Tag: Stuff and Money Stuff

More Linky Weekend Goodness For Late Fall

Where were we? Ah, yes. The great explosion of 1840:

Another huge fire erupted on 18 April 1840, this time on Counter’s wharf and, aided by the explosion of gunpowder stored in one of the warehouses, spread across much of the waterfront area. Strong winds helped it extend to the whole of the north block of the Market Square, and to most of the next block up to Store Street (now Princess Street)

Never heard of it until a month or so ago. You would think that the destruction of much of the town would be a folk tale, collective memory. Never understood why Ontario is not interested in its own past like other parts of Canada, the English speaking world.

♦ Saturday night update: The Flea, mon cher, teaches how to KooDon’t.
♦ Best thing ever on the internet: what is brown and sticky?

♦ I had no idea that, besides interest on debt, Italy was actually in the black. Canadian Conservatives everywhere must be hailing it as solvency as they do with Mulroney’s terms.

♦ Really? Do you think? Do you think a cabinet member gets attention from “foreign lady reporters” from nations run by totalitarian regimes because they find Tories hot?

♦ I had no idea that Harper has expanded the Federal public service by 13%. No wonder they think that Mulroney got us to solvency.

♦ What is it with all these odd Tory stories? I mean if they are going to be doing all the social engineering I really hope they know how to plug in the toaster first.

♦ Finally – a break from Ottawa’s amateur hour. A great story from Humblebub.

That’s enough of that. Check out the great series at NCPR on the state of the nations on the two sides of the Great Lakes.

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Friday Bullets For Truck Week

It was “Truck Day” this week and so by extension this is Truck Week. Is February Truck Month? It’s not a bad idea. The beginning of the end of winter. You can see it in how the sun melts the road cover even if you can’t feel it in a skip in your step. A few short weeks are left. Lawns shall be mown. Pork shall be smoked. Did you realized it’s two weeks tomorrow that the first game of spring training is played? Life has meaning again.

  • We Do What We Want Update: if it weren’t so sad it would be a great Kids in the Hall script – ““It’s like we’re on CSI or an investigative forensic thing – who’s put the ‘not’ in. I’d like to know what your issue is,” she said then. “What is your issue?” Resign.
  • Deferring a political and cultural question to the Canadian Standards Association, safe keeper of hockey helmets and other consumer products is both startling innovative and wildly dumb.
  • See. Tail. Wag. Dog… See. Crisis. In. Right. Begin.
  • Make your own joke here: “Bay Street lawyers fear job losses.”
  • I really dislike suits but mainly because they look like really dull pajamas made of far too heavy a cloth.
  • Really? “This government has a hostility toward people who think for a living or people who write for a living…”?

Did you know a Bieber movie opens today? Spot man with pre-teen.

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Friday Bullets For The End Of April

And a vintage base ball weekend. Just as I am getting to the point that I am not much use on the field anymore – as much from never actually having played baseball as being creaky – others are joining up who are actually good at the game. A cricketer even. Someone having the instinct to dive towards a line drive barehanded is pretty stunning to see. Me? Cricked neck and twinged back means the ball dropped near by. That could be a haiku.

Cricked neck and twinged back
Green grass, still play, a bat swings:
The ball falls too near.

Maybe we call it “Forty-seven”.

Maybe there will be another haiku entitled “So Many Aspirin” at the end of Saturday afternoon.

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Budget Day: Time To Invest In Concrete Makers

All the town is abuzz with the budget day news. Half the street had their lights on before 5 am, faces pressed to the windows waiting for the newspapers to be delivered. It’s budget day! It’s budget day!!!

Budgets used to be so drab. In the 70s and 80s there was a guy like Marc Lalonde stoking up the deficits like there was no tomorrow. Best wikipedia notation by the way: “He was very important and helpful.” In the 90’s it was all slash and burn as Paul Martin and Big Jean did the impossible and actually turned Canada around from being a rival to Italy in relation to fiscal house mess to being the talk of the G7 water cooler: “Jean said what? Paul said what?? I don’t believe it.” That is what Germany said to Japan.

There has been much made about PM Harper acting like a drunk NDPer at this moment in time, passing out Federal Government credit cards like Santa handing out candy canes. And it is true. But there is absolutely nothing indicating that the proper thing is to do otherwise. Except if, you know, Canada is not really having a recession. So there is more coming today as The Star semi-speculates:

The tax cuts will highlight a massive economic bailout plan with tens of billions of dollars in new federal spending and tax measures, $2 billion in help for the jobless, cash for the auto industry, $7 billion for urban reconstruction and measures to free up consumer and business loans. The budget will project a deficit of $64 billion over the next two years. The government is planning a series of tax initiatives, including incentives for home renovations to revive the building trades during the recession.

See, I don’t think so much that we are having a recession yet but the US is. The equivalent of the entire work force of PEI or Kingston or more was fired yesterday in the US. Home Depot is shutting stores for heaven’s sale – you know, the place you go to do it yourself to save money. The barber in Ithaca (a well off college town) said people who are getting once a month hair cuts are moving to one every six or eight weeks. The beer store owners told me that people are moving down in their buying patterns, too. The grocery store was mobbed on Sunday night but the malls were quiet. It could be January. It could also be the first January of a recession.

So while our biggest trade partner takes a hit, if we bridge build, home renovate, retool the car factories to make engines that run on hydro electricity is that so bad? Didn’t we spend the last 15 years through administrations that ran the gambit from the moderate centre-left to the moderate centre-right paying off the debt just in case this was going to happen? The self-defined “principled” who never have to actually do anything are not amused.

Utterly tangential amen: Amen.

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Not “Seven Things” – Instead the CBC and Nortel

I just lost the seven things about me post that I was tagged with doing after a power flicker at 6:45 am which was 95% done so I am not going to recreate it as I am too bummed out about the whole thing. It was tender and evocative. Challenging yet funny. I can never recreate that this morning. I will have to think up a whole new list and get back to you.

Meanwhile, why do I have the same reaction to the news that Nortel now wants a bail out and that no one much is signing up for the CBC’s “new fun game show” about being Canada’s next Prime Minister. As far as I am aware, Nortel has been moving towards its own demise for the best part of a decade. And, I think at least as far as my listenership and watchership goes, the same applies to the CBC. As evidence, I provide you with one one hand the story “Nortel Restatement To Slash 2003 Earnings” and on the other Sounds Like Canada. Both were untouchable monoliths for most of my life whose actual machinations of operations were beyond the ken of most Canadians. As a result, I think any bail out for Nortel needs to be tied to a reorganization of the CBC’s broadcast line up. My demands include:

  • creation of a compelling continuing dramatic series about an urban WASP male,
  • broadcast of a English language continuing sitcom based on and making fun of yet making a compelling and accurate case for the views of a family Quebecois separatist family,
  • making a public apology for the failure of CBC to broadcast Montreal Expos games and an admission that this failure directly led to the Expos leaving town and the country, and
  • making another admission that the extended run of the Air Farce was due to nepotism, blackmail or something that could possibly explain what the heck that was about.

Without meeting my demands, no money for Nortel.

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The Very First Friday Bullets For The New Year

This surely is the unnamed holiday. The shadow twin of Boxing Day, the orphaned Friday stuck between that holiday with a hangover and a weekend. I will suit up and make my way to work but will there be work to meet me there? There likely will be an emptiness, desks without jockeys, voice mail alerts flashing at no one until Monday’s return to the new term, the start of the second season.

  • Actual Doctor Who News Update: the next Doctor will be announced tomorrow. Will he be a she?
  • Update: Skull Splitter saved. More here.
  • New Year’s Day was as idle as idle could be. Ever notice how idle and ideal are so closely related? Hmm? Have you? I didn’t even watch a bowl game, which surprises me a bit. But I did roast a prime rib roast better than I have ever roasted one before. Thanks heavens for the pre-Christmas beef price collapse at the A+P.
  • Congratulations to the twins.
  • The New Years blizzard in PEI received the attention of bloggers with video cams.
  • Ben is quite content with both 2008 and the prospects for 2009. I suppose I have to agree: the family expands, kids are arguably above average, the holiday tours indicated a fairly contented clan. Some will complain but they, we must recall, were asked not to stay on.
  • What is to come? I expect again I will not be wise with my taxes even if I will spend hours getting better at Wii. I expect Iggy to coat tail what is happening to the south and benefit from the increase in confidence that will exist at the end of the year with or without yet another Federal election. I grew out my beard. Will it last? Such suspense.
  • The corner has been turned in the baseball year with the season to come now the topic rather than the one that has just passed. I like the idea of Derek Lowe playing for the Mets but I have no idea where Manny is going to land.
  • Predictions? Resolutions? What could they be? Pledging to be smarter and healthier? Promising to myself that I will eat wild game and buy cut flowers once a week? Ensuring I have an ear to the new bands despite all of new music being chronologically dislocated for me for almost a decade? Play more penny whistle. That’s it!

It is quiet in the house as it should be. The road outside is silent as I trust I will find the office. The day without a name.

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Make Sure You Chew Your Food Thirty Times, Too

In what can only be seen as a decision not to decide, our nation’s Prime Minister has proudly proclaimed that he will think about the impending recession after the whole deep dark Canadian winter has passed:

Canadians will have to wait until the next federal budget before Ottawa delivers what Prime Minister Stephen Harper said could be an “unprecedented” fiscal stimulus package – a delay economists say the country can ill afford. A spokesman for the Prime Minister’s Office said yesterday the government is still trying to determine what would be appropriate and is looking at 2009 budget measures rather than action outside of that.

Whoa, there big fella! Don’t get any whiplash or anything. Make sure you get a good season in before you react to fast moving events. I suppose it is funny because the infrastructure work that would likely be at the heart of a recovery plan is screaming to be done. Highway bridges in Quebec need renewal as do municipal sewer systems as do rural broadband as do water systems on remote First Nations. We have been sitting on our hands for a few decades and, now that we are facing the need to get work going, there is actually work needing done. And be honest – market intervention is not “yikes socialism!!!” when the government just plays the role of goods and services buyer. Puts money in the pockets of people who know how to use a shovel, always a good thing for the economy.

So, unless dong nothing turns out to be the wisest form of intervention – right after dairy production goes lunar – how will Mr. Harper look after Obama goes BAM! and gets the next generation of needed US infrastructure projects moving? Is this an Iggy-tastic moment?

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Without A Bailout, Whither the Corporate Elite?

Wall Street welfare. That’s what I have heard it called – imagine the insensitivity. Just because it is centred upon ensuring those who messed up get to both control the solution and be the sole beneficiaries of the solution. How can people be so cruel. David Brooks in the NYT stokes the flames of jealousy amongst those asked to pay for their betters wrongs:

Liberals and conservatives generally dislike the plan. William Greider of The Nation writes: “If Wall Street gets away with this, it will represent an historic swindle of the American public — all sugar for the villains, lasting pain and damage for the victims.” He approvingly quotes the conservative economist Christopher Whalen of Institutional Risk Analytics: “The joyous reception from Congressional Democrats to Paulson’s latest massive bailout proposal smells an awful lot like yet another corporatist love fest between Washington’s one-party government and the Sell Side investment banks.”

How rude.

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Friday Bullets For The Week Your Life Changed Forever!

OK, it didn’t change. It’s pretty much the same as last week – but it is really like that week twenty-seven weeks back if you think about it. It’s kinda eerie when you think about it like that. Or mid-May 2005. It’s like that, too. Weird:

  • Georgian military update: Castle Aaarrgh knows all.
  • Best Job Title Update: “Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Russia to Belarus Alexander Surikov said…” Wow. What a handle. I don’t care what he had to say but what a handle.
  • The Olympics are apparently on. I would like to maybe see the shot put. Not much else. Why not just have two weeks of shot putting on TV, you know, when the Red Sox aren’t playing. That would be better.
  • Olympic Update: is this pair of images to the right, including one created today, one of those separated-at-birth things? Click for more detail.
  • Even this link it so a .pdf, it is to a .pdf of a new map explaining international claims to the Arctic…and guess what: we are losing Santa.
  • Baywatch: it’s working out just fine.
  • Oh dear. This is the first real bit of bad economic news for Canada in yoinks. Pray for the return of the eighty cent dollar.
  • You know I like NCPR and you know I like “The Beat Authority” on Friday afternoons. Well, there is a Beat Authority Blog now, too. It’s the future and it’s all about that 1998 convergence thing. And throbbing dancing beats.
  • Australian monachists hate puns. Buns? No, puns.
  • Would a McCain Presidency with the Democrats running both houses be so bad?

So that is it for now. A late beginning to the day and an internet connection that fails makes for short bullets even when I write most of this through the week. I’d get a new internet service but I fear change.

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