Life lessons from The Korean

When I drove into town today to pick up my Saturday Globe, I found The Korean's wife and mother-in-law out in the parking lot putting up a tent.

I made a lame joke about it being shitty weather for camping. They laughed.

The Korean is a bit of a joker himself. He scans the bar-code on my paper and announces "five hundred and twenty-five dollar please!"

Ha ha... not enough good news in the world for that price, I tell him.

He settles for $5.25.

Have to say the paper was on the thin side today.

Big feature in the Focus section on condo flippers messing up the Toronto real estate market. That might be mildly interesting if you don't already have multiple friends and relatives milking that for all it's worth. You view them with a mix of envy and contempt; envy because at some level you wish you'd jumped into the game when the jumping was good.

Contempt because they're one of the reasons your children will never own property in Toronto.

But their children will.

Interesting, but nothing like the tour de force Cathal Kelly had on view a couple of weeks ago.

"Too drunk to fuck" indeed!

There's a couple of stories that cast well-deserved aspersions on Justin's captaincy of the ship of state. On page B-1 unpaid intern Rachelle Younglai has a story about shrinking paycheques for the working and middle classes.

On page A-4 Bill Curry has a story about how Justin's infrastructure initiatives are being massaged by the very people who will "ultimately own and manage infrastructure assets."

Public money, private profits; that's hardly a news story.

One thing I'd like to see more of in the Globe is coverage of the Supreme Court case that Rocco Galati has been pursuing for years now on behalf of COMER, the Committee for Monetary and Economic Reform. Follow that story and you soon realize there's no reason whatsoever for our infrastructure assets to end up in the pockets of Black Rock or the multitude of like-minded hedgies and finance sharpies.

But that's not a story the Globe is keen to spread around.

Elsewhere, Liz Renzetti uses her A-2 slot to let us know she's still pouty about Hillary's very bad and awfully terrible day six months ago. Apparently it wasn't just Russian interference in America's democratic process that sunk Hillary, although the Ruskies do get several shout-outs in her column.

No, it was even worse than that, if such a thing can be imagined.

There was a "pink elephant" in the room.

That would be sexism, for those too stunned to figure it out.

Well... sure.

Maybe.

I'd hazard a guess that the pink elephants were bigger when Golda became PM in the sixties or Maggie became PM in the seventies, but maybe Liz isn't old enough to remember those days.

Hillary lost because she and her army of consultants and advisers were outworked and outsmarted at every turn by a condo salesman from Manhattan.

Best story by far in today's paper was the profile of Toronto restauranteur Jen Agg. A far more palatable role model for young women than Hillary, if you ask me.

She's kicking the shit out of pink elephants every day, and may God bless her for it.

Anyway, I've come to accept that The Korean isn't responsible for what's in the newspaper he sells me.

His wife and mother-in-law were putting up that tent to protect the plants that all the Korean variety stores have on offer this time of year.

The weather channel is suggesting we'll get snow tonight.

So the flowers are camping tonight, I offer.

Yes! We must be prepared, he says.

Sound advice from The Korean.

Be prepared.

Once again Cathal Kelly succeeds in making himself the story

That lad got chutzpah!

Cathal Kelly showed up on my radar when he turned a sports reporter's free trip to Sochi to cover the Olympics into a flaming anti-Putin screed.

That got him a job at the Globe and Mail.

But he's at it again.

Yup, handing the FIFA world cup of women's football to Edmonton was a mistake, because when folks the world over tune into the FIFA world cup of women's football, what they're really looking for is the skyline of the host city.

And let's face it, Toronto does have a much more aesthetically pleasing skyline than Edmonton.

Frankly, I don't believe for two seconds that anyone who troubles themselves to dial up the FIFA world cup of women's football gives a shit about what the host city's skyline looks like. I've read enough of Kelly's stuff to know he knows that too...

But he doesn't let that hold him back.

Trade Kessel now!

Cathal Kelly's got a fair and balanced story in The Globe and Mail about Phil Kessel. Fact is, both the Kessel and Phaneuf deals were disasters from the get go.

Both are first line guys on a good day, but neither are guys to build a team around, which was obvious when Burke acquired them to build a team around.

Enough already!

The think tank here at Falling downs has been lobbying to rid our team (yes, we're Leaf fans around here, but our team hasn't given us much to work with for, oh, half a century or so...) of these guys for ages.

Time to undo the last vestiges of the Burke legacy and start afresh!

Canadian media chuffed over Harper's ultimatum to Putin

The Putin-haters are quite pleased with Canadian PM Harper's alleged snarky remark at the G20 in Brisbane.

As the story goes, Harper told Putin to get out of Ukraine, to which Putin supposedly replied "that would be impossible, since we're not in Ukraine."

The Toronto Star has the story as "Harper issued a blunt command to the Russian leader..."

The obvious retort to a blunt command from Harper would be, "or else what?" Or else Harper's gonna send the fabled Princess Pollyanna Regiment to Moscow to whup his ass?

Meanwhile over at the National Post, the flagship of the floundering Postmedia Network, unpaid intern Joe Brean begins his anti-Putin "analysis" with this howler, "Menace clouded the arrival of Russian President Vladimir Putin's arrival at the G20...", surely the most idiotic intro to a supposedly serious article since the moronic juvenilia that landed Cathal Kelly at the Globe and Mail.

Fact is, Putin is in the cross-hairs of the Beltway warmongers, and our mainstream media are doing what they can in the cheer-leading department. "News" be damned; we're in propaganda city with this stuff.

The US/NATO combine out-spends Russia on war toys by a factor of ten, but we are supposed to take seriously the assertion that it's the Russians who threaten world peace?

Harper's lapse of good manners in Brisbane paled in comparison to Obama's sanctimonious rant about a world in which big nations don't invade smaller ones. They don't? This comes from the President of the United States, a big country that has invaded or bombed at least a dozen smaller countries in the last twenty years or so. Russia's bloodless reclamation of Crimea can in no way be compared to the US/NATO campaigns of savagery unleashed on smaller countries from Libya to Afghanistan.

Yet, for some reason, Canadian journalists across the spectrum, from the left-leaning Star to the Thatcherite National Post, seem convinced that it is the West that holds the moral high ground.

Putin revealed as "the devil"

Next to Rob Ford one of the favorite targets of the Toronto Star's soft left journo crew is Vladimir Putin. This morning sports writer Cathal Kelly takes a turn at international relations and is rewarded with a spot on the front page. Here are a few quotes;

Vladimir Putin doesn't make entrances. Like the devil, he appears.

He took a seat up in the rafters, leaned forward like a gargoyle.

...the expression of raw power.

Putin looks like he's wearing his own death mask.

...Putin is full-on evil.

He rules through a personality cult.

...combination of power and malice.

Well! Move over Masha Gessen! This kind of objective and carefully balanced reportage should get Kelly off the sports beat and into the Washington bureau in no time!