DROWNING REMAINING CONFIDENCE IN HYDRO

HAZEL SAVED US FROM THE WORST

What a way to celebrate a wedding anniversary! Mary and I will never forget our 52nd. It was the water one.
I used to struggle to remember the symbol for an anniversary. I knew about the golden 50th, but not the rest. Long ago,  I found that paper was for the first, and walked across from old City Hall to Eaton's - that vanished gem of a department store- and spent more than half my weekly pay on two Gourmet Magazine cookbooks.  Since then we've acquired dozens of cookbooks but I still sample that first costly treasure. Unfortunately, not one cookbook helped me cook a lasagna on the barbecue, which was sort of the water anniversary celebration.
Mary and I never got to celebrate our 50th with the traditional party. I had just come out of hospital and just sitting upright was a struggle. Lurching across a sidewalk to the restaurant from a car for a humble family dinner almost finished me.
We didn't plan much for the 52nd. Number Three son was home from China, which was great, but Number Two son was in Rome with his family and Number One son was in California recuperating from his last visit.
 So we were going to a nice Japanese restaurant at the corner for tempura but then the downpour came and the electricity died and the Royal York and Bloor area spun into a sweaty cocoon that lasted for almost two days. And for hundreds, the ordeal stretched longer.
What did we do wrong, I demanded of Doug Holyday, the Tory candidate in Etobicoke-Lakeshore?
After all, I said, we pay more than our share of taxes. We don't riot in the streets. Yet neighbourhoods around us, like, for example,  the NOBs (north of Bloor), got electricity back almost a day before we did, and we aren't as mouthy as the Kingsway folk in criticizing government.
Holyday said the party was thinking of demanding compensation for streets like mine that sweltered for 46 hours. I said I think we should elect a Tory government to make Ontario Hydro swelter.
I have never been a fan of Toronto Hydro or Hydro One and their cheating smart meters. I hate the provincial electric boys for screwing us on delivery costs to try to recover some of the billions they wasted through their endless fat-cat years.
 I'm still smarting from a system that billed me more for a bunkie that had been used for a week than it did for providing electricity to the main cottage for five months. Obviously a mistake, but not for an outfit that specializes in pretending it has never made a mistake.
Perhaps my Sunnylea neighbours have also yelled as I have whenever the Hydro boys treat our money like, well, water.
 Perhaps the Hydro boys use all their ingenuity and equipment that should be used to deliver electricity even in a huge storm to mark the streets of all their critics on a big computerized map and say that now they have had a big rain, that's our excuse to turn their food into smelly garbage in their fridges and freezers and make them sweat in their beds and bang into things when they're hunting for flashlights.
I was out that Friday, Oct. 15, 1954, on the banks of the Humber River that killed 82 people. The rain was drenching but not as hard as the rain Monday that just poured down the brick walls of my house because the down pipes couldn't cope.
 I was shovelling rain from a patio on to the lawn because my basement fireplace was flooding. Except the rain just sat on top of the saturated grass.
I have been through a tropical storm in Fiji that shuttered the island for days and killed 10 people. And the rain wasn't as fierce. Nor was the sheets of rain and giant waves when I
 rode out a hurricane on the South China Sea. Doctor from Doctors Without Borders and I clung to the deck of a battered fishing boat and wondered how long we would last when we were tossed into the sea that deserves its treacherous rep.
Since Hurricane Hazel, I have sat on the conservation authority and know just how the watersheds feeding into Toronto have been tamed. The Humber can never again turn into the raging monster that killed more than 60 people on just one street, Raymore Dr., across from the Weston area where I lived.
The conservation authority has done solid work. I wish I could say that about the various varieties of Hydro. Just how in God's name can an outfit be so stupid that it can't ensure that vital cogs in its expensive delivery system won't flood?
And the communications afterwards was almost criminal in its stupidity and lack of information.
I could have loaded my Sienna van with the most expensive and delicate food and taken it to the cottage if we had known we would have had to wait into Wednesday afternoon.  Except we were told we would have power mid-day Tuesday. Then it was later, Then it was nothing.
On Wednesday, the officials say that only 1,600 people woke without power. Bullshit! Speaking as one of the 1,600, with the loyal support of wife and son, it was patchwork at best. It was like a chess game where you weren't sure there would be power when you landed on a new square. And too often there wasn't.
Only two of the five closest traffic lights to my house were working, and that was seen as progress. I went to a garden centre to buy crushed stone to make wells beside the patio for the new thunderstorm that was said to be coming. It was open but the grocery store beside it wasn' t. Islington was a limp artery.
 I wanted to collect a prescription from my Shoppers but it was closed, but the TD bank a block away wasn't. The stretch of Bloor on either side, with dozens of restaurants, shops and medical offices, was dark, with a grocery store trying to get rid of produce outside the gloomy premises.
Urban life as we know it didn't exist. And they pretend that only 1,600 were still affected  Wednesday morning. Bullshit, I say again, without fear of contradiction from the officials who really know how to BS. And when they say triumphantly that power was restored mid-afternoon, they forget that for hundreds on that second day, they stayed in the dark.
What bothers me, and makes me wonder how normal people could actually vote Liberal in these byelections, is that it's been obvious for years that the public doesn't think think Hydro is doing a great job. And throw in the Liberal party too. And assessment, and power plant cancellations, and staggering mismanagement in health funds.
 If you listened, even Dalton McGuinty could be critical of  the obese bureaucracies beneath him.
What happened Monday is that we had a freak weather calamity that dumped more water over us than the killer, Hazel. And it turned out that for the most part, thanks to the lessons of Hazel, we can handle the great torrents in our rivers and creeks but that's about it. Not in our sewers  or on our transit or, damn it, our power.
We are supposed to be impressed that workers removed 30 or 300 or a zillion Olympic-sized swimming pools of water from the drowned Manley transmission station. What would have impressed me more is if the same workers were boasting about how planning sensible infrastructure had prevented 300,000 gallons of water from getting into such key equipment in Etobicoke in the first place.
I suspect the Monday deluge not only submerged the tiny bit of confidence the public still had in Hydro One but also opened the flood gates to washing the damn Grits out of power. If that happens, I promise to forget a Monday night shovelling water.
But I'm not sure Mary will. Some celebration!

WHY WE SHOULD ELECT DOUG HOLYDAY

 LIBERALS SHOULD BE JAILED, NOT ELECTED

The news that Toronto's decent and hard-working deputy mayor is running provincially as a Conservative in my riding of Etobicoke-Lakeshore is wonderful.
If a provincial party ever deserves to be defeated, if not sued, it is this Liberal government that has the Legislature overflowing with scandal, waste and stupidity.
The Liberal standard bearer is Peter Milczyn, who is pleasant but mundane and not a leader, more a party foot soldier than a general or even much of an officer. When I want info or help, I don't call Milczyn, who is my councillor, but Holyday, because I have appealed to Milczyn on several problems without success.
Holyday has been so diligent in looking after his voters, and even refugees from other ridings,  that he hasn't had to spend a cent to get re-elected for years,
He didn't finish high school but has a degree in common sense. He built a successful insurance business which he sold to concentrate on politics. (Milczyn doesn't practise as an architect.) Holyday didn't slow as he entered his 70s but plays hockey several times a week and in old-timer tournaments, and golfs at  prestigious St. George's. His lifetime of involvement in sports, often around his birthplace of the Lakeshore,  even includes being assistant lacrosse coach in a pro league where the coach was his buddy Morley Kells.
The riding is written off carelessly by the media as a Grit stronghold but Kells won in the area  provincially and municipally. Terry Grier of Ryerson University won it federally for the NDP, and his wife Ruth, a former health minister, represented the area municipally and provincially. The Liberals like to boast about their hold, even giving their failed leader, Michael Ignatieff, a map to it so he could represent it. The carpetbagger from Harvard was chased away in 2011 by Bernard Trottier who won for the Conservatives.
 It was said to be an upset but my politically-aware neighbours haven't been thrilled lately by Liberals being shuffled in and out on the way to patronage and appointments as billions explode.But back to this natural conservative who should romp to victory.
The proof of the political pudding is in the spending, both personally and municipally. There never has been a media story about councillors with the best attendance, most diligent voting record and the lowest expenses that hasn't had Holyday either as the best or close. He's legendary for his concern about waste and thoughtful approach where he will even suffer fools if he thinks they may just have a tiny idea.

Among his many accomplishments is the privatization of garbage collection, first in Etobicoke, then, because it was proved to be such a success, in the merged city west of Yonge St. Not only were the savings huge, the collection was better and no one could complain because the private workers were treated fairly. The NDP will have a tough time bashing his thoughtful leadership in labour negotiations.
I should warn readers of my conflict (if that is really necessary.) I have known and liked Holyday for several decades and we often lunch together. We have mutual friends. In fact, I am surrounded by friends and neighbours who thought Holyday should run for mayor next time. After all, he was the last mayor of Etobicoke before the suburb was swallowed by amalgamation.
When I was president of the Canadian National Exhibition, he was a vice-president. I had him chair important committees. We served on the Canadian Sports Hall of Fame together, and he still serves on the Etobicoke version.  I know from personal experience that anyone who cares about public spending and calm analysis of issues and taxation should rush to choose Holyday because the city and province would be best served if he and the other four Tory candidates win these byelections and then the Conservatives win the general election which must follow.
I just can't comprehend how anyone who has paid the slightest attention to provincial issues in recent years could vote Liberal.
 And I covered the Legislature starting as a kid back in 1958 and have reported on countless elections at all levels of government. In all those decades, I have never seen a more inept government. Its cynical waste of billions makes every single provincial government going back to Les Frost in the 1950s, even that NDP disaster under Bob Rae, look like fiscal giants.
The Liberals won half the vote in Etobicoke-Lakeshore last time. Now that the MPP has moved on, which I always expected, one would hope those voters would actually see the light at the end of the tunnel, and it's not an oncoming train of Grit waste and blarney.

IT'S THE COLOUR OF THE WORDS

I DON'T CARE ABOUT APPEARANCE

I loved those excuses after the CBC got caught discriminating against a white as a program host. It was all a mistake to say "any race except Caucasian" in the job ad. What absolute BS! All you have to do is turn on a TV and there is plenty of evidence that was precisely what the CBC wanted.
And other TV networks and stations for that matter. The pendulum has swung too far, from blatant discrimination to militant acceptance.
I really don't give a damn what the colour of skin is of the announcer or host. I don't care about the nationality or if they are minorities just off the plane. I just want to understand what is being said. If it comes with a nice Island lilt, fine, or a Brit accent, so be it. Unfortunately, too often that's not true. Simple announcements become a Rorschach scramble of syllables.
If you think I'm a crank about English which verges on the broken, I have put my money where the mouths of the incomprehensible should be. Back in 1979, I was the official sponsor of 43 "boat people" that I found in the refugee camps of Malaysia and Hong Kong. I had the legal responsible of looking after them financially for a year. With the help of Sun readers, I insisted that they could not work until they had passed courses in English as a second language.
I think of that every time I encounter someone who has been in Canada for decades and still can't speak English. Or I encounter some person with stilted English in India on a help line who can't deal with colloquial usage  Or the begging phone call, despite my being registered with the useless "do not call" list,  from some person just trying to earn a living but just can't speak English very well.
There is too much evidence that with the politically correct CBC and dumb private broadcast execs,   the colour of skin is more important than the ability to speak the English language with some resemblance to the way it is spoken even in ethnic Toronto.
After all, the electronic employers seem to think, just look at the huge market of Canadians that were born somewhere else. And when we hire minorities, we might increase our business even as we get in good with all the lefties who want us to go overboard on immigration issues.
I remember arguing during the meeting of a university advisory committee that I wasn't sure just how far a university should go in making it easier for minorities to pass journalism or radio and television English courses even after they were given an edge in admittance.
A high-ranking CBC official made it plain that she thought it was important that minorities on the electronic media also sounded like minorities. Her example was Ian Hanomansing. Hanomansing is a handsome competent Canadian newsman reared in the Maritimes but definitely looking Trinidadian. She said he would not be suitable for her on CBC radio because he didn't sound minority but white.
I was the only one of the group to find that strange. And so I was on the losing side of the perennial debate in North American high schools and universities where affirmative action gives minorities an advantage in admittance and then helps with their marks.
As some of the commentaries demonstrated after the CBC was caught with its prejudice showing, it's not just skin colour that is important to Mother Corp. I know as someone who did dozens of TV shows and radio commentaries, that women, New Democrats and gLiberals are preferred to compassionate white Conservatives who worked at a tabloid.
It was not unusual during pre-interviews with  producers to find them losing interest unless I was really provocative. After all, I was too white and right and I was from that damn Sun .
The great Doug Fisher, dean of the Ottawa press gallery, finally insisted that he wouldn't appear on CBC TV unless he was identified as a Sun columnist. Since Fisher was such a giant in political journalism, the CBC and CTV were happy to use him even if he was white and older and not a francophone.
Now if only the CBC was caught putting all its wishes, and not just "not Caucasian," in job ads and in policies for program execs. Then all the pretence would drop and everyone would know for a fact that the CBC desires to be the biggest mouthpiece in the country for lefties and activists.

GIVE SCHOOL BOARD AN F

EVEN OLD BOOKS HAVE USE

The TDSB, initials which could stand for Toronto Dumb Silly Board, has never dazzled parents or taxpayers with wisdom, common sense or economy.
The Toronto District School Board, which is too busy being politically correct, is the kind of outfit that knows how to spend but not how to save, to protect incompetent teachers and overpay every one else.
When I talk about the school system of  Ontario back in the ancient times when I was a student, I never say that I graduated but that I survived.
 I used to take a quiet pride in the fact that my dad, a popular east-end GP, had been chairman of the city school board. Unfortunately a series of stumblebums and PC trustees since has taken away my family pride.
So what has me annoyed this time? No, not those stories of a few months ago about how much the TDSB pays for routine chores like hanging stuff or fixing doors. The board demonstrated such disregard for the public purse in simple maintenance that it was a laughing stock in the media. For me to add more insults is like kicking a dead cat on that issue.
No, this time it's the discovery that it is dumping old books, such as a Canadian history book that cost more than $90 each, because it says it can't give them away and needy countries can't afford the transportaiton costs if they were gifted.
I doubt if they tried that hard. Or maybe there was not enough time to work out a reasonable giveaway plan between summer holidays, Easter and Christmas vacations, professional development days (which never seem to  work) and sick days.
(I just had another example of the TDSB incompetence when the junior school near my home, Sunnylea, fell silent this week because the pupils have escaped for the summer.  So what's the big deal? For weeks, noisy construction equipment has been pounding away at one end of the school just metres from the early grades who are distracted so easily. This week, the equipment was silent.. What stupidity it was to have the construction going on during school hours when summer holidays were so close.)
Ontario has been blessed with great lieutenant-governors, and one of the most competent and nicest, James Bartleman, distinguished himself by putting together volunteers and public agencies to ship thousands of old  books to northern communities and native communities where books were rare.
It was a huge success, proof that there is no need for a dumpster to be filled with history books outside Harbord Collegiate Institute.
The blunt truth is that old school books can be useful if only the TDSB got off its ass and showed some initiative and ingenuity. Perhaps use the imagination that is now wasted on feeble excuses saying there is no use for  books dumped because there are now new versions. Presumably the new edition has more "sensitive" language and watered-down versions of the often turbulent and bloody history of the world.
The high cost of textbooks is scandalous. Often the old version is good enough. My defence as a husband and father who paid for 22 years of university texts was to pay for only half the cost of the textbooks to encourage the hunt for older but adequate versions.
Of course the TDSB has the taxpayers to buy their books, and goodness knows there are all those publishers to subsidize, and all those teachers who like to write textbooks for the money.
It was over 160 years ago that Egerton Ryerson, founder of our school system and the education  complex of St. James Square now occupied by Ryerson University, determined that it was vital that the colony that was not yet a country have a central system for school books and school libraries.
He ranked the books as important as a teachers' college and model school. The cost was very important to him, and to all the private booksellers who mounted a vicious propaganda campaign against him.
They certainly didn't throw their books in the garbage then but passed them down through the school and the family until the covers and pages were tattered.
They don't have to do that anymore. Ain't progress wonderful! But not the taxes!

HOW CYCLISTS CRASHED THEIR IMAGE

DUMB AND DUMBER CYCLISTS

The cyclist image reached its tipping point just a year or so again, plummeting from sainthood.
It's now so acceptable to complain that even the guru (in his own mind) David Suzuki concedes that a lot of the criticism of the arrogant and dangerous behaviour of cyclists is valid.
 And Suzuki has never seen a lefty or eco cause that he hasn't adored if it hurts motorists.
We should thank Karen Stintz (but not elect her mayor) for her self-obsessed attitude when she got a $110 ticket for cruising through a stop sign on the bike she occasionally rides to City Hall. (Because she thought it would make her look good to downtown activists to ride 7 km to Silly Hall twice a week. After all, the left considers drivers evil and suburbanites grubs you find under rocks.)
 Since even stupidity is never completely black and white, Stintz argues that there really isn't a stop sign where she was caught sweaty-footed, but the cop considered it an intersection where people on wheels should stop. So she'll probably win on a technicality in court but not in public image because she volunteers she often (always?) rolls through stops like most cyclists in Toronto.

As the chair of the transit commission and one of the supposed leaders of Toronto city council, one would expect more of Stintz, She got elected after she replied to an ad looking for candidates and has done her best to make herself acceptable to voters, even taking speech lessons to calm her strange speaking patterns.
 But isn't it nice when dubious politicians blow themselves up!
One would argue that all councillors, particularly those who supervise the multi-billion-dollar TTC operation, should set an example for the rest of us, not feed the transportation scofflawism that makes the routine car trip downtown a guerilla operation with bodies hurtling by stalled cars as if they were berserk missiles.
Unfortunately we get stuck with militant cyclists/councillors like Glen De Baeremaeker who boasted to the Star that the first thing he does when he gets up is put on his bike gear. I suppose the second thing is to reread the Little Red Book about all the things he and officials can do to handicap all those cars and trucks who insist on also being on the road when he rides to council.
I would like to see a study comparing the efficiency of vehicles and bikes in moving people. I would add delivering goods but we all know that even hardened cyclists don't deliver items like furniture. I suggest to you that if we ever got an honest examination of the impact of one person on one bike on a busy city street, we would find they cause two to three times the impact of a car. But such a study will never happen because of pols like Stintz because they believe the bike benefits are more important than the 80% of us who move around Toronto each day by vehicles because the TTC isn't convenient or is too crowded.
I have written about the casual approach by too many cyclists to too many rules of the road, in, for example a blog on May 9 titled Cyclists are the biggest road menace. And if you go to blog.johndowning.ca, you will find several columns on road issues and how City Hallers yell at each other and talk expensive transportation dreams without bothering to try to get more out of the existing system by actually applying common sense approaches.
One thing has become obvious to me, and it should be to the columnists/commentators who now consider it safe to no longer toe the line where bike lanes and cyclists are part of a Holy Grail approach to moving people where motorists are handicapped and pedestrians and cyclists are considered half-way to Heaven.
It was always obvious on the old regional council called Metro that downtowners were more demanding in taxes, services and social assistance, and suburbanites believed in less demands on government and a more conservative approach to taxation. Bikes were a downtown thing needing help to survive while suburban cyclists could look after themselves.
The downtown-suburban split on most issues cripples much of the supposed decision making of council since amalgamation. Rob Ford could be a slim moderate mini-controvery mayor and he would still be attacked by the Adam Vaughans of the world because he's a suburbanite.
 And since Ford wanders from disaster to disaster like a Model T weakened by rust, city politics resembles a mud fight during a college initiation.
All you have to do is drive from my neighbourhood in downtown Etobicoke to, say, University and College, and the number of cyclists soars along with their militant behaviour the closer you get to the centre.
 In much of the suburbs, cyclists are fewer and restrained and have little impact on traffic. Downtown during rushhour they handicap traffic. Banning bikes during rush hour on major streets like Bloor or King is something that even cyclists that I know think would be a good idea. And more $110 tickets for the Stintzs of the world, who are so arrogant that they don't even  try to conceal that they have been caught breaking a bylaw, might calm the two-wheeled anarchy.
I have a soft spot in my heart for The Netherlands because my mother was born there and I find it such an interesting country to visit. As I recall from the September when Toronto officially twinned with Amsterdam, Dutch cyclists on their plain bikes could give many lessons on behaviour to those in Toronto. And I'm talking about an estimated 880,000 bikes in a city of 800,000.
RecentlyI yelled at an older woman dressed in black riding a bike without lights and reflectors the wrong-way on a one-way street around 10 p.m. ,She screamed back. Why couldn't I leave her alone? Because if I hit you, you damn fool, it would change my life, and yours too, because you would probably be buried.
I find driving around T.O. these days a dangerous gamble, like I was juggling lighted dynamite. There is always someone walking behind the car when you back up, or trying to take the parking spot from you, or meandering in front of you on a turn talking into their phone. Traffic is dangerous enough without cyclists ignoring traffic signs, roaring down sidewalks and thinking they can float through the night as if the Star of Bethlehem was shining down on them like a spotlight.
I may drive the acceptable rate over the speed limit (but never in a school zone) but I obey bylaws and rules, from not littering and obeying stop signs, and generally not being a member of the growing pack of scofflaws that figure acceptable behaviour legally is what you can get away with.
 I care about survival, me first, then the cyclist.
It may be a stretch but is the reason that I see more motorists of all ages, particularly younger ones, routinely rolling through stop signs and gambling at lights,  because making illegal turns or not stopping has became routine in recent years, particularly for kids on bikes..
I don't think accident rates have spiked because of this but it certainly takes a toll on the nerves of drivers. You approach a routine traffic signal watching for the guy who isn't even going to catch the amber as he speeds through. Just going down your home street can be an adventure because of cyclists and motorists not even pretending to stop at the side streets. And construction, landscaping and delivery trucks seem to compete in awkward parking that blocks easy traffic flow.
When I get home without a dent or near collision (and I hasten to add I have an almost perfect accident record), I settle before the TV for a couch potato hour to relax with an old movie. Nope, never a Western, because after all I have already had my fill on the way home of stampedes and runaways and punks seeing how far they can go in thumbing their noses at the rules of civilization.
Survival of the fittest, they used to say, before cyclists decided they were the gods of the road.  

TRIVIA HAS BECOME TRIVIAL

ELECTRONIC  ECLIPSE OF TRIVIA BUFFS

Back when people sat in bars and actually conversed, instead of staring into smart phones as they do now, back when having a good memory, even a photographic memory, was useful, two Canadian newspaper types invented an instant hit called Trivial Pursuit.
I remember it well because that's when some stopped liking me.
We used to have a car pool party of the neighbours who took turns driving our kids to French immersion because no buses were provided at the start, and each year the French fries (as they were called by other classes during recess) were moved to another Etobicoke school.
The car pool crowd decided to play this new trivia game, a lot of fun until husbands got annoyed at me answering all the questions.
Sorry, I said, but the game grew out of newsrooms and press clubs and anyone who has ever spent time reporting and drinking collects trivia like a robin collects worms.
Before you think I'm becoming (too) egotistical, there were later variations involving, for example, pop culture, and I no longer was champ. Gone were the questions that could be answered by anyone who had ever been in a big newsroom where you were surrounded by people who knew trivia because they had interviewed many of the big players, whether in movies, politics, sports, business etc.
With the answers to most questions just seconds away on a smart phone, the wizards of trivia have had their wands broken. No longer would I boast about the dinner party where the senator named all the teams in English soccer and their home fields,  the financier who was later jailed - the businessman, not the senator - named all the ships in the Argentine navy and their tonnage, and the mayor disgorged endless stats about baseball before the Jays were  invented.
I hung in for a time but then decided it was safer on my ego to join the ladies.
It's a couple of years since I phoned the psychiatrist with the genius IQ and the photographic memory and said that we were now passe, no longer the wows at a party.  (I don't claim an IQ over 145 or a photo memory, just five decades of journalism.)
What's the point of trying to memorize anything when the Internet has become the flawed memory for the world, just a few strokes away? You can Google major stuff or the truly minor, like I was saying that Conan O'Brien was really tall and when someone challenged that, I winkled out immediately that he was 6'4".
Except.....
There are a lot of dubious sources out there on the Internet, a point I was trying to make to a university journalism class when I talked about how wonderful the flood of facts is on the Internet but when you look stuff up, it is like dipping a tea spoon into the torrents below Niagara Falls and expecting you will find accurate info on the first try.
That is the Achilles heel of smart phones (which is bizarre imagery.}  You can also be given too much info and drown while searching for the consensus.
For people in their anecdotage like me, smart phones can be a curse or a blessing, depending on whether you were right when your children decided to check out your memories.
Now I love to tell stories. Mary says I do it too much. Three sons often point out I've told them the story before. Yet Number Three son, in a forgiving mood, wrote a full page in the Sunday Sun on me where he delivered this wonderful line - the family don't mind me repeating stories because they want to see how they turn out this time. Touche, or something!
Yes the smart phone can be dangerous when sons challenge dear old dad, but I'm suspicious when they argue but then don't  pull it out and check me out immediately.. They must sense I may actually be right. For a change! Wow! There is hope for the old farts.
The local pub was so noisy recently that it was hard to follow the hockey and baseball over the yahoos. I swore when the Kings scored and Number One son was annoyed. I kidded him, since he lives just south of L.A., that I didn't like the Kings much as one of the "new" teams.
 He argued they had been around for years. And of course they have, founded in the 1960s by a refugee from Toronto. I said I was joking because, after all, they won the Cup last year. No, they didn't, Number Two son said, Chicago did. Since he still plays goal twice a week, I refrained from saying that it was the Kings last year, Boston the year before, and then Chicago in 2010.
The point about new" teams vs. the Original Six is not lost on those of who who still remember when hockey was really hockey and Tim Horton was not a doughnut/coffee joint but one of the srrongest players in the league. And Boston vs. Chicago is giving us a taste of a golden past, echoes of a vanished era before strikes and more stories about salaries than scoring.
But back to the noise, a typical night as beer disappeared and we were happy we could walk home.. We argued about planes, and everything else, I wondered about switching from draft to a Bloody Caesar with rum. And Number One son argued that no Caesar was ever made with white rum.  Then I remembered when Mary got so filled with the joy of drinking  Long Island Teas in Mexico, which were assorted rums,  that she tried walking out of the deep end of a very large pool. And Number One son said there was no such thing as all-rum Teas.
He insisted I was really living in the past as an ancient AC 1 in the RCAF when I talked about flight engineers even though, as I pointed out, there are literally thousands of older planes still using them. And of course the military, which don't have the same staffing concerns as the airlines which are always on the verge of bankruptcy.
I love Caesars and and know that about the only constant in all the recipes is clamato juice. And Long Island Tea is just a mix of white liquors like rum, vodka and tequila as well as a liqueur like triple sec. Those deadly ones in Mexico got their taste from a heavy planter's rum.
The sons like to poke fun at me because I still use an old cell phone for which only a few have the number. But Number Three Son says he'll give me his old smart phone after he buys the latest generation. Which is fortunate because I think the next time I go on a family pub crawl, I should be armed with more than just my memory. After all, it seems I need electronic confirmation that I actually do know what I am talking about....on occasion.

MEDIA LOVE THE CHIN (bikini) PICNIC

POLITICALLY CORRECT TAKE IT ON THE CHIN

I love picnics. Never been to a bad one, even when it rained, From a kid angling for a second piece of tart lemon pie to an older guy trying not to stare at what's inside those bikinis, a picnic is a joy forever.
When I was the skinny orphan where I never did anything during the summer but swim and imagine what the world must be like outside the small town, the simple church picnic was a major event.
Only one concession road out of Chesley, and the Saugeen River is not much at that point, and all the people there I saw twice every Sunday, but I still enjoyed every slice of pie and all the egg salad sandwiches even though well-filled bikinis had not yet entered my thoughts.
Then there have been all the Plewes picnics with my aunt and uncle and their 11 children with whom I lived when I went to Weston Collegiate. Fine food, great anecotes, but I couldn't admirt the bikinis because I was related to all of them.
And now has come,  for my 47th time, the preview of the CHIN Picnic which of course is held at the Ex for three days ending July 1. And I can stare at the bikinis, providing Mary is on the other side of the Liberty Grand and my son Mark is off winning the barbecue.
In my defense, may I say that I am restrained in my admiration and never say a word. But Lenny and Theresa Lombardi invite all these boisterous guys with Italian heritage and they are unreserved in their admiration and comments. I thought I was somewhere in Rome having a drink at an outside table while the world paraded by, and some may as well just been wearing a bikini.
What I love about Lenny's party, beside the food, is it's an unabashed celebration of womanhood. And in this day of political correctness which has destroyed such pleasant events as the Miss Toronto contest,  it is nice not to be made out to be a pervert for taking a second look.
Back when it all began in 1966, back when (sorry Lenny) CHIN was an unknown ethnic radio station run by his dad Johnny Lombardi who also brought acts over from Italy, Johnny got the idea of the bikini contest which was manna from heaven for all the news photographers who loved to shoot women, and for all the editors like me who loved to run the pictures.
The CHIN party became the darling of the media.
Usually we were made to feel guilty by the dogooders and PC missionaries who eventually convinced the Toronto police association that its sponsorship of the Miss Toronto beauty contest was not wise. Politicians of all hues and stripes hastened to crap all over beauty contests and threatened to ban them from public property everywhere, including, probably, the moon.
But along came Lombardi and an ETHNIC BEAUTY CONTEST. And the activists and gliberals didn't know quite what to do. After all, it was the era of the huge hit of Metro Caravan, those marvelous days where you bought a passport and jaunted around to 54 church halls and auditoriums named after distant capitals and ate and drank well, and admired the dancing and exotic displays.
No one official in Toronto was about to attack any ethnic event, perhaps to make up for how post-war immigrants were treated. So the CHIN picnic and the radio station prospered, even though the Toronto Sun in the early years still suffered broadsides of indignation whenever the SUNShine girl was too bare or not ethnic enough. Often I was called upon to defend the Girl, and used to bring up as a fallen Baptist  that I didn't remember which one of the Ten Commandments mentioned women's bathing suits. All the media loved the CHIN bikini contest even if the Star and Globe were holier than thou about the SUNshine Girl while running some pretty bare females themselves. TV and the Star and the Globe could display some "girlie" pictures without subscribers phoning up to cancel in blue-rinse indignation.
Over the years, the advance party has also been a must event for savvy politicians as well as photogs.  For example, Doug Holyday was at the latest, but then the deputy mayor may have just been in hiding from the tag team of the Fords. Everyone loves an invite because you can mingle in a rich ethnic boisterous affair which can torture the ears as you do the same to your stomach.
I would never miss it. Lenny says in his program: "Many people ask why we describe this fantastic multicultural music festival as a picnic. I like to say the image and emotion conjured up by the word picnic is synonymous with the event. Think family, fun, outdoors, friends and good food and just like a family picnic there is no admission fee."
Oh yes, I'm told there is also a bikini contest for men. That may well be so, but I keep getting distracted by what we used to call stupidly the weaker sex.