K-W Surplus and my first set of wrenches

When I was fifteen years old I saw an ad in the paper, 50% off a set of combination wrenches at K-W Surplus in Kitchener.

I wasn't yet of driving age, so I thumbed my way up Highway 7 to the K-W Surplus store, and then thumbed my way back home with my prized wrench kit under my arm. If I remember correctly, that  kit had everything from a half inch to an inch-and-a-quarter in it. "Combination" meant you had a box wrench at one end and an open wrench at the other.

First thing I did when I got home was blast the entire kit with a stripe of orange spray paint, because I wanted to make sure my tools didn't get mixed in with my dad's tools or with the tools of the various buddies who would be borrowing them.

That worked out well.

Fifty years later, I still see the orange stripe on some of the wrenches in the tool kit my father keeps in his truck. And in the tool boxes of a few of the buddies who have survived from then to now. In spite of all that thievery, I've still got a few of those orange-stripe wrenches in my own kit!

K-W Surplus is still around too. In fact, they birthed a spin-off called "Deals." Good deals on all your home shop essentials. I still shop at their Owen Sound store from time to time.

I used to take immaculate care of the shit in my kit, cleaning and oiling those wrenches a couple of times a year. But eventually life took over. Wiping down your wrenches with an oilcloth wasn't that important once you had kids to feed.

Or legal bills to pay.

As my final retirement draws nigh, I find myself once again caring about those wrenches. That inch-and-a-quarter has a real good heft to it, and in the course of the last fifty years was probably more often used as a weapon than as a tool. Not that I cracked any skulls with it, but there was the odd time when just having it dangle menacingly from your hand could change the course of a conversation.


When you go to your reward, whatever it may be, you want to have a tidy tool kit at your side.

Trans athletes

There's a bit of a brouhaha brewing in Toronto  over the appearance of an allegedly trans-phobic writer, Meghan Murphy, making a speech at a city-owned public library. Even Toronto's blue-blood mayor John Tory has come out against letting a city-run facility facilitate "hate speech."

The nub of the hate speech allegations is Murphy's opinion that just because a man claims to be a woman, that doesn't make him one.

I'm inclined to concur.

Just take a look at what's happening in the world of women's sport.

Before we do, let's take a moment to consider there is generally no concern evinced anywhere about trans men participating in men's sport. There's a reason for that. Whether you blame God or Mother Nature or Darwin makes no difference; fact of the matter is that men are generally bigger and stronger than women.

That's why a mediocre male athlete can become an elite trans woman athlete, whereas an elite female athlete will never become more than a mediocre trans man athlete. That's also why, when the Canadian women's Olympic hockey team plays exhibition games, they like to play Jr. B boys teams. That's their level of competition.

When the people in charge declare that trans women are entitled to a level playing field in women's sport, they are ensuring that trans women will in short order dominate women's sport.


Doesn't look like a great leap forward for feminism from where I'm watching.

NBA conspiracy theory

I was thinking how wacked it is that the folks who own global media, a very small clique of billionaires, have the power to decide what news you'll get or not get.

Take this Thunberg phenomenon for example. When you get right down to it, the only thing newsworthy about this kid is that the media have made her newsworthy.

Or consider the Hong Kong protests, which have been given saturation coverage across all Western media, while far more deadly protests in numerous other countries are ignored. The people deciding what you're able to see don't do this randomly, they have an agenda.

Israel is in our pocket (or we theirs), so no need to talk about the violent protests at the Gaza fence.

Haiti is in our pocket, so no need to talk about weeks of nationwide rioting that has taken dozens of lives.

And did you know the Yellow Vesters in France haven't gone away, they've just disappeared from your news feed!

Meanwhile, Hong Kong gets the spotlight because it serves the interests of the ruling class to make trouble for China.

It seems to me there's been substantially less HK in the news the last week or so. It seemed to fall off just after Coach Dickhead down in Texas tweeted his pro-protester tweet.

That led to a bit of a kerfluffle between rival billionaire factions, some of whom are NBA owners and some who are anti-China (because if we didn't have enemies, why would we need a trillion dollar military budget, and if we didn't have that we'd go broke).

Looks to me like the money-grubbers won out over the patriots (those guys who send their minions to the annual shareholder meetings at all the big military contractors and also fund pro-war think-tanks and own media networks), at least for the time-being.

I suspect Adam Silver made a conference call to the various billionaires on all sides, and said something like this;

Look guys, some of you are being assholes about this. China is the goose that is gonna be laying our golden eggs going forward. Maybe even the next 50 years! The China market is gonna make you all trillionaires by then! Stop fucking around already!

We can always resume our support for the protesters after that.

God bless America!

Actually, I don't think Silver would say that last bit, but isn't it interesting that coverage of the HK riots has dropped off the charts?


Remember, you read it here first.

Top terror mastermind killed again!

Islamic State's top towelhead 'o terror is a gonner! The good news came directly from the lips of The Real Donald Trump, so obviously it must be true.

This is of course not the first time the good guys have killed Abu Bakr "Big Daddy" Baghdadi. Check out this accounting of his various deaths at International Business Times. That's from over two years ago and doesn't include his several assassinations since. This guy has more lives than Bin Laden!

So did they really actually get him this time?

Who knows? Maybe...

But consider this counter-narrative. It was a particularly hallucinatory week in US foreign policy. It began with Trump's announcement that he, in his capacity as Commander-in-Chief, was withdrawing American troops from Syria. This sent the entire US defence and foreign policy establishment into a collective shit-hemmorage.

What!? That's treason! Nobody, not even the President, pulls US troops out of a foreign country they were illegally occupying! This just IS NOT DONE!!!

By the end of the week, forces higher up the food chain than the Commander-in-Chief had over-ruled Trump. US troops weren't leaving Syria after all; they were merely re-locating within the country to "protect the oil," which like all oil globally, pines for the protective umbrella of Uncle Sam.

Having exposed Trump as an ineffectual puppet president and American foreign policy as a bankrupt farce, the folks behind the curtain needed some catchy headlines to take our eyes off this shit-show.


Voila, there we have it; US Special Ops kill top terrorist in daring mission!

Here we go again...

Bolivia just had an election, and the guy who won is not a favorite of Washington. Ergo, the election was obviously fraudulent.

Bolivia is another one of those countries where the US government-funded "Non-Governmental Agency" the National Endowment for Democracy has been generously building capacity and stuff, which boils down to funding any group of malcontents who promise to make trouble for the government the USA does not approve of.

The US immediately declared the election fraudulent, and was instantly backed up by the usual ass-kissers in the EU and its South American vassal states. No surprise there.

But it prompts this scoldy story by Evan Dyer at CBC; Canada not ready to condemn Bolivia's election. The tone suggests that Canada is being remiss in not puckering up in sync with the other toadies.

Don't worry, Evan; we'll surely pucker up soon enough. Give it 48 hours.

The new now

As I've mentioned before, the Farm Manager still has her day job with the Greywater Board of Ed.

That's the same school board whose top gun was busted in a plagiarism scandal a few years ago and who takes home the same pay as a Brigadier General in the Canadian Forces. Because school boards are on the front line when it comes to defending democracy, I suppose...

The school board has been ruthlessly cutting back on Education Assistants for years now, even while the local college was minting dozens of newly qualified contenders every year. Thanks to union seniority rules, the EA staff now consists of a whole lotta middle-age gals who are prone to the manifold ailments that come with the ageing process.

And now they have access to legal marijuana!

According to the FM, all the EAs talk about around the water cooler is how to grow pot, how to cure pot, and how to turn pot into soothing balms for whatever happens to ail you.


That's the new now.

Chrysler 300

I first met Kipling when he was bleeding all over the interior of a 1969 Chrysler 300. The guy who owned the Chrysler says to me, "he's bleeding all over my fucking upholstery!"

Me and Mr. Chrysler were standing on the side of what is now officially "Line 86," but was at the time known as the Elmira Road. Kipling was out giving a demo ride to a couple of guys who were interested in buying his Chevy II.

I'd almost bought it before Kipling bought it. It had been owned by one of the Leader boys. The Leader boys worked at a gas station on the corner of Silvercreek and Waterloo Avenue. I walked by it every day after school on my way to my job at John's Supertest.

On the lot they had a couple of cars for sale. A 66 Chevelle with a 327 for $1,500, and a 64 Chevy II with a 283 4bbl and four speed, for a thousand bucks.

I worked crazy hours at John's Supertest, and was salting away a bit of cash from my dollar an hour job. That Chevy II called my name every time I walked by. My sixteenth birthday was coming up, the day I would have a driver's licence... and a 64 Chevy II!

Unfortunately, somebody bought it out from under me before that happy birthday.

Kipling.

A few years later, I'm talking to Buddy beside the road that night. There's two other guys still in the Chevy II, either dead or comatose, and Mr. Chrysler doesn't seem that interested in pulling them out and having them bleed over what's left of his upholstery.

That test drive had gone awry. Kipling had downshifted and stood on the gas to pass that Chrysler 300. A rookie mistake.

The road was a little damp due to the first snowflakes of the season.

The Chevy II spun out, left the road, and hit a tree head-on right across the road from the Brubacher Sales Arena.

That was quite a deal in its time too, the Brubacher Sales Arena. Some sharpie from the States comes up, buys a farm just down the road, calls it a "Sales Arena," and before you know it, they're in the news for selling a dairy cow for a hundred thousand bucks!

But I digress.

Kipling fully recovered from his injuries, as did the comatose guys in the Chevy II. In fact, they recovered so well that they sued Kipling's ass nine ways from Sunday. He's still paying the price today.


I don't know if Mr. Chrysler ever got over his bloodied upholstery.