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The Immorality of Komodo Dragons

I just watched a television documentary on Komodo Dragons. These creatures are real slime balls. I think we should have nothing to do with them. In the first place, they are very ugly. They’re up to five feet long, covered with scales, and they have kind of a baggy, flabby look. They look like a log covered with wet burlap. And it’s no wonder: they’re only active for about three hours a day. Why are they only active for three hours a day? Why don’t they get out there and put in a regular eight-hour day like the rest of the hard-working animal kingdom? Because they will eat anything, no matter how old or disgusting. Komodo dragons will kill large animals, like goats and deer, and eat part of them, and put the rest away for later, and not in a fridge. I guess when you’re as ugly as a Komodo dragon, you don’t care what goes into you. You see this fresh elk go leaping by and he looks real tasty and all, and then you look over at a two-week old rotting goat carcass and think, “hey, that looks good…”

Komodo dragons drool when they’re hungry. But not like you and me. Oh no. Komodo dragon drool is toxic. You see, Komodo dragons don’t go chasing after deer, knock their legs out from under them, and then break their spines, like the hard-working jaguar or cheetah. No, the Komodo dragon sort of wanders around as if he wasn’t up to anything, and then, if a deer gets kind of careless and doesn’t move out of the way quickly enough, they leap– “leap” being a relative term here–into the air and bite them. The deer often gets away, or thinks it gets away. It moves off into the distance and looks behind itself and sees this ugly, baggy old lizard coming after it… slowly. But the Komodo dragon will follow the deer for a week, from way behind, because the Komodo dragon knows that, thanks to that toxic sludge drool, that little bite is going to get very badly infected. That deer is doomed. Eventually.

You have to respect the Komodo dragon’s patience, don’t you? Would you go into MacDonald’s, order a hamburger, take a bite, and then wait a whole week until it quieted down ten blocks away so you could finish it off?

Komodo dragons will eat other Komodo dragons if they can. This is a non-issue for Komodo dragons. I don’t think they give it much thought at all. You certainly don’t see other Komodo dragons gathering around a corpse and demanding an investigation. They are more likely to demand a share. And this is why young Komodo dragons live in trees until they are three years old and at least five feet long.

Komodo Dragons mate for life, but the male doesn’t have a good memory. He can’t tell just by looking at a female whether it’s his wife or not. He kind of follows her for a while until she notices him. “Huh? What do you want? Oh—again? I should have known. Is that all you think about?” Yup. That’s her.

Seriously, if he is strolling along and he happens to see a female and he gets the urge, he has to get real close first and then taste her sweat glands. Then he knows. It is very important for him to be very, very sure that this beauty is his wife, because, if it isn’t, the minute he gets close, she might kill him and eat him. This makes it very difficult for Komodos to have orgies. I’m not saying it’s impossible or that it’s never happened: just that it’s difficult. And for the same reason that a dead goat lasts a Komodo a month, they aren’t too worried about “protection”. A Komodo thinks, “Listen, I just had a mouthful of month-old maggoty goat meat, I’m been crawling through leech infested muck for three hours, I live in a dark cave with thousands of fruit bats, and I just sniffed your sweat glands— and you’re worried about exchanging bodily fluids? What are you? A prude?”

In order to mate, the male Komodo has to bring his body temperature up about ten degrees. So he goes and lays in the sun for an hour before sex. This takes a lot of spontaneity out of the Komodo dragon’s life, but hey, how spontaneous can you be if you only move three miles per hour? So, say a couple of Komodo dragons meet in a singles swamp. He says, “hey, you look like my type.” She says, “Oooo. You’re getting me hot. Let’s make it.” He says, “Okay. I’ll go find a sunny rock and we’ll see you in an hour.”

And what if the nearest sunshine is waiting for him on the other side of a shady mango grove? He waddles over there at 3 miles per hour, lays in the sun for an hour, brushes his teeth and slaps a little after-shave under the old burlap, waddles half-way across hell’s half acre, through swamps, under trees, through gnarled roots, finds the female, sniffs her sweat glands to make sure it’s her, rears up… “Oh damn. I’m too cold.” And you thought Viagra was inconvenient?

As if life isn’t hard enough for the male Komodo dragon, if he stays in the sun too long, he will die of heat stroke. So he can’t let himself go way over the ten degrees up, and then hope he cools off just the right amount by the time he gets to the female. For Komodo dragons as for humans, timing is important.

Komodo dragons live in only one place in the entire world: you guessed it: Komodo. People have to be careful on Komodo because Komodo dragons will sometimes eat people. Now, you’ve got this 150 pound lizard roaming around this island drooling this toxic sludge and attacking your children… and what do you? You protect the lizard! You put him on the endangered species list!

Well, I think we’re just getting carried away with this endangered species business. If it was up to me, we’d be having Komodo soup every night until they were all gone.

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Mike Piazza Pie: Sports Economics

Mike Piazza now makes $91 million for playing baseball, for seven years. How on earth can they do it? Only 30 years ago, the entire New York Yankees baseball club was valued at only $12,000,000.

Well, it’s a free country. If a baseball owner wants to pay an athlete $17 million a year to play a game, why shouldn’t he?

They can pay Mike Piazza $91 million because fans continue to flock to the stadiums and plop themselves in front of their television sets to watch Mike Piazza play baseball. From that money, the New York Mets pays its players. And like every other business, they pay all their other expenses, like administrative staff, office space, scouts, managers, and rent or mortgage for the stadium… and taxes.

Well, wait a minute.

Yes, yes, the Blue Jays pay $11 million dollars a year in taxes on the Skydome. But who built the Skydome? You did. With your tax money. We paid $321 million to build the Skydome and then we rented it to the Jays for considerably less than it costs to operate it.

That is why the Skydome Corporation is now bankrupt.

This year, Hartford, Conn. is donating $350 million to the New England Patriots. And Maryland is donating $220 million to the Baltimore Ravens NFL team, and kicked in an extra $80 just to make owner Art Modell happy.

At least the Blue Jays paid their taxes last year. And so did the Expos. But the Cardinals and the White Sox, and the Red Sox, and the Reds, and the Dodgers, and the Rockies, and the Mets, and all the other teams? Not a penny.

How can that be? This is a multi-million dollar business! These owners are filthy rich. They pay their players absurdly extravagant sums of money to do what most of us would gladly do for nothing. And they don’t pay taxes?!

No, they don’t. They don’t pay taxes, because foolish citizens and even more foolish politicians have decided to use tax payer money to subsidize professional sports teams.

You see, Mike Piazza doesn’t care who he plays for. You do. You are a fan. You want your team to win. You are loyal to your team even if they lose. Loyalty is a good quality.  But baseball players have the loyalty of rats. If the New York Mets didn’t offer to pay Mike Piazza more money, he was going to go play for someone else!

But the New York Mets didn’t have enough money for Mike Piazza. How would the owners of the Mets make a profit if they had to pay Mike Piazza more money?

Well, they can cut other expenses, like those horrific stadium costs. But if the team cuts those costs from its budget, who is going to pay for it? Why the city, of course! But where does the city get its money? From property taxes. And where do property taxes come from?

Right– you. You with your $45,000 a year. You are going to give tax money to the New York Mets (if you are citizen of New York) so that they can give Mike Piazza an additional $4 million per year.

But the tax payer would think that is a dumb idea. So instead of the city giving a check to the Mets, it gives them a deduction on their taxes. And then it chips in for a stadium. And then it provides police and traffic services for free.

This is all no secret, by the way, though you would think it would be almost unimaginable that voters would be so stupid as to approve these arrangements. Sports Illustrated has been ranting about this devious little scam for years. A few smart politicians and journalists have caught on as well. And the voters in Minnesota caught on, and recently turned down a proposal to make a gift of a $100 million stadium to the billionaire owner of the Twins, who then threatened to move the Twins to some town with more idiots in it.

It is one of the biggest scandals in modern history: taxpayers subsidizing multi-million dollar contracts for spoiled athletes! And you just know that some of these same owners and athletes and sports journalists and politicians who approve of these arrangements would be among the first to complain bitterly about their hard-earned tax dollars going to a single mother on welfare. Freeloader! Parasite! Give us back your $500 a month and go find a job! Maybe you can park Mike Piazza’s spare Rolls Royce for him, if you’re good.

The problem is that too many cities give in to owner blackmail: build me a stadium or I move to a different city. And the city fathers weep and wail– “Alas, we cannot be without our sports team!” and issue a bond or debenture and build a stadium and forgive them their annual property taxes. Cities without sports teams plead with the Expos or the Twins: move here and we will give you millions of dollars. Millions of YOUR dollars.

And you voters stand for this??? You re-elect these guys? Are you insane?

The Baltimore Orioles, thank you, paid for their own stadium. Hurray for Baltimore! But they still don’t pay any taxes. [According to the Toronto Star of Nov. 29, 1998, the taxpayers paid $254 million for Baltimore’s stadium. When I find out who’s telling the truth, I’ll update this.]

Now, you will hear many supporters of these professional sport teams argue that the teams generate a great deal of revenue, including tax revenue, and attract jobs, and therefore, more than “pay for themselves”. Right. You can apply this argument to absolutely any business you like: banks, car makers, theatre companies, insurance companies, computer makers, anybody. They all generate revenue and taxes. Big deal. Pay your taxes and shut up.

And the issue has been studied: the economic benefits are grossly exaggerated, especially, as I say, compared to other possible investments.

The only solution is for all the cities to get together and agree that none of them will subsidize major league professional sports in any shape or form whatsoever. No subsidized stadiums. No tax concessions. No free police guards. Not even a parade (a long civic advertisement for the team). Tell the major leagues to conduct their businesses like everyone else: you balance out your income vs. your expenditures, and if you can’t afford to pay Mike Piazza $91 million, you offer him less.

Even better, the federal governments in both Canada and the U.S. should outlaw civic funding of sports stadiums.

 

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Dr. Laura’s Indescretion

You’ve probably heard the news, right? Self-righteous, simplistic-minded Dr. Laura, who tells her listeners what God says they should do, once posed naked for pictures by a former boyfriend, and now those pictures are all over the internet. They are even being posted in the Dr. Laura newsgroup.

Well, you can see worse things on the Internet, I suppose.

Dr. Laura first denied that the pictures existed. They were composites! Just like Bill Clinton! Then she admitted they existed, but they were stolen. Then she said she had the copyright on those pictures, so, they can’t be shown without her permission and she doesn’t give you her permission.

Copyright? Well, what do you know? If you take a picture of a bum on the street–except in Quebec–you don’t need any permission to publish this picture. By being in the street, you see, where everybody could see him, he was making himself “public”. So, he has no right to prevent you from taking his picture or showing what you saw to somebody else.

It’s a little different for a model. Models have to sign a release, to give you permission to use the pictures you take of them. That’s because they are not posing in the middle of the street– they are posing in a studio. You are paying them to pose. You have to get their permission.

Was Dr. Laura once a model? I don’t think so. Looks like she was just being nice to her former boyfriend. He wanted some dirty pictures he could keep as souvenirs.

The point is, I guess, that it doesn’t matter. Dr. Laura could get a hundred lawyers working on this full-time and they wouldn’t be able to stop the pictures. They are all over the world, on servers, in news groups, in web sites… everywhere. One little mistake, and kablooie! The whole world knows. People who have never heard Dr. Laura’s radio show can now see her naked by simply dialing into DejaNews.

Tell me– at this moment– are you trying to remember if you ever posed naked for anyone? Hmmm. You might be smart to post the pictures yourself. That way, at least you don’t look like you’re hiding anything from anybody.

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Lawyers

I used to be in charge of benefits administration at a small social service agency. It was my job to evaluate and understand all the provisions of our benefit package, in order to explain them to new employees and file claims.

I must have been more stupid than most: I got out the policies and actually tried to read them. Every word. Well, not exactly every word. I figured it would take two months or more to read every word, and another ten years to fully understand it. But I did read a lot of inscrutable text about all the subtle little conditions and notwithstandings and wherewithals and provisions. I discovered that our liability coverage had so many exceptions to it that I doubted that it actually covered anything. Sometimes I couldn’t believe what I was reading. It sounded so contrary to good sense that I thought I must have misunderstood it.

I phoned our agent and asked him to explain. In the back of my mind, I think I expected him to say that the small print didn’t mean anything because, of course, no reasonable person could ever find enough time to read it and, therefore, no one could ever really agree to it. That’s not what he said. He said that of course the small print applied. It’s all part of the agreement. He tried to convince me that all insurance companies had the same basic agreements. I called some of those other agencies and found out that that was not true. When I told him we intended to cancel the policy, he offered to cut our rates in half. Just like that! So much for the assumption that they were making a “reasonable” profit.

We cancelled anyway and switched to another company with more agreeable small print.

Did you ever think about the fact that the biggest agreements of all, God’s covenant with us, is phrased in the plainest, most straightforward language you can imagine? I will be your God. You will be my people. I will send a Redeemer. I will never again destroy the earth with a flood. He who believes in me shall never die.

The small print exists because lawyers write most of these agreements and, like many other professionals, they, consciously or not, want to ensure that they will always have plenty of work. It is there because insurance companies want to be able to protect themselves against having too many claims filed. It is there because banks don’t want you to know how obscene the interest rates on charge cards really is, or how much power they have to destroy your life if you forget to make a single payment on a loan.

Did you know, for example, that a lot of home-owner’s policies have a provision that during any extended absence by the homeowner, the insured house must be entered and inspected by someone every day? And there you were in Florida in your lawn chair feeling so comfy and reassured.

A lot of people won’t believe this, but there is no need in the universe for small print. It should be abolished, banned, exiled, censored, shredded. The law will not collapse. The courts will not be inundated with frivolous claims. Injustice will not prevail. In fact, I am quite sure the opposite will happen.

A holding company in Toronto which rented 30,000 apartment units tried to eliminate all the small print in their leases. The new lease agreements basically said “You agree to pay so much money every month so you can live in this apartment at this address. You agree not to damage the apartment. We agree to maintain the apartment. If you don’t pay the rent, you have to leave. If we don’t maintain the apartment, you don’t have to pay the rent.” Done. In plain English. What happened? The company saved thousands of dollars in legal fees every year because everybody understood the agreements and, as a result, were far less inclined to challenge or break them. The tenants loved the agreements. They understood them. They had the wonderful feeling that they weren’t about to be tricked or cheated because they didn’t have the time to read twenty pages of incomprehensible legalese.

The only drawback… ahem… is that most lawyers would be put out of business.

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The Plan Plan

Have you ever been part of a strategic planning session? I always picture Napoleon Bonaparte doing strategic planning. He’s in uniform at the front of a group of generals sitting on the grass and he’s got a easel with a big wad of lined paper, and he’s writing on the paper with magic marker.

Meanwhile, the other side, without a mission statement or a strategic plan or a list of stakeholders, has attacked from the rear and our noble conqueror is slain or captured.

Napoleon Creates a Strategic Plan:

Napoleon: All right, let’s talk about who we are. Anyone? Who are we?
General #1: conquerors?
Napoleon: (writes it down) Conquerors. Do you spell that with an “e” or an “o”? “O”? Okay. Anyone else?
General #2: soldiers?
Napoleon: Okay. That’s good, but too general. What do soldiers do? Pierre?
General #3: Well, we loot, and pillage, and burn houses down.
Napoleon: That’s good. Loot. Burn. Pillage.
General #1: And we rape.
Napoleon: Rape? Do I put that down.
General #2: Well, it’s not really part of our mission, as soldiers. I don’t think it belongs in who we are. It’s more like a strategy.
Napoleon: So, you’re saying that our goal is not to rape, but if rape facilitates the achievement of our goals–
General #1: Yes, like our mission.
General #3: To conquer. I think killing and burning belongs under “strategies” too.
Napoleon: Okay, but we’ll get to that later. Now, I think we need a mission statement to put on here so we can reflect on it and discuss it in terms of appropriate strategies, and resources, and other stakeholders. Then we come back to it at the end of tomorrow and discuss if it still reflects our thinking as a group? Agreed?
General #1: To conquer Europe?
Napoleon: That’s good. That’s simple, easy to remember. (writes it down).

 

The first thing to know about a “strategic plan” is that the term itself invites ridicule: a strategy is a plan. So what you have is a “plan plan”.

The second thing to know is that no group of employees who is using all of their time to contribute to the success of their company has any time for a “strategic plan” or “missions statement” or any other such nonsense.

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Small is Beautiful and Other Momentary Lapses in Justice

Twenty-five years after E.F. Schumacher published “Small is Beautiful” the Ontario government still doesn’t get it.

It is about to close hundreds of small schools across Ontario because they are “inefficient”. The Ontario Public Schools Association predicts that 600 small schools will have to be closed to meet the demands of the Harris government. In Toronto alone, 128 schools are slated to be shutdown. In response to the public outcry, Harris tells the boards to cut their own “bloated bureaucracy”. He tells them, to give up some of their administrative space, though he must know that even if they gave up all of their administrative space, it would still be less than 20% of what is required.

The Toronto Board has already implemented the following:

  • School superintendents (making $100,000 a year) cut from 92 to 47.
  • Trustees cut from 74 to 22.
  • Trustees’ salaries cut from up to $50,000 to $5,000.
  • Administrative staff of 2,000 to be cut in half over three years.

Well, hey, we all hate bureaucracies, so way to go Toronto School Board! I’m too stupid to figure out what 2,000 administrative staff do in a city the size of Toronto, so let’s turf them.

Well, what do they do? The truth is, I have a feeling that a lot of what they do is administrative masturbation. You need a clerical worker to do the filing for an administrator who organizes training seminars for other administrators who run the human resources department which administers the pension plans and benefits packages for the secretaries and the administrators. Other administrators spend a lot of time doing “the vision thing”, going on retreats, and making strategic plans.

Anyway, speaking of Napoleon, I’ve had enough the Harris sniveling about “improving” education. He thinks we are stupid enough to believe that reducing the money spent on education will result in smarter, better students and teachers. Just as you know that if you reduce the amount of money you spend on a car, you will end up with a better car, right? And if you spend less on plumbing, you get better pipes, right? And if you hire the cheapest computer programmer, you get the best software, right? Riiiiight.

Now, obviously, spending more money does not guarantee a better educational system, just as it doesn’t guarantee better software. But you certainly can’t have a good educational system without spending the money necessary to do the job well, attracted good people, and provide adequate resources.

I attended small schools all my life. My children attend a large high school. The larger high school has some advantages, but the biggest difference between the two, by far, is that it is relatively easy to coast unnoticed through four years of education without learning anything in a big school. And it is hard for parents to get to know your kids’ teachers. You see them once for the one semester your child is in their class, and then you never meet the same teacher again. You never develop a strong enough relationship to feel that wonderful sense of accountability that teachers in small schools feel.

Small schools are often an important social and cultural force in the communities they are located in. They are where everyone goes for Halloween parties and the Christmas pageant and graduation. Parents volunteer to help in the classroom and to improve facilities. Everyone meets there at 3:15 to bring their children home. Everyone cares about their safety.

Harris wants to put them all on a bus, demolish or sell the schools, and convince the parents to place all their trust in an institution he has been slamming ever since he came into office.

Does Harris really care at all about education? It’s hard to believe that anybody could be so stupid as to not care. But all of the policies and directives and initiatives he has taken seem far more concerned with reducing costs than actually improving anything. The truth is, improvements do cost money. The truth is, even though we know schools and school boards waste a lot of money, they do still accomplish things. Students need good lab equipment, computers, books, field trips, art supplies, film, paint, desks, and so on. Having all those things doesn’t guarantee a good education, but you can’t have a good education without them.

* * *

The government has stacked a committee that was supposed to hold hearings, listen to varying viewpoints, think about the information gathered, then come to a rational and fair conclusion about how 46 million hectares of publicly owned land in Northern and Central Ontario should be used. This committee heard from loggers, industrialists, commercialists, environmentalists, cottage-owners, and the general public. They then adopted a very thoughtful expression and said, “hell, let’s turn everything over to the loggers.”

The Committee’s official conclusion is that 7.6% of public land should be set aside for preservation. “Hell, let’s give everything to the loggers.”

Now, this is a government that says no one gets a free ride. No more welfare bums. No more government handouts for people who don’t contribute. This government wants to charge user fees for fresh air. This is a government that wants schools of 10,000 students, taught by video camera from a windowless cell in Port Elgin. This is a government that wants MacDonald’s to operate our prison system. But then they turnaround and offer all the trees in Ontario to the logging companies for practically nothing.

If you’re poor. If you’re destitute, and living on the streets of the Toronto– this government says, tough luck, fella. I can’t help yah. But give that bum a chain saw, and the government says, hey, you want some trees? We don’t need them.

* * *

Hey, I’ve been saying this all along! You know those late penalties they charge you on your utilities bill (in Canada)? Like, about $20.00 if you’re one day late on a $200.00 bill? The real interest rate on those charges is, according to actuarial experts, about 5,000,000,000%. That’s right, five billion. In Canada, it is illegal to charge interest rates higher than 60% per annum (which is pretty ridiculous anyway). Well the Supreme Court just ruled that these interest rates, contrary to previous rulings, and with the complicity of the Minister of Energy for Ontario in the 1970’s (under Premier Comatose, Bill Davis), may well be subject to Federal law after all.

This was just another example of the golden rule: he who has the gold makes the rules. Now it looks like there’s a chance that the law might be applied equally once again.

The court case is based on a challenge of the penalty filed by Gordon Garland against Consumer’s Gas, on behalf of the 30% of customers who pay late.

* * *

The Blue Jays are demanding a “better deal” from the Skydome or, so they say, they will play at the “mistake on the lake”, Exhibition Place, next season.

Watch your pockets. A “better deal” means the Blue Jays want the taxpayers of Ontario to subsidize the cost of playing baseball in the Skydome so they can pay Jose Canseco $28 million over four years to bat .234.

Why don’t they just pay Jose Canseco less? Because the New York Mets just agreed to pay Mike Piazza $91 million over seven years to play catcher for them. How can they pay this guy so much money? Well, they can’t. Buy we can. You and I will gladly hand over our money for stadiums and police and road construction so Mike can have an extra limo, three or four extra houses, body guards, and a $25,000 stereo system.

If we don’t pay, undoubtedly, they will move the Blue Jays to Sarasota or someplace that has more suckers per capita than we do.
* * *

How many wars are there in the world this year? How many conflicts between two or more nations in which people are shooting or bombing or shelling each other?

None. Nada. Not a single one.

Yes, there are conflicts. But every conflict in the world this year, involving military action, is a civil conflict, between two factions within a single nation.

It’s true– you can check it out. Is humanity making progress? I think so. Eeyore says, “oh, there’s sure to be another war soon.” Pooh says that’s dumb.

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My Cars

love cars.

I mean, public transit is great, and we should use it more often. That way, there’d be less of you people in the way when I get on the road with my car.

As you an see from the list on the right, I have owned 12 different cars in my life. Well, the Studebaker was my brother’s, but I ended up with it. The Impala was my Dad’s, but I drove it most of the time. The Beetle never made it to the road.

Not one of them is a mini-van. I am trying to round up pictures of all them just so you can see how wonderful they all were.

That’s a quite a pile of cars. Where are they now? Oh, just anywhere. I got rid of them. They have disappeared from my life. It was easy: you tow them off somewhere and leave them. Someone else takes care of it. It’s not my problem anymore. Two tons of rusted, decaying metal and rubber and plastic— poof! Gone! You try to get rid of a gallon of toxic herbicide like that! Forget it. They make you fill out a form at least.

When my 1964 Dodge Dart, a car I dearly loved, broke down for good, in Calgary, I called the Ministry of Fear and told them that though the car was registered in Illinois, I would like to junk it in Calgary. They nearly had a fit. You couldn’t do that, they said. You had to import it first. When you import a car, you pay taxes based on the assessed value of the car. But the government liked the car a lot more than I did. They thought it was still worth thousands of dollars. A government official warned me that there would be dire consequences if I didn’t pay up.

I didn’t want to pay a lot of money just to tow it to a junk yard. We argued for days. I was ready to try to fix the thing just so I could drive it down to Montana and ditch it in the first Forest Preserve I could find. I got an estimate for fixing the broken starter motor and the transmission and the door. Then I realized it might be cheaper to import it after all. I called the government back.

Then I read an article in the paper about a man who had bought some golf clubs in the United States and then smuggled them into Canada without paying duty. You know what the police did? They seized the golf clubs.

That was good enough for me. I called the government back: seize away, it’s yours. The government official said, well, we’d rather not have to tow it. Could you drop it off at the compound? So, my friend Sid came over with his Malibu and we towed it to the government compound and left it there to be seized. Gone. Poof.

If you put all twelve of those cars in my backyard today, it would make a pretty cool tower of jagged steel. It would stand about 80 feet high, towering over the houses in the neighborhood. It would tell you something: this is the kind of monumental mess a single human being can create in only twenty-five years here in the affluent West.

I never paid a cent to dispose of my old cars. Usually, I got a few bucks. Think about it. In our society, do people ever do anything for you for nothing? Would your neighbor like it if you dropped five bags of leaves onto his driveway? Does he want your old stereo? Your old freezer? No, never! This leads me to believe that there are people out there who want your old car. Old cars are so good for the environment, that the government doesn’t even charge you to dispose of them, the same way they never charge corporations to clean up their big polluted dumps or poisoned rivers. I’ll bet there are lots of people out there just crawling over each other for a chance to have a wrecked car. And that’s where my next wrecked car is going to go.

But in the meantime, here I come! Out of the way, you slow-moving eco-baby freaks! I’m coming by at 120 kilometres per hour! I don’t care where I’m going: I just want to drive!

My Cars and the Years I Owned Them:

1960 Mini Morris [1970]
1961 Studebaker [1970]
1965 Peugeot [1971]
1965 Chevrolet Impala [1972]
1965 Volkswagen Beetle [1974]
1964 Dodge Dart [1975]
1967 Plymouth Valiant [1978]
1972 Plymouth Valiant [1979]
1971 Dodge van [1981]
1983 Lada [1983]
1978 Ford Fairmont [1987]
1983 Chevrolet Malibu [1989]
1987 Toyota Camry [1998]
1987 Toyota 4Runner [1998]
1999 Honda Accord (1999)
2004 Toyota Corolla (2007-11)
2001 Honda Accord (2005?)
2002 Honda CRV (2010-11)
2010 Toyota Corolla
2012 Toyota Rav4

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I Came Upon a Wedding

When I was seven years old, I used to chase girls around the school yard and try to kiss them. Especially Elizabeth, whom I loved because she had long pig-tails.

I can’t remember a stage of life where I didn’t like girls. Just loved them. I loved the way they looked, the way they talked, the way they walked…. I had girl “friends” when none of the boys I played with wanted anything to do with girls. I had an immense crush on my Sunday School teacher, and erotic dreams about her. I had a crush on a bride I saw at a wedding in Holland. A substitute teacher. A friend’s mother. The babysitter. Well, not my babysitter, like Paul Anka. Someone else’s babysitter. She was fifteen and I was about thirteen and she invited me upstairs to watch tv and “neck” during the commercials. She really wanted my older brother, Al, but I was a temporary fix, I guess. Our relationship started to deteriorate when she kept asking me to get her some milk for her “ulcer”.

Tonight, I went to a wedding, that two college students had contrived.

It was held in the Court House Theatre in Niagara-on-the-Lake, the scene of my very first date with a girl named Leslie, to see a musical based on the music of Leonard Cohen called “The Sisters of Mercy”. We thought it was great. It was our first play. I think it closed a week later.

The reception itself was right in the auditorium. The stage, the proscenium, is still there. I still like girls, and I especially like watching them dance. There were two spirited young women at this party: Christine, who danced like a maniac, all arms and legs and outrage and torrential energy unleashed, with earrings in her nose, and a tattoo, and who was more interesting to talk to than anybody else. And then there was Kim, who was dark and mysterious looking, who teaches dance, and who moved with elegance and style, but also exuberance. Kim was dramatic in a black dress, with spaghetti straps, and long black hair, moving around the floor like some healing gypsy with a gift of uncharted rhythms for everybody.

It was wonderful night until– I’m not kidding– they played a polka. The halls of my beloved courthouse rang with “e-i-e-i-e-i-o”.

I watched someone make a move on an attractive young woman with big hair. I watched them intently. He couldn’t dance worth a lick, but she was sporting and patient and tried to teach him the steps and keep her feet out from under his. I went out for a smoke and found good conversation with a gent who looked like Einstein and had traveled to the Arctic. I wasn’t sure I believed him. He said that when aircraft land in the Arctic, they have to keep their engines running because it is too cold to restart them. Once, a C-145 Transport was shut down for two hours. It never flew again. It is now somewhere beneath the pack-ice, a hundred miles from where it stopped.

So I learned four things tonight. Firstly, always keep your engines running. Secondly, there is a dance for everything, and for some people, that dance is a polka. I don’t know if that guy went home with the girl, but he at least had a polka. Thirdly,: in the dance of spirituality, someone, somewhere always needs a polka. Fourth: dancing is like keeping your engines running. In this arctic life of ours, this world of spiritless tundra, if it takes a polka to keep your engines running, go outside for a smoke.

[The wedding was of my nephew, Steven, and Noemi.]

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That Darned Subversive Cat

Remember all the stuff you heard about democracy and freedom and so on when you were kid? And how the Russians were supposed to be so evil because their government spied on their own people and arrested and imprisoned them just for daring to criticize Communism? And how the United States and Canada were so great, because here we were free to vote for whoever we wanted and think whatever we wanted?

Well, let’s keep things in perspective. What follows is not meant to suggest that the West was as bad as Russia was then (and China is today). It’s just meant to balance out a fairly idiotic image of who and what we were during the cold war. The truth is, our own governments were spying on us, and arresting people who spoke out in dissent and attempting to control the free flow of information, just like the commies did.

Actually, none of this is news. We already know about McCarthyism and the excesses of J. Edgar Hoover. I merely want to add a little tidbit here to help put the extent of government control into perspective.

It seems that in 1965 Walt Disney wanted to make a movie based on a book by former FBI agent Gordon Gordon and his wife, Mildred, about a cat who belongs to a kidnap victim. When the cat turns up one night wearing the victim’s wrist watch, the FBI puts the cat under surveillance. Hayley Mills, Dean Jones, and Frank Gorshin starred. Hilarious concept!

Anyway, the FBI heard about this movie, and, when informed about it, J. Edgar Hoover immediately turned to his faithful sidekick, Pedro De Loach, and told him, “Hey, it’s a free country. People can make movies about whatever they please.”

No, he did not.  As a matter of fact,  Mr. De Loach dispatched an FBI agent to investigate this movie to ensure that the Bureau’s “interests” were protected.  I’m not making this up.

Think about this. The FBI, using your hard-earned tax dollars, dispatches a highly-paid agent to Hollywood to investigate the possibility that a Disney movie about a cat might be dangerous to civil order and the justice system.

Did they have time? Well, Groucho Marx might have been retired by then, so I guess that freed up a few agents. Maybe Lucille Ball had let her communist party membership lapse. Perhaps Ring Lardner hadn’t ordered any explosives recently. Maybe Dalton Trumbo had started hanging out with Ronald Reagan. Who knows?

It is tempting to laugh at this bizarre episode and just shrug it off. When you were a kid and you recited the pledge of allegiance to the flag of America and the liberty for which it stands, did you think for a moment that your own government had it’s own little department of thought control?

Did you watch the television drama called “The FBI” on TV in the 1960’s? Did you know that the FBI virtually controlled the program? They could veto any line of dialogue, any shot, if they didn’t like it. And do you even have to think for a minute to realize that their first priority was not “accuracy”, as they claimed, but depicting the agency in a favourable light?

Ever see that episode where the FBI tapped Martin Luther King’s phones? Yeah, me neither. Or where they collected information about President Kennedy’s mistresses?

Even today, with all the so-called sophistication we now have, TV is still inundated with police-approved TV shows that labour mightily to convince you that the police never make mistakes. I watched one episode of “REAL TV”, which showed tapes from a police helicopter chasing a “suspect”. What was the man suspected of? We never find out, for the only thing he is ever charged with is resisting arrest– a chilling echo of Soviet Russia’s “enemy of the state”. All during the chase, the voice-over narration laboured to assure us that these reckless and insane pursuits were necessary because the felon might very well have done something unspeakably evil, if the police had not damaged five cruisers chasing him at speeds of 100 mph through populated suburbs and snarled highways.

Is there a single TV police show that does not show police officers assaulting suspects and violating their civil rights with approval. The program is careful to let you “know” the one thing that, in real life, the police almost never know with any degree of certainty: that the suspect is guilty.

Back to the FBI: I’m sure if you asked the FBI today, their official spokesman would chuckle and say something like, “Oh, well, yes, J. Edgar did get a little carried away back in the 1960’s, but I can assure you that the FBI today is too busy tracking down militant survivalists and murderers to waste time on Hollywood movies.”

Like the Branch Davidians, in Waco, Texas?

To see a copy of the FBI report on “That Darn Cat”:
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/darncat1.html

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Marketting Lennon

Well, Apple Computer has done it again. They persuaded Yoko Ono, presumably, to sell them her vampirish endorsement of their computer products. “Think Different” is the theme of the campaign.

But wait– isn’t that John sitting beside Yoko? Isn’t that a picture from the “bed-in for peace” in Amsterdam? John Lennon, who wrote:

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
Nothing to kill or die for
A brotherhood of man

Well, this takes the cake. It reminds me of Rolling Stone Magazine, emerging from the flotsam of the 1960’s as the first, supposedly, “counter-culture” magazine. In actual fact, it was no more counter-culture than dental floss. Jann Wenner, the publisher, simply realized, before almost anyone else did, that there was a lot of money to be made in the “money can’t buy me love” business. A lot of trinkets to be sold. A lot of images to make and remake and sell. And all of it while pretending to be “different” from the materialistic older generation.

There ought to be a law against exploiting the dead. There is something particularly offensive about taking someone like John Lennon, who genuinely did stand for something, and using his image to market consumer products for one of greediest and most self-centred corporations in Silicone Valley. Yes, Apple, not Microsoft (Dracula, not Frankenstein).

John isn’t around to mock the whole idea the way he probably would. “Imagine there’s no Windows/It’s easy if you try”. He was one of the few rock stars of the 1960’s to stay relatively true to his own vision.

The vampires of Wall Street has no shame.