Winter struggling to get traction... Blame Climate Crisis!

One of the favorite rituals of abuse visited on school children back in the day was the mandatory "public speech." That was where you had to make a speech in front of the class. The vast majority of students dreaded the prospect. Some would break down in tears half way through their speech. One poor kid wet himself right there at the front of everybody. I first had to make a speech in 4th grade, at Ponsonby Public School. My topic was Alan Shepard, the first US astronaut in space. It was supposed to last four minutes. I held up OK; wobbly knees, but no tearful breakdowns and no pants-wetting. Whew! Some of the kids were not at all phased. Janet Mitchell, who I had a bit of a crush on, blew the class away with her masterful speech about Rachel Carson's best-seller, Silent Spring. Seems we were doing great harm to the planet and if we didn't mend our wayward ways, we were doomed! That was sixty years ago. Since then, we've never mended our ways, we do greater harm to the planet every year, and we're ever more doomed by the day. And yet... life seems to go on. Sea levels have been rising so fast that numerous vulnerable states that were predicted to be underwater 20 years ago are with us still. I went to the east coast last summer for the first time in 30 years, and the sea level was pretty much where I remember it. Our government is handing out billions in subsidies to foreign companies promising to build batteries for the EV market. With what? Yes, Canada has a lot of high value minerals... in the ground! How's that "Ring of Fire" development going? The only way all our subsidized battery factories are going to build batteries is if we buy the ingredients from... China? In spite of a sixty years+ campaign to scare the world off carbon fuels, 2023 marks the all-time record consumption of them. Yup, we're burning more coal and oil than ever! India and China are leading the war on the climate; they lead the world in greenhouse gas emissions, by far. But here's the thing; India and China educate more scientists and engineers than the rest of the world combined. Is it really plausible that none of their engineers and scientists are smart enough to see the urgency of our climate crisis? Or is it more plausible that they're a couple of steps ahead of Western engineers and scientists, and realize one or two degrees in average global temperature is no big whoop one way or the other? As for me, I'm just happy I'm gonna make it into December whithout once lifting a snow shovel!

Modern living v old school

Modern living is the greatest, is it not?

You can get a whole roast chicken at any of the mega chains for well under ten bucks. What with these damned socialists upping the minimum wage to a luxuriant fifteen plump and rosy-cheeked dollars for every hour of so-called "work," (texting while ignoring customers, which happens all the time these days) the minimum wage crowd can now buy a whole roast chicken for about 45 minutes in the yoke.

A whole roast chicken, paired with a bag of pannini buns from Bunsmaster, and a 4L box of Keller Estates Dry Red, will keep a family of four going for two or three days, easy.

Looks to me like the millennial crowd is pretty close to recapturing the standard of living we (the working class) had in the pre-industrial era. Bread and wine and a roast chicken or locally made sausage on the dinner table.

Remember, this was the pre-industrial era. "Jobs" had yet to be invented. You were a butcher or a baker or a shoemaker and that's what you did and that's who you were.

Thankfully, we've been liberated from all that old school hippy dippy shit. Everything is way more efficient.

Just take that roast chicken, for example. Back in the day, lot's of folks would keep a few chickens. You'd get the eggs for two or three years and then you'd have a roast chicken. That's a stupendously inefficient way of getting your roast chicken.

That roast chicken our newly flush underclass will be chowing down on going forward doesn't come from there, obviously.  It comes from the kind of "farms" you'll see if you take a drive up the Elora Road. Just past my alma mater, Ponsonby Public School, you pass about a mile's worth of nondescript agricultural buildings.

Those are chicken factories.

Those chickens will never see a ray of sunshine or eat a blade of grass. They are the epitome of factory to plate dining.

Ya, I can see where you can wring inefficiencies out of things, but how far down that road do you go before you're wringing the soul out of them too?


I think we need to look to the past for our future.

School bus shenanigans

I didn't have a plan for this blog when I fired it up six years ago, and some 5,000 posts later, I still don't.

At the back of my mind I figured maybe someday I'd do some editing and winnow things down a bit and maybe come out with a "Best of Falling Downs" e-book or something.

But editing and winnowing are way too much like work, whereas just slapping my latest insights into the human condition out into the world is rather enjoyable.

Which is why this blog is what it is. Critical analyses of US foreign policy interspersed with commentary about where my dogs shit and too-fond memories of "the good old days."

I have zero interest in editing those 5,000 posts.

But when I see which of those five thousand posts have been looked at on any given day, it can sometimes jog me into a trip down memory lane. That's what happened when it came to my attention that Wheel of Karma had a few page views recently.

Looking at that from my 2017 perspective, I'd say my school-pal Billy was guilty of molesting schoolgirls on the school bus.

At the time, it was all "boys will be boys."

Be that as it may, it got me to thinking about other goings-on on the school bus.

My friend Ev Dargie, who hails from Ripley, told me about how her school-bus driver would stop at the Ripley pub...

"Sit tight kids," he'd say, and they'd sit tight while he got tight. Never a problem. He could down three pints in the half hour the bus sat idling at the curb.

Then there were the hooligans on my bus who prided themselves on their ability to cover roadside hitch-hikers with spit as the bus drove by. I secretly wished the bus driver would stop for one of those dudes, just to find out how tough those spitters really were, but it never happened.

Bullying was a fact of life on the school bus. I got lots of that, at least till I grew big enough to kick the shit out of the bullies.

In grade nine, I'd get on the bus, and I'd hear "oh look, it's the Moose Jaw Kid!"

Guffaws all around.

By grade ten, I'd put on fifty pounds and grown six inches.

"Oh look, it's the Moose Jaw... "

Thwack thwack thwack...

Buddy had his nose flattened, was dribbling blood all over the place, and I got temporarily banned from the bus, but I was never again called "The Moose Jaw Kid."

By grade eleven I had my driver's license and a car, so it didn't matter. I was one of the cool dudes by then.

The best school bus story by far comes from my Ponsonby Public School days. That bus driver from Ev's childhood must have got a job there, because one night on the way home, the bus just slowed down and gently veered into the ditch.

The driver was sound asleep.

Or shit-faced drunk... take your pick.

No matter. One of the thirteen year old farm boys on that bus was able to manoeuvre it out of the ditch and finish the bus route.

That would be a front-page scandal were it to happen today.

Back then, you just did what you had to do.

Even if you were just a thirteen year old farm boy.

Props to an old pal

Me and Dave hooked up at Ponsonby PS in grade four. We were inseparable buddies till about grade seven or eight, after which our high school careers took us in different directions.

I'm thinking about Dave because there's a story in today's Globe, penned by major league practitioners of the dismal science, that heavily references my old pal.

Seems Dave was the first Dismal Scientist to stick his neck out for the proposition that increasing the minimum wage did not necessarily mean that jobs would be lost. He more or less got his head chopped off for that.

Twenty years later everything old is new again.

Raising the minimum wage is not a job-killer after all!

Dave will no doubt have a Nobel with his name attached in a few years.

Good on you, buddy!

Remembering the great teachers I had coming up

If you think you're going to read about my years at the feet of Wittgenstein, turn the page... this is about my grade one teacher etc.

Grade one was Ms. Farquhar, if I'm not mistaken. My first year of formal education. I still remember my very first day of my first year. My father dropped me off at Elora Public School, said a few words to the teacher, and off he went. I remember waving bye-bye.

Those were the days before Kindergarten and pre-Kindergarten and so forth. They're putting two year olds on the school bus these days, for fucks sakes.

By that time he'd picked up a few words of English. He'd been working at Omark for a few years. When you're on the job I guess you're kinda forced to pick up a few words. Unfortunately, once he got home from work everything was in my native tongue. Don't think I had more than three words of the English language by the time he dropped me off that day.

So it was sink or swim.

I don't know about swimming, but I must have at least floated, because by the end of that first year I was in the back row with the bunnies instead of in the front row with the turtles. Ya, there was a bunnies-turtles continuum in play even back then. Everybody knew who was slow and who wasn't.

Having a blackout about who the grade two teacher was, but I remember her car; a '59 Buick with fins and angled headlights.

Grade three, it was Ms. Plyly. And by the way, back in the day these "Ms." folks were always Miss or Mrs. It was to be another quarter century before the honorific "Ms." was invented.

Grade four was at a new school, Ponsonby Public. That's where I first crossed paths with David Card. Ya, long before he was a famous economist he was a simple farm lad from southern Ontario. Our teacher was Ms. Prickett. My one memory of her was when she freaked out at my misbehaviour the day the itinerant music teacher, a Mr. Bennett, visited our class. Apparently I was the first one in the cloak room when the bell went, and Mr. Bennett was not yet finished his accordion solo for our class.

In hindsight, I figure she may have had some designs on Mr. Bennett and my rude snub of him may have dimmed her chances. Hope not.

Grade five was Ms. Moore. I remember her telling me I'd buy her a grand piano when I got rich. Hey Ms. Moore, I'm not quite there yet, but after I syndicate this blog into e-zines, that piano could still be coming your way... but at 150 years old your arthritis may make it difficult to play...

Grade six saw me at Marden Public School under the tutelage of a Ms. Tawse. Overall, I'd have to say she was kind to me, even though I recall getting strapped for something that really belonged to Bill Bailey. Bill was one of those guys born to be a pirate and lived the pirate life, although I do recall an exchange with him when I ran into him at a gas bar many years later... "well, you can't just loot and pillage your whole life..."

You couldn't?

Fuck! What a bummer it was hearing that news come out of Bill's mouth. He could have saved me a whack of grief had he shared that insight in grade six.

By grade eight I was in the hands of Ms. McCall. She had the keener class at Willow Road, and I was bumped into it after the first month of the school year because the two English twats in charge of the dummy class thought I was misplaced.

Ha ha ha!!!

Then there was high school. GCVI.

A whole 'nother chapter...