever been a politician less honest than Dalton McGuinty? He's broken practically every promise he made in that campaign. Some of them he's broken repeatedly. Every year, the date to close Ontario's filthy coal-fired electricity plants gets shoved back eighteen months, for instance. It'd be one thing if there was a plan, any kind of plan at all, to replace that power. Then Dalton could announce "there's been some delays in the construction of the new nuclear facilities: we'll have to rely on our coal plants until they're up and runnning." But there are no new nukes. Instead, we will make up that shortfall in power by purchasing from the U.S...from coal plants considerably dirtier than our own. Oh, yeah, that makes sense.

The list of broken promises goes on and on. He was going to roll back tolls on Highway 407--they've gone up six or seven times. Highway 407 has simply got to be the most expensive toll road in North America. You can travel the entire Ohio Turnpike for less than the cost of traversing Toronto.

(High tolls may be a good thing, although gas taxes are supposed to serve that function. No matter: the promise was made.)

They promised balanced budgets, then promptly ran a deficit. They promised ministers would take a pay cut for running a deficit. Never happened. You name a promise, they shattered it. The biggie, of course, was that new health tax they brought in almost immediately, while simultaneously delisting (privatizing) several medical services--two broken promises in one!



But see, says McGuinty, that wasn't a tax, it was a "premium". I don't know, Dalton...whether you call it an anus or a rectum, it's still an asshole.



There's another provincial election FINALLY coming up in October. Ever since that first big promise turned out to be a lie, I've been counting the days until I could boot McGuinty in his metaphorical ass (rectum, anus). My wife feels even worse: she did vote for him in 2003. Between the two of us, we wish we could cast about thirty million ballots.



But what always happens to me politically is happening again. I really wish that just once, just once, I could unreservedly vote for someone, rather than having to vote against somebody every frigging election. I voted for Harper, despite some serious misgivings, because I just couldn't bring myself to reward Martin's Liberals for AdScam. (Actually, I can't believe anybody could convince themselves to trust that gang of thieves, but lo and behold many did.)

Now it's happening again. I'm not sure I like John Tory much.

Oh, he would have made a great mayor of Toronto, I think. Certain much better than his Blondness, union shill David Miller. But Premier of Ontario? I don't know.



Consider his latest: he wants to divert funds out of the public education system to fund faith-based schools.

This is wrong on so many levels it's hard to know where to begin. What I find most amazing is that Tory's actually lauding this as an inclusive policy. How's that again? We already have one too many religious school systems in this province. How does further segregation bring people together?
Parents who send their children to faith-based schools think this is great news, of course. They've been arguing for years that they're subsidizing, through their taxes, an educational system they're not using, and that they shouldn't have to pay twice. Which sounds fair--until you stop and think about it for, oh, half a second.
Nobody forced these parents to enroll their kids in religious schools: it was something they freely chose to do, knowing full well the costs involved. Having moved next to an international airport, do you complain to the media about all those noisy planes? Having accepted a job that pays a certain wage, do you turn around and strike for a higher wage?
(Wait a second. Don't answer that.)

My view, for what it's worth, is that in a country which claims to support the separation of Church and State, the State has no business propagating the claims of any particular Church, particularly not to its children who are too young to understand what they're being taught.

In other words: one public system.

This has nothing to do with my (admitted) disdain for organized religion. Religious faith ought to be a private matter between a person and his/her god(dess)(es). By all means, teach children about religion--it has been, and continues to be, one of the most important influences on society. But teaching one particular religion over another denies a child the opportunity to choose for herself what to believe. It also goes a long way towards preventing interaction between children of different faiths...surely not something a multicultural society ought to encourage.

It's sort of like politics, now that I come to think of it. Would you send your kid to Republican school? Hell, even if I was an ardent Republican, I wouldn't do that.

I believe the appeal of faith-based schools is rooted in fear...fear that your child might grow up to stand for something different than you. So long as that child has come to her beliefs honestly, why should that matter? I submit it doesn't...and I certainly don't think money should be stolen out of the public education system just because some parents disagree with me.

Economoron

Does anyone know where I can get a good ultra-beginner's-level introduction to Canadian economics?
This is one area I find myself woefully deficient in. You name it, I don't understand it. For instance:

Today it was reported that the Toronto Stock exchange was down nearly 400 points, the steepest one-day decline in some seven years. A variety of reasons were given. Retail sales are sharply higher; the price of oil has dropped considerably; there is some fear that interest rates will rise to "cool off" the economy.
Why would we want to "cool off" the economy, he asks, stupidly. I thought a hot economy was a good thing--for us plebes and the fat cats running the show. But no, supposedly this "hot economy" phenomenon inevitably leads, through yet another process I don't comprehend, to "inflation"--which in economic speak seems to be the equivalent of "the deepest darkest depths of Hell". One person speculating that inflation might rise causes a mini-panic.
Inflation: as far as I know, it means prices go up. So long as wages keep pace, what's the big deal? And if they don't keep pace, it means employers are simply pocketing more profit...doesn't it?
Another definition I've read: inflation is the process by which your money deteriorates in value. Fair enough, except money doesn't have a value in real terms, not since the world abandoned the gold standard. Money is just paper.
So are shares, and it astounds me to think how many shares there are in any given company. I'll hear something like "quarterly profits were $7 million, or twelve cents a share"--my God, that's a lot of shares.
Company stocks, I've noticed, always go up when (a) there's a merger in the works or (b) they lay off a bunch of people. Following that logic, there should be one company producing everything in the world, employing only robots, and its shares would be infinitely valuable.
The above is proof positive that the stock market cares little for the peons that actually drive any given company.
Bonds, mutual funds, GICs, annuities...the complexity goes on and on. This is all stuff that should be taught in school, part of a "Life Skills" curriculum that ought to be mandatory.

Meantime, I'm an economoron.

Bye, Atus

I'm baaaaack...
Okay, so I'm two days early. And my mission to get something in the mail en route to publication, fame, and fortune has hit a little snag. I still think it something of a minor miracle that I (mostly) managed a month without blogging. Even more surprising, to me at least, was that I rarely even thought about blogging, or regretted not blogging. It's certainly easy to fall out of habit.
My story, tentatively titled "Sleeping Like The Undead", is about two-thirds done. It concerns a couple (much like Eva and I in an alternate universe: all my couples tend to be) who go out and buy a bed ("write what you know!") only to find it turns certain people into vampires. The premise, I grant you, sounds flatly ridiculous. But I happen to believe that one mark of a good story is convincing a reader to accept the flatly ridiculous. Stephen King is a master at that sort of thing, and while I am no Stephen King, I'd like to think I've learned something from the man.

Like King, I believe that stories are not so much created as they are uncovered. When I set out to write a story--or a blog entry, for that matter--I almost never know how it's going to end, except maybe in the vaguest of terms. Heck, sometimes I don't even know what's in the middle.

This vampire bed story zipped along tickety-boo until I realized I was going to have to write (gasp!) a sex scene.

There's no getting around it. There's no considering getting around it. It didn't occur to me at the outset, but as I dug up more and more chunks of story, it slowly dawned on me that a sex scene was going to serve as a crucial plot point.
And then I got to that crucial plot point, and froze. Shit, I thought, I don't even have the slightest clue how to write this.
Oh, a boilerplate sex scene I could envision in my sleep...and often do, ha-ha. But it is required that this sex scene be (a) plausibly "hot" (not necessarily explicit, but arousing) and (b) written from a female perspective.
The first stipulation's not that difficult, if I'm writing for a male audience. Just ask any woman: it's pathetically easy to excite a man. But (b)'s got me utterly flummoxed. I've read everything from fluffly Harlequins in which the descriptive power yields an uncontrollable urge to laugh hysterically--"he thrust his purple-helmeted warrior into her moist cavern of love"--all the way up through Black Lace and Herotica to Nancy Friday (whose supposedly non-fictional catalogues of woman's fantasies are, quite frankly, disturbing). None of this has given me a handle on writing a believable sex scene from a woman's point of view.

Once upon a time, a whole three months ago, this situation would have resulted in my putting the story aside and donning the "see? see? you'll never be a writer" hairshirt for the umpteenth time. Now it means a little pause while I consider my options. Remove the sex scene and I might as well firebomb the whole tale. I tried writing it from the husband's point of view, which was much easier but just didn't work in context. I can only see one viable option remaining: lower my expectations. Maybe I can't get every woman who reads my story to feel lusty, but I can poll my wife on her favourite sex scenes and write something that will affect her just a little bit.

Meantime, I'll be going to the library some time in the next little while to peruse a copy of Writer's Market. My stories, both "Sleeping Like The Undead" and "Market Share" (check the index at left for July 2006: it's a story in five parts) will be residing in slush piles long before we see slush piles out the window.

**************************

Not much happening in the real world of late. The Sleep Number bed has yet to arrive our house...the one they shipped us from Ottawa or wherever showed up at the Sleep Country warehouse damaged, so its brother's coming next weekend.
I'm back on night shift, after much agitation. (Days are unbearably agitating, and so I agitated our District Manager until he forced our store manager to reinstate the night crew.) Eva's almost done the final volume of Harry Potter, which got here at ten o'clock (I'd be neck-deep in it right now myself if she hadn't slept for a couple of hours before embarking on it). I'm also reading Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, a weighty tome that is by turns fascinating and almost impossibly boring--the catch is that it can be both on the same page.

Hey, I did a blog.

*smile*

This one doesn't count

Just popping in to say--okay, the writing's going so-so, one story just needs some polishing and the other's almost done, and I'll have both in the mail...to somewhere...before I do a real blog entry on July 23.

But why I'm really here: another friend of mine has joined the blogosphere.

I haven't seen Melanie in about fifteen years, but we've kept in touch. She's a woman of many talents. I first met her in the intermission of a Kiwanis Festival concert--she was playing clarinet on a devilishly hard piece called Hounds of Spring. Her band did quite well, as I recall, certainly better than the orchestra I was a part of.
She put her clarinet aside some years ago in favour of stained glass--which was at first a hobby and has now become a career. I could write pages on how phenomenal her work is...or I could just direct you to her site, where you can see for yourself.

Check it out, and bring your sense of wonder.