CTV said the MS problem was solved about a year ago,

It seems the solution is not perfect, CTV’s eating crow.

________________________________________

It seems Mr. Obama is no longer the golden boy,

Midterm votes for Congress didn’t bring him joy.

____________________________________

The revelation is that people who are going to die have to take classes at the YBOTHR School.  Your first lesson there is that there is no point in surviving the communications age: ‘Why bother?’ you ask yourself.  This explains why mother did not like the Beatles and why Granny did not want to own a radio.  Continued advances in technology continue to create this YBOTHR School as people give up.  Mind you, I love this age of communications and will therefore live forever.

Mind you, playing golf on Wii with an eleven-year old grandson the other day was also a revelation.  That little character was beating me!  It was not my drives that did me in, they were straight and far.  My approach shots were right on and I would reach the green, ready for my birdie.  What did me in was that on a television set I could not read the speed of the greens.  On one hole, I tapped my ball off the green, across the apron and into a sand trap.  I have to get that little guy onto a real course where he could learn some respect for Grandpa.

But where you do appreciate their supercilious technological superiority is in dealing with today’s television equipment.  A flat screen high-definition system with video recorder and high definition digital video discs requires electronic engineering expertise not readily available among us seniors.  And a 12-year old is not always available to manage all the buttons for you.  Some of us older folks seem to prefer to fall asleep in front of the TV rather than admit we could not get to what we really wanted to watch.

Thankfully, the telephone company changes the clock on our computers and keeps them set to the right time.  The same is true for the cable company and the video box.  At your age you hardly care if the clock radio is not all that accurate but it is the time on the microwave that can make a senior cry.  It is only twice a year—with daylight saving—that the clock needs adjustment and occasionally the power goes off.  The problem is not with the simple method of setting the time.  It is with remembering the simple damn method of setting the time.

And as for the blankety-blank computerized car information system in late model automobiles, not even a 12-year old can fix that.  The auto companies have it rigged to get you into their avaricious dealerships so that they can squeeze more money from you.  For the last 3000 kilometres, since I last changed the oil, the stupid system tells me unctuously that I need to change the oil soon!  Then I fixed that by putting on my snow tires and now it tells me my tires are flat before adding that I need an oil change.  If I was philosophical about it, I would think of it like a stopped clock.  Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

So you can understand why so many seniors give up and go to the YBOTHR School.  Life in the communications age is a challenge.  It is also great fun!

– 30 –

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

Solving Mr. McGinty’s problems wasn’t an idle boast,

He’ll listen to the politically savvy or he will be toast.

____________________________________

Premier McGinty really does not have a problem,

His concerns about re-election, we’ll  solve them.

____________________________________

It is like admitting your age.  Should you admit to having been involved in more than 80 election campaigns?

You might as well.  The explanation is that in Toronto, where the ridings are so close together, the political activist is rarely involved in just one campaign in a general election.  There was a time as campaign manager in the second largest riding in Canada when a good deal of time was also devoted to helping the novice campaign manager in the adjacent riding—the largest riding in Canada (we won both).

With special expertise in preparing literature for political candidates there were quite a few general elections over the years where the task was to write and design literature for as many as a dozen candidates.  The key to doing the job was in already knowing the candidates and having an easy working relationship with the various campaign managers.  There was also the advantage at the time of being head of communications for the Ontario Liberal Party.

In municipal elections, the layering of candidates at various levels made it very easy to work with a number of candidates in a municipality.  In several municipal campaigns, there was also some fun work as far away as the London area of Ontario.  Awkward media problems were a specialty.  In St. Thomas, an advertising solution for a mayoral candidate coincidently won a national newspaper award.

Every federal and provincial campaign included an opportunity for the ethnic media to meet and interview the party leader.  Feting these people made good sense and they always responded well to the invitations.  The sad thing was that after the election, it was a person from one ethnic group or other that was appointed to look after the needs of this media group.  It never occurred to the party, when in power, to have a sixth generation Canadian—who respected them all—looking after the ethnic media contact needs.

Leaders’ tours through federal and provincial elections were a very demanding part of the campaigns and the local organizational needs were never left entirely to the host riding.  Having a local organizer who knew the people, the streets and the venue was always considered essential as long as it was someone the leader’s people knew and trusted.  As a local function organizer for Prime Minister Trudeau in Toronto throughout most of his years in office, this election time role was particularly demanding.

One of the most appreciated roles for local party organizers was the training provided to riding workers to teach them about the why’s, wherefore’s, useful tips and the fun of canvassing for political candidates.  Whether it was 10 or 40 people at a time in the local candidate’s headquarters, these were always fun sessions.  At one time, federal party campaign chief Senator Keith Davey and I worked up a joint program for out of town that we briefly took on the road.  We did the show for audiences of many hundreds at a time in school auditoriums.

But the point of this is to explain that at my young age(!) I have probably been involved in many political campaigns over the years.  There were times the involvement was in depth and there were many times I was just as a visiting specialist.  I always enjoyed it.

– 30 –

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

The Babel Manifesto is Canada’s future mapper.

Makes great reading when you’re on the crapper.

Send $5.00 for a copy, in a plain brown wrapper.

___________________________________

PM Harper has gone to Seoul to teach the G20 economics,

Cheaper if he stays put and lets them learn it in the comics.

__________________________________________

It seems we are waiting until March for an election,

I don’t think five months will change our intention.

____________________________________

There are new types of polls.  Imagine the surprise when you answer the telephone and a recorded voice asks you to indicate the candidate for whom you are going to vote.  Your first inclination is to hang up.  Your second is to see where the questioning goes.  There are more options for you than just the person you might already support.

If you know anything about polling techniques, you understand that this type of poll in a municipal campaign would have an extremely high error rate.  The first problem is that in the previous election only three out of ten people who were eligible to vote did so.  Now you have added people under the legal voting age and other non voters to your sample.  It makes you wonder: why bother?

The answer is: mainly because it’s cheap.  The autodial and recording software are inexpensive and the system can complete a couple thousand calls very quickly.  And the results are immediate.  There is no long drawn out analysis of these results: what you see is what you get.  At least four groups were using this technique citywide in the recent election in Babel.  Three of the groups were each supporting their candidate for mayor.

What was surprising was hearing a rumour that a group of business people in the development industry also paid for one or more of these polls.  They were supposedly making sure that they were investing their funds properly.  This became somewhat futile when they found the leading candidate was refusing their funds.

The best indication of where you stood in these different polls was the level of personal attack on specific candidates.  Mind you, you do not get that nice warm feeling when your candidate is being viciously slandered on behalf of opponents.

But you are inclined to keep it quiet when you realize you are no longer number two but the leader of the pack.  First of all, you hardly want your supporters to slack off their effort as you have no idea how strong your lead might really be.  There are other indicators: sign destruction is one of the first.  It happens as opponents’ helpers recognize the futility of their campaign.  There are also those donations that you would really have liked to see early in the campaign that start arriving.  There are also the late sign requests and the arrival of more volunteers.  Everyone loves a winner.

But you do miss the older, more reliable polling techniques.  Telephone coincidental polls with highly trained, live interviewers can tell you a great deal if the questions are couched properly, the answers carefully analysed and the results balanced to the right demographics.  At one time, we could consistently forecast federal and provincial elections so precisely that nobody would take our election bets.

Nobody would take our bets in this election.  While it was fun to win a side bet on the ‘others’ in the Babel campaign, we would have lost if we had bet on the number of votes for our candidate.  He won with a thousand more votes than anticipated.

– 30 –

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