No kidding.
Yesterday, I was strolling in the 'hood and suddenly I thought I was in a Bruce Willis movie.
See this baby?
He was following me around.
Or so I felt.
Or imagined.
I do have an elevated sense of my own importance, I know, but really, kids!
Enjoy life in Gamesistan.
School or jail.
The choice seems obvious.
Yet it is only now that a local court had found the way to offer some people who break the law a chance to really change their own destiny.
The news and the stories and photos from Haiti are relentless.
So too are the "good" stories of a world jumping in to help - money, aid, supplies, food, clothing, the adoption of children and plans to try to rebuild a much better community.
But how can one absorb this idea - bulldozers pushing 90,000 dead into newly dug mass graves in the Haitian hillsides?
All praise to those who are helping in any large or small way. If you want to send a dollar, just Google something like "Haiti relief" and I am sure you will find a toll free number or website.
Here at home, I returned from a week of work in Winnipeg to learn that a lovely young woman in our neighbourhood had died.
She was the daughter of a local shop owner.
I scarcely knew her, but I knew her pop and I stopped in to see him.
There were 90,000 and they are real.
And there was one and she was real.
Grief is local and it is universal.
I confess ignorance here.
So you will forgive my being shocked by the revelation today that Canadian banks are buoyed by enormous support from me and you and our tax dollars.
At the end of 2008, the latest figures we have, CMHC had $149-billion of investments in mortgage-backed securities on its balance sheet, up from $96-billion the previous year.
Nice.
Does anyone remember what happened not too many miles south not too many months ago?
Last night over dinner, a friend pointed out that he knows many young people in their early twenties who text between 200 and 300 messages a day.
These important communications, he added, are typically of the order of "sup?"
Which roughly translated means, "And so Reginald, how is life treating you exactly these days, and how pray tell are you filling your ample time?"
The Globe editorial this morning leaps madly into the fray by suggesting that our youth are
Jean Simmons was one of my favorite movie actors and stars.
She died Friday at her home in Santa Monica at the age of 80.
Simmons was impossibly beautiful and she had the most lovely speaking voice.
And she was unforgettable as Sister Sharon in "Elmer Gantry."
Justice is supposed to be swift.
That notion has pretty much gone the way of the long bow and the noose.
But never fear.
VANOC conquers all.
My friend, Bob Ransford, contributed an excellent and thoughtful piece to the Vancouver Sun yesterday on the need for better planning in Greater Vancouver.
Give it a read.
Then, explain this mystery to me.
Two friends of mine - one lives in Shaughnessy in half a beautiful old mansion, and the other lives on 4 acres in the Gulf Islands in a log house he built with his own hands 40 years ago - have had their property assessments jump 60% this year.
That's right.
60%!
Short of discovering crude in the back yard, what could possibly justify this unholy demand for more tax money.
60% raise in one year?
They can't afford that and both are contesting this arbitrary and cruel "adjustment."
I can't.
Could you?
Should we?
Yesterday I wrote about City hall laying off workers - the wrong workers.
Today, our friendm Martin, shares the gruesome details:
The thing that bugs my wife the most about this is that not one person called or even asked what she does in her job. She oversees the busiest community centre in Vancouver (Kerrisdale) with the most programs. She is constantly overworked, with endless committees to attend, and always took on more responsibilities with a smile on her face.
Without her, there is no way to continue with the amount of programs that are currently running, which will inevitably lead to cuts. And the people who will suffer are the good taxpayers of Vancouver, who depend on their community centre to enrich and educate themselves/their children. To a lesser extent, the Community Centre suffers too, as they will lose revenue that gave it the ability to offer programs at a discounted rate to seniors and school age children.
The worse part of all this is they still expect her to represent the City of Vancouver at one of the LiveCity sites with a smile on her face. She become so cynical the last 48 hours that she thinks she'll have to resign from that, which stinks considering she supported the Olympics from day one and wanted to do her part to represent the city she was so proud of. She even turned down a great volunteer position with VANOC since the City asked that she represent the City for this event.
At the very least, the City should have hired an independent auditor who actually went out and found out what people did in their job...not some fatcat at City Hall who just wanted to balance the budget in order to keep their job.
The whole Olympic movement needs to take a pill.
Just relax, fellas.
Stop trying to own the world and run it.
Others have a right to live and breathe.
Like the Canadian Congenital Heart Alliance, for example.
This is the group that works with people who are born with heart defects.
My mother - may she rest in peace - was such a person.
The poor old Alliance has made the unforgivable sin of having for many years now a logo with a hand holding a small torch.
The flame of the torch is in the shape of a heart.
OK, so far?
Not if you are the Canadian Olympic Committee, who never saw a sleeping dog it could let lie.
Oh, no.
COC has got to rise up and make demands and threats.
Bully much?
A billion dollar party team gangs up on a long-existing, small non-profit society that struggles daily for money and provides life-saving responses for people with critical health problems.
COC needs to drop the viagra and take up all that methadone that's lying around.
City workers are let go and given layoff notices all the time.
What is noteworthy on any given such occasion is who and what and why and when and where.
That's why they call it W5.
In today's case,
Scare Canada is running full page color ads in newspapers these days.
The ads show a plane brightly festooned in PC green and Olympic doodlings.
It's a happy aircraft.
The body of the ad is 13 "quotes" ( I must put quotes around the quotes because we have no idea if they made this up or they really are quotes from the Handful of the Happy.)
The "quotes" are all from deliriously satisfied Scare Canada flyers.
Huh?
Is this your experience?
It is not mine.
I find their routing and timing for departures and arrivals consistently inconvenient, their telephone, desk and in flight service people consistently arrogant, superior and bored, and their prices ranging from incomprehensible to simply expensive.
But aside from all that they are wonderful.
So wonderful that my last five trips within Canada have been on WestJet and my next trip overseas is with British Airways.
Please comment.
You like Air Canada? You love Air Canada? You heart Air Canada?
You
When you get past all the other noise and confusion, one sour note rings through.
Universal health care is not a happy thought for many Americans.
The fact that close to 50 million of their fellow citizens and (maybe not) neighbours are uninsured - and therefore always one snivel away from personal and financial catastrophe - doesn't seem nearly as important as punishing a president or a party or a candidate they don't like.
Or rising to the bait of scare words like...00000...socialism. Oooooo...
That this simple goal - coverage for all - has been drowned in the cheesiest forms of partisan politics is overwhelmingly sad and disgusting.
The editorial in the Globe blames Boston voters, among others.
If Obama can save this bill and his own place in history from this mess, he will replace Cujo on the alltime save list.
"Everything on the Internet should the free."
Dream on, Little Grasshopper.
The dot.com hay days of the late '90's may have come and gone with their $100 Million start-ups that folded 90 nights later, but people are still determined to make money on the net.
With ad revenues down on average 30% world-wide for daily print newspapers, it should not come as a surprise that the New York Times will try once again to get you to subscribe to its electronic articles.
This program is slated to start next year, with the fees and the dates yet to be announced.
"If the newspapers, including the Times, continue giving away their content for free while asking subscribers to pay for an edition that they get six hours later, it is a continuing foolhardy business proposition," said Joel Brinkley, a communications professor at Stanford University who worked for The New York Times for 23 years.
What all of this means for info vampires like me and you remains to be seen.
If I pay the subscription fee and I read a NY Times article, under the proposed new system I can recommend it to you.
But can I LINK it to you?
Perhaps you won't be able to open that link if you have not paid up as well.
Ah well.
The Tree People will be basking.
President Obama's light is seriously dimming.
A pretty boy Republican has stolen the Boston Senate seat that has belonged to the Kennedys for decades right out from under, and partisanship is storming away at an all-time high in American politics.
Read Konrad Yakabuski's excellent coverage in this morning's Globe.
Even a grand old Democratic warrior like Harry Belafonte, speaking the other day with Tavis Smiley is disenchanted with the directions and tones coming these days from the White House.
If the health care bill is lost, Obama may have the shortest effective presidency in history.
May all of this get much better - and soon!
"We strongly believe in local television and we're strongly committed to local television"
Hahahahaha...
This was a Rogers executive, speaking about how their wholly-owned CITY-TV franchise is cutting local news across the country.
It always amazes me how folks like this can say things like, "We love you and we care deeply for you," as they drive the knife expertly between L4 and L5.
The irony here is that in this case, the cable operator and the broadcaster are one and the same.
Don't you love those mushy TV ads declaring that Local TV Matters?
They go out of their way to find a round black woman, who immediately suggests motherhood and professorship and intelligence and integrity all at studied once to babble on about the importance of local television.
All the while the people who have paid for the ad make all of their money buying shows in and from Los Angeles or making new Canadian drek like, "Human Target," and cutting local news.
The bottom line here is that the very sociopathds who are crying for more breaks from the government and claimning ownership of local concerns are in reality cutting jobs and information and public access.
Be clear in understanding what colossal bullshitters they really are.
