Some friends of the blog have been confused by an announcement I made about a week ago regarding guest columnists.
To be clear.
I have decided that I will not publish friends' columns in their entirety on this site.
What I will do is provide links and recommendations to columns that I think you will enjoy or find worth reading.
From time to time, I will continue to publish other's comments as I chose.
Hey, It's my sandbox.
Yesterday I commented on the lack of understanding coming from Victoria Mayor Allen Lowe in ending the Police Chief affair with no information given to the public.
Today we learn that the nine-member police board happily voted no confidence in the Police Chief on Lowe's word, without reading a single word about the issues or facts involved.
Who are these sheep?
Wouldn't even one of these bleating ungulates say, "No, sir. Not good enough. I want to know the whole story."
The perfectly named Christine Stoneman (Not as perfect as Canadian Olympic swimmer, Keith Beavers, but hey...) has the gall to say with a straight stoneman face, "We're intelligent people."
Hahahaha...
Of course, The Opaque One has said in the past that mayors should not be the heads of police boards and he was right. The only problem is that now that he is Attorney-general and in a position to do something about it, he is a grinning rictus , as usual.
Solicitor-General, John van Dongen, was absent in his field somewhere.
Batman's thumping his mom and his sister in a swanky hotel room...
And 82-year old Jerry Lewis is packing heat at the airport.
Vaaaiiirrry scaaaaiiirrry ...
Oh wait.
This just in.
Jerry's 22 baretta was a prop gun, and Baleful's loving mom and sis are not pressing charges.
Still scary...
The go ahead for slots at Hastings stirs memories of the unique ability of BC politicians to combine hypocrisy and stupidity.
Remember Steve Wynn. This was the guy from Vegas who was going to build a casino on the Vancouver waterfront and toss in a convention centre ten years ago. All on his own tab. He is currently doing precisely that in Macau.But the politicians in Vancouver and Victoria would have none of it. Why? Well he was an American, see. A little too flashy for Rubeville-on-the-sea. And gambling was bad. Bad,bad, bad.Well since then, taxpayers have been gouged with a grossly over-budget convention centre. Our governments grow fat on gambling revenues now that every convenience store is a mini casino, selling lottery tickets to survive.And Steve. Well, he's over in Macau, spending billions, welcomed with open arms by those very Chinese we are currently labeling as intolerant.
The streetcar of today is very different from the streetcar of yesterday.
- Helsinki, just built 5 km of new streetcar (streetcars are LRT) for Euro 15 million or CAD $23.6 million or CAD $4.72 million a km.! Compare that with almost $200 million/km. for SkyTrain.
- Helsinki's tram (streetcar) system carries over 20,000 persons per hour per direction (pphpd) one one downtown route, during peak hours. Compare with SkyTrain, which can't carry 15,000 pphpd without a $3 billion upgrade!
- In Karlsrhue, Germany, one can board a streetcar in the downtown and alight in Heilbronn, some 150 km. away, with the streetcar operating on-street; on a reserved rights-of-way (LRT); and as a railway train, track-sharing with the mainline railways! Compare with SkyTrain, it can only operate on a massively expensive segregated rights-of-way and is compatible with no other railway!
- The Kong Kong tramway's (those quaint double-decker streetcars) CARRIES OVER 80 MILLION PASSENGERS ANNUALLY! Compare with SkyTrain, with almost $6 billion invested with the metro, barely 70 million passengers annually use it, with 80% first taking a bus to use it.
- In Spain, a new streetcar line cost under CAD $7 million/km to build, including cars! Compare with SkyTrain where $7 million would buy you 70 metres of guide-way, without cars!
- Streetcars can travel at 30 second headways. Compare with SkyTrain, which even 1 minute headways pose a problem.
- Streetcars come in all sizes, from small metre gauge 2 axle affairs, to large, multi-axle articulated vehicles, with a maximum capacity of 350 persons (Strasbourg's 'Jumbos').
- Streetcars can climb 10% grades with ease (Sheffield, UK); in Lisbon, their 'heritage cars' (see above) climb 13.7 percent grades. compare with SkyTrain where the system doesn't like steep grades at all!
- Streetcars can travel as fast as 100 kph.
- AND STREETCARS OPERATE WITHOUT PROBLEM IN THE SNOW! In the Great Blizzard's in Denver last year, the LRT/streetcar only stopped operating because there was no passengers to take. No one could reach the streetcar! Compare with SkyTrain, where one flake of snow causes panic and.......... you know the rest
The firing of the Breakfast Television team at CityTV is not a national tragedy, but it is discouraging.
Not only for the very decent and capable people who will be hard-pressed to find work in this moribund market, but for all of us as lively and involved citizens.
It is a text book case of everything that is wrong with broadcasting in this country.
The CRTC grants licences to every manner of well-heeled hooligan, who dutifully promises to spend millions on local programming.
The reality, of course, is that people want to kick back and watch American Idol or the NFL.
What would local programming have to be to attract a significant audience? Sex and snuff movies?
So, from the very beginning of television in Canada, we have been soaking up the Ed Sullivan Show and Donny and Marie and Oprah and Charlie Rose.
The original Global station in Toronto became incredibly rich on two strands - one, great buying of new American product at the annual Las Vegas fair, and two, repeater stations granted to Global throughout rural Ontario. Literally, a license to print money.
Except for local newscasts - which CITY abandoned a few years ago - very few local or even Canadian programming ever sees the light of day. CTV and CBC love to gush over themselves when they crank out cheezy, imitative police dramas.
Yawn, goodnight.
CBC, never having the courage of its own alleged convictions, plays CanCult one minute and Sean Penn movies the next.
Australia has the advantage of being very, very far away, adrift in a remote sea. Thus, they have created a booming and unique film industry and their own TV stars.
But, as we huddle together here on the 49th parallel, in the shadow of the really, really Big Show, we continue to be a B-movie that can't even sustain a morning show with 6-minute guests.
Pity.
Most of us, in our wisdom, ignored the PR stunt called the "conversation on health."
Its transparent purpose - to encourage support for private initiatives in health services - was comically apparent.
The rube who heads the class in Victoria sees the rest of us as turnip patchers and thinks that we won't get his cloddish slight-of-hand tricks.
How refreshing therefore to learn that the $10Million caper brought exactly the opposite results. Over and over again, citizens showed up and told the hired monkeys that they supported government funded universal health care.
Hahahaha.
Of course, I shouldn't be laughing. That's 10 Million of my and your Canadian tax dollars and 18 months wasted on complete and utter bull.
Isn't government grand?
The Mayor of Victoria, Alan Lowe, needs some quick instruction on the the basics of contributing to a democratic society.
His handling of the Police Chief affair is appalling and amateurish in the extreme.
The Police Chief has been under investigation for many months. He has now been cleared. And he has resigned.
He was under investigation for WHAT? He has been cleared of WHAT? He has resigned WHY?
This is the Police Chief! If there is the hint of an aroma of a whiff of mis-doing, we the public must know.
Hiding behind arcane inner sanctum rules will not cut it.
If anyone should resign, it is this mayor.
For fans of LRT - and we are legion - it is very good news indeed that no less than 40 American cities are looking at re-investing in long gone or non-existent or minimal streetcar systems.
Not that the uber-planners in Victoria would ever consider such good sensible ideas.
Read the NY Times story and hope and email your local elected dope.
I have one thing to say today and it is politically incorrect.
The subject is The Olympics.
I don't care about the local food or culture or customs or whether or not someone has a sister in the hospital or grew up in a hut with wolves.
I rush home each evening to watch beautiful young men and women doing extraordinary physical and mental things.
I watch them dive and swim and run and jump and twist and contort and lift their bodies in ways that defy gravity and common sense.
And I marvel at it all.
I don't care about their nationality. It is only of passing interest to me that a competitor comes from the Ukraine or Canada or China.
I wish them all well and cheer them on.
The TV and the radio and the newspapers are filled with drivel by entire nations of so-called journalists babbling about nothing. They are all so intense and so clever and so completely beside the point.
When they can run and jump and part the waves in record times, I will be interested in them too.
It's all about The Games, Stupid.
And it's beautiful.
In all the many years I have been reading newspapers, I have never, never ever, read a more wrong-headed, stupid, colossally appalling editorial as that in the Sun today.
This is the Heading:
No soldier should be sent on a third combat tour, except under the most compelling circumstances of need and crisis.
This speaks to a depleted force and very bad planning.
To make matters worse, for a young Canadian with a young family to die, as Master Corporal Erin Doyle of Kamloops did yesterday, fighting a useless war in the drug economy known as Afghanistan is both tragic and obscene.
What will any of us remember of this idiotic conflict years from now? What gain will these senseless deaths have brought?
Canada, get out.
There is a small story in this morning's Province that speaks volumes about so-called nursing homes or senior citizen's homes.
A man dies and days later the staff call his family to ask what they should do with his bicycle. No one had called to say he was in hospital for two weeks.
The staff and the hospital are pointing fingers at each other saying it was the other guy's responsibility to behave like a caring human being with common sense.
Read the story and then multiply by about 100,000.
In my experience, too many of these institutions have a culture that is lacking in common sense or common decency.
As soon as you hear the staff telling you how much they care about their residents, book a flight for Tierra del Fuego.
In Georgia today, people are asking, "Where is the Untied States? Where is NATO?"
Well, we know where Bush and Putin are. They're at the games in Beijing.
A war has been declared and people are being killed and not many people seem to be noticing.
Here is one NY Times report, if you can drag yourself away from archery or beach volleyball.
And here is another.
My family never had to work at being Jewish.
That is what we were.
Thus, I don't think I heard the self-conscious kvetching of klezmer music, with its store bought gaiety and off-the-rack minor key sadness, until I was in my 30's or 40's.
The house I grew up in - my grandparent's house in North Winnipeg - was filled with music.
But none was ethno-centrically Jewish.
It was the music of Beethoven and Ravel, Gershwin and Leiber & Stoller.
There were Hebrew texts and Yiddish short stories, no doubt, but there was an ample supply of Joyce and John O'Hara and Somerset Maughm.
Usually when I listen to music, I have no apparent thoughts. I am happily hearing the music itself.
But last night, at a wonderful concert by the Leipzig String Quartet - part of Festival Vancouver at the Chan - my mind wandered back a mere 60 years.
The players were playing Mendelsshon, most beautifully.
Maybe I had heard this piece somewhere long ago. I don't know.
But I had certainly heard this kind of moment many times before.
Intricate melodies and rhythms, now powered, now delicate.
I curled a little lower in my seat, leaning a little closer to my friend. I was at home.
Home.
In case you might have thought that evil has disappeared in the world or that it always shows bared teeth, witness the horrifying and astonishing story of food supplies in Sudan.
The NY Times chronicles this morning a tale of a country receiving tons of free food, growing billions of dollars of its own food for export (including to feed camels in nearby countries) and starving its own masses in Darfur.
No doubt this is all done with the customary well-tailed diplomacy that shields inhumanity everywhere and in all times.
