Epoch-eclipse now

Just five days to go for the arrival of the solar eclipse, which will be visible from western Mexico to eastern Canada on April 8. Weather permitting, it really should be a once-in-a-lifetime show, and the hype machines are gearing up accordingly.

My little town will be in the area of totality for just over three minutes near mid-afternoon. So will Niagara Falls, twenty minutes drive from us (though probably not on April 8), and in keeping with its over-the-top money-grabbing ethos, that little city is pulling out all the stops. The chief carnival barker, Mayor Jim Diodati, is telling everyone who will listen that he is expecting one million people to show up.

I'm not sure why Diodati or anyone else would imagine that watching it in Niagara Falls will somehow make the eclipse more exciting.  Plenty of other less glitzy towns in the area -- Buffalo, NY or Hamilton, ON for example -- will get exactly the same celestial show. It's also not clear how Diodati figures his city can accommodate anything like a million people. Have you ever been? Its permanent population is less than 90,000 and the tourist area, which is presumably where all the visitors will try to go, is really quite small -- basically it's a kilometre or two along the edge of the Niagara River, plus the incomparably tacky Clifton Hill, which makes the Las Vegas strip look like the Uffizi gallery. 

There are going to be extra trains to bring people down from Toronto, but this being Canada, there will only be three of them, and a quick back-of-the envelope calculation suggests they will be able to accommodate fewer than 10,000 people even with crush loads. So most of Diodati's million will be coming by car. At four persons per car, that suggests there will be 250,000 vehicles converging on the city. 

There's only one expressway to Niagara Falls, and it's busy at the best of times. Even for those who do make it into town, there is nowhere to park that many cars. And even if you do find parking, there is no way the tourist area can accommodate the people.  Total visitor numbers to the Canadian side of the Falls were about 13 million in 2022. That was a COVID year so the numbers may be higher now, but that equates to about 40,000 per day -- and as anyone who has ever visited can attest, the tourist area is always packed. 

Has Mayor Diodati though this through? What's your guess?  However, the very strong likelihood is that potential visitors have thought it through, and that many of them will think better of it, resulting in crowds that are just a fraction of the numbers Diodati is counting on.  That said, it's still going to be a zoo, and I won't be going any further than my south-facing driveway that day. 

UPDATE, 9 April: The first official estimate is that a total of 200,000 visitors took in the eclipse in the Niagara region, which is about 30 miles long. That's a far cry from Diodati's one million in Niagara Falls alone. There were maybe 100,000 in that city.  How many people were put off by Diodati's insane prediction?  Not that they missed much -- overcast skies across the area throughout the eclipse. And since I haven't stooped to this before, allow me to point out that an anagram of Diodati is "da idiot".

Black mark!

Here's another in my very occasional series of candidates for the worst sentence ever written. The author is none other than Conrad Black in the National Post:

Once the Liberals adopted the policy of alternating English and French-Canadian leaders, and the Conservatives obligingly recruited some prominent English-speaking Liberal politicians to mobilize the anglophone majority in the country to impose conscription on French-Canadians who had no particular reason to feel any filial loyalty to the British or the French in the hecatomb of the First World War, the preeminence of the Liberals was assured.

Got that?  Come to think of it, most of the column that contains this gem is similarly overwrought and under-edited. You can check it out here.  

Nobody knows anything

I've blogged several times over the years about the deterioration of traditional media, in terms of both content and literacy. The events of the past week surrounding the cargo ship Ever Given have provided plenty of gruesome opportunities to observe today's journalists at work. No names, no pack drill, but everything that follows is true!

Person A is a newsreader at breakfast time on a Toronto TV station. A couple of days into the Ever Given stranding, this person worriedly informed the sleepy-eyed audience that the Ever Given's cargo was crude oil, so that any attempt to lighten the ship would create a severe pollution risk. Eighteen thousand containers of crude oil perched up on deck, is it? Amazingly Person B, the station's business whiz, on air at the same time, chose not to correct this piece of misinformation, possibly so as not to embarrass Person A. 

Person B's own chance to shine came right after the ship had been freed, in the form of a statement that the seven-day blockage might cause "some empty shelves" in Canadian stores, to which Person A nodded sagely. Let's think about that. The Ever Given had sailed from two ports in China, one in Taiwan and one in Malaysia, through the Indian Ocean and Red Sea into the south end of the Suez Canal. It still had to negotiate the Canal itself, the Mediterranean, the Bay of Biscay, the English Channel and the North Sea to reach its destination, Rotterdam. 

Two thoughts here. First, even without the delay, the ship was not scheduled to arrive in Rotterdam until March 31. Allowing time for unloading and trans-shipment, any containers headed for Canada would not be arriving until late April at best, so the "empty shelves" threat seems a bit premature. More importantly, though, how likely is it that any goods coming from East Asia to Canada take this absurdly convoluted route?  The Pacific is a whole lot more direct, and the scale of the container ports along the littoral from Vancouver down to San Diego suggests that the Chinese and Japanese have figured that out. Maybe we can get them to tell Persons A and B. 

On a separate channel, Person C told evening viewers that the Ever Given incident was not likely to lead to fresh food shortages in Canada, as most of our food imports come from the US and Mexico. That's certainly a relief. You wouldn't have wanted to contemplate containers of bok choy and ramen rotting in the Suez heat as efforts to free the ship dragged on and on. 

In the past I've been kinda sorta charitable and assumed that some of the failings of today's journalists arise from the fact that they aren't able to specialize any more -- it's "next man up" when a fresh story breaks. But this is surely a bit beyond that.  A reporter who doesn't know the difference between a container ship and a tanker, another who has little evident grasp of geography? When I was in school, this kind of thing was considered "general knowledge'. Not so general any more, it seems. 

Pedantry-pourri

 Journalists work with words every day, so it's depressing to note how often they use them incorrectly.  Here are just a few example of poor English I have come across recently.

• "A new tact", to describe someone trying to change direction.  That should, of course, be "a new tack", a naval term for a change of course, going back to the age of sailing ships.

• "Unchartered waters", another corruption of a naval term. The correct usage is "uncharted waters", a reference to dangerous and unmapped areas where all manner of unknown perils might reside. By the way, "unchartered" is promptly flagged up by the spell-checker, which you'd think a journalist might notice.

• "Free reign", used to denote the liberty to choose your own course of action, is not some kind of reference to the powers of an absolute monarch. It should, of course, be "free rein", an equestrian term for giving a horse its head so as to coax it along.  

• "Amount" and "number" confused.  "Amount" is for things you measure; "number" is for things you count. So, there is "a large amount of careless journalism", but "a large number of careless journalists".

• Lastly, "fulsome". To be fair, Merriam-Webster now accepts that this can mean copious or abundant, but that's only because this sloppy usage has become commonplace in recent years. The original meaning of the word is "exaggerated", "insincere", or even "offensive". I actually quite enjoy this one, because when I read about a politician offering "a fulsome apology" for something, I know the writer is almost certainly using the word in its more recent meaning, when the older sense is so much more appropriate!    

You got the wrong St. John's

The weather guy on a Toronto TV station just now breathlessly announced that Tropical Storm Edouard, out there in the Atlantic, was a record breaker. It was -- wait for it -- the earliest ever fifth named storm for any Atlantic hurricane season. Seems like a pretty obscure record, but there we are.

Thing is, the previous four named storms haven't amounted to much, certainly not to anything like a hurricane.  One of the four, Bertha, formed in the Pacific, crossed over Central America into the Caribbean and stayed active just long enough for NOAA to give it a name before it headed onshore and petered out. The other three (Arthur, Cristobal and Dolly) formed in the Atlantic but barely had time to get christened before quite literally going off the radar.  The NOAA meteorologists have predicted an above-average hurricane season this year: giving every thundercloud a name is certainly one way to ensure they're right!

You can scroll through the NOAA website to find out all about Edouard. It was given a name (thus becoming the "earliest ever fifth named storm") when it was located about 36 degrees north of the equator. It's a long time since I studied geography, but I'm close to 100 percent sure that's a very long way north of the tropics. And check out the location -- the nearest land is the Avalon Peninsula in Newfoundland, where icebergs are a much more common sight than hurricanes.

This may well turn out to be an above-average hurricane season -- there are two more possible candidates out there even now -- but I'm not sure NOAA is doing anyone any favours by crying wolf so much. Serious suggestion: a depression that doesn't build up to the required windspeed until it moves out of the tropics really should not be called a tropical storm. Or here's an alternative rule: if a storm forms near St. John's, Antigua it could be a tropical storm; if it forms near St.John's, Newfoundland, it definitely isn't!

Say what?

I've suggested here before that the sports section of the newspaper is usually where you'll find the worst writing.  It's not that there are no good sportswriters -- the peerless Frank Deford is my personal favourite and current Toronto practitioners Bruce Arthur and Cathal Kelly are excellent-- but the subject itself seems to bring out the worst in some journalists.

The Toronto Star's Rosie diManno is a particularly interesting case.  It seems as if she has the freedom to write about anything she wants. so as well as offering up her thoughts on her preferred sports (which include skating, baseball, hockey and tennis), she also gets to cover court proceedings (the more lurid the better) and even international affairs.

When she's writing about "serious" subjects. Rosie's prose is workmanlike and readable.  When she switches to sports, however, some synapse in her brain fires up and her writing becomes quite crazed.  Her article in today's paper about the Halep-Williams final at Wimbledon begins with this short paragraph, which surely ranks as one of the worst I've ever read:

Before it’s dipped in molten gold and preserved for history — ossified as memorable grandeur — sporting greatness inevitably flakes off. The shedding of invincibility gilding.

I suppose we should be grateful that the metaphor doesn't get badly mixed, though trust me, there's plenty of that in the paragraphs that follow.  But, seriously, Rosie?  It's as if you think that an intrinsically unserious subject like sports -- grown ups playing kids' games -- can't be written about in a serious way.  That's insulting to your readers, don't you think? 

Then again, Ms diManno can maybe take comfort that she didn't write this sentence, from the UK's Independent paper in September 2008.  The perpetrator of this particular outrage was James Lawton. like Rosie a veteran hack whose strangled prose always seemed to escape the attentions of the editor.  Ready? Here goes:

Also, and you could see it plainly enough when Faldo embraced him after he had won his fourth straight point in the cause that had looked to be lost the moment Garcia could not disguise the fact he had no answer to the power and the authority of young Anthony Kim in the opening singles match, that here was, for the foreseeable future, probably the most dynamic candidate to lead a European drive to regain some of their old competitive edge in South Wales in two years' time.

Parse that if you dare!
 

Taking a punt

Sorry about the lack of posting lately. Family wedding, visitors from the UK, that sort of thing.  Anyway to ease myself back in gently, here's a little story about lawyers and flat-bottomed boats.

Ever visited Cambridge, my alma mater?  Decades ago, when I was studying there, it was a sleepy backwater, far less popular with tourists than Oxford, even though both cities are about the same distance from London.  No more.  It's now arguably the high-tech capital of the UK, the major retail centre of its region, and --as tourists have come to recognize -- at least as interesting a day-trip destination as its rival to the west.

One of the fun things to do in Cambridge was always the punt ride on the River Cam. (Same at Oxford on the River Cherwell, but for some unaccountable reason Oxonians punt from the wrong end of the boat, ignoring the flat platform at one end that's clearly there for the pole-wielder to stand on.  But that's another story).  It used to be that you could do your own punting, or hire someone from the rental company to do the hard work for you (you wimp), but in either case you would be in the same, narrow boat, seating about eight.

I'm not sure when this happened, but at some point the rental companies realised they could make more money with bigger boats. Now, people trying to make their own way along the Cam in the traditional punts have to run the gauntlet of landing-craft-sized punts used by the rental companies to squeeze in as many visitors as possible -- see the picture above.   As the linked story relates, one of these companies has been mooring its craft and soliciting patrons from a spot on Garret Hostel Lane, a medieval street near Trinity College.  After protests from the college, which claimed its property rights were being infringed, the company has been forced out of business.

That's tough on the sixty or so people who may be losing their jobs, though it may at least give them an opportunity to learn some of the actual history of the city and university before their next gig: some of the entirely fictitious nonsense I've overheard these people telling innocent visitors over the years has been quite amazing. Anyway, if you're heading to Cambridge or Oxford any time soon and fancy a punt ride, think about doing the punting yourself.  It's not difficult, as long as you keep in mind a sign that I saw a year or two ago, on Garret Hostel Lane as it happens: "Punting and selfies don't mix"!

Peak political correctness?

Either I have slept through the winter and this is April 1, or we have reached the apotheosis of political correctness.  Per this story in the Toronto Star, the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) is dropping the word "chief" from titles like Chief Financial Officer, out of respect for indigenous peoples.

To say that the rationale presented in the article is confusing would be putting it mildly. At one point an actual indigenous person at the TDSB (more about him later) says "The word has a lot of meaning to our people", evidently in a positive sense.  Later an academic who may or may not also be indigenous says the term "carries the weight of being forced to adopt an alien form of governance", which doesn't sound positive at all.

"Chief" is an ancient English word that the indigenous peoples had never used and didn't want, but it was forced on them by the settlers.  Now, rather than coming up with a different word that the indigenous people themselves can agree on (difficult, as there are so many indigenous languages), the English school board in Toronto is proposing to stop using this perfectly serviceable word to describe positions that have very little to do with indigenous people. Remarkably, it seems this process of re-titling has already taken several years, and there is still no indication of what the replacement term might be.     

Years ago I was involved in a major initiative with indigenous peoples and met a whole lot of chiefs, all of whom wore the title proudly.  (They told me that the term "Indian", though no longer much used, was not seen as insulting because until the white man showed up, the indigenous people did not really have a collective term for themselves).  The TDSB may be tying itself in knots for no-one's real benefit: as the TDSB's indigenous arts creator, Dr Duke Redbird, tells the Star, "we do not have a problem with their use of the word for what they want to describe in their own communities".

Oh, and about your own given name, Dr Redbird: Duke??  Cultural appropriation or what?*  A duke is a personage of great importance in many white cultures, so how about.....

* I'm joking.  Just wish the TDSB was joking too. 

And I bet she voted for Brexit

True story.  This past Sunday morning I was waiting near the main gate of Christ's College in Cambridge, waiting for my sister to pick me up.  There was a lot going on. Graduates I had enjoyed a reunion bash with the previous evening were dropping off their keys at the Porters' Lodge and taking their leave.  People who had been attending an engineering conference in college were also bringing their bags for storage and preparing to leave town.  And there was a charity walk under way, with hundreds of people parading in an almost unbroken stream through the college for local good causes. There were army cadets waving big, green styrofoam fingers to show them the way.

Two Polish ladies who had been at the engineering conference came to the Porters' Lodge, paid their bills, handed in their keys and asked for their luggage to be stored.  Then they came out to the courtyard (which dates back almost half a millennium) for a last look round.  There's quite a small sign asking visitors not to walk on the exquisitely manicured lawn;  only Fellows of the college are permitted to set foot on the hallowed turf.  Maybe they didn't see the sign because of the stream of charity walkers, or maybe they didn't care, but one of them walked a few paces onto the grass to get a better angle for a selfie.

She was immediately spotted by the porter who was returning from putting her bags in storage. He called out in a loud voice, "Off the grass, please".  She obeyed at once, but not before the charity marchers had taken notice.  As they passed me, one middle-aged female walker said quite loudly to her companion. "There's always one, isn't there?"

Winner have a we

Back in September 2008 I suggested that this sentence, written by the Independent's sports columnist, James Lawton, might be the worst ever penned by a professional writer:

"Also, and you could see it plainly enough when Faldo embraced him after he had won his fourth straight point in the cause that had looked to be lost the moment Garcia could not disguise the fact he had no answer to the power and the authority of young Anthony Kim in the opening singles match, that here was, for the foreseeable future, probably the most dynamic candidate to lead a European drive to regain some of their old competitive edge in South Wales in two years' time."

That's still excruciating, but I believe it may now have been surpassed by this doozy by Carly Maga, one of the theatre critics at the Toronto Star, reviewing a show at the Shaw Festival here in Niagara. :

"For Wilde, which is reflected in his stories, love is a powerful, life-altering force, one that isn’t confined between a man and a woman (nor even between humans), and while it itself may be impermanent, its impact, however, is."

Lawton's sentence is ludicrously long, so it's not altogether surprising that he loses control of it about halfway through.  Maga's sentence is a whole lot shorter, but remarkably, she manages to lose control of it by the third word, and never gets it back.  Definitely a worthy champion! 

Canada's health care myths

A couple of posts ago, I ended a piece on the Canadian prescription drug market thus: "It will be interesting to see whether any of the major parties adopts a commitment to pharmacare as part of its platform for this year's election. There would seem to be a lot of votes in it."  I think I need to walk that back -- quite a long way back.

The fact is, a national prescription drug plan for Canada may be the right thing to do, and opinion polls may show it has widespread popular support, but that doesn't mean it will be a big vote-getter in this year's Federal election.  Who's going to vote for it?

• Seniors?  They traditionally turn out at the polls in higher numbers than other age cohorts, so their support is crucial. But most seniors already enjoy prescription drug coverage. Some may vote for a national program as a matter of principle but for most, to the extent that it's a pocketbook issue at all, it's a negative one, because taxes will have to go up to cover the additional costs to the public sector (estimated  at $ 1 billion) if a national scheme is adopted. 

• The middle classes?  A high proportion of permanently-employed Canadians, especially those in the public sector, have a health insurance plan, often financed on a co-pay basis with their employer. Those plans include prescription drug benefits.  The insurance companies that underwrite the plans are expected to save big-time if a national pharmacare plan goes into effect, but unless you believe that those reduced costs will be passed onto planholders (and if you do believe that, can I ask if you've met any insurance people lately?), there's no obvious advantage to the middle classes in a national drug plan. In fact, to the extent that a national public plan might well cover a much smaller formulary than private plans do, many people with private insurance might actually feel they would be worse off with a public plan.

• The less well-off?  They would certainly benefit the most from a public drug plan. Many of them can't afford prescription drugs at present, and the tax burden of setting up a public plan would mostly fall on the better-off. But the poor tend not to be politically engaged, so it's hard to imagine them turning out in greater-than-usual numbers to support such a plan.

Not many sure votes for any party that supports pharmacare, then.  But in reconsidering my initial take on this issue, I've been forced to focus on the sad but usually ignored truths about Canada's healthcare system in general: it's not very comprehensive, it's not entirely in the public sector any more, and it's not very good.  

The absence of a prescription drug plan is by no means the only hole in Canada's public health system. To take just one example,  there's no publicly-funded dental care of any kind. Anecdotally, dentists and their fellow-travellers (denturists, endodontists, orthodontists and so on) seem to outnumber family doctors by at least two-to-one in our neck of the woods, which gives you some idea of where the big money is to be made.

As for the system no longer being primarily in the public sector, this is evident in a number of ways:

• Almost all ancillary services (X-rays, bloodwork and such) have been contracted out to private labs. This may be cost-effective, but it places a burden on those seeking treatment, who now have to trek from place to place to get work done.

• The growing role of insurance companies in the system is evidence of the mounting inadequacy of the public system.  The very fact that these insurance providers are around seems to provide cover for governments' continual, stealthy reduction in services provided at public expense. 

• Some of the more prestigious specialized hospitals (Princess Margaret Cancer Centre and Sick Children's Hospital, both in Toronto are prominent examples) rely on annual multi-million dollar lotteries to raise funds.  In a properly-funded system this would hardly be necessary. 

Taking all of these things together,  it's clear that what a Federal health minister once referred to as "our magnificent medicare" is, nowadays, nothing of the sort. So what's it like to live under such a system?  Well, maybe I can be allowed to illustrate by reference to the recent experiences of my wife.  

A few years ago, back in the UK, she was diagnosed as needing a hip replacement.  From diagnosis to operation the interval was six weeks. All meetings with the surgeon, pre-op sessions, the operation itself and post-op treatments including physiotherapy took place at our local hospital

Last fall, here in Canada, she was diagnosed as needing a knee replacement. The diagnosis was based on X-rays (taken at a private clinic) and an MRI (at a nearby hospital). Meetings with the surgeon took place in his office, in a medical arts building separate from the hospital. He referred her to an internist in the same medical arts building.  He sent her for further X-rays (same location as the first set) and for heart stress tests (at a separate private clinic in another location). A date for the procedure has finally been set, fully six months after the initial diagnosis -- if she's lucky: the surgeon has already warned us that he had to cancel some planned surgeries at short notice last year because the local hospital ran out of funds!

You could get sick worrying about these things, but that probably wouldn't be wise.   

Science 101

Earlier this week one of the weather guys over the river in Buffalo, where they know a thing or two about snow, was musing about the problems they're facing in Boston. There has been so much snow in Beantown over the last two weeks that the city is running out of places to put it, so they're thinking of dumping some of it in the ocean.

Of course, said Buffalo guy, they have to be careful about that because of all the road-clearing chemicals that have been ploughed up with the snow, "especially sodium chloride".

Well, quite. It certainly wouldn't do to make the sea salty, would it?

Rule of Schlock

You may think that the most depressing news out of the entertainment world this week is Sony's capitulation over the release of The Interview, but trust me, this is worse!

With new ideas ever harder to find, I suppose it's no surprise that someone has hit on the notion of a Broadway production of School of Rock. The movie was an enjoyable though lightweight Hollywood feel-good fantasy, made watchable mainly by the reliably off-kilter presence of Jack Black in the leading role.

The movie's soundtrack was mostly unoriginal, featuring killer tunes by the likes of The Doors and Led Zeppelin.  So guess who the producers of the stage version have chosen to write new material for the stage version.  Yes, it's a man whose very name is synonymous with rock'n'roll -- Andrew Lloyd Webber!  Truth to tell, it's hard to think of any living composer with less rock sensibility than old Andrew, but his name in lights outside the theater will certainly pull in the punters, at least those who did not run screaming into the streets from Starlight Express or Cats.

And of course the story itself has to be adapted for the stage, and who better to do that than...Julian Fellowes! Yes, the plummy British toff whose tin-eared dialogue and preposterous plots have mysteriously attracted a global following for the execrable Downton Abbey.  Who better than a man who can't write believable dialogue for people of his own race and class to put words into the mouths of a misfit American teacher and a group of feisty teens?

Two creaky members of the British House of Lords writing a rock musical for Broadway -- by all that's logical it should have about as much chance of success as Springtime for Hitler.  It's scheduled to open next November at the vast Winter Garden, where it will replace the equally implausible stage version of Rocky.

I think I may start a rumour that their Lordships are inserting Kim Jong-Un into the storyline.  

Updating the anthem

There's a move afoot in Canada to amend the national anthem, O Canada, to remove a non-gender-inclusive phrase.  The words "all thy sons" should, it's proposed, give way to "all of us".  Seems unobjectionable, though you'd be amazed how many traditionalists (i.e. the Tory government in Ottawa) want to stick with the old words.

There's another issue here, though.  Once you start picking away at the words, the whole anthem emerges as a viper's nest of problems.  Let's go through it line by line.

O Canada, our home and native land.

Not any more it isn't! Canada's a country of immigrants, so it's not really the "native land" for a large percentage of the population.  And while we're at it, a lot of Canadians live abroad, so when they sing the anthem, it's not really their home, is it?

True patriot love, in all thy sons command.

We've already agreed that the sexism has to go, but what about that word "patriot"?  Patriotism is famously "the last refuge of a scoundrel", and that's surely not what we want to say about ourselves, is it?

With glowing hearts we see thee rise,  the true north strong and free.

Whaddaya mean, north?  The most populous parts of Canada lie south of large chunks of the United States.  (For example, Toronto lies to the south of Seattle, Portland and Minneapolis).  In addition, Canada lies south of most of the parts of Europe from which its white settlers came, including the pioneering French and English.

From far and wide O Canada we stand on guard for thee. 

Clearly non-inclusive of folks with disabilities who are unable to stand when the anthem is sung. The "stand on guard" part is anachronistically militaristic too, especially with Canada spending so little on its armed forces these days.

God keep our land glorious and free, O Canada we stand on guard for thee.

Who dragged the Deity into this??  Clearly not appropriate in this more "enlightened" day and age!

So where does all of that leave us?  Let's put it back together.

O Canada, our favourite patch of land
Warm sentiments in all of us command
With glowing hearts we see thee rise, a very big country
From far and wide O Canada
We gather 'round for thee
Let's hope our land stays glorious and free
O Canada we gather 'round for thee!

Inspiring, no?  Think I should have a go at the French language version?

Biofuels are worse for the environment than gasoline

It's true, and this peer-reviewed study proves it. You would need a heart of stone not to laugh.

My SUV can only use high-grade gas, which doesn't contain ethanol.  I'm just glad to be doing my bit for the environment.

Happy Earth Day!

You call that funny?

One of the harmless myths that Canadians live by is that we're funnier than our neighbours to the south.  There's some historical evidence for this.  A century ago, Stephen Leacock managed the remarkable double play of being both an economist and a wit.  If you've never heard of him, think a slightly gentler, non-Jewish version of SJ Perelman, the guy who wrote most of the Marx Brothers' material.*

More recently, Canadians have played major roles in ensemble comedy shows like SNL and Second City -- people like John Candy, Mike Myers and the acerbic Norm Macdonald all hail from this side of the border.  And we mustn't forget Lorne Michaels, who may not be funny himself, but has kept SNL loaded with fresh talent for going on three decades.

But there are strong counter-arguments: Jim Carrey, for instance, who was briefly the highest paid star in movies until someone realized that watching someone gurning wasn't worth a whole lot.  Nowadays he can't get himself arrested, more's the pity.

And then there's Martin Short, a Second City alumnus who unaccountably went on to a lengthy post-SNL career.  He pitched up in Toronto this past weekend to host the Canadian Screen Awards show, a bizarre concoction that honours everything from movies to sportscasting.

To no-one's surprise, Short reeled off a litany of Rob Ford jokes, but then he let loose with this gem.  Looking at the audience of stars big and (mostly) small, he said "this reminds me of the luge at the Winter Olympics.  Most of you have got to where you are by lying flat on your backs".

That's not unfunny, but it's wildly sexist.  It sounds like something Rob Ford might have said.  And if Ford had said it, his critics in the media would have piled in on him unmercifully.

Aside from some gasps from the audience, Short got away with it.  Because of course, he's "Canadian Showbiz Royalty".  That may seem to you to be an oxymoron, and maybe it is.  But it's also a synonym, for "lives in Los Angeles".

* Interestingly, Leacock himself seems to have thought that the funniest person in the world at the time was Dorothy Parker.

Why people vote for Rob Ford

It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at this one.  News is emerging today of a "project" at Toronto City Hall with an approved budget of $8 million, which is now expected to cost....$70 million!  That's a cost overrun of almost 800 percent!

And just what is this project?  It's called FPARS, or Financial Planning and Reporting System.  That's right -- the project that has its blown its budget to such a spectacular degree is a project to improve budgeting!

There's another downside to this, though, quite apart from the financial cost.  This sort of egregious micturition* of taxpayers' moolah is exactly the kind of thing that persuaded a lot of voters in Toronto to put Rob Ford in the mayor's seat in the first place.

* You'll have to look it up.  This is a family blog. 

Groundhog daze

As you are no doubt aware, the two ranking groundhogs, Punxsutawney Phil in Pennsylvania and Wiarton Willie here in Ontario, have decreed that we will have an early spring.  Second-rater Shubenacadie Sam in Nova Scotia disagrees, but who's ever heard of him (or her)?

Yesterday evening on our local "superstation" CHCH, the newsreader was ribbing the weather guy over the fact that a majority of people trust the rodents more than they trust meteorologists, even though the success rate for Phil and Willie's annual prognostications is only about 37%.

"Thirty-seven percent?" sneered the meteorologist.  "That's hardly better than random!"

Well actually, weather guru, it's quite a lot worse than random.  The outcome here is purely binary -- either the ugly critter* is right or he's wrong.  Over a long enough run (and Phil has been in business down at Gobbler's Knob for well over a century) a random outcome would produce a success rate of very close to 50%.

Scientific weather forecasting is largely about precedents and probabilities, so the meteorologist's ignorance is a bit surprising -- but it may help to explain why most people would rather trust the groundhogs.

* The groundhog, that is, rather than the CHCH weather guy. 

Clear as mud

According to our local freesheet, the Niagara Advance, this area used to be one of the traffic accident capitals of Canada.  In recent years, however, strenuous efforts by the town's highways department have brought the accident rate down to much more acceptable levels.

One thing that doesn't help is the naming of the rural roads, which dates back to the time a couple of centuries ago when the land was first surveyed and subdivided.  Here's the list from the "Advance" of the most dangerous rural intersections in Niagara on the Lake; I swear I am not making this up:

Concession 1 at Line 2
Concession 1 at Line 3
Concession 1 at Line 6
Concession 2 at Line 1
Concession 2 at Line 2
Concession 2 at Line 3

And here's the first priority for further improvements to get the accident rate even lower:

"Add advance street name signs to intersection advance warning signs and stop-ahead signs, to allow drivers to make navigation decisions before reaching the intersection, as a benefit to drivers who aren't local".

Is the "Advance" suggesting that drivers might be finding it tough to figure out their way around the area?  I can't imagine why that should be the case.  

So long, sucker!

I haven't been blogging about the hassles and travails of our ongoing move back to Canada.  I figure nobody wants to see a grown man cry.  However, there was one quite spooky incident on our last day in the old house....

Once all our furniture was out of the way, we gave the place a good cleaning.  It was a tip when we bought it, and we were determined not to leave it the same way.  Our venerable Miele vacuum cleaner was clearly struggling to cope with all the dustbunnies and cobwebs.  Literally as I finished the very last stair, an ominous red light came on and the machine gently expired!

So it's gone to vacuum cleaner heaven, or at least to the municipal dump at Garston, where I have been such a frequent visitor over the last two months that they are naming one of the skips after me. 

Next posting on the blog will almost certainly be from our new base in Canada, as we fly out later this week.  Budget deficits, separatist government just elected in Quebec, hockey season cancelled because of a strike -- doesn't seem like much has changed in the fourteen years we've been away.  Still, plenty to blog about!