Tag: Stuff and Money Stuff

Consider Your Morning Break Options Accordingly

I thought that Tims had lost it when they introduced centralized baking. They certainly lost my trade but this is whacked:

Giving a free Timbit to a baby has cost a single mother of four her job. Nicole Lilliman, 27, was fired yesterday from her Tim Hortons job for giving one of the 16-cent blobs of fried dough to a tot. “I have been fired for giving a baby a Timbit,” Lilliman said yesterday. “It was just out of my heart – she was pointing and going `ah, ah…’ I should have gone to my purse and got the change, but it was busy.”

Can you imagine worse PR? How about Jesus showing up for the second coming and getting booted out before he’s done his coffee for annoying folks with the glow off his halo. No that would be not as bad – because that wouldn’t be firing someone for giving a baby a frikkin’ timbit!!!

The Best of 2007: My Year Interacting With Stuff

Stuff becomes me: I like it and I assimilate it. Every year I think that the stuff I was introduced to was the best stuff and then more stuff comes along and I realize that that is pretty damn good, too. Here is the best stuff of 2007:

  • Pear Juice: pear juice from South Africa in particular. Sounds like a real big whoop but pears are that stealth food that pervades our lives without having all the pushiness of apples or the fear engendering pits of plums, peaches or apricots. Wilde 100% pure pear juice from South Africa is also politically correct and fairly cheap. I never thought that the blackcurrent juices of Poland could be unseated as the juice of the future but there you have it. Life constantly surprises.
  • Sean Kingston: first noticed due to the vaguely menacing joke single “Beautiful Girls”, this Jamaican teen pulls off calypso Zep while saying “girl” just like Bob or maybe Shaggy or maybe Peter. “Shorty” has been added to the vocabulary. “Take You There” plays on winter-get-away package jingles with “Trench Town”.
  • My bench and canoe: really this “best of” is just a celebration of US shopping but the 400 bucks the canoe and bench cost collectively stunned even me, an avid border crosser.
  • BBQ: once again proving that techniques from 57,483 BC still rule, scotched and smoked meats lead the way. Best new ‘que? Smoking extra pork shoulder roasts which are then sliced thin and frozen for mid-winter sangwhichies. Next year? Dropping the wood shavings for solid apple wood blocks.

Not the fanciest stuff nor the most rare to be sure but, really, doesn’t stuff need to be available, reasonable and useful?

When To Call In The Universal Postal Union

It’s all so sad – bad service, unfreeing regulation, poor neighbourliness and a very short memory:

The list of import duties listed on Industry Canada’s website is hundreds of pages long. The section governing just shoes, a popular online purchase, and other footwear is 15 pages long. The federal goods and services tax, at 6 per cent, and provincial sales tax, in Ontario 8 per cent, and any excise tax is added on top of whatever duty is charged. Then there’s the problem of clearing customs. Do you pay a private courier service, like UPS Canada, a customs brokerage fee, which can run between $20 and $70, to expedite it for your? Or do you ship through the postal service, which charges a flat $5 fee, but may take longer to deliver? Or do you avoid the fees altogether by making a trip to the customs office in Mississauga?

It would be interesting to find out the expenses related to maintaining all these nutty picky fees. I can’t imagine it pays for itself. And there is nothing prouder than a custom’s agent required to tell you that you owe $5.47. Don’t get me wrong. I pay. I pay or at least show all receipts every time. But sooner or later someone has to twig to the fact that the US dollar is going to rise again and the show will be on the other foot and also that what goes around comes around. Time for a new greater sort of universal postal union. Maybe call it free trade.

You can also take some comfort in the fact that it has been years since I have been charged that cursed $5 GST handling fee – usually charged by Canada Post when the GST being handled is 87 cents.

My Day Off With The Roofers

Having roofed before, as with laying large amounts of sod, I do not do it any more. As you might be aware, I am what is known as not handy half by choice. It is not because I am lazy or fabulously wealthy but when (not if) I made a mistake I would likely leave it and then would hate that mistake for decades as I looked at the house. I know this is what I am like and I freely admit it. I console myself with other strengths, like my sense of indignity at bad BBQ and a passing understanding of a large range of athletic endeavors.

Plus it is very tippy up there. I am quite sure of that.

GM Decisions

A tough but perhaps telling comparison of neighbouring economies as GM pulls out of Massena, NY about two hours to the east but plans to expand in Niagara Falls, Ontario about the same distance as the crow flies to the west. The two plans are not related directly but we often assume that Canada is not in a competitive position in these sorts of things. But it takes doing as grannie might have said:

At GM’s massive assembly operations in Oshawa, workers agreed to outsource janitorial operations and eliminate an in-house construction crew in order to win investment. The Ontario and federal governments also backstopped the plan by providing $435-million (Canadian) for the project, which included investments at other GM operations in Ontario and several research and development projects at universities throughout the country.

Tough decisions in a shakey market. But at least get the spelling right, wouldja.

Real Future Phones

Here we are now,
Entertain us!

More news out of some trade show that the world demands to replicate kids copying the deaf dumb and blind kid playing pinball from Tommy even though we all know the kids are really like the kids in Quadrophenia:

The head of the world’s biggest maker of cellphones struck the tone for the whole wireless industry this week when he rode a bright yellow bicycle onto the stage before giving a keynote speech…Wireless e-mail was just the start. Major consumer electronics and technology players say the time is here for delivering e-mail, music and video to mobile devices, and that theme is dominating much of the discussion here at the world’s largest consumer electronics trade show.

No, not Steve Jobs and his hand Segway but a less interesting but actually practical head of Motorola about putting real things in to real people’s hands.

I do not despair as I am entering that age of life where I am more and more unimportant and my thoughts on things are of less value to the populace than they ever were. But Canada’s nicest geek, Tod Maffin, was on the CBC this morning talking about these new small screen gizmos, yapping them up like the biased frontman any business reporter is – the MSM bias on business never being a concern, of course – when the host gave the telling closing quation “how are your eyes?” Answer: “bad.”

Problem? Like with recent US foreign policy there is no accountability with IT claims, no review of either the return on investment or the practical performance. These announcements will sell a bunch of stuff that does not yet really work and also sell some stuff that does work that has been on the market. Stuff will sell. That is the key to a bubble economy.