Boat shopping in winter

I've been boat shopping for fifty years, and haven't bought one yet. The 15' Coleman canoe, under the snow at the side of the driveway, doesn't count.

Nor does that 14' Arkansas Traveller that fell into my clutches for a couple of summers. It had a somewhat temperamental 38 horse Johnson on the back. I took it for a toot around the Cargill Mill Pond, and we stalled out in the middle, which is about fifty feet from shore. Then I ripped out the pull-cord while trying to restart it.

I fixed that, after wading to shore while pulling the boat behind me with the anchor rope. Last I heard, after I lent the motor to my cousin Klaus for the back of his sailboat, it now resides at the bottom of Georgian Bay. Seems he was able to save his boat, but my outboard motor had to go. That was twenty-five years ago, and cousin Klaus hasn't ever said a word about compensation. 

What am I gonna do? Start a family feud over a sixty year old Johnson outboard?

But I digress.

There's nothing like spending a cold winter evening in front of the fire, perusing the listings at Boat Dealers dot com. on your laptop.

I like the idea of a power boat, because waiting three days for the wind to pick up seems like a very long three days.

Then again, they're talking about $200/bbl oil, which translates into a thousand bucks to fill up a 26' cruiser. That's when you become one of those people who hang out at the marina weeks on end but their boat never goes anywhere.

From what I've seen, those folks have a fair bit of fun. 

You get a forty year old 40 foot power cruiser for $40k, and it's your summer cottage. Your square footage is like a downtown condo, and the marina fees are about the same as your taxes would be on that condo. Once a year you limp your summer home around the harbour, just to prove it's a boat, and you are in fact a legitimate sea captain.

Or maybe I'll just get that 14' inflatable I can tow behind the Toyota. I hear it's a rocket when you hang a 60 hp outboard off the back. 

Police fear American insurgents with guns to infiltrate Ottawa protest

That enticing nugget of speculation can be found in the pages of the Globe and Mail today (Gary Mason p 15), so you may wish to take it with a pound of salt or two.

The thought leaders at the Globe have been mightily indignant since before the convoy left Vancouver. After all, according to them, vaccine hesitancy has always been a symptom of racism and white supremacy. When Black Lives Matter declares vaccine mandates racist, the blinkered nabobs at the Globe stay silent.

PM Fluffy, meanwhile, is doubling down on his campaign of relentless vilification of the protesters. His handlers are under the impression this is a vote-winning strategy. When, two years into this pandemic, Trudeau can still stand there and talk about the only way out is getting more people vaccinated, he's definitely not got science on his side.

"Safe" and "effective" are relative terms, of course. We're among the leading nations in terms of vaccine uptake, and we've got more covid, more hospitalizations, and more deaths than ever. Does that really strike you as a sound basis for a mandatory vaccination policy?

The folks in those trucks don't thinks so.

US sends more troops and missiles while Putin gives NATO the finger

I'm not optimistic about how this will turn out.

The Americans still talk as if they're the Big Dog who gets to boss everybody around. Look at their track record since WWII.

• fought the Koreans to a draw in a war that remains officially hot
• destroyed and lost Vietnam
• sabotaged multiple developing countries by assassinating democratically elected leaders
• destroyed multiple countries in the Middle East since 9/11
• spent twenty years occupying Afghanistan, only to leave the place worse than they found it, and hand it back to the previous owners.

With a resume like that, where do these morons get the idea they can tell the rest of the planet what to do?

But there's no stopping them. America's ruling class is so blinded by hubris they have no clue what they're doing. These are the people who spent $300 million every day, including weekends, for twenty years, trying to bend a nation of semi-literate subsistence farmers to their will.

And failed!

All of this while their own country is going down the shitter, big time, while the whole world is watching.

But now they're gonna take on Russia, China, and Iran? All at the same time?

We live in truly interesting times...

How to maintain your composure while sailing through the air clutching a bag of dog-sh!t

Weather permitting, Bruno gets a drive to the off-leash dog-park every morning. It's not so much about the exercise as it is about his social skills. He spent pretty much the first year of his life in a crate, and therefore didn't have any.

Very first time I walked him in public was out at MacGregor Point. Had him on the leash, but when he spotted a couple of hounds coming our way he went total Crazy Dog and took me with him, dragging me through the snow, hanging onto the leash for dear life. There ensued fifteen seconds of mayhem of which all I remember is a three-dog fight and the two gals walking those hounds making a bigger racket than the dogs. 

By then I'm lying in the snow, Bruno lying across my chest in contrition, trying to make sense of what just happened. One of the gals kept yelling "I'm sorry I kicked your dog," and the other one, "are you alright are you alright are you alright?" While it's not what I see when I look in the mirror, folks quite often mistake me for a senior citizen, so I suppose their concern was not unwarranted.

Wouldn't that be the dog walk from hell? Coupla gals head out to MacGregor for a pleasant hike with their canine companions, only to have their dogs attacked and then see this geezer drop dead from a heart attack right in front of their eyes.

My takeaway from that embarrassing episode was we gotta get the Big Boy some social skills.

So for the first time in my life, I sought out a dog park. We've been attending regularly ever since, except when the experts had some concerns over dog-to-human or vice versa virus transmission and the place was locked down for a spell.

And he's come a long way. He's got the butt-sniffing thing down. Whenever you arrive at the park and get in the gate, all the other dogs come over to check you out. Resembles an elephant walk at times.

Today four of his pals were waiting; Rosie, Dexter, Tilley, and Piper. They're racing this way and that. Bruno takes a time-out for a crap on the first lap. He's the biggest dog in the park and his shits are equally impressive. This is a particularly generous effort, and it's all I can do to get that bag inside out without getting any on my hands. He rejoins the pack and they resume their festivities, while I'm heading down the back straight with the bag 'o poo.

At 130 lbs Bruno doesn't have the acceleration of the little guys, but he can build up an impressive head of steam. He's a little deficient in braking and cornering though.

I turn around and see the herd heading straight for me, Bruno in the lead, Piper and Dexter hard on his tail, and while he's hurtling towards me, his head is turned and he's looking back at them...

For half a second, my head and my feet were equidistant from the ground... and then I was flat on my back in the snow, still holding that bag of dogshit in front of me.

The pack is delighted that a human has joined them at ground level, and I'm lost in a blizzard of snouts and tails and paws as everbody except Tilley tries to lick my face. Tilley, (not her real name) has a bit of a taste for poop, and she thinks me holding that bag in the air is a special game just for her. 

Lucky for me, the other parents had by then caught up and pried the dog-pile off me.

I got up, brushed myself off, put on my hat one of the parents had recovered, and walked away like I'd meant to do it, still holding that bag in front of me.

Trudeau to call on NATO to evict trucker's Freedom Convoy

The Canadian Rebellion of '22 will make it into the history books.

We’ve had rebellions before in our history. They tend not to end well for the rebels.

So what will the history books be saying about this one? As you know, the victors write the history books, so that depends. I’m inclined to consider that’s a forgone conclusion; not the rebels, obviously!

Then again…

I’m hearing there’s an issue around finding towing contractors to tow protest trucks. You can understand why. The tow-truck drivers live on the same side of the tracks as the cross-border truckers who fired up this rebellion

Failing that, the authorities could bring in Canadian Armed Forces tow trucks.

Guess who’s driving them? Kids who saw the CAF as their best bet after graduating high school. What do you think their fathers did? What side of the tracks do they live on?

See where this is going?

PM Fluffy isn’t helping himself here. This is an uprising of working-class Canadians way past sick and tired of being ignored, belittled, and talked down to.

Their prime minister refuses to talk to them and dismisses them with one insult after another. He is taking the classic authoritarian approach to dissenters; smear them fast and hard, and if that don’t work, call in the troops, but never ever actually talk to them.

Fluffy’s hands are tied, of course; how can he possibly indulge something as morally repugnant as talking to uncouth smelly working people, many of whom have bad haircuts, especially when they’re just a bunch of Jew-hating homophobic misogynists anyway?

Worst case scenario?

If the CAF fails to come through, he’ll have to call in our NATO allies to sort this out.

One way or another, you know who’s gonna win this.

BREAKING!!! Experts conclude lockdowns don't work after all

The science deniers at Johns Hopkins University are at it again. Whereas we all know, having been told so multiple times per day for two years, that lockdowns save lives, here comes some wise-guys from JHU saying not so much.

Here’s a taste from the abstract:

This meta-analysis concludes that lockdowns have had little to no public health effects. They have imposed enormous social and economic costs where they have been adopted. In consequence, lockdown policies are ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument.

Huh?

That’s what I’ve been saying for at least a year, when it was becoming obvious according to emerging data there was little correlation between lockdowns and mortality rates.

We’ve got a dozen “Premier’s Science Tables” in this country, plus the feds, plus big cities like Toronto with their own “Chief Medical Officers” and their own advisory tables. How could all those experts and doctors and scientists warming the chairs around all those tables get it so wrong?

So the benefits are negligible to non-existent, but the social and economic costs are incalculable, and we’ll be paying them for generations.

Good job, experts! 

An open letter to my member of parliament from a peaceable supporter of the truckers' protest

To Alex Ruff, House of Commons, Ottawa

Dear Alex,

I am a fully vaccinated resident of Georgian Bluffs. Some of my neighbours are not. Nevertheless, in the proud tradition of rural Ontario, we respect one another in spite of our differences.

A number of people from this area attended the Ottawa protest. All of them seem to have had an experience totally at odds with what was portrayed in the media. They spoke of an atmosphere of joyful excitement,  whereas the media present nothing but tales of intimidation, misogyny, racism, and hate.

Although our Prime Minister chose not to see for himself, he has concluded that, because a handful of attendees misbehaved, he can dismiss the entire protest out of hand in the most contemptuous terms.

Here is a suggestion that I hope you can bring up in parliament; point out to the PM that there were many thousands of entirely peaceful and law-abiding protesters in attendance, and he has no excuse whatsoever not to engage in dialogue with them. If he is at all interested in bringing Canadians together instead of further stoking division, he should do so.

Overall, Canada has done relatively well in pandemic management and we have a high level of vaccine uptake. Case numbers are once again in decline. Peer nations like UK and Denmark have eliminated all pandemic mandates. 

This is not the time for the PM to show us he's "the boss." 

This should be a time for healing and moving forward as a united country.

Justin's power trip is taking us in the opposite direction.

Respectfully,

Dieter Neumann

Georgian Bluffs, ON