Greyhound

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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).

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.

Jeffrey Sachs goes full commie

The good Professor has an op-ed in the Globe today, which for the first eleven paragraphs I took to be a sly and subtle piece of PR fluff for the Donkey Party.

But then Sachs rips off the mask and reveals his true agenda; class warfare!

America's almost 160 year long civil war, he tells us, "will not end until working-class Americans of all regions, races and ethnicities join forces to demand higher taxes and greater accountability of the rich corporate elite."

While that's not quite the same as the proletariat seizing the means of production, it's way out there, and seems at odds with the first eleven paragraphs. After all, the Democratic Party of Clinton and Pelosi is every bit as much the plaything of the "rich corporate elite" as is the GOP.

Which is why that working-class solidarity will never ever happen within either of the establishment parties in America.

Keeping an eye on the Arabs

This Khashoggi drama sure raises a few interesting questions.

Since when does Erdogan, or Trump for that matter, give a shit about the welfare of journos?

Since about the time Khashoggi walked into that Saudi embassy, as far as I can tell.

The Khashoggi name is quite prominent in Saudi circles. My understanding is they're a clan accustomed to being close to power, and found themselves out of the ruling circle only with the ascent of MBS. That explains why they've developed a sudden interest in a free press.

America's interest in human rights is equally recent. Dave Lindorff has a story on view at Counterpunch today contrasting the US reaction to the Khashoggi murder to their reaction to the murder of Furkan Dogan by the IDF.


While I was flat on my back and hoping for the best the other day, it occurred to me that the profession of eye-doctor seems to be particularly prestigious in the Arab world. I remember reading, just as the German refugee crisis was building up a good head of steam, an interview with the daughter of Albert Speer, who had happily acquiesced to putting up a couple of Syrian refugees in her Berlin home.

They were ophthalmologists. And they were also great house guests, according to Frau Speer, the message being "hey, open your hearts and your homes, fellow Squareheads! Nothing to fear from these Syrians we've been bombing to ratshit!"

And isn't the evil Assad an ophthalmologist too?... do you see a pattern here? Maybe everybody in Syria aims for an eye-doctor career. The top grads get to bunk with Frau Speer or come to Canada to do eye surgery on the likes of me.

The guys who don't make the grade get to gouge out eyeballs in Syria's secret torture prisons, like the one Canada sent Maher Arar to for the kind of proper interrogation we can't do ourselves.



For obvious reasons.

I'm flat on my back and a Muslim immigrant is sticking pointy objects in my eye

Yup, and God bless him!

Had the long anticipated cataract surgery today. It's amazing what they can do these days. In and out in under three hours. And when you're lying there, flat on your back, and you can feel and even see the tools the surgeon has stuck into your eyeball, you don't care if he's a Muslim or a Christian or a Jew.

You just hope whatever God he believes in will bless him with steady hands.

You know you're a hillbilly when...

The last time my dear step-daughter Hanna was here, she cooked up some spaghetti, and was of course obliged to toss a piece at the wall to see if it was ready.

Hanna being Hanna, she left it there.

Me being me, it took about a month for me to notice. But then I couldn't bring myself to take it off the wall. Instead, I stuck a couple of googly eyes over it from the dollar store.

After all, Hanna works in a food truck called the "Moustache." That's run by an Iranian guy, and my Jewish step-daughter is his key employee. The other side of the story is that his most valued employee sports a four year honours degree in "Social Equity and Human Rights" from York University. The best you can do with that degree is work in a food truck, apparently.

These are tough times for kids with useless university degrees and big student loans. Hanna's doubling down on education by going back for a MSW. At least when she's done she'll be able to get a job. Pity she didn't think ahead when she signed up for that social justice and human equity jazz.

My dear son Jake, on the other hand, doesn't have to worry about student loan payments. When he was fifteen he was on a mission to read everything Eric Blair ever wrote. Unfortunately, he was never on any mission to attend classes at the GCVI, and therefore student loans for post-secondary were never an issue.

Instead, being a brilliant but as yet undiscovered musician, he was forced to do what every other undiscovered musician does in our society; get a job at a restaurant. In three years he's gone from dish-washer to being the guy who fixes your calamari!

But at least he doesn't have student loans!

Empathy for the luckless

I was still in my teens when I found myself on a Greyhound making its final approach into the Kenora bus station. Local folks were standing up at that point, knowing we were ready for touchdown, and I heard a guy say, as he was gazing out the window... "there's a lotta dogs out tonight."

I took that as a generic reference to the folks visibly impaired when you looked out the window. I got off the bus, and facing a two hour layover, found time to buy a loaf of bread and a sixpack nearby. Sat down by the railroad tracks for my own personal picnic.

This old geezer wobbles up and sits down. I offer him a piece of my loaf and 1/6 of my sixpack to wash it down.

He tended towards the taciturn, but once we got to a couple more hunks of that loaf and 2/6 of my sixpack, he let out that he was from the White Dog Nation.

I had one of those learning moments that you sometimes hear about but seldom experience firsthand.

Dogs... White Dog Nation... everything suddenly fell into place!

The "dogs" were the down and out from the local res. I've never forgotten what I learned that day at the Kenora International Bus Stop.


Of course you don't have to be First Nations to be luckless, although there can be no doubt that it helps.

A lot.

I used to tour up to Grand Valley now and then to meet up with the local game warden, who managed a huge wilderness area nearby. We'd get together over pitchers of beer and a basket of wings at the local. One night there's a local at the next table recounting the following horror story;

"...so I was commin' home from a visit with my lawyer, who's gonna do my impaired charge, and I was like two driveways away from my place, and a fuckin' deer runs out in fronta me. I know you gotta report this, so I leave my car there, walk ten minutes home, and call the cops. Then I have a beer.

So I have a couple beer and the cops finally show up, and I tell them about the deer. Yup, my car's still out there. I didn't want to disturb any evidence, so I walked home and called you guys...

Well, long story short, they fucking charge me with impaired driving again!

I didn't even have the heart to tell my lawyer..."

Now THAT's luckless!

Game Warden guy, on the other hand, was having quite a run of good luck going at the time. I remember being at his place when he pulls out a big green garbage bag stuffed full.

Stuffed full of weed!

"Hey, is this shit any good?"

It was decent enough. How do you get a gig like that? The taxpayer funds your digs, you're encouraged to own guns, and you can grow fifty pounds of weed on the wilderness reserve without anybody even noticing?

How do you get a gig like that? Fleming College might be the place for you.


But a run of luck only lasts so long. If you've been enjoying a run of good luck, brace yourself; it's about to turn.

If, on the other hand, you've been in the shithouse of karma for the past twenty years, cheer up!



That's about to turn too!

The three Franks

Back in the day a couple of Franks were casting quite a shadow over the Royal City. A third Frank was probably casting an even bigger shadow in certain neighbourhoods, but I'm talking about the other guys, the German-speaking ones who got off the boat in the middle fifties to make their way in the new world.

And make their way they did!

By the time I hit high-school age, Frank's place was where you could land a job the day you dropped out of high-school at age 15. Frank had a little machine shop out the Silvercreek Extension which was rapidly becoming a factory. He needed factory hands, and those hands didn't need to be holding no damned high-school diploma, thank-you very much!

Nosiree! Frank built his business on square dealing and rock bottom wages. That's not as bad as it sounds. Back in the day you could buy a house and raise a family on a rock bottom wage.

Other Frank was from out of town but still cast a shadow in my hometown. Other Frank was busy buying up damned near everything auto-parts related. One of the local guys sold him his fledgling press-building business for ten million. A few years later, when Magna was on the ropes, he bought it back for one million.

But don't shed any tears for other Frank, he's done OK. More than OK. That's why it's so sad to see his name in the news today. He's suing his daughter for half a billion, accusing her of messing up the family fortune. That's gotta be a heartbreak for all concerned.

Makes you wonder, don't it? You generally want to believe that a stand-up guy raised up stand-up kids. I still want to believe that about him. Makes you wonder if he's still got all the marbles rolling in the same direction.

Other Frank hasn't had the ignominious distinction of suing his daughter for half a billion, but he's had his own tragedy in what was supposed to be his golden years. Spent five years putting up a fabulous mansion right in behind his old mansion out on the Silvercreek Extension. Not that there was anything wrong with the first one, but rumour had it he wanted a house in the same league as Stronach's. He got it.

Unfortunately, his wife passed on before it was finished. He's got ten thousand feet of neo-classical European villa all to himself now.  That's gotta suck.

Third Frank didn't live to suffer the indignities of advanced years. He passed on while out for a jog while still in his early fifties. That was a humbling end to a hard-edged life. I guess every "end" is humbling in its way.

But it must have been especially humbling for third Frank. Not that he would give a shit; he was dead! I knew a guy who had a bit of a disagreement with Frank. Frank called him in for a chat. That was a nice gesture on Frank's part. It meant he really deep-down liked you. Otherwise he'd just send a couple of guys over to bust your legs.

So in the course of the chat Frank reached into a drawer and pulled out a fistful of thousand dollar bills. This was when a thousand bucks was still serious money. He ripped them in half and handed one handful to the guy who told me this story.

"I'll give you the other half when you do what I'm asking you to do," he says.

Not long after, he went for his last jog.

Who does the CBC imagine they're speaking to?

For the past few days the top story every hour on the hour at CBC News has been the Kavanaugh hearings.

Why should any Canadian, let alone Canada's public broadcaster, give a shit about Kavanaugh?

How many Canadians can name any SCOTUS members?

How many Canadians know which SCOTUS member Kavanaugh is replacing?

I'd guess next to none in both cases.

He's replacing the "liberal" Anthony Kennedy. He's the guy who spearheaded the Citizens United decision.

That was where the supreme court of the USA determined that corporations are people too.

That's a "liberal" in America's scheme of things.

That's the guy Kavanaugh is replacing.

And according to the CBC, that's been the most important story in the world this past week.

Bullsh@t alert: Right-wing extremism on the rise across Canada

That's a front-page story in the Sunday Star today. Yup, the fascists and neo-nazis are on the rise!

There was a Sociology prof at the U of G in the early '80's who specialized in tracking right-wing extremism. Guess what? It was on the rise then, too! In fact, it's been perpetually on the rise forever!

Today's scary story informs us that when the many extremist hate groups called a mass rally in Ottawa last July, fewer than 100 people showed up. That's a bit vague. Ninety-nine is fewer than 100. So is nine...

I'm pretty sure Canada's got more academics studying extremist hate groups than it has actual hate group members. It's not till you're ten paragraphs in that you hit this disclaimer; "In fact, it may be misleading to call it a "movement" at all..."

Yes, it is in fact very misleading, so why keep doing it?

Giving thanks for trade agreements

I see where Tiffany Gooch, full-time Liberal Party strategist and part-time Toronto Star op-ed writer, has crafted a paean to the derring-do of the Trudeau-Freeland negotiating team for their masterful take-down of Team Trump in the USMCA negotiations.

Yup, "our prime minister aimed high and held true to his commitment that he would only sign a deal that was good for Canadians."

Well, maybe, but I guess you'd have to ask yourself, which Canadians? The first NAFTA deal was good for some Canadians too, mainly the ones in the corner offices and on the shareholder roll. For Canadians on the shop floor, not so much.

Canadian auto-parts giant Magna built their first Mexican factory in the early '90s. Today they've got thirty-two plants in Mexico employing 28,000 Mexicans. That's the logical result of making a free-trade agreement with a third world economy. Why pay a Canadian twenty bucks an hour when a Mexican will do the same work for twenty bucks a day?

But our media and the political class still tell us every chance they get that NAFTA was good for us, and so of course this "new" deal will be too.

Being a Liberal Party shill means Gooch has to toss in the obligatory bit of virtue signalling re: this being a "progressive" trade agreement. Why, it defends the rights of workers against gender-based discrimination, don't ya know!

Protection against gender discrimination has been enshrined in Canadian law since the Charter of Rights, which predates the original NAFTA, so this is hardly a win for Canadian workers.

But isn't it nice that we're doing something for those 28,000 Mexicans working at Canadian owned auto plants in Mexico!

Thanksgiving again

Made it down to Guelph where my dear octogenarian parents were hosting Turkey Day.

It was a stellar day for them; they had all five of their kids and seven of nine grandchildren at the table.

Not to mention the assorted boyfriends, girlfriends, and spouses in the mix. So it was obviously a big table.

It was also five hours of driving for a three-hour get-together. I do not appreciate that kind of math, which is one reason me and the Farm Manager have been toying with the idea of upping sticks and moving a little ways south.

One reason it was only a five hour round trip was we made exceptional time on the return run. It was late in the evening, there was little to no traffic, and you could therefore maintain a good speed. Otherwise it would have been six hours of driving, and as much as I love my family, that's starting to push the limits.

The night driving is a bit of a drag. I'm a couple weeks away from cataract surgery, and I gotta say it'll be nice to be able to tell tail-lights from stoplights.

So we scoped out a place in Allan Park. About an hour north of Guelph, and within 45 minutes of Bubby's retirement home. Ticked a lot of boxes, it did. Ten heavily wooded acres. You can't see the house from the road. A long uphill driveway takes you to a killer view.

So we thought about it.

Then we thought about it again, and after that, we thought about it some more.

After a couple of weeks of thinking about it, we sat down to talk about it. We talked about it for a couple of hours. We concluded that we'd best think about it some more.

On the way down to Guelph we took a modest departure from our normal route for a drive-by.

There's a sold sticker on the sign...

Shit!


But you know what? I'm pretty okay right here at Falling Downs. There's an abundance of things to be thankful for, and I am.

Happy Thanksgiving!

The wages of sin

Sin doesn't always pay a wage. Quite a lot of us have been conditioned into sinning for no recompense whatsoever.

We're sinning for free!

That's gotta stop. It's no wonder sin doesn't pay a wage; we're putting out for nothing.


I loved those old school British comedies.

Doctor in the House. What a hilarious show!

Are you being served?...

Monty Python, the Carry on crowd... they're all part of a Brit tradition.

And they'd none of them have a chance in hell of getting on the big stage today.


Not in this era of political correctitude.

We'll all be Gazans soon enough

It's quite amazing what Israel has been getting a free pass on recently. The spectacle of professional army snipers using unarmed civilians for target practice at the Gaza fence passes without comment in the West.

Oh shush now... that's the most moral army in the world... and don't you think Israel has a right to defend itself? What are you, some kind of anti-Semite? Snap out of it man.

The Greatest Leader since Moses hasn't a clue what he's in the process of unleashing. It seems folly to invite a death match with an adversary who has nothing to lose. Then again, Bibi and his enablers in DC have never yet suffered a setback in the pursuit of their genocidal agenda, to wit, cleansing Judea and Samaria of the Palestinians.

And in the age of Trump they can be forgiven for thinking they're home free.


But maybe what we're seeing here is a glimpse into the future. Perhaps this is the new normal in dealing with inconvenient populations. The new normal looks a lot like the good old days, when the powerful could annihilate the weak simply because they were more powerful and they could. That was just the way the world worked.

For a few hundred years we tried to believe we were better than that.

That's why we don't want to look at Gaza today. We'd rather look away...