How much fear can you take before your brain explodes?

As you've probably noticed, it's been one catastrophe after another out there in that big old world, at least according to the merchants of fear. Let's take a deep dive into the pit of doom and suss out just how screwed we really are. The major calamities, in no particular order:

• Covid. Unlike what some science-denying politicians have been telling you, covid was never over. In fact, it's back, and bigger than ever! Guess we should have listened to that expert on CBC who's been warning us the vax rate for five-year-olds wasn't nearly high enough! For God's sake, kids, put those masks back on before you kill Granny! 
• Disinformation. It's everywhere! Putin's troll armies are spreading the stuff faster than British Intelligence and the CIA can set the record straight. Lucky for us, Big Tech experts are on the job sealing the last leaks in the protective berm designed to keep you safe. Now that Chris Hedges is erased from YouTube, we're almost there.
• Democracy. It was the French sociologist Michel Crozier who first isolated the crisis of democracy in '75 or so, proving for the first time that sociologists could add anything to the storehouse of human knowledge. Mark Twain actually foreshadowed many of his findings 100 years before, but he wasn't a sociologist. 
• Dictatorship. We who are fortunate enough to live in the free world are constantly threatened by dictators. We are led by the greatest democracy of all time, which also has the greatest military of all time, so it is inevitable that we will prevail. I wouldn't worry about this calamity too much.
• Ukraine. This timely crisis encapsulates several of the previous calamities. Contrary to Putin's disinformation, the real reason he attacked his peaceful democratic neighbour was because it was a peaceful democratic neighbour. The longer Russians saw all that peaceful prosperity going on next door, the more they hated Putin. He attacked to save his regime!
• Energy. The agents of disinfo want to scare you into thinking there's an energy crisis. Rubbish! The German people are fully prepared to put on sweaters once Putin turns their heating gas off. A small price to pay to stand with free and democratic Ukraine!
• Financial. The Gloomy Gustovs and the Nervous Nellies would have you believe all of the above will lead to a financial crisis. Impossible! The United States Dollar is the most beloved currency in the world, and the US can legally print as many as they need. It is technically impossible to ever have a financial crisis in the US!
• Climate. Last but not least, let's consider the supposed "climate crisis." Like all these other calamities, this one too is highly exaggerated. Hate to break the news, but Greta Looney Tunesberg didn't even finish high school, never mind becoming a scientist, so why should we listen to her? Besides, by the time the worst comes to pass, Elon Musk's space colonies should ready for move-in!

So relax! Nothing to fear but fear itself! We lucky folks in the free and democratic world got nothing but sunny days ahead!

Falling in the campfire while drunk

I long believed the world could be divided into two types of people; those who have fallen into the campfire while drunk, and those who have not.

But as the numbers on the odometer of life spin by, I've come to see that binary interpretation of reality as somewhat of an over-simplification.

For instance, there is no consideration whatsoever of those who fell into the campfire while sober.

Nor is there any consideration of those who may have been drunk, but fell into the outhouse or off the balcony instead.

I suspect that by the end of the day, Darwin will have separated the wheat from the chaff, as it were.

Which kinda brings us back to the binary, I suppose. 

In which case, we need to delve further and drill down deeper, and circle around the drain for awhile, something that used to be called "participatory sociology," before it was called something else. No "science" is as desperate as the social sciences to freshen up with some jargon shuffling.

But no matter. Where others see gratuitous preening, I see opportunity. Clearly, the question of campfire drinking requires more in the way of rigorous academic inquiry. And clearly, with my in-depth knowledge of and experience in both drinking and campfires, I'm the guy for the job.

Luckily, I have recently entered that stage of life called "retirement," and faced with multiple unpleasant options, have decided this might be the time for that graduate degree in Soc. To that end, I'm looking around for a school that would have me.

I was thinking Ryerson, because they're pretty open to fresh ideas. Mind you, they seem pretty open to completely stupid ideas too, but that doesn't necessarily hurt my case.

So I'm working on a thesis proposal and also preparing multiple grant applications, so I can hit the ground running. If I can pull this off, I should be able to get enough money to study campfire drunkeness as a participant observer for at least the next three or four years.

See you round the campfire!

Will one picture of a dead toddler be a game-changer?

Not in Canada.

The Farm Manager actually asked me that question.

Will one picture of a dead toddler be a game-changer?

It's a question that has Media Studies 101 written all over it...

We've certainly tamped down on the "sociology" here during the Harper years. You know, the sociology that suggests that when you kill somebody's parents and grandparents, their children and grandchildren make it their life's work to kill you and your grandchildren and grandparents in return...

Yup, a lot of those backward folks in the Middle East buy into that kind of shit.

Which is something the morons in Ottawa should have given some thought to before they embarked on their "let's bomb ISIS" mission.

But, in for a penny, in for a pound, as the saying goes...

Hermeneutics of the welding shop

We finally got Bubby into a home.

Just temporarily though. She's recovering from a broken wrist on account of her last fall.

That's just one of the shit-sucking side-dramas of getting older. You fall. You break stuff.

You're in a home.

So a couple years ago my old pal Tom had a tree fall and break the roof of his cabin on an island in the middle of a lake out in the Muskokas. Tom and I go way back to when he was an up-and-coming young academic and I was accidentally parked in a fourth year sociology course at the U of G.

In fact, we go back even further than that.

When I was an up and coming welder-fitter at Kearney National in Guelph, I'd often see Tom handing out commie propaganda at the plant gates. That was common around Guelph in the middle '70s. After all, the Communist Party of Canada got its start in a barn off the Silvercreek Road just behind the General Electric plant.

One thing I profoundly respect about the Bubbinator is that all her clan, at least the ones who managed to dodge the death camps in the WW II, came away dyed-in-the-wool commies. Then they washed up on these shores and became entrepreneurs.

Capitalists.

It's a crazy fucked-up thing, but when you talk to elderly Jews you'll find a lot of heart-felt respect for socialist ideals, no matter how rich their families got playing the entrepreneurship game in the New World.

The reason so many got into the entrepreneur game was because that was the most viable path open to them, especially if you arrived here from Russia or Poland without the benefit of a serious education. Interestingly enough, most of your Jewish entrepreneurs who made it big in the New World came from Eastern Europe where they were denied education opportunities.

By contrast, up till the Nazi era, German Jews were, as a class, the most educated Jews and the most educated Germans in all of Europe.

But I digress.

Tom was in a bit of a flap about fixing the roof of his shack out there on his island in the middle of the Muskokas. He was ready to call in a contractor.

Here's something you might want to know about contractors in the Muskokas.

First of all, they assume anyone who has property in the Muskokas is filthy rich, and they therefore price their work accordingly.

My pal Tom is a humble university professor, rather "poor" by Muskoka standards. He is not seen as a lucrative target to the local contractor community.

But he still needs the roof of his cabin fixed. The tree that fell on it fractured a couple of the roof trusses. It wasn't hard to see what the local contractors would recommend; peel off the roof, replace the trusses, replace the roof... you'd get out of that for maybe ten grand, probably closer to twenty.

I got up there and eye-balled the situation. Looked to me like we could jack up the roof, and then through-bolt a couple of pieces of angle iron on the fractured trusses. That would be a "temporary" fix, but "temporary" might mean twenty years.

We headed into town to fetch some angle iron.

I spent my working years, or at least a goodly percentage of them, working in welding shops large and small, from Saint John Shipbuilding on the east coast to Harjim Machinery Works on Vancouver Island. One thing I know is that you can't bullshit welding. Nor can you bullshit a roof repair on an island in the Muskokas.

That roof's gonna stay up or it's gonna fall down.

No amount of bullshit will keep it up if the fundamentals of physics say it's gotta fall...

Kearney National was a good place to fine-tune my chops. I still remember to this day the lads I learned from and worked with.

Dudley. Magician with the pipe bending machine.

Cheech Contini. Me and him did some serious boozing in the back shop on the afternoon shift. He taught me how to cover my tracks.

Manny in shipping...

So me and Tom end up at this little fab shop in Gravenhurst, looking for a few lengths of 1/4 x 3 angle iron with the holes knocked in just so. It's a fab shop that looks just like every other small-town welding joint; everybody who works there looks like they're outlaw bikers waiting for their probation to end.

We just wandered in the back door and helped ourselves to the chop-saw and the iron-worker. Buddy at the front desk when we checked out enquired sarcastically whether my flip-flops had steel toes. Ministry of Labour rules or some such horse-shit.

I told him ya for sure...

Tom got the roof of his cabin fixed for a couple hundred bucks instead of ten or twenty thousand.

Last I heard, that roof is still keeping the warm in and the weather out.