IDIOTS DRIVE BETTER THAN YOU

LEFT LANE ROAD HOGS SHOULD BE JAILED

Nothing poisons the mood on a congested highway quicker than some idiot dawdling in the passing lane. It can turn a simple trip into a difficult one as the other drivers start zipping around as if they're in a stock car race.
The dumb driver hunkered down behind the wheel, ostentatiously ignoring the glares, is a slap in the face to the rest of us, a reminder that there are a lot of stupid people in the world and most of them live in the left lane.
Ancient map makers used to mark the unknown territories with a warning that "here be dragons." We should paint that on the passing lane pavement.
Maybe a little name calling would work. After all, there are fines for the really slow drivers blocking that lane and it doesn't seem to work, probably because the police are more interested in speeders or erratic drivers rather than those who probably bought their licence rather than fail again in taking the test.
British Columbia is said to be contemplating more powers to allow the cops to curb this blight on traffic moving at a reasonable speed. Ontario may boast of being among the North American jurisdictions with the best accident stats but some days, looking around, it appears that happens more by luck than by enforcement.
I remember with fondness my driving expeditions on the super roads of Europe where some drivers are moving at incredible speeds and blast with horns anyone who impedes the passing lane. I suspect road rage incidents there are limited to a few cases of an European driver blasting with a bazooka any North American nerd who dawdles.
A example of the muddled thinking that some authorities have about this problem, which causes accidents as much as it wastes gasoline and time, is the latest Bush to run for president.
Jeb as Florida governor vetoed  a law in 2005 forcing slow drivers to keep right because he said it hurt "cautious and careful drivers" and just helped speeders and those with emotional intemperance.
Now that may appeal to all those old farts living in God's waiting room but it's another reason why there shouldn't be a third Bush in the White House unless it's a plant.
Surely it's obvious, unless he never looked out the window of the limousine, but the slow driver blocking the faster traffic causes cars weaving in and out, which adds to the danger. Passing on the right is always a trifle more dangerous, mainly because the drivers shoved over to that side of the highway are now travelling with all the poorer drivers who are only on the highway in the first place because they can't figure out from the map how to get there on a secondary roads.
New Jersey has doubled the fine to $300 for slowpokes in the passing lane. There are laws in some states saying you have to yield the lane to a faster car no matter if you are speeding yourself. And there are many laws saying you can't go slower than the speed limit in the passing lane.
It's time for Ontario to get serious about that. The OPP should lay more charges, and the punishment should be increased. Perhaps forcing an offender to listen to 20 hours of the premier's speeches would work. 

SORRY BELL ....RIGHT NUMBER

THE BLESSINGS/CURSES OF CELL PHONES

It's a miracle, but the bureaucratic monstrosity known as the CRTC has produced a report saying pay phones have a role in Canadian society and need to be preserved.
Damn right!
Speaking as someone who thinks smart phones and cell phones and watch phones are wonderful, in their place that is, which is not in my face or when I'm talking to you or when you are pretending to be interesting company, I realize pay phones are unnecessary 99.9% of the time.
But what if you're poor or homeless or the battery has gone kerfooie or you're in a dead reception area. BCE is a rich outfit with stock near record highs. It can afford to leave a few pay phones even if it says it has 10,502 pay phones that only average one caller daily at 50 cents.
I no longer run  many meeting but I can assure that if I did, you would leave your phones at the door or hide them or I would deposit them in a round receptacle.
Perhaps this is fuelled partially by jealousy rather than just a wish to have a return to good manners. Heaven knows, my 50 years of journalism would have been a lot easier if I hadn't always been looking for a way to talk to the office or get a story to the office. And then balky computers came along to add to the frustration.
A wonderful teacher and writer, Ted Schrader, emphasized to me on Day One of Journalism at Ryerson that the first thing you did on a story was to figure out how to get it back to the editor. I spent a couple of decades doing that before there were far more phones around, and then the first clunky cell phones arrived.
You would be at a murder scene or a meeting or a trial in the middle of nowhere - believe me not everything happens on a Toronto street - and then spend hours just trying to find a pay phone to dictate for the next edition.
Some times the Star-ling got there first. The famous inquest into the RCMP drownings in Lake Simcoe that caused the plate in every boat giving the maximum weight took place in a country schoolhouse. The Tely guy found the nearest pay phone a mile  away and after he dictated, unscrewed the mouthpiece and took it. The Star guy arrived to discover the trickery but check-mated by stealing the earpiece. They agreed to share...but not with the Globe.
Another way to screw Star-ling was that after you dictated your story to rewrite, you then proceeded to read the telephone book over the line while the Star-ling cursed and threatened to punch you.
Three years ago, after I was incarcerated in four hospitals for three months and temporarily lost the ability to walk - dammit I could not even stand - I was shipped from one hospital to awful St. Joseph's in a wheelchair van to see if I still had the MRSA infection that the U. S. hospitals had given me along with the $85.000 bill.
I was the last patient of the day in the clinic just inside the Tranquility Gate entrance - some cruel gimmick name by healthcrats - and after a cursory look, the specialist fled along with all the staff who locked up everything. The van should have been there but I waited alone for an hour. I had no change for the only pay phone. I wheeled around and found a young immigrant cleaner who loaned me his cell phone. The dispatcher for the van had some silly excuse. Waited. Couldn't find the cleaner. Waited. Then remembered I had a secret VISA card against hospital rules and used it to place calls on the pay phone to the home hospital - my meal and medications were long overdue - and to yell at the dispatcher.
The driver finally arrived only to send me crashing down the wheelchair ramp. I remember the whole misadventure, from having the driver fired to that pay phone rescuing me.
Now if I can only remember to carry change. I haven't for years. About as long as I have carried a cell phone turned off so no one can bother me.  

THE PROMOTION OF HAWGTOWN

T.O. DOES LOUSY JOB ON DEFENCE

The cottage potluck party is a pleasant affair. It also gives me an insight into life outside the bubble of Toronto where all the people live who either dislike the Big Smoke a trifle or hate it a lot.
My cottage neighbours gather in the dead of winter to exchange notes about how the cottages are surviving, to look at baby pictures of grandchildren, and to appreciate the joys of rum.
We don't go all the way to Burnt Point, now frozen above Healey Falls on the Trent River, but one of us has a lovely sprawling home half-way there, a beauty that is twice the size of my humble home in Etobicoke but is assessed at less and is taxed at more.
Which bugs the owner, a  C.A. who knows his way around numbers, and figures Torontonians are always whining about taxes when his municipality on the edge of the G.T.A. gets treated much worse at Queen's Park.
Which we discussed, loudly, over the fourth beer before the great food.

The potluck party is a grounding for me in life in Canada as seen through the eyes of some people who really don't follow current events. There is one couple who don't read newspapers or magazines or watch news or political shows on TV.  Talk to them about how awful it is that the Ontario voters keep ignoring the shenanigans and costly vote buying of the ruling Liberals and it might as well be  happening on an Australian island.
After half-a-century of working in the media and being submerged by what my colleagues are saying, I have often stubbed my toe on the fact that so many in this country really don't like Toronto. We are the piggies of Hawgtown.
There are two versions of how we got the insult. One is that we used to "hog" credit for everything that happened in Ontario, or Canada for that matter. The second is, that like Chicago, we slaughtered most of the pigs of the country before the stockyards of the Junction turned into plazas and super-box stores.
It was only a couple of decades ago, or so it seems, that the Junction was an area with pens and cattle and pigs and stink and sidings as far as the eye could see.
 Now it's gone but the name remains, and a dislike of the city by the rest of the country.
 The old joke is that hatred of Toronto was one of the unifying forces behind Confederation and is still keeping Canada united.
You would have thought there would be some mercy generated by the dismal Leafs, which were once called Canada's team, as if they had nothing to do with the city, but that's not about to happen, even if the old rivalry with Montreal died long ago.
It strikes me that when Mayor John Tory goes cap-in-hand to Ottawa, begging for more in his tax bowl, that he and the other 44 members of council are targeting politicians who really don't see any votes for them in helping Toronto.
Tory and the councillors have sung the song of need for so long, they don't realize that most of the people outside the Toronto bubble really don't know the words, or the facts.
And they don't care because they don't feel guilty.We must make them feel guilty.
I asked my cottage friend why I as a Toronto taxpayer should subsidize his trips on GO and the TTC when he and his wife drive to Oshawa and then use that public transit twice a day because they work inside Toronto.
Toronto has costly and additional problems in transit, roads, Hydro and policing because it is a magnet for all those who want to work here each day but avoid hassles by fleeing outside for the rest of the time to larger houses with more lot that cost far less than in the city.
Toronto has costly and additional problems in welfare and education because most immigrants want to come here because of the opportunity and all the special programs such as English as a second language. More people with income, employment and language problems live in the city than in the GTA. Social housing is clustered in the city.
It is a dirty secret at Queen's Park and Ottawa that they force the city to pay extra for provincial and federal programs that are forced upon the city and are not the responsibility of city taxpayers.
The list is endless of how the city is ripped off by the senior levels of government, which is how those pickpocket organizations dignify themselves as they extract more money in federal and provincial income tax and fuel taxes than they get from the rest of the country.
Instead of the usual mumbo jumbo of griping, the city must confront the rest of the country with several crisp pages detailing how the smaller rural ridings routinely get far more assistance than the larger Toronto ridings. We must embarrass them as freeloaders.
The wonder is that there hasn't been a move to secede by the 2.8 million Torontonians tired of being the financial anchor of a country that loves to call it names.

THERE'S ONLY ONE TAXPAYER

    NOT ONE BUT THREE POLITICAL PICKPOCKETS

I have been baffled by one weird taxation issue since I first covered politics.
And that is a long time since it was in May, 1957, that they tried to throw me out of my first city council meeting that I went to cover as the nervous editor of the Whitehorse Star.
After I appeared as the lone spectator at a meeting of Whitehorse council in the Yukon, the mayor demanded to know what I wanted.
I explained that I had just started working for the only newspaper in the territory and I wanted to cover the city news. He told me not to bother, he would phone me later. I didn't leave, arguing I had a right to be there for the debate. I didn't know if I did but from their faces I knew I had landed a good right.
I stayed, couldn't figure out anything, there was no debate, and I never wrote a word.

But there have been countless meetings at all levels of our governments ever since. A prevailing theme from the municipal level is that they need more money from the province, and the provincial level is always yowelling that they need more money from the feds, and the feds always preach that they need more money from everyone.
I am sure that if you were at those meetings with me, whether they be a council or a legislative or Commons session, you would also look around vainly for all these taxpayers who run around with signs on their chest that they are a municipal or provincial or federal taxpayer.
Of course you will never find those three taxpayers because there is only one.  Yet there is a daily con by all the politicians, a monstrous lie that dwarfs all the others in politics, that the cost of any scheme, whether it be a fare increase or a stadium or a welfare payment, goes down by some miracle if only the fibbers get another government to pay a share.
The poor over-taxed middle class Canuck loses about half of every dollar to taxes. There are these three governments whacking him whether he swims in a pool or buys gas or pays income tax or sales tax or municipal tax.
The sensible people know that. If the spouse suggests a frivolous purchase, you double the price in your mind because that's what you have to earn in order to cover the cost. If you treat yourself because slush is now gushing up through the floor of your car, that wonderful replacement that you say cost only $25,000 in cash really means you have to earn $50,000 because of all the taxes
  I  would avoid thinking of that too often if you don't want to sink into a black hole of despair.
So Mayor John Tory says Queen's Park has to give the city more money for the TTC. What he really means is that you and I must contribute more money out of our provincial taxes in order not to have our municipal taxes go up when the city helps the TTC.
It's a taxation circus with the con artists running a different kind of shell game. This version has the mayor sneaking millions under his shell from the provincial shell and the premier screaming because the PM is hammering her fingers every time she tries to get under the federal shell.
All the while they all pretend that they are the ones keeping taxes low. Sure!

ORPHAN SOCKS

DO THEY DIE IN THE LINT TRAP?

Today I want to discuss questions that have always baffled me more than the deadly combination of algebra, geometry and trigonometry.
 What happens to the other sock? Where does the mate go to die? Is this revenge by my wife?
After I finished the last fruitless search for a sock that had disappeared into the great beyond, I decided this was a better topic for a PhD thesis than some of the stuff graduate students tackle.
Research should be sponsored in self-defence by a sock manufacturer because if we ever do solve this, there will be so many more useful pairs of socks around that they will have to close up shop.
You may think this a frivolous topic but I have seen some fascinating accounts of Socks Missing-in-Action.
It even brings back one that tugs at me where I wished I had acted differently.
I wrote a blog/column on April 11 last year about the death of Vince Devitt, one of those solid  reporters and companions in Toronto journalism.
When Vince was winding down after a nice career that had taken him from tough bartender to headline stories to premier's aide, he sent me a delightful column about socks that go missing in the wash.
At the time, the Sun had more regular columnists than we had spaces for them. Then there are all the writers who think that anyone can write a column and prove with what they send that they can't.
But Vince knew how to write. So I skimmed it and put it aside for vacation periods or emergencies where we kill a column for legal reasons or because the writer has become incoherent.
Vince phoned. I said I had no space then but I would save it. In the middle of my explanation, some crisis flared and I had to go. I think Vince took it as an old friend letting him down easy and he never sent me anything again. He moved south. And Socks MIA got lost in the flood of paper on an editor's office even in the computer age.
I think of this every time I rummage around a dryer looking for the other  sock. It was the kind of gentle observation of the passing scene that I long for after wading through newspapers jammed with politics because it cost less to cover politics than to really cover the city., where a State of the Union address is treated like the Second Coming when the president is mired in a Republican tar pit.
What haunts me is that I never got to the end of Vince's humour. Maybe he as veteran investigative  journalist had solved whether there's a black hole in the laundry room or just in space.

DON HARRON THE WORDSMITH

A LONG AND ARTICULATE  CAREER

Don Harron cared about words. He could make me cringe with how he mangled the language in his Charlie Farquharson rube act with some obvious and rude contrivances, but he was the quickest punster I've ever seen.
And I loved adroit puns. Those who don't just haven't the wit to appreciate them.
Harron was a graceful actor, gifted performer, insightful writer and critic, and a familiar face around Ontario. Anyone smart enough to sidle up to him at an intermission got a clever sentence about the strengths and weaknesses.

He may have had an international rep but you would see him at some humble performances.
One evening at the Fourth Line Theatre, held in a barnyard near Cavan, there was Harron watching with appreciation. An actor who had strutted the boards at Stratford and Broadway, who had been a fixture on long-running TV shows like Hee Haw and major radio, watching anonymously with several hundred others a performance that was obese due to the ego of the producer/inspiration behind the summer theatre.
"Needs a good editor like you," Harron said to me quietly at a break, not wanting to bruise local egos. He was being too mice to me but his message wasn't that. Less of the play would have been more.
Then we chatted about current events where he had  cutting insights about our rulers.
I remember a frigid Ottawa evening when Fraser Kelly, the TV anchor and political commentator, and I ended up in the House of Commons watching a boring debate by backbenchers. The only other spectator was Harron.
I said our excuse was that Fraser and I had had a very busy day with MPs and we were unwinding before a Chinese meal.
Harron said he had been writing night and day on an overdue movie script that he had just mailed to New York. He was too tired to sleep, it was too late for a movie, so he had come to the House hoping at least to capture some business for a skit.
Off we all went to an undistinguished meal. At midnight then on a weekday, there wasn't much  choice.
I said I was staying at the Skyline rather than the Chateau because I liked its pool and assortment of saunas, even though one of them, a dry affair redolent with eucalyptus resin, wasn't worth the money.
"Oh," Harron said, "a real you-clip-tus room."
In the early days of the two brigantines in Toronto harbour, I helped in a race to get the sailing program some publicity. The crews were media and regulars on the scene like Harron and Catharine McKinnon, then his wife.
It was the start of a fine summer day. Catharine  perched on the bow spit and as we brought 60 tonnes around into the wind and the jib billowed above, she sang her anthem Farewell to Nova Scotia.
I shivered. For one glorious moment, I could have been on the Bluenose as it again showed its stern to the fastest competition, or with Nelson at Trafalgar, not on a thick old ship used to give teenagers like my son John Henry a real sailing experience.
I remember that moment fondly, along with all the wordplay from a man who over 90 years may have tried to carve a pun out of every word in the  language.
I know some dunderheads say a "pun is the lowest form of humour." As Oscar Levant riposted,
"when you don't think of it first."
 Harron usually did.

RUIN OUR KIDS BY PROTECTING THEM

    SAVE THE CHILDREN

Of course we should ban tobogganing. I'm all for the municipalities which do that. The politicians aren't being silly chicken-shits in the face of liability problems but protective of our young.
 Let them continue too with the plan to develop an all-purpose cotton batten armour that  must be worn by all children off their property.
Let's not stop there. I have a long list of how we must do more to save our children from scrapes and bruises as they grow up. Let's not continue the savagery that surrounded us when we were kids and vulnerable to all the menaces of life. Let's put J&J out of business because obviously it is part of the underground pushing such activity to hype the sale of Band-Aids.
At the head of my extinction list is the unforgivable slackness in how we have childproofed our playgrounds. That they even still exist is an outrage. A child could fall from a swing, one of those devilish creations of orthopaedic surgeons looking for business.
As for municipal pools, why even wading pools, hat we let kids wade in even inches of water is just asking for trouble. They could slip. The idea that we should teach everyone how to swim is silly. Canada may have more lakes and rivers than useless politicians but there's no reason why people should learn how to save themselves if they're dumb enough to actually want to go out boating. To me, that's just hunting for trouble.
It is rather obvious that the best way to save our children is just keep them inside. Let's not have recess outside because who know what hi jinks might start. Blow fresh air into the gym and let them do calisthenics after, and this is mandatory, a proper period of warming up and stretching.
Have municipal curfews at 7.30 p.m. for anyone under 16.  There are all sorts of vapours in the night air and the idea of letting kids play outside, on the street even, until the streetlights come on, is just asking for trouble.

I can testify under oath about how dangerous it was for me to grow up. In fact, I have written that I'm slightly amazed that I lived to retirement age, because just getting to become a teenager was a miracle.
Tobogganing, I admit, was a helluva lot of  fun. But it must be banned. I skinned cheeks and bruised knees and backsides about every second time I wooshed down a hill, laughing and screaming and having a great time. But the risks are too great. At least one in every 5,000 tobogganers may be hurt, so that's good reason to ruin the fun and exercise for 4,999 people.
The schoolyard for me was a dangerous pit because I was the smallest kid in class, one reason, I guess, that in Grade 2, Dick Klefford, the bully a year ahead, cut me across the face with a whip he made from a pussy willow, one reason I think that we should cut down all the pussy willows in Canada. After I had my growth spurt and became the biggest kid in the class, I knocked him out with one punch. That's the way the school yard used to function but rough justice can be unequal so it's just best that pupils should be only out there in small groups and closely supervised in case someone starts to giggle.
Unfortunately, I heard a parent the other day talk about tag being a lot of fun. It made me shiver nervously. All that running around means someone is bound to fall.
Playing tag can really be dangerous. One day my chums and I were playing tag on top of piles of drying lumber outside the Chesley sawmill.  There were gaps of a couple of metres between the piles, which were about the height of a two-storey house. It was a golden, dangerous time that we all were savouring.
 I jumped from one stack to the next without looking, only to discover that there was no "next." I remember my stunned amazement as I fell and fell and landed on a pile of rocks on the banks of the Rocky Saugeen River  which seems suitable named.
Everything went black. I came to looking up into the faces of my buddies who knew, of course, that I had killed myself. Damn it, I felt awful, my chest acted as if it had been caved in,  but I never even got a decent bruise out of it, nothing to show off in honour of my near-death experience.
So as I say, playing tag can be dangerous and should be banned, although there are probably no longer piles of lumber there because the sawmill has burned down.
What we  need is to get a little organization into the ordeal of protecting our kids. We could do what they do in cities in China and have neighbourhood committees generally headed by a couple of grandmothers who make a Marine drill sergeant look like a softy.
Each parent would take their child before the committee and have a proper program of exercise worked out for them. I know that tobogganing and anything to do with unsupervised play would not be considered and anyone actually doing that would be subject to  family court discipline.
Which is the way it should be. Growing up is just too dangerous to just happen. Look how awful we turned out to be, some of us emotionally scarred forever by following off the toboggan just before it hit a tree..