Business as usual for the Toronto Maple Leafs

As in, after fifty-plus years of missing out on the finals, this supposed hockey hotbed treats us to another frustrating finale. 

Let's face it. Front office is a bunch of good ole boy hockey insiders, the kind of guys who make sure their pals have plush sinecures somewhere in the ranks. And they do! And they have and they will, no matter how bad the team these wankers are supposedly responsible for SUCKS!!!

The beautiful thing about having a Toronto franchise, and this is why the Leafs are one of the top sports brands, with a value well into the billions, for a team that hasn't come within a sniff of the Stanley Cup for over half a century, is that Canadians are so stupid they'll boycott this run-on sentence before they boycott the Leafs!

Rise up Leaf Nation. Away with Dubas. Away with Shanahan! Off with their heads!

Paying a 300% premium for your next sofa is a small price to pay for Chinese democracy

Check out this story at CBC. What remains of Canada's furniture industry accounts for approximately 15% of the Canadian furniture market, a market share that's been sinking steadily, since it's really hard to compete with China, where everything is made by Uighur slave labour.

So the furniture lobby petitioned the government for relief. They got it!

While in normal times such a petition would have been dismissed as frivolous, these are not normal times. Indeed, we and our allies have recently concluded that China wants to rule the world. Well, not "we and our allies" so much. Probably more accurate to say we're taking our cues from our betters, as we always do, and if Uncle Sam says China is an existential threat to our way of life, well, slapping a 295% tariff on commie couches is a small price to pay to save freedom and democracy.

So when you go to Leon's next week to pick up that sectional you saw in the flyer last week for $699, and the price is $3200, don't get pissy with the Leon's staff.

Unless selfish Canadians learn to pay a little more to preserve freedom, human rights, and democracy, communism is destined to prevail.

Uncle Sam's blank cheque destroyed the Israel that might have been

The Farm Manager has family in Israel. We're not tight or anything, but she hears through the extended family grapevine that the latest round of giving the terrorists a good slap hasn't enhanced their peace of mind.

What? The terrorists can hit Tel Aviv with sewer pipe rockets ? Fuck that, we're moving back to California.

Well into the 1960s, and this may well have been delusional, but well-intentioned people believed there could be a harmonious integration of the Jewish State into the Middle East. I for one believe there could have been. Edgar Bronfman thought there could have been. Yitzak Rabin thought there could have been.

After 1973 the US money became a toxic threat to the hopes of those who believed in harmonious integration. The arrival of the Russians in large numbers in the early nineties shifted Israeli politics irreparably rightward and more rightward, to the point where Israel is today seen in most of the world as a quasi-fascist apartheid state.

Along the way, Israel has provoked war after war with its neighbours and its caged Gaza population. None of these wars have done Israel one iota of good. Instead, they have fortified the position of the most belligerent and racist segments of Israeli politics. All of these wars of choice have been facilitated and paid for by America.

America has more than enough problems to solve at home. It's time to cut Israel loose.

That's the best hope for peace in the Middle East.

Pissing with Bruno

About half an hour ago, I stepped out for a pee. Bruno joined me.

While we do enjoy the benefits of indoor plumbing here at Falling Downs, one of the big draws of country living is you can just whip it out and take a whiz off the front stoop anytime nature calls. While I'm busy with that, Bruno is busy with a leak on the currant bushes.

I zip up and sit down for a smoke.

Bruno wanders over to the fire-pit and has another piss.

Then it's over to the arbour. Another piss.

Then the sun dial. I used to have my students make sun-dials. Lots of good learning in the making of a sun-dial.

After pissing on the sun-dial, he moves on to the bird-feeder for another piss...

Truly amazing! Why can he do this, but I can't?

Maybe because he's a young hound and I'm an old man.

Woke

Not too long after George Floyd, I happened upon a conversation at CBC radio between a well-known Caribbean-Canadian academic and writer, and a marquis CBC personality, who I hadn't previously realized was Black, because, well, it's sometimes hard to tell on the radio. Not that I'd ever given the matter any thought, but what the hell, maybe my thoughtlessness is part of the problem.

CBC was in the process of re-calibrating to fully-woke mode at the time, and who can blame them? The Floyd effect was causing a lot of soul-searching in a lot of places. The white bougie decision-makers at CBC can't be faulted for trying to get in front of the wave.

I was looking forward to what these two prominent Black Canadians might have to contribute to our understanding of race relations in Canada. What I heard was two extremely privileged and successful people swap stories about the micro-aggressions they had to overcome to make it to the top.

What?

The whole world is traumatised by that iconic image of Floyd's dying breaths, and these people want to talk about micro-aggressions? She's a household name, at least in that shrinking percentage of households where CBC Radio remains the go-to soundtrack. His $200k annual salary at U of T is a matter of public record. These Black Canadians are at the very pinnacle of Canada's cultural scene. They are part of the elite. Not the Black elite or the BIPOC elite; the actual, real-world Canadian elite, and the best they can do is micro-aggressions? Maybe those aren't the people we should be consulting for insights into the state of race relations.

It's not getting any better. Remember the CBC "scoop" last fall, when we got to hear, over and over again, the hysterical "this is what BIPOC people go through every day" shrieking of a 20-something Indian (from India) woman. Her dad is a cab-driver in Halifax, and she had released the in-car audio of an abusive drunk telling him to go back where he came from.

Sorry kid. Contrary to what you learned in your social justice seminar, that's not a BIPOC thing, it's a cab-driver thing. My father had a brief stint driving a cab in his early years in Canada. His cab was shit in, pissed in, puked in, and while his English wasn't yet good enough to appreciate the nuances of the verbal abuse, being spat on is something everyone understands. He was and remains white. It's what happens when you have drunks in your cab. It's not about racism; it's about drunken a-holes.

It's not just the CBC. What were the brainiacs at The Globe and Mail thinking when they plastered a picture of 24 yo Alfred Burgesson on the front page of Report on Business? That used to be a serious space, reserved for serious capitalists who had built some seriously polluting gold mines and made some serious billions or something. And only the most seriously successful of them would dare put their feet on the boardroom table.

I've followed Burgesson a little since that came out. He's a really sharp guy who knows intuitively which way the wind is blowing. You'll be hearing his name again, as long as the white bougie management types think there's something to gain in promoting him, but please, not on the front page of Report on Business, at least until he has some business experience, or business education, or... any accomplishment whatsoever!

The virtue signalling of bougie white folks doesn't do anything to improve race relations.

 

U of T professor agrees BIPOC is bullsh!t

Sweet vindication for the pot-addled hillbilly;  a philosophy prof at U of T has an opinion piece in the Globe and Mail today that essentially reprises something I wrote a month ago, Why BIPOC is bullsh!t. Here's a quote from Professor Joseph Heath;

... the Black population in Canada consists almost entirely of immigrants and their immediate descendants.

Exactly! They voluntarily came to Canada of their own accord. Their ancestors were not brought here against their will in the holds of slave ships. They are every bit as much "settlers" in this country as are the white settlers.

Heath goes on to suggest an alternative, more "Canadian" acronym for Canada's non-white population; FIVN, which stands for Francophone, Indigenous, and Visible Minority. I believe he's partially contradicting himself by favouring the Fs over the Is, but IFVM doesn't quite roll off the tongue as easily.

As much as I appreciate the back-up, I suspect the wokesters at U of T will soon be circulating a petition to have Professor Heath tarred, feathered, and run out of town. He will stand accused of erasing Blacks from the Canadian experience.

He is not. He is merely suggesting a more appropriate acronym.

The gut-wagon

Not sure where this lurch down memory lane originated, but I got to thinking about knocking around in the Guelph-Cambridge-KW neighbourhood back in the seventies. That's when southern Ontario was still an industrial powerhouse. Decent jobs were abundant.

By decent, I mean a guy working in any of the unionized manufacturing plants, and even most of the non-union ones, could afford a house and a car and a vacation now and then. Unfortunately, we took it all for granted and it's long gone.

Most of those places had cafeterias, but quite often the cafeteria was only open during the day shift. If you happened to work second shift, which would typically look like 4 till midnight or something like that, you were out of luck.

There were often good reasons to work second shift, aside from the shift premium. In my case, as a welder, things got pretty dodgy in mid-July when the temperature outside was 90. I've never in my life seen such a thing as an air-conditioned welding shop, so second shift was the way to go.

If the cafeteria was closed, and you lacked the foresight to pack a lunch, you were left to scrabble for whatever was on offer when the gut-wagon pulled into the parking lot at lunch-time. That might not have been at the beginning of lunch, because these guys had to rush around to different worksites that shared the same half hour lunch slot. 

The fare from these mobile lunchrooms wasn't that great. You typically had a selection of plastic-wrapped sandwiches, subs, and donuts. If you wanted a hot meal there was burgers that were cooked up six hours beforehand and had been marinating under a heat lamp ever since. For drinks you could have a coffee or a canned pop. Bottled water hadn't been invented yet.

The folks who ran these trucks, and they were quite often women, had an enviable mark-up on their goods, but I often wondered what kind of living they really made. The more savvy ones would supplement their income with a weed sideline or maybe a can of beer instead of a can of pop for the right people, but I doubt they made as much as their customers.

They did have one great advantage, though. At the end of lunch, they drove away.

I had to go back to work.