SAILING THE DANUBE THROUGH GLORIES, COMMUNIST WRECKAGE AND POLLUTION

EIGHT COUNTRIES IN A TWINKLING VIA VIKING CRUISES

It does sound like that movie If It's Tuesday It Must Be Belgium. After all, we were in nine countries in 18 days, with a day at either end for flying - which daily grows more of a hassle.

The link was the Danube River stretching between Bulgaria and Romania and Germany and the Czech Republic. From swimming in the cold Black Sea to the great steps of Prague Castle.

Sadly, the Danube is not the blue delight of the song. Its waters more closely resemble dirty sock water. It's a river of the tugs and barges of commerce, the major artery through Eastern Europe.

A few days after we passed through Western Hungary, a reservoir wall gave way and the floods of toxic waste killed nine and injured 150. As the respected Economist magazine observed on Oct. 14, "the Danube basin is littered with accidents about to happen."

Still the trip through the the ancient glories and the modern curses left behind by communism was the "odyssey" promised by Viking (in the ancient name of Homer for an epic journey.) The scenery was often a picturesque movie, with the ruined factories and leaking storage facilities left by dictators obscured by the pleasant banks of a mighty river.

I would be happy to sail the Primadonna again, a giant catamaran accommodating 148 guests, and a tiny but efficient staff. It sailed so smoothly, you didn't know it had left the dock.

It was the key to the odyssey because we sailed the Danube in our cosy cabin and wonderful dining room, and were bused with guides chatting over our earphones to the major points of interest. If we had travelled instead by plane, train or bus, our nerves would have been as frazzled as the ruined countries left behind by the cruel and discredited communists.

The 40-year-old movie about Belgium - which has become the cliche condemnation of package tours -no longer resonates with me and other travellers, because we've done it the old way, searching vainly for hotels and restaurants with tattered guidebook in hand while night looms.

We prefer more of the comfortable cocoon, knowing where we're going to eat and sleep each night.

My wife and I have searched the lanes of Cairo and Jerusalem while sweat smarts the eyes.

We've spent a night in Brussels in a whorehouse with no bedroom ceiling and the toilet down the hall. The only bed we could find at midnight. Yet Mary wasn't about to sit in the railway station all night.

I have too many such stories about the perils of doing it on your own, even if you have rented a car and have a vague idea what part of the country you may be in.

A photographer and I once went around the world on a day's notice, with me carrying only a one-suiter for two weeks. I could do it again, providing I had a bathing suit and cold beer. But it's nicer to have company when misery creeps into the trip, and there's always some boring bit.

Our tour group called the Intrepids is based loosely on Humber Valley United Church members in Etobicoke led by the indomitable Cathy Wilkes. We adopted the name when we went to Turkey despite a new Iraq war along one border. They've also been to Egypt and other African countries, and Russia, China and Japan. We will continue sailing off into the sunset as long as airline security doesn't grow so tight, they will no longer allow any passengers at all.

Our river cruise displayed the glories of the past and the emerging good and the awful residue of communism and war. It included the usual tour stuff of lofty cathedrals and lowly old churches disguised to protect Christians. We saw the ancient houses of the rich.

We explored the grotesque rock formations of Belogradchik in Bulgaria, shaped by erosion, and the scenic stretch of the Danube in Serbia known as the Iron Gate. And we listened to the waltzes and classical music of old. (The best music for a Danube cruise is Smetana's Moldau . The Czech's most famous tune has the surges and flowing water of notes as brooks and rivers merge near Prague.)

There were hitches. One of the Primadonna's great engines failed for a day or so, so the excellent guides had to scramble to patch the schedule.

So we were packed off to a stud farm for the Lippizaner white horses of war. Not well done. Besides, there are too many places claiming to be the original home of the famous horses.

Mary and I know the truth because we once spent a great day and night on what's really the home, a stud farm at Lipica in Croatia. At least I got a nice shot in Vienna of three of the famous horses. It will hang on my wall to jog my memory, and my thoughts will be good.

Yet not all the memories of Eastern Europe are, not when the Balkans have long been one of the notorious trouble centres of the world.

We visited the Croatian city of Vukovar where 2,000 amateur soldiers held out for 87 days against the professional killers of Serbia - 36,000 soldiers, 110 tanks and dozens of war planes.

After the Serbs killed the defenders and demolished the port city and the war ended in 1995, 800 Croatians were missing and 22,000 killed or exiled. There had only been 30,000 residents.

So the dateline of Vukovar is a bitter reminder of the insanity of war between ancient enemies. The jagged walls of shelled houses still remain on too many streets, while the Croatians have left the huge water tower standing as a monument that was holed like Swiss cheese by artillery.

The hatred still festers in much of the disintegrated Yugoslavia.

In the giant church cave still under construction of St. Sava in Belgrade, one of the largest Orthodox churches in the world, a Serb I was talking to cursed the Slovenians for departing the Yugoslav federation on Jan. 25, 1991, one day before the Croatians. The Serbs abandoned their war on the tiny pastoral country after only 11 days because of the stiff resistance where 67 were killed, most of them Serbs. The angry Serb's curses were drowned by the pealing of the bells above the huge white structure. The guide was mortified because all of their commentary as we floated from country to country was carefully correct and neutral.

As we idled down a street of restaurants, Mary asked a lounging maitre d' how the Serbs said thank you. Then she asked how the Slovenians did and explained her parents had come from Slovenia. Young punk waiters said they had never been to Slovenia, which is as close there as Toronto to the Falls. Besides, one sneered, Slovenians were lazy and murderers.

Imagine! Spewing racist hatred to casual tourists. And the Serbs wonder why so many hate them. Back on the Primadonna, the staff was embarrassed again.

Yet most of our travels were good, even if Bulgaria and Romania are filled with the derelict buildings and economic rust left by failed communism. Empty fields, or with just a few animals, closed factories and shops, and the unemployed sitting on corners. Bulgaria is the poorest Balkan member of the European Union and EU officials grumble that they allowed it and Romania in too soon. Now the European hassle is over the gypsies from Romania

Mary and I had a chance to return to fabled Cesky Krumlov, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. We had a marvelous time there once with our son John Henry, when we still travelled on our own and came across a enormous bargain of room, dinner and beer for $20.

The great beer centres that gave us Budweiser and Pilsener are near the lovely Bohemian centre. I told my fellow travellers how the arrogant brewers of American Budweiser went after the brewery in Budvar over naming rights and were reminded that the Czechs had been brewing Budweiser before the U.S. existed.

Ah, Cesky Krumlov, one of the best preserved cities in the Czech Republic. The beautiful baroque, Gothic and renaissance architecture. The market square. The bridges over the curving river.

It often pops up when I think of travels. For me it's like the Brigadoon of movie musical fame which comes to life one night each century. I would love to spend years there.

There are many who rave about Vienna. I've found in three visits that it is too full of itself, from the imperial Ringstrasse that encircles the inner city to St. Stephan's Cathedral which is always being scrubbed. The Viennese boast of their elegance and romance, of their musical heritage and their food. Demels lives up to its rep as a great bakery of confections and cakes but on a previous visit I found the famous tort at the Sacher Hotel behind the restored State Opera House - one setting for the fabled Third Man movie - to be a dry chocolate cake that people would send back in Canada.

I much prefer the crowded streets of the people's Prague to royal Vienna. Our visit was a post-cruise extension. There were literally thousands of young people swarming the cobble lanes and compact medieval centre of the city of a hundred spires. Occasionally it seemed they were all on my street.

The Charles Bridge is unique in a world filled with great bridges. No visit to Prague is complete without seeing the grand pedestrian bridge that began in 1357 and is lined with 30 Gothic religious statues that artists use as backdrops as they paint their tourist patrons.

Then there's the 600-year-old Astronomical Clock which has had dials, facades and moving statues added over the centuries. Crowds of tourist worship its hourly wonders, carpeting the square underneath to watch.

A great walking city, and walk we did for two days, from Wenceslas Square to the Old Jewish cemetery, with time out for beer and sausages.

Nothing like munching and sipping a real Bud and talking about the wonders of past days, like the 900-year-old Melk Abbey perched on sheer cliffs above the Danube, with rainbow colours splashed on the walls and ceilings inside the abbey church making up for the arduous climb. And the twin cities of Buda and Pest with the massive hilltop castle and the lovely stonework of the restored Parliament.

A grand trip. One we would like to do again. And I will. Especially Prague.

THE CRUEL REACH OF THE HST

BUT SENATOR NANCY RUTH OBJECTS TO POPPY EXCEPTION

The HST is here to stay. Get used to it. But we don't have to accept the HST being applied to every facet of our lives except breathing.

(By the way, HST stands for Harmonized Sales Tax, the combining of federal and provincial sales taxes, not Harmonized Stupid Tax, which is more apt.)

It shook up many readers when the Editor of The Toronto Sun supported the GST. When I wrote the editorials I pointed out that the GST was a logical replacement for a tax that had been around for years and was not loved by business. We had to accept that the feds needed some form of a federal sales tax.

Unfortunately, the critics of the GST concentrated on condemnation rather than on reform. What they should have been demanding is that it be eliminated from many of the new targets. Taxing books, including Holy Books, had been a government no no as long as there had been governments. When the bureaucrats included the PST in the price to be taxed by the GST, like on gasoline, that had been considered illegal and immoral for decades.

Which brings me to the HST which I hope brings down more politicians than just a B.C. premier. How about Dalt0n McGuinty next October. How about federal politicians who don't

realize that while Canadians should accept some form of HST, we should fight like hell against all the extra targets, the services and products that were targeted by the GST and have now been expanded under the HST.

The Ontario Government boasts that there was no new HST on 83% of products and services.

Consider its cunning double talk. The key is the word new. Yes, Queen's Park does tax many products and services that we shouldn't, like Bibles, but we only increased the tax on 17% of products and services. Sure, on everything from having your hair done to paying the onerous bills of lawyers. Let's not forget home heating and electricity.

There have been many heated arguments over the HST but I was in a strange one with Senator Nancy Ruth. Nothing new about that since she as a militant declared lesbian is used to rocking the boat, trying to make men fall out, on everything from her name to her advocacy of women's rights.

The occasion was the induction luncheon of the Canadian Disability Hall of Fame. (I wrote about it on Nov. 11.) The senator, who goes only by two first names, loudly declared at the table (where she had ignored fellow diners, and had busied herself with her dumbphone to ignore the inductions and speeches) that she was furious the government had waived the HST on the red poppy.

She then ripped one up and used the innard and part of a program to make a crude white poppy, which is supposed by tiny groups of women and peaceniks to represent peace and not all those nasty men who died fighting for peace.

She complained loudly, as an arrogant activist used to bellowing her views, that look at all the charities that have to pay the HST. Why make an exception for veterans, she said? She grumbled about the male-dominated war stuff on TV that she said ignored the contribution of women.

Since it was the day before Remembrance Day, since red poppies bloomed throughout the concert hall in honour of those immortal words from John McRae in 1915 - "In Flanders fields the poppies grow" - since there were men in the room who had heard the brazen throat of war, her words were like a sour trumpet.

I said that at least 95% of Canadians would be okay with no HST on poppies. She said it would be 50-50 at best. I challenged her to have a vote in the Senate. I said why didn't we get John Wright of Ipsos-Reid to include that question in his next poll. I challenged her to have a vote at the luncheon, perhaps run by her brother Hal Jackman, the former lieutenant governor. She refuses to use the Jackman name, an honourable one where her grandfather and father had been MPs (she was defeated federally twice, which showed voter wisdom.)

She wondered why I was so upset. I said her wearing her crude white poppy demeaned the icon of the red poppy, just as much as her carping at a tax break the day before we remember, sorrowfully, our fallen in war, was insensitive and dumb.

It was a profane act by a profane politician who uses fuck as an action verb when she isn't pulling such stunts as changing the words of O Canada.

Imagine! A senator opposed to a break on the HST for an honourable reason. Just as bad as all the politicians who don't understand that overtaxed Canadians will bite the hand, and throat too at election time, of any pol who wants to tax every activity of our lives.

In England, Muslim demonstrators against the British military burned a giant red poppy and scandalized other Muslims. Muslims disrupted the moment of silence on Remembrance Day. Jerks! But what about the people here who should know better, especially when Henry Jackman, the MP father of Nancy, idolized Winston Churchill and was an important link between Canada and England during World War II.

The red poppy honoured his service too.

P.S.

My friend, David Smith, a leading Liberal senator, later mentioned my confrontation to Senator Nancy. (She said she was a Progressive Conservative when she was appointed by Paul Martin but then became a Conservative.)

She said, in effect, that I was a loudmouth jerk. Maybe Smith held off on rougher adjectives because even my family has called me that.

She chaired a Senate human rights committee on Women, Peace and Security which said in a report, according to its summary, that UN states, peacekeepers and other stakeholders "must take varying steps to ensure that efforts to prevent, resolve and rebuild from armed conflict incorporate the perspectives of women."

Such careful bland generalities makes me wish that the senator saved more of her fire for conflict belligerents and less for Canadians honouring our dead in war.

TRIUMPHING OVER DISABILITIES

2010 CANADIAN DISABILITY HALL OF FAME

For 17 years, it is an event that awes and humbles me when we honour the men and women who turned their major problems of physical disabilities into minor hurdles that they vaulted with a smile.

They're the ones who led the way in kicking the old term of handicap in the teeth. As David Crombie, the former Toronto mayor, said as he chaired the presentation luncheon: "They work, go to school, raise families and get involved - and they do it with all the passion, talent and ability of their able-bodied peers. This is the real message of the Hall and it's a message that we hope one day all Canadians will take to heart."

Crombie has been the Hall chair, along with the founder, Vim Kochhar, a new senator, of the selection committee and the event itself. I have been a committee member since it began and was known as the Terry Fox Hall of Fame before Terry's family, to their discredit, decided that somehow this Hall subtracted from Terry's honourable memory and bled off a few donations.

I think another message from the Hall is for Canadians to get off their fat rumps and do more without grumbling about aches.

It certainly is a prod in my life. This year the Hall inducted David Shannon, a Thunder Bay lawyer who has reached the North Pole and jumped in a parachute from nearly 30,000 feet DESPITE THE FACT HE IS A QUADRIPLEGIC.

Not only is Shannon a confident champion for his causes, he also has a sense of humour. When he and his friend who pulled the sledge, Christopher Walkins, reached the Pole, they planted an accessible parking sign.

(There must be something special in the water in Thunder Bay. A firefighter from that city who had received a heart transplant has skied to the North Pole and climbed a mountain in Antarctica. He was accompanied by my cardiologist, Heather Ross, in charge of heart transplants at the University Health Network. Dr. Ross is not exactly an easy person if people complain about exercise.)

The magazine for the luncheon has always been titled WhyNot. And why not indeed! This year, one cover picture belonged to its publisher, Jeff Tiessen, whose gold medal time in the 1988 Paralympics in Seoul still stands as the record. Tiessen is a tireless advocate for people with disabilities, has been an original member of the Hall's selection committee and is a successful publisher.

Oh yes, no arms!

Our cheerful Lt. Governor, David Onley, also presided over the induction of Colette Bourgonje, a nine-time Paralympian whose treasure house of medals resulted in her receiving a major world achievement award at the games in Vancouver. A phys ed teacher in a wheelchair who put away the memory of the near-death car crash.

The final recipient is Alan Dean, who after his loss of a leg became a pioneering sports administrators and Secretary General of the International Sports Organization for the Disabled.

Onley, of course, is in a wheelchair. His deteriorating condition from polio didn't stop him as a TV personality and best-selling author on space. What a wonderful example he is for all the kids who can't run like their friends....or even walk.

A nice finish came this year during a speech by Gordon Nixon, the Royal Bank president. On each table sat a glass piggybank, and Scotia Bank pledged to match all the donations from the diners. Nixon said RBC would match all the money in the piggybanks too, and he was sure his banking rival wouldn't mind having to double their contribution.

A fine bit of fiscal gamesmanship that fit right in with the warm feeling in the banquet hall from the many people there who know all about having to deal with people who think it's not a disability but a handicap.

BLIGHT OF WATER WEEDS ON COTTAGE LIFE

SCUGOG ADOPTS THE LESSER OF TWO WEEVILS

That headline about the "lesser of two weevils" won a newspaper award for Rik Davie and his newspaper The Scugog Standard. The substance of those weevil stories should have impact far beyond the weedy shores of Lake Scugog

They show how an environmental group, with the support in varying degrees of the community, conservation authority and the municipality, can help win at least one battle in the expensive war against the water weeds which threaten to carpet Cottage Country since the invasion of zebra mussels let them run amuck.

The lesson should not be lost on Queen's Park and any municipality that has more than one cottage. After all, not only does the explosion of water weeds hurt the enjoyment of Cottage Country, and the real estate values, it also results in a public loss because cottagers have their municipal taxes reduced if they have a water weed problem.

And I'm not saying it has to be as bad as some of my neighbours have at the height of the season when the weeds stretch from dock to dock in a smelly, unsightly mess. They have to carve channels for their boats and swim elsewhere.

So my municipality of Trent Hills has a financial stake in the plight of their cottage residents. If the council was to aid the cottagers in the harvesting or destruction of weeds, and the provincial ministries were more involved, tax money would be regained.

The councils should ask their reps on the board of the Municipal Property Assessment Corp. to get their assessors to give ballpark figures on the total cost in Ontario because of all the lowered assessments.

The Scugog Lake Stewards, a nicely named environmental group, bought thousands of weevils in 2009 from EnviroScience in the U.S. (10 beetles to each milfoil stalk) and planted them near King's Bay in Lake Scugog. Last summer, the result was impressive. The weevils had almost eaten themselves out of house and home because there were empty stretches in between all the dead and dying plants.

There is an advantage in using weevils as a biological control. Not only are they native to the Kawarthas, they leave native plant species alone. There's always a threat when you import a solution that you tip the balance in nature. Unfortunately the world is full of examples. .

The stewards got a mixed reaction when they pitched their scheme. But the Baagwating Community Association donated $25,000 to the pilot project. The township was lukewarm. That council had hired a company at $8,000 to cut water vegetation in Port Perry in 2009 but didn't do it again because of questions about the effectiveness.

Yet the weevils certainly seem effective. A conservation authority official was quoted by the Standard as saying the destruction of weeds is impressive. Yet as I survey what the experts interviewed by the Standard think, and after a message from Davie, I would guess that some in the Kawarthas would only go for weevils if there were countless examples of success.

But the weevil experiment is hardly unique. It has been tried in many waters choked with weeds in the U.S. and the success has lasted from four to 10 years. Yet too many are uncomfortable about anything new.

However, consider the alternatives. There's Reward (diquat) that can be sprayed on the water, which is short-term and expensive or you can cut the weeds, which means they return.

My neighbours, and other groups on the Trent River, have tried Reward and found it not rewarding. Queen's Park controls its sale, and makes it so expensive, the herbicide might as well be liquid gold. The permission process is so extensive, it bothered my neighbour who completed forms for us, and he's a CA used to nitpicking. My conclusion is that the government really doesn't want us using the stuff. If they did, it would be cheaper and easier to obtain.

Now the municipalities could be involved more in cutting the weeds, which they call harvesting. Surely it makes as much sense to do this, perhaps charging cottagers half the cost on a frontage basis, as it does to cut the grass at the side of roads. They certainly have been doing that for years while leaving the water weeds up to the cottagers. And so they lose.

Queen's Park and the municipalities have to get off their fat rumps and participate in weed control as if they actually cared. They can do that with experts to advise cottage associations in language that doesn't read like a PhD thesis. They can do that by helping to pay for pilot projects instead of sticking a community group with the cost. They can do that by buying weed cutting equipment, and if they don't want to get involved, rent them out.

This is also a cause for ratepayer groups, like the North Seymour Ratepayers Association to which I belong. The annual picnic, which is a great bargain in the $10 membership, had displays in July about the latest menaces in water weeds. It's great that the bureaucrats are so quick to deal with the new curse of water soldier. But what about all the old?

Let's put this into perspective. There are only a couple of water soldier plants in my stretch of the Trent. Yet there are millions of plants (probably not much of an exaggeration) of milfoil, the pondweed family etc. I don't pretend to be an expert, not knowing a coontail from a hydrilla, or chara from muskgrass (that's a trick, they're the same) but I do know how water weeds have hurt my point since that foreign freighter dumped its ballast water (with zebra mussels) twenty years ago.

Each summer morning, I cut weeds so that visitors and my grandkids don't grumble incessantly about icky stuff. I'm eager for new solutions. Wouldn't it be great if we could figure out how to cook them so they would be the new Ontario fiddlehead?

There's no benefit for the cottager from water weeds, not even as fish habitat, because there's plenty of vacant shoreline for that. Our area boasts that it is 25 kilometres between the locks at Healy Falls to the one at Hastings. So that means, considering the Trent's meandering path, islands and great expanses of shallows, that there are at least 30 kilometres of shoreline where the weeds can proliferate to the joy of fishermen and environmentalists without hurting cottagers. All you have to do is read the shoreline guide to a healthy waterfront by the Federation of Ontario Cottagers' Association about "keeping aquatic plant population intact" and you realize there are some who really don't give a damn about our problem.

Queen's Park spends almost all its cottage time protecting endangered species and habitat, and ensuring we are harassed bureaucratically and financially if we dare build anything. The water patrols by the OPP are a joke since the cops are more concerned about a bottle of beer in a boat than a speeding yacht. Rural Hydro prices are a scam.

The politicians better start realizing that cottagers figure they're shortchanged when it comes to the benefits they receive. Giving even some feeble assistance with this blight would be a start at a better deal for our taxes. Cottagers would be willing to participate in costs if it loosened the stranglehold on our waterfront. And if FOCA wants to worship aquatic plants, it better do that away from my cottage neighbours.

THE CURSE OF EMAIL

THINK BEFORE YOU FORWARD

I am the beneficiary of friends and relatives bombarding me daily with emails. Great! But there is a nasty downside to the flood of cartoons, jokes and polemics because too many people forward crap to me as well.

By crap, I mean nasty racism in stories and jokes. (That conference in Ottawa on anti-semitism found that there is now a record flood of hatred against the Jews.)

I mean mini sermons that are filled with malicious information and contrived propaganda.

I mean information about politicians that is so slanted and mean, you wonder if the sender understands that democracy only works when you have honest debate over the two (or three or four) sides of an issue. You don't have to dream up hateful stuff about politicians simply because they disagree with you.

Spare me the garbage over Barack Obama's birth certificate and religion. Spare me the murderous rhetoric of the anti-abortionists. Don't give me amateurish insights into possible conspiracies. Don't forward golfer jokes that were circulating before Tiger exposed himself.

An easy estimate is that I get at least two emails about any new joke that is around. As for the old ones, often I stopped thinking they were funny ten years ago.

It is time for people to think before they forward an email. I don't want another set of garbled figures about how refugee claimants do better financially than Canadian pensioners since those figures were shot down half a decade ago. Our governments at every level give us plenty of legitimate targets to attack without us having to make stuff up like that.

For years I have lectured journalism students and cub reporters to beware of EVERYTHING they read on the Internet. Just because someone has access to a computer and knows how to put a blog together doesn't mean they also have something insightful or revealing to say.

I read about the supposed $200 million a day cost of Obama's travels just hours before I heard it at dinner from a respected retired journalist who should have known better. Another journalist and me pointed out that the figures were so huge and the source so doubtful, it wasn't hard to know it was a hoax.

The next night, Bill O'Reilly of the anti-Democrat Fox News, just waved the figures away as nonsense when Jon Stewart raised it on his show, expecting O'Reilly to take the bait and to start foaming at Obama. Since then various spokesman for the Administration and various rational talking heads have blown the "scandal" to smithereens, pointing out, for example, that all the U.S. ships that were supposed to have accompanied Obama to India would have been a tenth of the U.S. Navy. So the number was ridiculous. Yet suckers are still spreading the story.

It may have been started by an anonymous blogger in India quoting an anonymous Indian official. I can tell you that any newspaper larger than a free shopper would never have accepted that as the basis for any story. Most newspapers have at least three sets of eyes on any story before it gets into print. So I recommend, using that as a foundation, that you should never accept anything on the Internet unless, as a minimum, the writer has achieved some credibility or there are other sources, especially major newspapers and magazines.

So keep the emails coming, friends, but remember that if you forward obvious nonsense, it will reflect on my opinion of you. No sermons, please, or diatribes. I can write that nonsense myself, without research.

In the glory days of the Toronto Sun, most columns that I wrote, according to readership surveys, were read by a million people. When I did my research and when I wrote, I knew that libel lawyers and friends of the boss would be scrutinizing any accusation along with nitpicking readers. Legal costs and angry memos hovered over my head like the sword of Damocles. When your credibility and readability slip away, so does the job.

That's the way newspapers work. That's the reason why they will survive in some form. People know, and their numbers will only increase, that they can only believe a story on the Internet when they find embedded in it enough verifiable facts about the writer and the item to determine it wasn't just some nut telling us about his latest hallucination.

There has been an explosion in the media: 24/7 TV and radio news, community weeklies, magazines and on-line access to newspapers and magazines. Then we have the huge and confusing world of the Internet, bloggers, the baby talk of twitter and social media.

It has never been harder to figure out what's really going on. And too many of our high school grads don't even know how to read a label. Google has replaced thinking and in-depth research. At such a time, we can't let the anonymous mobs that stampede around the Internet poison the wells from which we draw the information that govern our lives.

SO HARPER HAS A SENSE OF HUMOUR

WHY I LOVE POLITICAL ANECDOTES!

I love the stories of history. It puts a human face on all the nuts and bolts and facts of statesmanship.

Thanks to Maureen Dowd, the great columnist on a great newspaper, the New York Times, we now know that inside the austere facade of the Canadian PM, there may be a glint of fun.

Dowd is writing about George W. Bush's book, Decision Points, which gives the ancedotal side of his eight years in the Oval Office.

Obviously W. had a great ghost writer and editor because the book is great and his administration was a costly disaster, sticking Obama with a tsunami of crises.

W. writes about a visit to Russia where Vladimir Putin shows him his black Labrador Koni. Putin bragged that Koni was "bigger, stronger and faster than Barney," which was W. pet.

Later W. is telling this story to Harper who drolly noted: "You're lucky he only showed you his dog."

Golly! Not only does Harper play the piano and write hockey history, he can also make a memorable quip to the most powerful man on earth.

Unfortunately, some of the readers won't know where Canada is.

MPAC'S RUINING OF COTTAGE LIFE

ILLEGITIMUM NON CARBORUNDUM

That's a mock Latin expression just above, probably created during the Great War To End All Wars. What it means in its various versions, especially for Harvard students who have it embedded in their campus liturgy, is don't let the bastards grind you down.

Which brings me to the Municipal Property Assessment Corp., the bureaucrats who have drawn criticism from the premier to the lowest cottager.

We can't let MPAC grind us down, and the technocrats certainly try. In fact, I suspect they think we're trying to do that to them.

Appealing the process is a little like running the gauntlet must have been when the natives were restless. It reminds me of the expression about figures lie and liars figure.

I have just fought MPAC successfully, sort of, on both my Etobicoke house and my Trent Hills cottage. It's taken a couple of years and probably a week's work. And that doesn't include the $75 cost of each appeal or the help of my son Brett, the computer expert, because my Mac

doesn't fit with the MPAC system of PCs (which is just another frustration about MPAC.)

My victory is that I've had my assessment reduced by $107,000 on the two (asssessment is the key in determining your municipal taxes.)

I wrote about my cottage assessment jumping by 300% in my blog (blog.johndowning.ca) in a column on Dec. 14. 2008. Just Google Failure To Subtract While Adding In Cottage Taxes. I also wrote Taxes For The Future While Living In The Past on Dec. 20, 2008.

I detailed the rotten foundation of figures which was MPAC's justification for a huge jump of my assessment in three years from $76,000 to $226,000. The assessment apparatchiks wanted to make my cottage the highest taxed in the neighbourhood.

I conceded that MPAC had a complicated and controversial job in assessing more than 4.7 million properties, which the pencil pushers claim is the largest such operation in North America. This caused some readers, such as Penny Caldwell, the Editor of Cottage Life magazine, to think at first that I wasn't critical and annoyed. I guess my fire was banked like a dormant volcano. But by the end of all the research and forms and letters and calls and inspections, I would like to erupt all over the baffling bas...and I don't mean bassets.

What complicated the cottage process was that the first renovation I had made in my 30-year-ownership was finished largely after Jan. 1, 2008, which was the date when the new assessment clicked in all over the province. Yet the suits added the $52,000 cost of my big new room to what they claimed had been an assessment of $92,000.

So I appealed. I sent assessment figures for the neighbours - which my son had to get - and a letter detailing mistakes in their description of my cottage - which included, for example, a well when I don't have one.

Then a letter came knocking $16,000 off. Nope, I said. So a hearing by an independent arbiter was scheduled. I said June was bad because of medical appointments. So the date was set for the same day as a specialist's inspection of my innards. I then said that everything was clear for the summer, but not after Sept. 15 because I would be in Europe. So the hearing was scheduled while I was cruising on the Danube.

The date was then set for late November, but a "valuation review specialist" showed up before that for the first examination of the property that has ever been done to my knowledge. She measured and we argued and she inspected and we argued. She was convinced their accounting of past assessment figures was correct even when I showed her the actual bills. She argued that the well wasn't that important in assessment, and I asked if she would prefer a cottage with a well to one that didn't have one.

A week later the offer came at $190,000, which is 16% lower than the first figure. Still too high, but I didn't fancy wasting a cold November day and $40 in gas to keep fighting the system. Surely a crushing indictment is that it took more than two years.

My city battle was as complicated but I never got as close to the hearing. This time the "valuation review specialist" and I argued about the drawbacks in my 1 1/2 storey house where I've lived for more than 40 years.

The Sunnylea area just south of The Kingsway is great and hot. But the home has the normal sloped ceilings upstairs and low basement ceilings. The "specialist" said that the factors she considered didn't include sloped ceilings being a drawback. I said to hell with her factors and formulas because what was essential in assessment is the price the property would bring on the market. And since I was over six foot, I knew that tall couples wouldn't be rushing to my house.

There were other arguments, like the idiot parking by yuppies taking their kids to the school just one house and a road away. So the "specialist" offered to reduce the assessment by just over 10% to $603,000, which seemed fair to me.

What bothers me about my fights over the two properties is just how complicated it was. As a columnist and editor familiar with red tape, I should have been able to manoeuvre much easier through the process. Much of this was done by computer. What about those without computers, or those who find computers frustrating or baffling? What about those without the time and inclination to deal with the forms and arguments? What about seniors who can't handle the latest contrivances of the paper mills?

Are these people well served, or do they in the end let the regulators grind them down?

You don't have to be a careful reader of Cottage Life magazine or listen to the latest bitchings on the dock to know of too many horror stories about taxes. The young couples who give up their dreams of owning a home or cottage because they just can't handle the taxes. The old couples who sell because they just can't pay the taxes on top of the Hydro and upkeep.

There is a revolt against the McGuinty government over the HST. (Unfortunately we need such a tax but the reach of the tax into every service and purchase is obscene.) We also need a revolt against how MPAC takes more than $130 million annually from us just to fashion a bureaucratic mystery. We can't let the bas...sets grind us down.