Category: New

Dr. Goebbels gave lessons on how to twist words,

Misstate what I write and you will eat your words.

____________________________________

Saw the Chinese warriors in terracotta,

Since advice we got was that we gotta,

This dioramic, it needs more terracotta

And less of Chinese social propaganda.

__________________________

Stopping mixed martial arts is paternalistic,

To forbid Internet gambling is paternalistic,

To say okay to them is liberal and realistic.

_____________________________

If we are contradictory from day to day,

It probably depends on our mood today.

_____________________________

Babel had Caribfest this past weekend. Caribfest is supposed to be the same as Caribana in Toronto. It is not. I am not at all sure that what I witnessed this weekend should take place in Babel.

Caribana is a joyous festival in which all Torontonians can participate. When living in Toronto, we found we could enjoy the food, the culture and the music of the islands of the Caribbean throughout the year and especially at Caribana. And what Canadian does not appreciate those beautiful islands that can offer much needed respite from the brutality of our winters?

But Babel lacks the cultural and racial mix of Toronto. Old Babel is old Ontario and is mainly European in origin. The visual minorities are just that: minorities. Somebody asked the other day, since we were having Caribfest, if Babel has a large population from the Caribbean? The answer was: no, we have to import them.

And that might be the problem. From our front row seats above Centennial Park, we settled in on Saturday to watch the parade that started in the downtown. The music was raucous, the crowds enthusiastic and colourful and the parking along the Lakeshore was unimaginably more chaotic than it had been for Kempenfest two weeks earlier. It took a while to realize what was wrong.

The first clue was the very noisy announcers below us who were working their sound system from the back of a van. While it was hard to understand through the announcers’ accents and the way the sound was bouncing, we finally realized that they were broadcasting for Toronto’s new black radio station.

The area around that van was probably not planned by that radio station. It was one very large and noisy tailgate party. It was a party with none of the facilities needed to accommodate the thousands of people involved. Instead of parking and then going across to the very attractive park area with all its facilities on the east side of Lakeshore, this part of the party was mainly on the road and among the helter-skelter of parked cars on the west side of the road.

The organizers and the city had failed to work out the logistics. And, while economists say that the anticipated earnings for the local community for events can be worked out at so much per attendee, nobody was making any money in this situation. These partygoers brought their own music, their own food, their own liquor and their own entertainment. They failed to bring their own toilets, garbage receptacles and good manners.

Quite frankly, these visitors to our beautiful city acted as though they had never been housebroken. It was as though their parents had never taught them that, when invited to a party, you do not defecate on the hosts’ front lawn. You should not throw liquor bottles and trash around with abandon. Gentlemen should not go into the bushes, below where people live, to wag their weenie. They might consider it discrete for the people around them but from above they do not appear very shy about the process.

There is no point in shouting down to them. Despite the dazzling performances of the bands and dancers out on the road being much appreciated, the performance of the revellers in the parking lot did not win universal approval.

From where we were, we saw only a few thousand of the people attending the event. Most were having fun and if there was some littering out on the road, the city had it swept up in short order. It was only a few people who disrespected us as residents and forced us inside to control our anger at their bad manners. Regrettably, the city and the organizers need to seriously rethink their attempt at bringing Caribana to Babel.

– 30 –

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to [email protected]

The McGinty gang want to allow mixed martial arts,

Rowdies used to get arrested for that in these parts.

_____________________________________

It’s Caribfest weekend in Babel, there’s nothing Babel lacks!

It’s a joyous Caribbean festival, that honours Babel’s blacks.

____________________________________________

Snake an’ the Corporal will be studying Pythagoras,

Finding the square of a hippopotamus is beyond us.

_______________________________________

Have you ever complained to Canada’s Commissioner for Complaints for Telecommunications Services (CCTS)? Canadians are expected to complain to this organization about their home telephone service, cell phone service, cable, satellite, television or radio programming, Internet service, all things that create the fabric of our modern society. If you have complained, have you ever wondered afterwards why you did? You blush to admit that you could have been so gullible. It appears that something like 99 per cent of the people who complain to this body are told that the complaint is outside the CCTS’ scope. Word of mouth says, “Don’t waste your time.”

It is embarrassing for Canadians and triply embarrassing for the Canadian Radio-Television Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) that we have let our telecommunications companies make such a mockery of customer service. Decency, fairness, consideration, empathy, respect, caring, humanity, kindness, regard, honesty, concern for our fellows are not words that are part of the modern telecom’s language. Canada’s telecoms and their customers are in an abusive relationship.

Much of the fault for this sorry state of affairs rests with the CRTC. This craven agency of an uncaring and ideologically consumed government has committed this act against the citizens they are supposed to represent and protect. They ignore the problems we face with telecoms in the guise of deregulation. That is their mantra: It seems, they claim, that unregulated companies care about their customers while that truth is today that nobody gives a damn—regulated or unregulated.

But somebody has to give a damn. The joke used to be in days gone by that the regulator (the CRTC) and the telecoms spent so much time across the table from each other that they began to think alike. They are so much of a like mind that they finish each others’ jokes. Never was this more evident than in the hearings last fall on having cable and satellite companies paying broadcasters for local signals.

The first half of the hearings was the heavy-weight event. It was broadcasters versus cable and satellite companies. Everyone was on their game. The broadcasters were wily and smirking—buddy-buddy with their pals, the commissioners. The cable and satellite people were wary and erudite—buddy-buddy with same commissioners.

It was obvious as the hearings progressed that the commissioners were feeling squeezed between their influential buddies and were trying to push the service delivery companies into a negotiation with the program creation companies to set a price for local signals. What was left unsaid was that the cable and satellite companies would just pass on the cost to their customers and no commissioner would care—except one commissioner, a gentleman from Quebec, who noted that basic cable and satellite costs were too high and he wanted the companies to consider what he called a “skinny basic” cost structure for cable and satellite service.

He had little trouble selling his proposition to the individual consumers who represented more than 20,000 Canadians who had asked to intercede on behalf of either the cable/satellite companies or the broadcasters and even a few who thought about the issues and brought some original thinking to the deliberations.

But the consumers were wasting their time. It was like a mask had dropped over the chairman’s and most of the commissioners’ faces when the consumers started to appear. Sitting in the commission’s tiny Toronto office, crammed between other consumer supplicants and facing a web camera, the only view on the television screen was the bored commissioners at their head office, paying attention to everything else but the speakers. The only recommendation to them, that made sense at the time, was to suggest they resign. They were hardly doing any good for Canadians.

An addendum to that is the CRTC recently looked into the complaints process at CCTS. According to Michael Geist of the Toronto Star, Bell Canada argued before the CRTC that CCTS is not needed. The point Bell was trying to make was that competition encourages better customer service. Geist reported that Bell believed it was in the interests of all the telecom companies to provide “high-quality customer service and complaints resolution.” One wonders when that miracle might happen.

– 30 –

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to [email protected]

The McGinty gang want to gamble on the Internet,

All things considered, I don’t think I’ll make a bet.

_____________________________________

Prime Minister Harper is feeling the heat. You can almost see him mumbling to himself about his cabinet ministers and caucus as he rambles around 24 Sussex Drive in Ottawa. It is not as though he runs with the smartest people. Run with idiots, you can get fleas! After all, what can you expect from ideologues?

It is not that believing in an ideology, in itself, is necessarily a bad thing. It is those who put their ideology ahead of common sense and common decency that worry the rest of us. Take Stockwell Day for example. Mr. Day is a religious zealot and considered a quite devoted member of the right wing of Canadian politics. He is the only guy to ever actually implement a flat tax rate as Treasurer of a Canadian province. Of course, it was in Alberta. It was hardly likely that he would get away with it in any other province.

Many of Harper’s caucus are flat-tax advocates and we have been saved from any discussion of such a tax as long as the Harper Conservatives are a minority government. Day, who failed to graduate even from North West Bible College, is not one of the smarter members of Harper’s cabinet. He once told reporters that the Niagara River flows south and when they tried to correct him, he said he would have it looked into.

Stockwell Day is the one who Harper put in as leader of the temporary Canadian Alliance back in 2000. When he showed up for his first media scrum in a wet suit on a Seadoo, we knew that he was not heading for fame. He lasted less than a year in the job.

One of the brighter lights in Harper’s cabinet was Maxime Bernier, a member from Quebec who showed up at the Governor General’s to be sworn in, along with an attractive date. As he is single, there is nothing wrong with him bringing the current lady friend. It was her choice of bra and décolletage that attracted the admiration of many men and condemnation of many women. That secret did not stay just with Victoria. He later had to resign because of taking secret documents along on a sleep-over.

We could also get into the Helena Guergis affair but that has already been worked to death here in Babel. The Guergis’ are a prominent family here and whether the sundry offspring have ever been properly potty trained is not something we discuss.

North of here is Tony Clement country. Tony is the boy genius in the Harper cabinet who as Minister of Industry is responsible for Statistics Canada. He has not done well by the good folks at StatsCan. He recently decided that the census long form should be cancelled but there were so many objections to that, he said he would just make it optional. He did this so that nobody would go to jail for not filling out the long form. Since nobody has ever gone to jail for not filling out the form, the chief statistician quit in a huff and Tony has been made to look even sillier.

Mr. Harper had stayed away from Ottawa most of July in hopes that the kids would mind the store for him without getting into any trouble. He needs a new breed of conservatives for that to happen.

– 30 –

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to [email protected]