Back in the all-things-are-possible days of my youth, I must have done the cross-Canada trip a dozen times or more.
Sometimes I drove. Me and Paul Newman did a Guelph to Calgary run in the dead of winter in a Mercury Grand Marquis in just under 28 hours once. That remains a personal best for that particular route. The achievement is doubly noteworthy because the wipers on that old boat didn't work, and it was snowing constantly, so you had to maintain a good turn of speed to keep the snow off the windshield.
Other times I thumbed.
When I was flush, which was not very often, I might take a plane.
From time to time I'd find myself on a Greyhound bus. That was the modality of last resort, and taking the bus usually didn't cross your mind till about the third day of trying to hitch a ride out of some shithole northern town where the locals were more inclined to give you the finger rather than give you a lift.
One thing you figured out pretty quick was that the Greyhound was a great place to get to know your First Nations brothers and sisters. There was a general aversion to socializing with your Indian co-passengers, but I found that if they saw you as a hard-luck kinda person they could be quite congenial.
Greyhound has officially washed its hands of the hard-luck folks who have to take the bus. As much as the general public may not give a shit, those buses were a lifeline for a lot of First Nations communities.
This is a great opportunity for some of those First Nations millionaires to step up to the plate. Any sovereign nation has a vested interest in the transport needs of its citizens. If the "market" can't meet those needs, and if the settler government in Ottawa won't meet those needs, maybe its time for First Nations to provide the solution to this problem.
That's what a sovereign nation would do.
Wednesday, October 31, 2018
Friday, October 26, 2018
Donny J is pop culture's Frankenstein
Think about it.
In the original Frankenstein fable a bunch of really smart folks create this being who subsequently turned on them.
Fast forward to President Trump...
I rest my case.
In the original Frankenstein fable a bunch of really smart folks create this being who subsequently turned on them.
Fast forward to President Trump...
I rest my case.
Storm the embassy!
This Khashoggi stuff is just over the top, isn't it?
We should just storm the Saudi embassy to express our displeasure!
As an aside, I can't figure out why that name is now pronounced with a soft "g" by all the news readers. Maybe it's because the powers that be behind the scenes would prefer we not confuse him with his hard "g" cousin Adnan.
This crisis foregrounds the pivotal role media plays in letting us know who we need to be pissed off at.
Obviously, we need to storm the Saudi embassy.
But those towellers aren't the only ones sticking a finger in the eye of our virtuous institutions here in the Nations of Virtue.
Putin.
Need I say more?
Of course not. Everybody knows it's Putin and his industrial-scale troll farms that subverted America's democratic process and got Trump into the White House!
Let's storm the Russian Embassy!
And while we're storming embassies, let's not forget Israel.
Those IDF snipers honing their skills by kneecapping Gaza children from two thousand metres away surely deserve the wrath of our political correctitude...
STORM THE ISRAELI EMBASSY!!!
Looks like us progressives have a lot of storming to do...
Or you could just spark up a fattie and put this on.
We should just storm the Saudi embassy to express our displeasure!
As an aside, I can't figure out why that name is now pronounced with a soft "g" by all the news readers. Maybe it's because the powers that be behind the scenes would prefer we not confuse him with his hard "g" cousin Adnan.
This crisis foregrounds the pivotal role media plays in letting us know who we need to be pissed off at.
Obviously, we need to storm the Saudi embassy.
But those towellers aren't the only ones sticking a finger in the eye of our virtuous institutions here in the Nations of Virtue.
Putin.
Need I say more?
Of course not. Everybody knows it's Putin and his industrial-scale troll farms that subverted America's democratic process and got Trump into the White House!
Let's storm the Russian Embassy!
And while we're storming embassies, let's not forget Israel.
Those IDF snipers honing their skills by kneecapping Gaza children from two thousand metres away surely deserve the wrath of our political correctitude...
STORM THE ISRAELI EMBASSY!!!
Looks like us progressives have a lot of storming to do...
Or you could just spark up a fattie and put this on.
Wednesday, October 24, 2018
How things work
I was rooting around on the Googlator today and accidentally discovered that Strombo got himself a honorary doctorate degree from the U of Calgary way back in '07!
Strombo? An honorary degree? Get the f@ck outta here! Strombo's got a pretty thin resume today, and it must have been even thinner eleven years ago. An honorary degree?...
Then again, maybe he was tight with some Very Influential Person types. That might explain it.
Speaking of VIP types, I see where former hash dealer and current preem Dougie Ford held a presser at Leland Industries to unveil his "Ontario is Open for Business so Screw the Working Poor Act." That's where he officially undid the only worthwhile stuff the Liberals ever did in their interminable reign of error.
Not that there's anything wrong with hash dealers - used to peddle a few of the brown bricks myself from time to time, but unlike Doug, it never occurred to me that this qualified me to be Premier of Ontario.
From what I can glean on the internet, Leland is one of those operations who's business model is predicated on the availability of a labour pool willing to work for poverty wages. They pay their folks $14 something an hour in a city where the average house sells for well over a million bucks. Those are the kind of job creators Dougie is stepping up to the plate for.
That Globe piece references a couple of other job creators. Surati Sweet Mart is another outfit that talks up an entrepreneurial storm while paying starvation wages. Then there's Pete Gossmann, a perennial favourite in anti-worker stories, who claims that the brazenly communistic Wynne labour reforms cost his company thirty thousand bucks because all forty of his employees took their two paid sick days in the first three months of the year, most of them around the Super Bowl, because that's what conniving lazy-ass working people do when you give them a chance.
But let's back up and do a little math here. Forty workers each take two paid sick days. That's 80 sick days at a cost of 30k. That suggests Gossmann's workers are making $375 a day, or close to fifty bucks an hour!
The fact of the matter is Gossmann's Plasticap has got a handful of trades guys making a half decent wage, although nobody's anywhere near fifty bucks an hour, and the vast majority of his forty workers are just a hop and a skip above min wage. For this Gossman is regularly trotted out as an expert on the economics of running a business.
Things are not always what they seem.
Strombo's honorary doctorate may have had more to do with his "network" than with his achievements. A guy on the periphery of my (very modest) social circle surprised me one day by announcing that he had to cut out early from our beer-drinking session because he had to go to a party in Toronto. His sister was getting an honorary doctorate from York University! As near as I can tell, her "journalism" has attracted more lawsuits than journalism awards.
But that's OK. She's cultivated some Very Influential People along the way...
That's how things work.
Strombo? An honorary degree? Get the f@ck outta here! Strombo's got a pretty thin resume today, and it must have been even thinner eleven years ago. An honorary degree?...
Then again, maybe he was tight with some Very Influential Person types. That might explain it.
Speaking of VIP types, I see where former hash dealer and current preem Dougie Ford held a presser at Leland Industries to unveil his "Ontario is Open for Business so Screw the Working Poor Act." That's where he officially undid the only worthwhile stuff the Liberals ever did in their interminable reign of error.
Not that there's anything wrong with hash dealers - used to peddle a few of the brown bricks myself from time to time, but unlike Doug, it never occurred to me that this qualified me to be Premier of Ontario.
From what I can glean on the internet, Leland is one of those operations who's business model is predicated on the availability of a labour pool willing to work for poverty wages. They pay their folks $14 something an hour in a city where the average house sells for well over a million bucks. Those are the kind of job creators Dougie is stepping up to the plate for.
That Globe piece references a couple of other job creators. Surati Sweet Mart is another outfit that talks up an entrepreneurial storm while paying starvation wages. Then there's Pete Gossmann, a perennial favourite in anti-worker stories, who claims that the brazenly communistic Wynne labour reforms cost his company thirty thousand bucks because all forty of his employees took their two paid sick days in the first three months of the year, most of them around the Super Bowl, because that's what conniving lazy-ass working people do when you give them a chance.
But let's back up and do a little math here. Forty workers each take two paid sick days. That's 80 sick days at a cost of 30k. That suggests Gossmann's workers are making $375 a day, or close to fifty bucks an hour!
The fact of the matter is Gossmann's Plasticap has got a handful of trades guys making a half decent wage, although nobody's anywhere near fifty bucks an hour, and the vast majority of his forty workers are just a hop and a skip above min wage. For this Gossman is regularly trotted out as an expert on the economics of running a business.
Things are not always what they seem.
Strombo's honorary doctorate may have had more to do with his "network" than with his achievements. A guy on the periphery of my (very modest) social circle surprised me one day by announcing that he had to cut out early from our beer-drinking session because he had to go to a party in Toronto. His sister was getting an honorary doctorate from York University! As near as I can tell, her "journalism" has attracted more lawsuits than journalism awards.
But that's OK. She's cultivated some Very Influential People along the way...
That's how things work.
Tuesday, October 23, 2018
Buy this fully detached 3br 2bath home two hours from Toronto for under $100,000
Two hours and seventeen minutes from King and Bay, according to Google Maps.
Since you're gonna save at least a million compared to buying the same house in Toronto, why not invest some of those savings in a new 911 Carrera 4S? You'll cut your commute down to about half an hour, and you'll be the talk of Teeswater!
Guaranteed!
Since you're gonna save at least a million compared to buying the same house in Toronto, why not invest some of those savings in a new 911 Carrera 4S? You'll cut your commute down to about half an hour, and you'll be the talk of Teeswater!
Guaranteed!
Saturday, October 20, 2018
The future's looking bleaker every day
It's amazing what the Globe and Mail can find room for when they don't give half the opinion section over to that self-aggrandising American harpy, Sarah Kendzior. Today's Sarah-free paper featured thoughtful and timely opinion pieces by a couple of Canadians instead.
Iconic Canadian architect Jack Diamond offers a scathing critique of Toronto's descent into dystopian uninhabitability. We're not there yet, but that's our general direction. He's clearly talking to the two mayoral candidates and the current preem, but it's a good read for anyone interested in the future of what could still be a great liveable city.
Just a few pages away you can find an advert for two-bedroom plus den condos starting at a mere $710,000... oh, wait a minute; this two-bed plus den measures out at 764 square feet!
WTF? How do you get two bedrooms and a den out of 764 feet? Well, the "den" is 5' by 6'4" for starters. Back in the day, when Toronto's first wave of highrises were going up at ten bucks a foot, 764 would have been considered a roomy one bedroom apartment. Fifty years later it's a two-bedroom + den condo that clocks in at a whisker under a thousand bucks a foot.
We're clearly trending in the wrong direction!
Elsewhere in the Opinion section, Canadian academic Marcel O'Gorman offers up a timely analysis of our tech enslavement. We even get a shout-out to the great Canadian obfuscator Marshall McLuhan! Marcel seems to be a little wary of our brave new tech-obsessed world, and who can blame him? You can fill your two-bedroom plus den 764 foot condo with all the tech gadgets you want; it ain't gonna get any bigger.
Those two articles alone were worth the price of admission (still $6.30 at the Korean extortionist).
Iconic Canadian architect Jack Diamond offers a scathing critique of Toronto's descent into dystopian uninhabitability. We're not there yet, but that's our general direction. He's clearly talking to the two mayoral candidates and the current preem, but it's a good read for anyone interested in the future of what could still be a great liveable city.
Just a few pages away you can find an advert for two-bedroom plus den condos starting at a mere $710,000... oh, wait a minute; this two-bed plus den measures out at 764 square feet!
WTF? How do you get two bedrooms and a den out of 764 feet? Well, the "den" is 5' by 6'4" for starters. Back in the day, when Toronto's first wave of highrises were going up at ten bucks a foot, 764 would have been considered a roomy one bedroom apartment. Fifty years later it's a two-bedroom + den condo that clocks in at a whisker under a thousand bucks a foot.
We're clearly trending in the wrong direction!
Elsewhere in the Opinion section, Canadian academic Marcel O'Gorman offers up a timely analysis of our tech enslavement. We even get a shout-out to the great Canadian obfuscator Marshall McLuhan! Marcel seems to be a little wary of our brave new tech-obsessed world, and who can blame him? You can fill your two-bedroom plus den 764 foot condo with all the tech gadgets you want; it ain't gonna get any bigger.
Those two articles alone were worth the price of admission (still $6.30 at the Korean extortionist).
More accolades for Chystia Freeland
If you heard Chrystia Freeland's interview on the CBC this morning, you may have cringed just a little when you heard her boasting about her buddy "Bob" Lighthizer coming to her Toronto home for dinner. Clearly, Freeland is quite impressed with herself, and is pleased to consider Bob a personal friend.
Others are not quite as impressed.
"She's way out of her league," quoth Zekelman Industries boss Barry Zekelman in a CBC story the other day.
And today we've got Konrad Yakabuski's assessment in the Globe and Mail; "We were out-negotiated, almost humiliatingly so."
I'm guessing neither Yakabuski or Zekelman will be getting dinner invites to Chrystia's house anytime soon.
Others are not quite as impressed.
"She's way out of her league," quoth Zekelman Industries boss Barry Zekelman in a CBC story the other day.
And today we've got Konrad Yakabuski's assessment in the Globe and Mail; "We were out-negotiated, almost humiliatingly so."
I'm guessing neither Yakabuski or Zekelman will be getting dinner invites to Chrystia's house anytime soon.
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