Reading among the maggots

It's been nothing but bad news out of Alberta for the past year or so. First, the price of oil goes for a shit. Then Notley's socialist hordes seize power... That's pretty much gotta be the end of the road for the Wildrose province. I've got a soft spot for Alberta. Put in some time there back in the '70s. In fact, the all-time worst welding gig I ever had was in Edmonton. Worked at an outfit called Tandem Industries. Decent enough rate of pay, and, for the most part, a nice variety of work. Tandem did truck and trailer maintenance and repair. They claimed to be the only place in the West, north of California, to be certified in repairing the big compressed gas tankers. But, that wasn't the only stuff they repaired. The worst job ever was when an offal truck came in for a rework. In case you don't know, offal is the stuff left over at abattoirs after they've made every possible bit of edible protein into hot-dogs or chicken nuggets. I'm not sure where it goes, but they use tanker trucks to take it there. So with the gazillion doom and gloom stories festooning the nation's news platforms, I thought I'd pay a visit to Canada Job Bank for a look-see. Are there any jobs out there at all? What an eye-opener! Search "heavy equipment mechanic, Alberta" and there's dozens of open jobs! Search "welder, Alberta," and you get stuff like this; Jacobs Industrial Services has thirty welding jobs open. Right now. At $45.79 per hour. So it's not all doom and gloom after all. The 300 horsepower snowmobile and the 75 grand pick-up truck are still within reach if you've got the right tickets! But back to the '70s. That offal rig needed a partial re-skin. That involved mostly working inside the tank. As soon as this unit was pulled into the shop you had guys retching all over the place. Man, was it foul! Needless to say nobody stepped up for this assignment, so we drew straws. Me and Buddy got the two shortest. Buddy was probably the top gun in that shop, a can-do overachiever who had ambitions of opening his own shop. I was a pot-addled wanker with no ambitions whatsoever. So first day we had to climb into that tank, I was mostly pre-occupied with fighting my retch reflex. We drag in fans, O-A hoses, welding cables, more fans, and we're good to go. It's amazing how fast you acclimatize to the absolutely foulest of smells. After a couple of hours you didn't even notice it. Buddy the overachiever figures we can do this job in two days max. But because he's a favorite with the front office, he's privy to inside info; he knows they've told the client this is a two week job, and by God, we're going to live up to their expectations! So I'm clambering into that tank as of day two with a coffee in hand and a Edmonton Journal in the back pocket of my Big Bill overalls. Even though the unit was allegedly steam cleaned before it came into the shop, there's a two or three inch crust of petrified offal encrusted on the sides of the tank, which is literally seething with maggots. You'd sit there for an hour or two burning off the maggots with a rosebud before you could get round to any actual work. We realized from the get-go that there was zero likelihood of any supervisors paying a surprise visit to this particular job. I was therefore able to read the Journal cover to cover and mostly complete the crossword puzzle before we even fired up the torches. Buddy used to disappear for long stretches at a time... I think he was already getting his own business off the ground. But who wants to read the paper with the walls around them writhing with maggots? I didn't last long at that job. As for Buddy, I hear through the grape-vine that he went on to huge success in his own business and is a millionaire many times over. As for the prospects for young folks thinking about a career in Alberta today, get yourself the right credentials and it is obviously still a land of opportunity. Especially if you don't mind reading among the maggots.

Lessons from the Zone of Lost Souls

Spent a couple of days in Oshawa, visiting with a newly minted grand-daughter and her parents. No matter how generous the hospitality, I hate waking up in someone else's home. I'm ready for a 5k power walk at six a.m. when nobody else gets out of bed before 9, not even the grand-daughter. So this morning I head out for a drive, looking for a Sunday paper and a Timmies. Drove all the way up the main drag, from the lake through the downtown core and the elite neighborhoods immediately north all the way to the Durham College campus. Downtown Oshawa is the Zone of Lost Souls. At 6 a.m. the streets are full of folks who have gazed too long into the face of God. Whatever drug/alcohol combo it takes to pull that off, there's plenty of downtowners who know the secret. Some have clearly cracked the code for catastrophic personality disintegration, and wobble down the street raging at the sky. But here's something else I noticed. Three people trying to push a bicycle up the street. One woman, two men, two white, one black, and they're 100% working as a team to get this bicycle wherever they're going. They'd got about half a block when I came back down the street a half hour later, but by God, they were still giving it the old college try. Together! A totally fucked-up white dude with his arm around a black dude even more fucked-up, leaning on one another to get wherever they think they're going. White privilege ain’t worth shit once you’re living on the sidewalk. Those are typical scenes all through the downtown core. As you get further north it's mostly McMansions and condo towers. Up here, nobody's homeless, but a lot of people don't even know their neighbors. If nothing else, the homeless enjoy more community.

Lessons from the 'shwa on poverty, homelessness, and community

Spent a couple of days in Oshawa, visiting with a newly minted grand-daughter and her parents. No matter how generous the hospitality, I hate waking up in someone else's home. I'm ready for a 5k power walk at six a.m. when nobody else gets out of bed before 9, not even the grand-daughter. So this morning I head out for a drive, looking for a Sunday paper and a Timmies. Drove all the way up the main drag, from the lake through the downtown core and the elite neighbourhoods immediately north all the way to the Durham College campus. Downtown Oshawa is the Zone of Lost Souls. At 6 a.m. the streets are full of folks who have gazed too long into the face of God. Whatever drug/alcohol combo it takes to pull that off, there's plenty of downtowners who know the secret. Some have clearly cracked the code for catastrophic personality disintegration, and wobble down the street raging at the sky. But here's something else I noticed. Three people trying to push a bicycle up the street. One woman, two men, two white, one black, and they're 100% working as a team to get this bicycle wherever they're going. They'd got about half a block when I came back down the street a half hour later, but by God, they were still giving it the old college try. Together! A totally fucked-up white dude with his arm around a black dude even more fucked-up, leaning on one another to get wherever they think they're going. Those are typical scenes all through the downtown core. As you get further north it's mostly McMansions and condo towers. Up here, nobody's homeless, but a lot of people don't even know their neighbours. If nothing else, the homeless enjoy more community.

The Mighty Wurlitzer at work

Google “mighty wurlitzer” and you’ll get two definitions. I’m talking about the second one; a metaphor CIA official Frank Wisner used to describe the Agency’s influence over public opinion. Wisner may have been wielding that metaphor fifty years ago, but the mighty Wurlitzer plays on today. Mainstream and social media toot the same notes at the same time, whether the tune is about George Floyd or Greta Thunberg or Little Bana or Donald Trump or Covid. The CIA probably has more influence on public opinion today than it had fifty years ago. Of course, any hint of such a thing is nothing but a “conspiracy theory.” If I’m not mistaken, the term “conspiracy theory” was coined by the CIA, about fifty years ago.

CJ Hopkins goes to jail

Unless he pays a fine of 3,600 Euros instead. What was his crime? Hopkins is a satirist who runs "The Consent Factory" website. He used to show up at Counterpunch with some regularity, until they found his satire too unfunny for them. I discovered him during the lock-down years - one of the few happy take-aways of those bleak times. His crime was mocking a German politician. Going to jail for mocking a politician? Sounds more like Stalin's Russia than a modern liberal democracy to me. Sad to say, there's an awful lot in our liberal democracies that smells more than a little totalitarian to me. There's no finer virtue-signaler in the entire Virtuous West than our very own PM Fluffy, and by God when those truck-driving Freedom Convoy yokels unleashed their horn-honking terror on law-abiding Ottawa, he wasted no time declaring a State of Emergency. To hell with civil rights... those people have UNACCEPTABLE OPINIONS! And that's why CJ is up a 3,600 Euro stump over there in the cradle of fascism. Making sport of a German politician is simply a bridge too far in the age of wokery.

Ukraine war news: the ominous silence

After a year and a half of relentlessly trumpeting Ukraine’s military achievements, The Globe and Mail seems to have imposed a news blackout. I searched in vain for any mention of Ukraine in yesterday’s print edition. In the 20 pages of the news section, not a single headline reference to Ukraine. Ditto the 12 page opinion section. It’s not till you get to the business section that Ukraine gets a mention, and that’s a speculative article by Eric Reguly about how the “sanctions from hell” are about to kick in 18 months into the war. His opinion is based on the ruble/USD exchange rate and assumes Russia needs dollars to finance the war. Reguly should know better. So after regaling us for a year and a half with tales of Ukraine, thanks to superior western arms and superior NATO training, piling humiliation after humiliation on the hapless Russian forces, the Globe falls silent on Ukraine? This comes after numerous American media, including CNN, NYT, and the Washington Post, have labelled the vastly over-hyped and long-awaited counter-offensive a devastating failure. Perhaps the worthies at Canada’s newspaper of record have determined that Canadians can’t handle bad news and are better served by no news at all.

Bruno meets an Irish wolfhound, in the back seat of his car

The back seat of the car being Bruno's space. We'd set up the garden chairs out past the marina, by the water treatment plant, for a couple of hours of gentle breezes and stellar waterfront views. Threw a few sticks in the water for Big-lips Bruno, which he dutifully retrieved. There was a guy throwing a line in a couple of hundred feet away. Had an Irish wolfhound with him. Seemed a youngish one, and noticed Bruno long before Bruno noticed him. As we're packing up, I open the door for Bruno while we stash the chairs in the back. Mr wolfhound can't contain himself. Comes bounding over to give Bruno the all-over sniff. Then he jumps in the back of our car. Bruno is giving me a look that says "what the hell goes on here?" Meanwhile, wolfhound's dad is running over yelling "Star Star Star." I assume that was Mr wolfhounds actual name. Star's dad had to retrieve his dog out of the back of our car. He was mightily apologetic. He needn't have worried. We would have been happy to take Star home with us!