NUDES, KNEELING AND PLAYBOY

ENDLESS OUTRAGE ABOUT PETTY ISSUES

I believe in standing at precise attention for O Canada.
I believe in kneeling.
I believe in nudes.
I believed in Playboy.
My beliefs have been jostled by a lot of jerks spouting off a lot of crap which demonstrates to everyone, as if there was any doubt, that they really don't give a damn about what anyone else thinks about anything, including the latest grabbag of minor issues.
Now I do. And if you want to kneel in protest or in prayer or to propose, go right ahead. There is an honourable foundation to that. And we don't need a mouthy jerk who rode outrage against the awful  politics of today into the White House to wrap himself in the flag as a shield against all those who  see that the Emperor wears no clothes.
I played a lot of football. I remember the game when the lineman beside me was hit so hard, the resulting concussion had him wear glasses for the rest of his life and we had trouble taking him to hospital because he couldn't remember the combination to get his street clothes out of his locker.
It is insulting to give publicity to some weakling who has dodged combat and contact sport only to criticize the penalties for high hits in football. He couldn't tackle a scarecrow. He doesn't even have enough guts to pay his debts and to stop cheating and lying.
I was already standing stiffly at attention before I was in the RCAF Reserve. A year ago at the CNE Air Show, I unloaded on three youths in the VIP section who slouched and talked during our anthem.
They looked shocked when I pointed out profanely that they could take their hands out of their pockets and shove them up their ass.
Let's move on to a pleasant topic, nudes, and particularly nice pictures of nude women, and particularly how they were displayed in Playboy.
Now when I was a teenager in the 1950s,  Playboy still had an illicit keep-it-under-the-mattress flavour. Yet I actually did read it for the articles too. It was an excellent magazine even if the publisher was sleazy.
I was astounded as the kid editor of The Whitehorse Star to find that the famous Marilyn Monroe nude picture in the first Playboy (she was clothed on the cover and nude inside, and was never paid) hung in full view over the desk on which I laid out the paper, a desk once used by a local bank accountant named Robert W. Service.
The publisher didn't really care what people thought of that. And he certainly proved that by having a luscious nude painting of his wife hang in his living room. Not everyone realized it was his wife. The United Church minister who roomed with them didn't until I pointed out the resemblance. Which meant that he blushed every time he saw her.
It was in the Yukon that I learned to be careful about how much I argued about something because one irate reader was inclined to come to the newspaper office to complain. He had very brittle bones and was very pugnacious so I was afraid of getting into a fatal scrap with him. He also occasionally came with a shotgun.
That was thousands of columns and editorials and blogs and commentaries ago. But after I make my point, I try to shut up, because I remember that it can be dangerous not to.
Not only is it safer, it's infuriatingly boring to have Trump or trolls or Fox anchors go on and on in their inept language without ever managing to say anything graceful or new.
The reality is that too many politicians and commentators worry at anthem protests like a dog with a bone. Yet it's all a diversion!  In the end these issues don't matter as much as more difficult topics like taxes, health care, education etc. And so we are stuck, like insects on pins in a collector's box, with a rebellion against politicians that elected Trump and Trudeau.
And so I return to playboys.

TORONTO'S INSANITY OVER BIKES

POLITICIANS NEED TRAINING WHEELS ON THEIR MINDS

It's just before 9 a.m. on Harbord west of Spadina when three tots teeter by my car in shaky control of their bikes.
All legal since they were using Toronto's octopus tangle of bike lanes. Also insane since many parents, including me, would not have let Grade Oners ride on any road without running alongside waving medieval shields.
My son Mark and I are fighting morning traffic to get to the hospital complex on University which might as well be surrounded by a moat due to construction, cyclists, and stupidity.
 I lecture Mark, who knows the speech well, that cyclists should not be allowed to use major streets during rushhour. For that matter, there are some major arteries where bikes should be banned all the time, like the major highways.
Mark has lived and worked in China for years, to the extent he can speak Mandarin and some Cantonese. He points out that some streets in Shanghai, that giant city, are closed to bikes, the Chinese not being nuts about what used to be their major transportation.
At this point, a father drifts by our traffic jam on a big bike with one hand holding the seat of a kid's bike being ridden by a girl who may still be in kindergarten. She is zigzagging along the bike lane.
I see a cruiser coming and vainly try to flag it down. Much as I believe in letting parents raise their own kids without interference by the state, I didn't feel like testifying at a coroner's inquest because the odds were high that she might skid into traffic despite the efforts of the beanpole father wearing farmer's suspenders.
I would have sicced the cop on father-and daughter without misgiving, but I also concede that many cyclists, who have just been reminded again by new cycling laws that they have to act in all ways like vehicles on our roads, routinely don't while cops ignore the scofflaws.
I end up 20 minutes late for a major medical matter involving my wife primarily because cyclists near the city core were buzzing around like demented bees.
I daydreamed recently about a sarcastic column where I complained that cyclists were not obeying the new law that they must stay a metre away from vehicles.
Then I looked at that law again and saw that while the driver has to keep a metre from the bike, the cyclist has no such obligation.
Anyone who spends time driving downtown - since the suburbs, thank heavens, are not infested with this problem - knows it's often close encounters with a berserk culture with cyclists feeling free to push off your car to get a good start at the light or to scream and spit and pound if they feel you've intruded on their politician-annointed space.
What the new rules mean is that in heavy traffic with congested bike lanes, drivers can not pass the cyclist if they are on the outside edge of the lane unless by some miracle he can use part of the opposite lane.
I know from personal experience that it's difficult to predict the future without looking foolish. Some writer fished out predictions I made about city life in a magazine 25 years ago and I didn't do that well. But I predict that in a decade or so, people will look back at this current boom in Toronto bike lanes and think our politicians were rather stupid.
The facts about cars and drivers and insurance and municipal costs don't lie. There are no real facts about cyclists and bikes because the supposed ones are created by activists and anti-car movements. They produce more alternative facts than Trump!
So we spend fortunes constructing roads that will carry heavy loads, and on those roads we move costly machines covered by expensive insurance driven by men and women after difficult tests. Each machine can carry one or two or many people quickly no matter what the weather.
Yet our politicians insist that little cheaper machines that move comparatively slowly as they carry one person without insurance or operator testing over the same expensive asphalt can interfere with commuting and commercial delivery so that all other movements are compromised.
It makes no sense to steal space from cars and trucks and buses and streetcars which carry 99.9 % of the transportation burden of the city. After all, bike paths cost a fraction of roads constructed to withstand traffic.
Then add the crushing fact beyond lousy personal fitness. For too much of the year (remember the joke we get 9 months of cold weather and three months of bad skiing) most of us don't chose to ride in the rain or the snow or the cold and certainly not after 9.
Oh yeah, cyclists will say, just another anti-bike rant.
I have a personal lexicon of bike truths. I've done my share of bike riding in this city beyond bike-a-thons. I remember being forced into a ditch but I caught the truck driver and challenged him to a fight. He went through the light to escape.  I have had a bike stolen and two bikes of sons vanished. One son rode a bike to work for years. Another son has competed in Iron Man races where cycling was part of the endurance.
I have even been in two bike collision as a pedestrian.  I was hit by a cyclist speeding on the sidewalk as I left a downtown King St. restaurant. Since he and his bike were injured and I was only bruised, it didn't leave me with the same bad feeling I get while driving downtown and looking at the uneconomic and silly accommodations our politicians are making for a minority who rip off the taxpayers in the guise of noble healthy transportation.
For 60 hours a week for six months a year, we screw up traffic for a giant majority 24-7. It doesn't compute. Let them stick to lanes, parks, councillors' streets and bikeways far from traffic.

RYERSON'S UNICORN AMONG HORSES REVIEWS

RYERSONIANS HAVE UNIQUE HISTORY

Often for a writer the subject wilts under examination. Back in the 1970s when I poked around in the history of Ryerson University, I was prepared for disappointment.
But I found more gold than brass.
I had come in 1955 to the crumbling complex on Gould St. After being a campus editor and student president, there had been lecturing and a decade of serving on boards and committees.
When I was commissioned to write its history, I knew nuggets about the past from the pioneers. Yet as I sifted myths, anecdotes, clippings and reports, like panning for gold in the Yukon where I had my first newspaper job, what I gleaned was a grand story about an old downtown square that had been the key nursery in education and culture.
So I produced Ryerson University - A Unicorn Among Horses. The book, for strange reasons, languished as a bowdlerized mess in the archives for years until I resuscitated it this spring.
What fills me with pleasure is not just readers who say they didn't know its rich past, but those who were at the early Ryerson too and savour again those days from reading my pages.
 David Crombie has a Ryerson history as rich as his municipal service as alderman and mayor and his federal service in several major portfolios before being waterfront royal commissioner and troubleshooter and mediator in countless disputes.
Crombie was a Ryerson lecturer, administrator and first chancellor. And he still loves to lunch with colleagues from the old days when it all began.
He wrote me about "your outstanding book. The people and events chronicled by you brought back so many warm memories that I found myself mentally and emotionally reliving those days.
"It also underscored for me the extraordinary role Ryerson has played and indeed continues to play in Ontario's history. Those of us who were lucky enough to be part of it owe a great debt of gratitude. "Your book needs to get around. It's an exciting sometimes rollicking saga about how some ordinary but unorthodox people were given the freedom and opportunity to invent solutions to emerging practical needs and problems in post-secondary education, and in the process created a unique institution dedicated to serving both the market place and the changing needs of community."
My book details how Crombie took over from David Sutherland as director of student services, a position they invented for Canada using an American booklet. Sutherland coined that felicitous term of "unicorn among horses."
He became founding president of Sir Sandford Fleming in Peterborough - Ryerson was the model for the colleges - and married a Ryerson grad, my colleague from the old Tely, Sylvia Sylvie, who went on to become Peterborough mayor and member of the important Ontario Municipal Board.
Sylvia Sutherland wrote on Facebook: "For all the old Ryersonians out there - and there are a lot of us - here is a 'must' read. It is John Downing's history of Ryerson."
After 50 years of writing, after thousands of columns, editorials, books, and articles, I feel comfortable declaring that Ryerson really is one of a kind and its history makes an interesting read.  . 

PRAISING.....ATTACKING.....TTC....BYFORD

TTC CONSTRUCTION LASTS LONGER THAN PYRAMIDS

There I was with my right arm and cane seized inside the subway door when the train left the Bloor/Yonge station with me still on the platform wondering what jerk was closing the doors and whether I would be able to write with my left hand. 

I ripped my arm out of the train's grasp. Only bruises while the cane was not dented, to my amazement. I tried revenge by shouting "asshole" in the open window of the train but I doubt that failure of a TTC employee heard me.
The crowd certainly did!

The little old lady standing beside me said we should complain about this. Which I thought was strange because she hadn't been the one grabbed by the door. She had just been part of the group who had dutifully waited for everyone to get off, only to see the first person trying to get aboard, me, seized immediately as if I had assaulted someone.
The TTC's technical excuse would have been that the train was packed, another one was right behind and it had space,  and despite my size, which means some call me Big John, I had been missed in the crowd by the employee failing to handle the doors.
Oh yes, it was 10.20 a.m. Which prompts me to wonder, again, why the hell the TTC loses so much money when the subway seems jammed no matter when I chose to ride it from Royal York Station because the vapidity of John Tory, 44 brainless councillors, and a clutch-and-grab of inept over-paid senior officials, means that downtown traffic is the worst in North America by every anecdotal or technical survey.
The TTC spends so much on labour costs, maybe three quarters of the budget because of the unions, that it can't afford to put real sensors into the rubber lips of their subway doors, like tens of thousands of elevator doors in this country have always had, so that they won't close on an arm holding a cane.
But back to the minority who ride the subway while being subsidized extravagantly by their fellow taxpayers.
Those of us who know something about transit after decades of observation beyond just riding the damn system think that Andy Byford, the Grand Pooh-Bah as CEO of the TTC, is a good transit man who must be undercut by the incompetents around him.
My belief stems from an incident where I fell on the stairs of the University/College subway station where for some bizarre reason the escalator was removed at the south-east corner of the intersection despite the hundreds who now have to labour up the stairs to the complex of five hospitals.
I was wearing tri-focals, which create a blur around your feet, so I thought I had reached the landing when I was still one step up. Not unusual for too many of us, but still painful. Then one year later, if you can believe it, I fell at exactly the same place, this time doing more damage.
I brooded about this and finally sent Byford an email at 8.30 in the evening, explaining what had happened and adding I had once been such a knowledgeable supporter of the TTC that I was offered a VP post. I received a reply 10 minutes later. Unbelievable! He had officials look into my suggestion that the last step before a landing or the platform have a special strip, like the yellow edge of the main station platform, to aid people who for some reason can't see very well and find the step and landing blur together.
He sent me their report two weeks later. They didn't agree with me and proposed no change, even though St. Michael's Hospital was said to be doing a similar study involving public buildings because of the many falls at curbs and on stairs.
Ironically, I have noticed since that all subway steps are not coloured the same. The stairs at Royal York  are two colours which form bands running the width, the dark one being the outer one, while at the TTC Davisville headquarters, the dark band is the inner one meaning the grey outer edge blends with the platform.
I still think the edge of the last step should be marked, but at least Byford had his people look into it. Council would still be trying to decide what official should be assigned not to do anything helpful, or maybe a change that would cost a few million after several months of study and advice from at least two consultants known to be friendly to important councillors.
In case you were wondering, I did not send an email to Byford complaining about how the subway car tried to make off with my right arm. I reasoned, ironically, that perhaps it was all my fault for trying to fight the crowds and get on the first train to come to an important station at 10.20 a.m.
You know, as far as the TTC is concerned,  rush hour is all the time.
But beware the alternative. If we're not careful, they will be hiring pushers to shove us in the doors like they do in Japan.