10-SPEED JERKS

What We Need Is Car Lanes
It is wonderful news that Toronto council will consider bike lanes from Etobicoke to Scarborough along the central arteries of Bloor St. and Danforth Ave.

After all, it is bound to generate so many traffic jams and bursts of anger that councillors may be forced to do a needed re-examination of the entire city bike lane policy.
I thought the height of absurdity was reached when engineers egged on by anti-car politicians and activists proposed bike lanes for the ramp feeding to and from the Gardiner from the proposed Front St. extension. You see, bikes are banned on the Gardiner.

But it was all sham anyway because they loaded so many silly ideas into that extension that eventually it died because of cost....which was the general idea.

The city actually has a manager in charge of biking and he is quoted as saying the east-west bike lanes are an obvious need but past proposals by cycling activists have run into parking and traffic problems "that complicate the issue."

You're not kidding!
Remember that not all councillors buy into the strange gimmicks by Mayor David Miller and his majority clutch of Miller Lite supporters. So let's not blast the sane minority who still subscribe to the novel idea that the basic concept behind Toronto streets is to move people by vehicle, whether transit or private. The city actually has a hidden official policy to handicap private cars at every opportunity.
Putting bike lanes on main roads is insane. In fact, where we presently have them, they should be signed that cyclists can't use them during rushhours.
Cycling activists love to point to all the cars with just one person in them on city streets. Yes, but just look at all the bicycle carrying just one person, and all you need to do to take one lane out of service every rushhour is to have several cyclists careening along in each block.

If the purpose of a major street in rushhour is to move people, any impartial census will show that one lane will move far more people by vehicle each minute than it can by bike.
But why bring up logic! Bike lanes are a political statement, a revenge on the car, and any pretense that they make any economic or transportation sense is just ludicrous.
If council approves this latest madness in principle, there will be detailed studies and elaborate public consultations where cycling activists will berate any one who doesn't appreciate their guerilla approach to commuting.
The majority will not be there because we have been beaten down by the Miller Lites because they rarely do anything sensible in the stewardship of this great city.

It would be even greater and more liveable if it wasn't for the dumb shenanigans at City Hall that have replaced any basic concerns about just making the damn city work by caring about old services and decaying infrastructure more than the latest socialist gimmick.

TORONTO SYMPHONY TREASURES

Breaking Down The Doors

I love Toronto Symphony concerts. I hate the hassles of getting there.
My son Mark has been a symphony subscriber for years and since he now lives most of the year in China, it's up to Dad to keep up the subscription so we don't lose those two seats in the front row just to the left of the conductor.

(And that's important because that's where the soloists perform, and since our seats are the closest to that magic spot, it's like they're performing just for us.)
It's been a great season. My wife Mary is hardly a classlcal fan but the night called Rachmaninoff & Bernstein was wonderful. I came home and called up Mark in far-off Dalien (via Skype) and raved about what he had missed. With a talented Russian pianist, Natasha Peremski, pounding away at the huge grand piano just over our heads, and the Chinese conductor, Xian Zhang, practically dancing on the podium, it was like we were awash with music.

And the symphony players kept smiling at each other. It's easy to see they liked it too. But the pianist seem to enjoy it most.
Then a week later it was that corny but delightful confection called Last Night of the Proms. It's stolen, of course, from Royal Victoria Hall in London, England, where the decades of waving flags and teddy bears and egos is a grand tradition as the symphonic season ends.
And so it was here, with volunteers selling flags for $5 each in the lobby, and the concert goers bringing giant flags of their own, or even wearing flag T-shirts. And they waved them enthusiastically as they sang Land of Hope and Glory (from Pomp & Circumstance March No. 1,) Rule Britannia and Jerusalem. It was enough to make everyone an Anglophile for the night.
This was presided over by Bramwell Tovey who seems to have been born just for this concert. I've seen him before, and listened and watched the English version many times, but Tovey the other night was just right, in everything from his corny puns, his topical digs and his repartee with the audience.
Then there was a clever mugging performance from Richard Stuart in some of the great Gilbert & Sullivan skits from The Mikado and Pirates, with backup from the Toronto treasure known as the Mendelssohn Choir, complete with sight gags of swooning maidens, giant sun glasses, even a pizza box (don't ask).
Mary and I have never enjoyed ourselves more in a lifetime of going to concerts. It made me forget all the dog yelpings and dirges and gawdawful modern compositions that I've endured.
But then it ends and you have all the hassles of funneling hundreds of people through a dozen heavy exit doors, some of which generally aren't open, and then through another pinch point, two heavy doors to the underground parking and the passage to the subway station. Then there are several more heavy sets of doors (in the PATH system) and then you line up at the TTC wicket because many of the concert goers use senior TTC tickets. And then you ride to St. George where it's standing room only on the train home to Etobicoke even though it's 10.30 at night.
Now all this could be a lot simpler if only the symphony and hall directors did more than just check the program to make sure their name is still there. And it would also help if Mayor David Miller and his henchmen like Howard Moscoe spent more time ensuring the present transit system worked better and less time blaming other governments for their funding problems.
There are problems due to the shape of Roy Thomson Hall. But getting in and out, and using the underground passages to get there, is made difficult by the heaviest doors in a public facility. Why don't they sell them to a prison and buy lighter ones? It would also be nice if the escalator wasn't under repair so often and that the elevator the disabled have to use wasn't the slowest one in the world. (I challenge the bureaucrats to find me a slower elevator and offer a one-way ticket there to test it.
If the TTC knows that a downtown performance is going to end around a specific time, why can't they open a second ticket window at the nearest station for an hour? Surely that isn't rocket science.
But oh no, when it comes to improving the circulation of Thomson Hall, the underground lanes and the TTC, we get performances from our politicians and officials that make me wish we still had that character around from The Mikado. You know, the Lord High Commissioner.

THE RIGHTS OF PASSAGE

Police Serve Us Not Demonstrators

So demonstrators charged up the ramp and closed one of the busiest highways on the continent. Natives plan to block an international bridge, just the latest in harassment in favour of their latest dubious cause.

And the police sleepwalk their way to peaceful arrangements because they care more about the feelings of demonstrators than the screwed public. After all, that's easier. And then there are all those forms to fill out if they actually arrested a few dozen and didn't just let them go after a lecture.

What we need is a new clause in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms - the foundation of our legal system - that gives ordinary Joes and Janes the right to passage without even a second of interference from the latest yahoos who want to scream in our faces from their side of the barricades.
Everyone knows the basic rights and freedoms of the Charter. Included is the right to assembly and freedom of association. The mouthy jerks who brandish those rights in our face would like us to forget that the Charter says the right is to "peaceful assembly."
That doesn't include closing the main ceremonial avenue in downtown Toronto for days because Canadians of Tamil heritage don't like what's happening in the country that they left because they like Canada more. Is this really the way to thank us for our hospitality?
The police arranged on University Ave. a deal to let emergency vehicles through the screaming demonstrators because of all the hospitals north of where they were storming the U.S. Consulate. When I complained about all this to a senior Toronto cop at a reception, he was surprised at my angry comments because our police are now so used to going along with demonstrators and picketers and people just wanting to vent their spleen about something that they forget that most of the people that they are sworn to serve and protect just want to drive and walk on public property without being blocked.
A very senior OPP cop argued with me a year ago that Commisioner Julian Fantino had to moderate his tone in talking about native demonstrators because it didn't help in ending seige situations. Hell, I said, just throw them all in jail, and have the army as back-up if you want.
Ironically, the Charter does get into mobility rights, but that allows Canadians the right to move to other provinces or countries. When the politicians and bureaucrats were drafting its language, they obviously never thought it was necessary to include language saying we had the right to drive down a highway without being blocked by native bonfires.
Strikers have been getting away with malicious nonsense for years even though the Canadian courts have ruled that picketers have no right to stop anyone for even a second if they want to cross a picket line. Union thugs argue that they have the right "for the purpose of communication." Nope, a senior judge threw out that argument. Yet police routinely make deals at strikes that picketers can stop people for 15 minutes or even 30 minutes. And they defend that as the best way to keep the peace.
Even the so-called "civil" servants know what to do with those deals. At Queen's Park they kept even pregnant women standing for 45 minutes without the cops doing a damn thing.
A disgrace for the cops as well as the civil servants. If they can't get their way with arguments, they try to do it by intimidation.
The irony is that Ontario's shrinking union movement and ethnic protesters don't realize as they bask in the media attention that all this publicity is just hurting their alleged causes. The 24-hour news cycle likes to fill with pictures and stories of the latest demonstrations but it doesn't mean the media think it is that important or that there is general acceptance of the noise.
Sit-ins in corporate headquarters and university presidential offices used to be the way to go. Saul Alinsky, one veteran organizer in the U.S., mourned just before he died that he knew the days of sit-ins were over when one university president showed off his new official digs which included two lobbies, special washrooms complete with change tables, and escape staircases. Alinsky was famous for such stunts as having people line up at every teller's window with transactions of only $1, bringing banks to a standstill, and then there was his protest at O'Hare airport where he threatened to have blacks stand before every urinal and sit on every toilet for entire days. The airport administration settled, and it should have, because integration of that giant airport went to the core of the rights of workers of every colour.
If only the demonstrations here had such lofty goals. The U.S. Consulate in Toronto is the favourite site to let off steam, often on issues that have little to do with the States and nothing to do with Canada, and the building and its surroundings have been hardened so that protesters haven't a hope in making a dent. But then all they want is to make the news, for someone to pay attention, which often backfires.
It's time for all levels of government and policing to end this nonsense. Each year it gets worse, and the protesters and the cops may have got used to it but the public hasn't. Nor should we! When you block me, you make me mad. Because you have no right to do so. It's certainly not the best way to win friends and influence people.

THE ONTARIO SAFETY LEAGUE CHAMPS

We've just had the annual meeting of the Ontario Safety League and things were booming. The room was crowded in the new facilities, Transport Minister Jim Bradley praised us, OPP Commissioner Julian Fantino dropped in to press some flesh, and we were awash with smiles.
I thought back only a few years ago when four of us huddled in the winter gloom and wondered just how we were going to keep the doors open. And now the OSL is back from the wake. Most days there's some incident that calls on the expertise of the OSL. And now the United Nations has asked it to advise internationally.It's all due to the leadership of Brian Patterson, now familiar to everyone through his media pronouncements, and Steve Pengelly, who was head of the premier's office and is now running the Ontario Bar Association.
And of course John Legge as the faithful lawyer. The Legge family have been central to safety advocacy in Canada, with Bruce Legge, famous in military circles, and Laura Legge, first female head of the Law Society of Upper Canada, giving decades of service and lots of blunt advice.
The OSL has always been blessed with directors of wide-ranging experience, from deputy Toronto fire chief to hospital chaplain to Insurance Bureau of Canada head to newspaper editor.But it really had sunk to evil prospects, until a stout handful led by Patterson and Pengelly soldiered away. And so a venerable association that had been around for 90 years was saved for the vital work of reminding, goading and showing all Ontarians how to live longer without maiming themselves, whether in vehicles, homes or boats.
I've had a ringside seat as a director, which some times was a bit onerous because my instincts as a newspaper man encouraged me to rush to the keyboard with an exclusive story. But I held off because solving the problems, for example ending the under-the-counter sale of drivers' licences and air brake shenanigans, was more important than a one-day news wonder. The OSL has done some quiet but tough advocacy to the provincial government on such vital matters as driving school competency and the real threat that it would be easier for a terrorist to steal a 18-wheel tanker and crash it under a skyscraper than to steal an airliner and cause another awful Sept. 11.For a comparative outsider, I did play a safety role with two Canadian institutions, Elmer the Safety Elephant and the RIDE program. Both began with the Metro Citizens Safety Council. I helped bury that organization when the big Metro council withdrew its funding, a stupid thing to do when our members included a judge and police commission chairman and Ontario's chief coroner. Our accomplishments were considerable despite the low budget.
In 1957, the promotion genius of the Toronto Telegram, Bas Mason, brought a Walt Disney artist to Toronto for a weekend and he drew the first Elmer the Safety Elephant. The Tely found its Elmer program to be so wildly successful that it couldn't afford to keep running it, since so many schools wanted the Elmer flag to fly if they had a perfect accident record or to have an Elmer show up to lecture the kids about his rules.
So the citizens safety council took it over, and later its ownership passed to the OSL with other council programs. But Elmer has proven such an icon that various outfits, from other safety groups and even insurance companies wanted to use Elmer for commercial purposes.
I was enlisted by the OSL in the fight to keep Elmer pure because I brought unique history credentials as a former Tely editor who had also been a safety council member. And the OSL won.
The old safety council also produced a world first with the RIDE program. Few know that its original name came from Reduce Impaired Driving in Etobicoke. Two dedicated Toronto cops came to the council with the idea of trying this RIDE program as an experiment in the western suburb with just two cruisers. In order to demonstrate public support for the radical idea of stopping a car for no other reason than to ask if the driver had been drinking, the police wanted the council to buy two roof signs for, I think, $280. (Not much money, you might think, but this was the 1960s.)
I worried about the police using the stop as an excuse to fish through the vehicles. The police promised that wouldn't happen. So I moved the motion for the council to pay for the roof signs.
It proved so popular, and the expected public resistance never did flame into furious rebellion, so the project was expanded to all of Toronto. And we thought and thought and the E in "Etobicoke" became the E for "Everywhere," so we could still use the original signs, name and publicity.
But all this is in the distant past. Along with the controversy over other safety measures. Bradley has served as an MPP for 32 years, which ties him with Bob Runciman as dean of the Legislature, and he recalled in his speech the other night when many people opposed mandatory seat belts (including one of the transport ministers.) Now it is such a given that Bradley told of hopping into a van back in his St. Catharines constituency and the two kids told their mother who was driving that she shouldn't move because "that man" isn't wearing his seat belt.
The kids' safety seats also began with considerable controversy. I won a couple of safety awards for championing the idea in my column when many complained about even needing one to bring the new baby home from the hospital.
Now there is a new OSL board chair, Brian Lawrie, who also has left his mark on Toronto history as founder of POINTTs where you can hire a civilian advocate to represent you on traffic charges. This was also controversial when Lawrie began. If he hadn't been a veteran cop, he never would have won.
Lawrie had been on the Toronto force but he began in London, England, walking a beat in that famous uniform. He's a cop to the core, and recalls his first day when he was strolling the street trying to get it just right, like the veterans. There was a crowd clustered on the sidewalk and he pushed through officiously, not trying to let it show he was a rookie. There was a woman passed out, with another leaning solicitously over her. She told Lawrie she thought it was a heat stroke. So he leaned over to inspect and that big Bobby helmet fell off and smacked the woman right in the face. He was mortified. Then he saw to his horror a big purple bruise forming. As he leaned over again, his helmet slipped again and he grabbed it at the last moment. And the voice of an old gent drifted out of the crowd, suggestingd Lawrie had better watch it before he killed the woman.
Ah yes, Lawrie has a lifetime of experience in saving people from themselves, And so the OSL has another good leader. It needs them as it takes on this advisory role for UNESCO and to help keep the record intact of Ontario having the safest roads in all of North America.
That's something to boast about, and it's all due to the provincial transportation ministry and the advisory OSL stewardship.
There's more to be done, of course, but not everyone on the OSL agrees with my ideas. I would like to see the speed limit on the super 400 series of highways set at 120 instead of the 100 that just encourages scofflawism. And I think we must be tougher on tractor trailers.
It will be interesting in a couple of decades (I doubt I'll be around) to see what safety innovations of the next few years will last as long as Elmer, RIDE and mandatory seat belts have. Just think of all our neighbours who are still around because of them.

EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN

The More Things Change The More They Stay The Same

I'm still singing that song about "everything old is new again." What's sticking in my throat is all this nonsense about the apparent invention of frugal living. Please! When you throw in this wonderful new concept (I'm being sarcastic) of recycling and conservation, I become nauseous.
After all, there are many of us who have never overdosed on credit cards, who know that being careful with resources wasn't just invented by mouthy activists and media mouths who never bothered to find out what happened before they were hatched.
I know that for readers past the Biblical promise of three score years and ten, and for many in their sixties, this is just a return to basics, the way many of us lived when we were kids and our parents had only modest means. Even those in their thirties and forties may understand what I'm talking about because the explosion in wasteful living is only a couple of decades old.
In the 1940s, I was a kid living in a little house in Chesley, which is southwest of Owen Sound. And we lived out of necessity the way the greenies do today out of flamboyant conviction.
There was an outhouse in the woodshed, papered with big posters of the generators at Niagara Falls. A "honey" wagon was a common sight emptying the outhouses.
Oh yes, there was a compost heap in the back yard, and many scraps we also fed to the Leghorns which we ate after they got too old for laying. We even fed the chickens any preserves that had gone bad, causing them to stagger around drunkenly. My Baptist grandfather didn't appear to notice even though he once worked in a distillery.
We grew most of our vegetables and fruit on the empty second lot beside the house, which was common in towns around 1950. There was still lots of space around the houses and garages often were converted stables.
The house was heated by running the hot water pipes through the fire box of the wood stove, which was also the only heat for the house. The stove was one of those smart old ones with a warming shelf up top and a reservoir to heat water on one side. Plenty of hot water on those days when the bread was baked, since many people didn't buy store bread.
There was a pump in the kitchen for the cistern which was under the kitchen floor, fed from the eaves troughs.Now this old-fashioned house featured many of the green gimmicks which are now touted half-a-century later as the latest thing. And I'm not just talking about growing your own vegetables.

I have a Envirolet composting toilet at my cottage, and indeed there's still an outhouse tucked behind evergreens for winter use when I've drained the water pump.
I would just love to have a big old wood stove at the cottage, fed from all the limbs that fall in the winter, but they now cost a fortune. Saving rain in barrels is now so fashionable they have fancy varieties which conceal the function behind bric-a-brac.
And so it goes. Yet we are told breathlessly about how the latest fad is to live frugally and greenly.
Let me give you a few more examples of how green most of us really were 50 or 60 years ago, starting with the fact there was no need for blue boxes and grey boxes etc. because every bottle was saved for jams, preserves and nails. And boys like me trundled our wagons around Chesley collecting newspapers which we then sold to the furniture factories for packing.
No one threw away newspapers because paper was needed to start stoves, furnaces, bonfires and trash fires. (Of course that's a socialist no no today since the lefties/gliberals won't even allow clean incinerators producing watts from waste.)
When you bought groceries, every store in Chesley subscribed to the Vandervort delivery truck and your groceries were delivered a few hours later. No one walked the streets carrying groceries. The local dairy also had refrigerated lockers where you could store your meats etc. so you didn't have to have a home freezer. (And it sold buttermilk for a nickel a pail.)
The big furniture factory also owned the sawmill so a team pulling a wagon filled with sawdust plodded by my house every hour ferrying the sawdust to the factory furnace.
Now the good old days often weren't. Half-a-century ago, a major illness could bankrupt a family because Medicare and welfare hadn't yet transformed the lives of Canadians. But all of us lived carefully. Any string on parcels was rolled into a big ball for reuse. If the Post Office missed cancelling a stamp, we soaked them off and glued them to our new mail, which still drives the posties nuts as they rant about it being illegal.
So we no longer have the luxury of as much space around our homes and cottages. And new windows save us more heat than the big old wooden ones. Same with modern insulation. But when I read Time talking about a young chap whose idea of hardship is that he can no longer buy $200 ties, when I read newspaper stories about teenagers now being careful about their cell phone costs, when I see the expanses of useless space in the modern show homes, I wonder what kind of fiscal insanity infected North America before the recession/depression forced more sanity on people who never ever have had to save, who knew that life was only going to get fatter tomorrow, who have just learned they should have been living within their means.
Giving mortgages to sucker who had no down payment, allowing people to max out six credit cards, advertising even after the depression/recession hit that you could get a loan without one credit check, all these are just a few examples of the good times madness that struck every street which are now lined with leased cars that people can't afford.
Chesley was hardly a dream town, but most of the people there 50 years ago would have observed what passes for ordinary living today with amazement. What about saving for a rainy day? What about never buying on time, with exceptions for the house? What about saving 10% of everything you earn, which everyone from the wealthy barber to Dickens said was the key to happiness and prosperity? What about buying a used car (avoiding that crap about pre-owned) until you could really afford a new one? What about using the old stereos and TVs even when fancy new varieties tempt you?
History is filled with crashes of markets and dreams. Only fools would think that it would never happen again. Many thinkers have reminded us that those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.
And yet many around us did choose to ignore history. They kidded us about not living as well as them because, after all, we can't take our money to heaven/hell. They forgot that everything old should become new again, especially when it comes to living without the worry about how to pay for tomorrow.

GREEN HYPOCRITES WASTE TAXES

Everything Old Is New Again

The politicians who don green capes to conceal their nakedness when it comes to thrift with taxes and good new ideas are the curse of our lives.
They hold special Earth Days and hire PR flacks to put out costly brochures about how great they are when it comes to the environment. Mother Earth has survived many things, and she will survive anything that these envirocrats dream up, but it does become tedious and costly.
The green hypocrites are led in Toronto by Mayor David Miller who presides over a city that throws away money to make it look good while failing completely on such basics as actually providing the basics of city services.

As just one example, the potholes and shoulder ruins of Toronto streets are the worst I have seen in my entire life. When you return after seven weeks driving on smooth roads, the disrepair of our streets is a poke in the eye.

It just intensified the rage against the city's new car tax which will collect almost $50 million this year.
While Miller struts around the city and indeed the world as chair of an international clutch of municipal leaders said to be green too, Toronto's infrastructure rusts out or sinks.
The international clutch even have a new home in London, and Toronto taxpayers are paying $140,000 towards that headquarters so Miller can visit his English roots.
On the last civic Earth Day and its barrage of feel-good bureaucratese, Miller unveiled $21 million worth of measures to make City Hall a showplace for the environment and not just for conspicuous waste. Of course, city councillors follow in the footsteps of politicians everywhere and keep announcing the same programs over and over until they become shopworn before they are even opened.
When you consider all the pronouncements with healthy skepticism, some of them unravel into mere maintenance. In other words, if you're going to spend $6.8 million to fix the place up, mainly on new windows, you call them "energy efficiency improvements" and hope people don't wonder why you're spending so bloody much on windows.
But then you say you're going to spend $2.3 million on a green roof at City Hall. Wow, just imagine, a green roof, just like they've been installing at Exhibition Place. I guess settlers all over the world, from the steppes to the prairies, didn't realize a hundred years ago just how modern they were with the sod roofs on their hovels, sheds and their barns. If they had known, they wouldn't have done their damndest to get away from green roofs because they aren't as easy as plain old-fashioned roofs to maintain. And with the price of sod these days, ordinary shingles look like a bargain.
Exhibition Place has been the showplace, or so they say, for the city's research and development of expensive green technology. The Toronto Sun headlined one of the schemes "wasting taxes while looking good," a headline that could be used almost every time the socialist/gliberal majority of council gets a so-called bright idea.
I've already written a blog on July 26, 2008, of how city politicians and senior bureaucrats are spending $935,000 to collect rainwater on the roof of a renovated Automotive Building even though one of the largest lakes in the world is just across the road. Hardly something to boast about since there won't be enough rain in the summer to flush the toilets and this radical "new" idea of collecting rain in cisterns is really thousands of years old.
Maybe Miller and Deputy Mayor Joe Pantalone need to visit more ruins, and I'm not just talking about city buildings that they have let fall into disrepair.
(The wonder is that Pantalone is still chair of the Exhibition Place Board of Governors. I know something about that board since I was once the vice-chair. Pantalone and the city have just lost the Sportsmen's Show to the provincially-run Convention Centre, meaning Queen's Park and not the city will now get at least $800,000 in annual profits. All because city council passed a bylaw against guns being displayed and sold on city property, which meant the show couldn't continue at the Ex. Pantalone tried to amend the bylaw so it covered only handguns, which is, after all, the concern, but council balked. And so we have council screwing the Ex again.)
But back to the Millerites costing us a fortune so they can look good. They're going to spend half-a-million on clean electricity from an outfit called Bullfrog Power. (I guess BS Power was taken as a name.) A good idea except they will be paying almost double the normal rates. Surely that's too high a price to pay to help the environment. But I guess the {blue) sky's the limit when it comes to spending our taxes on their environmental salvation.
The city still talks about the $1.8 million wind turbine at the Ex. It was supposed to be a brave demonstration project almost a decade ago but I voted against because turbines were already common throughout the world so why put an expensive version in a downtown park. Besides, turbines are just windmills and they've been around since the caveman. I feel vindictated every time I drive by and see that it isn't working....again.
The city has been talking about utilizing the deep lake water cooling system for almost a decade. A good idea. Now they're going to spend $2.9 million cooling old City Hall. I spent two years working there and it is already a remarkably cool building in the summer. Those thick walls! Why spend this now when the city has been leaving beyond our means for years? And they're also going to spend another $2.9 million cooling Metro Hall. That building was the headquarters for the vanished regional government and the city would have sold it years ago if it could have got a good price. Hardly a smart investment.
Oh yes, they're saving trees and paying a good buck on salaries for environmental activists. The new special environmental office has a staff of 25 to promote old measures, some of them hundreds of years old. Among their main hot but green ideas will be to encourage more of us to put grass on our roofs. Of course, you won't be able to spray your roofs for weeds and after a few dandelions and other stout-rooted weeds grow through into the attics, you will join the many of us who would just like the bloody council majority to just run the city, damn it, and stop it from falling apart.

IRRITATING CONVENIENCE FOR BOORS

One Of Society's Biggest Wrong Numbers

The crowd had been swept from the giant beach by the winds. I plodded along towards the only other person. When I passed, he was shouting instructions about his business to some poor sap.
Nope, you can't get away from the cell phone. No matter how remote and solitary you may be, and no matter how much you yearn for peace from the world, there is always some yahoo bellowing into a phone.
The cell phoniacs are often so rude, they really don't seem to understand when you accuse them of rudeness.Once upon a time, a cell phone would have been the answer to my prayers. As a reporter and later an editor, I was always stuck in some nook of the world frantically trying to contact the office.So you would think that I would regard the cell phone as a wonderful evolution in communications technology.
I do.
But the silly plague that has kids reporting every step they take to school, that allows the chap at the Florida pool to conduct six hours of business while you are trying to toast and tan, that has the jerk in the car just ahead of you wandering in and out of his lane while driving spasmodically, and all of the other nonsense that people pull with their cell phones, has me wishing they were hung and quartered while some supreme being yelled in their ear.
Mary and I sat in a restaurant near I-75 on a trip to Florida while the woman in the next booth, who has a business pumping out or repairing septic tanks, conducted a 30-minute interview on her cell with a customer who wondered why his tank had backed up into his house. She described in graphic detail exactly what would be the problem. When the waitress asked us what flavour of ice cream we wanted, I said anything, as long as it isn't chocolate.
It is amazing, however, just how cell phones have revolutionized journalism.
At Ryerson journalism school back in cave-man days, Ted Schrader taught us that the first thing you did when you got to a story is figure out how to get the story back to the office. Rye grads still talk about his iconic lecture on getting the story back from the Red Lake fire. He had marvelous stories, like the one about bribing a bulldozer operator to park across a mountain road so the opposition couldn't get to a phone and file his story.
The "scoops" often went to the first reporter who could figure out how to get the news back to the presses.
Of course there was also a problem with telexes, telegraphs and LD phones when you wandered the world. It blighted some of my stays in the world's beauty spots. Like the hotel converted from a monastery. How wonderful to have spent the night in a thousand-year-old monk's cell. If only. I ended up being in the room for only 20 minutes because I couldn't get a telex line to North America.
Now you can direct dial from Beijing, or send e-mails from Cape Town, or talk from the peak of Mount Everest, without having to crawl around the floor disconnecting telephones to make your old computer work, complete with its now-ancient acoustic couplers (don't ask).
How great it is in the remotest spots on earth to aim your computer's dish at some satellite and, presto, the editor has the story. Except now the office can get hold of you any time they want, meaning there is no down time. In the bad old days, at least you had peace in between the calls once a day to the boss.
There is no need to talk at length about the plague of cell phones that causes children of all ages feeling they have to talk to their friends every 15 minutes.
And there is no need to remind at length how some people have never mastered the technology and feel they have to talk in a loud voice, or even bellow.
The curse of the driver on the phone also is apparent, damn it, on every road. Even the phones that you don't have to hold can distract a driver right into an accident. Unfortunately, enforcement is spotty. The Ontario Safety League, a venerable non-profit lobby for safety (I have long been a director) was pressuring the Ontario government to crack down on cell phone use by drivers in moving vehicles, only to have the government lurch into action without bothering to spend the necessary time on drafting how the new law would actually work.
Perhaps the abuses will be reduced when the public stop using cell phones as the latest toy instead of a useful tool. Perhaps more people will join the club of which I'm a charter member. We carry cell phones but only use them to make brief calls. Unless we are expecting a call at a certain pre-arranged time, our phones are turned off. Life is simpler that way.
We get all the advantages without being bothered all the time. Now if I can only turn off the sun bather beside me at the pool, or the guy yelling into his phone on an empty beach. The golf clubs that ban cell phones have the right idea. Now if it would only spread to theatres.
On my latest trip, I lost my cell phone in the luggage (Mary takes a lot of stuff) and didn't find it for two weeks. I was kind of hoping it had been stolen.