Oar not...

It's unclear at the moment, what with different sources touting vastly different he-said-she-said versions of the story on Sunday. But it seems at least likely that the reason the incumbent minority PM is so certain that those costly new stealth fighter planes he's set his heart on would cost ludicrously less, by at least half, than the figures that every other financial and military authority other than the PM and the Department of National Defence has come up with, is because they're ummm, gliders.

But us coyotes can see the, ummm, logic. Yeah. That's it. Logic. Because this solves everything. All the haters who've pointed out that our
economically-trained PM has never actually practiced economics - nor, apparently, economy of any kind - look like losers this time.

Because ordering motorless planes saves a veritable billions-and-billions bundle on up-front costs and downline engine maintenance. And it'll put the Canadian military at the tippy-top forefront of those petroleum conservation and low carbon footprint thingies. Just what the country needs to counterbalance that plethora of negative tar sands environmental impacts, I'm sure. Not to mention how much stealthier they'll be than everybody else's stealth fighters, if they don't make any noise.

How to make 'em go, then? Look no further than Canada's proud and ancient voyageur tradition, people! Just borrow the Olympic rowing team's supply of high-tech carbon fibre oars (to match the high-tech carbon fibre wings, y'unnerstand...) and paddle them suckers! Using penitentiary prisoners as galley slaves would, without a Tory doubt, save huge bucks on the big prison-building schema, too!

All done within budget, just like those prudent, conservative fiscal managers said they would! Problem solved! Mission accomplished! Where have I heard that line before? Never mind! How could I have ever doubted?

Tracking the mint's missing gold

I happened by Mister Sloppy's place yesterday - okay, he happens to have air conditioning - and by way of breaking his grumpy Evil-Genius silence, mentioned the Mint's vanishing gold problem, and how the local Petfinder was just yesterday obsessing again about the strange silence of government, mint and red coated gendarme types.

Mister Sloppy snickered. My usually cast-iron coyote tummy clenched. That laugh is never good.

"Slop," I said, fearing the worst. "In your obsessive quest for world domination, you haven't sucked 15 million bucks' worth of gold into an improbability vortex? Or something?"

"I didn't need to," he cackled.

"Huh?" I can be a dimwitted doggy. Especially when it helps me enjoy nice cold air conditioning a bit longer.

"You know how the Tories - having such terrific heads for business - are all hot on selling off prime government assets at fire sale prices? To allegedly balance the government's books, even though it always loses major money?

"I was rummaging around a government network one night a coupla years back and sniffed out the fact that their brain trust had decided to flog the mint's extra gold inventory in secret. To - get this - one of those "We buy all of your used gold - no amount too large or too small" joints that advertise on late night cable channels. I hacked myself into a few emails as a discussion option, and incorporated myself as a cheap gold buyer the next day. Bought a few ads in throw-away tabloids and on cable to look legit. Hung out. Waited. The government showed up in no time!"

"Aaand?" I breathed.

"I drew up a contract they couldn't make head or tails of. Not that they ever make head or tails of anything," he snorted. "When the dust cleared, I had signatures on an airtight document assigning me fifteen million bucks in gold ingots and assorted refining scrap, purchased for the princely sum of thirty-seven dollars and fifty-two cents. Which, by the way, is actually about what most old gold places would have paid 'em. A buncha the backroom guys from the PMO are now so redfaced, all they wanna do is drop the whole story down a mine in Sudbury."

"Now, if you'll excuse me, I gotta pack." Mister Sloppy looked dreamy. "Maybe Switzerland. The ice cream in Zurich is fabulous this time of year."

"So you're taking a well-deserved break from planning world domination?" I said, hopefully. I've had enough Pepto-Bismol moments lately already, with Mayor Larry back.

Mister Sloppy cast an austere blue eye at me. "Of course not! The Large Hadron Collider is there, too..."

When AAs sag

No, no, not those AAs. What were you thinking?

We coyotes lead portable lives. And that means we carry much small, valuable electronic paraphernalia about our ummm, persons. Anti-mayor radar, that sorta thing. If you see a medium-sized 'was that a dog?' someplace weird downtown - and it clanks with hidden gear - that's me. Oops. I digress. Who'da thunk?

Anyway, based on an anecdotal sample of one, I've lately noticed a steep climb in instances where costly gizmos go wonky, and I open them up to floods of corrosive goo from burst AA cells. Which I must clean out, or lose the gadget. This almost never used to happen if one avoided off-brands and dodgy dollar store counterfeits. Lately it's been like, twice a week.

I'm sure our friend Milan has statistics somewhere on the environmental unfriendliness of alkaline cells versus rechargeable, with life-cycle assessments demonstrating that investing in new and rechargeable gizmos is better than pumping one-use alkalines into old stuff. He's all over that sort of thing.

My issue is that rechargeable AAs are often AAAs stuffed in bigger AA cases. They're weak, and wear down fast. Still-working, but power-mad older stuff is what I have, and I am loathe to replace it. Especially that anti-mayor radar. It saves my tail sometimes... Oop. Digression detector's beeping!

Ummm, I blame Wall-to-Wall-Mart. And globalization. Among others.

Wall-to-Wall is a retail gorilla that tempts potential suppliers with huge markets. Under contract, they start relying too heavily on that fat, high-volume, low-margin cash cow. Then Wall-to-Wall orders 'em to slash supply costs, so it can undersell Target or Sears. Suppliers have to cheapen themselves or die. Win for the consumer, right? Or maybe once-reputable brands fatally debase themselves on Wall-to-Wall's altar. And maybe Wall-to-Wall throws 'em away when they're so lousy nobody buys 'em anymore. It's bidness.

Something similar can happen when formerly home-grown businesses contract out to far eastern factories for hire. Factories low ball contract bids insanely, then do test runs to prove they can actually make a thing to a "carefully monitored" North American or European firm's specifications. Once they snag the contract, they squeeze already low-paid workers, and find all sorts of cheesy, sleazy ways to progressively save a few cents per unit here, a penny a unit there, until they get a profit. Who cares if there's lead in the toys or venetian blinds? Or carcinogens in the baby formula? Or that flimsy MP3 and DVD players fail in weeks? And batteries vomit? We're only really talkin' about makin' money here!

Which may be why I keep running old, still-serviceable, but power-hungry electronic thingies on alkaline AAs. Years later, they still work. They wear out, not break. Just as long as I can keep those cheap fucking batteries from screwing 'em up...

Overtaxed: coyote's late post

When I was a younger, dumber doggy, I mistakenly signed up for a Social Insurance Number.

Imagine my complete disappointment when I found that I'd misheard the pitch (an old inner-ear problem, exacerbated by an unfortunate one-track mind...) and realized that I now had to deal with tax returns rather than cat returns.

Imagine my further chagrin when I found out that SINs indeed condemn you to Hell. In Revenue Canada's eyes, once you're in, you fry forever. No matter if you're a semimythical coyote with no visible means of support barring fast paws and a larcenous soul. One youthful moment of misguided drooliness dooms you to file annual tax forms in perpetuity.

I want to make it clear that I have no objection to income taxes themselves. (This places me firmly in the minority back my old Alberta stomping grounds. I digress.) But aside from the fact that I don't actually pay them, I believe the social safety net and other services that they finance make this a far better country than the alternative.

No, it's the diabolical forms. Every year, those twisted <redacteds> at Revenue Canada change them. The net result is always pretty much the same, but those annual new and ummm, interesting, calculation methods to arrive there, drive me freakin' crazy.

No hackneyed comments, please, about what a short trip that is. I shall nap now. Awaken me in refund season.

Recessionomony 101

According the latest stats, it's not only a recession we are facing, it's a he-cession. More men are losing jobs in this downturn than women. To clarify public policy for headline writers, I'll throw the following taxonomy into the fold:


We-cession: your work section gets the boot but the rest of your company keeps going; or, what your 4 year-old calls the recession

Me-cession: you get laid off but everyone else at your office gets promoted

Pre-cession: period before the recession; some called it the economic boom but now we know the glass was half-empty

Free-cession: the economy is so bad you can't even afford stuff they give away for nothing

Pee-cession: people don't even have a pot to piss in

G-session: men can't find jobs nor can they find their partners g-spot --- bad, very bad

e-session: the downturn has reduced bloggers' output to the point where they employ cheap tactics to solicit comments on otherwise pointless blog entries

Getting a handle on economic disaster

This week, StatsCan jobless figures and the parliamentary budget officer's new economic report suggest that we're even more totally screwed, despite the prime minister's consistently cheery "don't worry be happy" mantra. Imagine that.

So, previous stellar efforts of our own Audrey and Fourth Dwarf notwithstanding, obviously it is time again for the ESIs to step into the economy. Yuck! It's all over my paws now, and it smells, like, ummm, bad! I digress.

At the ESI Institute for Tax-Deductible Thinktankage, we are all over putting a face on the true extent of this economic mess, with our specialty, the all-important nomenclature. For now, we'll leave the actual fixing-up stuff to trained economists like the PM. Who unfortunately has never actually worked as an economist. Oops.

Now where was I? Oh, right: Economy. Doom. Disaster. Etymology.* Terminology. Coinage.

"Ecopalypse" had the nicest ring, but a quick paw-over of Google shows those freakin' pesky environmentalists have already tagged it. Bastards. And why is it that their cosmic antimatter, all those smart develop-at-any-cost business types, still haven't noticed that economy and ecology look, even to a casual observer, to be so closely related? Not a coincidence, surely. I digress again.

"Econalypse" made our fallback list, but it turns out some lousy blogger beat us to it by months. Bastard. Besides, it sounds too much like "Econo-Lips". Which in turn sounds too much like the kind of big, red wax lips that Stephen Harper would buy at a dollar store, and wear to lighten up those hinterland news conferences where he keeps insisting that the country's economic fundamentals are great. That kidder.

Then, in homage to the epic Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme that finally overbalanced the global economy's already-sideways tilt, we thought "Eponzilypse". We were really graspin' at straws on that one...

Crap! We need ideas. What to do, what to do? I know! How 'bout a contest...?

* Memo to Traci, perky but inexperienced new summer intern in the ESI graphics department: Kid, etymology is about words. Entomology is about bugs. Take a note for next time, please...

Good things about the Economic Downturn

1. I feel less poor than usual.
2. I feel better about myself and my fiscally irresponsible past.
3. I feel slightly more grateful than usual for being employed.
4. My recycled clothing and home furnishings are now chic.
5.
6. Communism might make a comeback. Viva la revolution!!
7. When I shop now, I think of myself as stimulating the economy and that stimulates me.
8. It's fun to nest at home and make crafts.
9. Depression glass may become all the rage again.
10. We'll be able to say we lived through the ED and that it made us stronger as people.

An excellent idea from Bandobras

Audrey's posts have had me thinking about saving money, but I just can't do it. Fortunately Bandobras at Retired and Tired has a plan I can get behind:

Daylight savings time starts this weekend and if we all save as much as we can maybe there will be enough to go around next winter.

If it is dark and dreary again the government may make us save daylight all year round. It's up to you to do your part. If we all just save a little each day, through the miracle of compound interest I'm sure we can have enough to get through next winter.

He makes a good point that if we don't start saving daylight voluntarily the government may force us to do it anyway.

Unfit to print...?

We coyotes like news papers. Probably due to puppyhood training, about which the less said in polite company, the better. So when the vivacious Jo S. began a thread on the health of the media, many, including your faithful/unreliable reporter/narrator, had things to say. I had a lot. You may safely surmise that I have not finished sucking my paws and, ummm, pawndering. And I'm not the only one. Just the only coyote...

Current world economic woes are not themselves killing newspapers and legacy electronic media. They've exposed pre-existing rot. Newspapers were a disruptive technology for their time, an artifact of (mostly) the 19th century, freshened for the 20th by the advent of giant, costly, high-speed presses. These allowed papers to meet radio, then TV, pretty much head-on, even as pundits forecast the end of hard copy.

But papers' attempts to compete with later media on their (newer) terms have lost subtle ground with each new disruption, and the Net changes the game totally. In developed societies, it's faster, more accessible and scalable than its ancestors, and cheaper for content makers. The computers we pay for download many of their distribution costs - legacy media need printing presses, delivery trucks, transmitters - right onto our desks.

And the Net's tuned to the ADD nanosecond. Why write, edit, publish and distribute articles about Paris' latest deep thinkage or Britney's wardrobe malfunctions when they can be fully, ummm, exposed in 140-character Tweets? The Craigslists and Kijijis efficiently nabbed the papers' classified lifeblood from under publishers' noses. Topping it all, media outlets began more than a decade ago to throw up content on the Net - often badly, always for free - hoping to somehow gain beachheads there until they somehow figured out how to make a buck from it. They never really did.

Newspaper presses used to pretty much print money for their owners. The Thomsons, Blacks and Aspers of Canada, and the Hearsts and Knights and Murdochs of the world, got into the business because profits were so amazingly fat. But rather than improving the product when faced with competition or adversity, they too often acted to protect profit margins with chiselling economies that made newspapers less enjoyable and more irrelevant. And unhealthy.

Oh, the Petfinder's former editor in chief tried to regain hip cred by hanging major news stories on movie and comic book leads - complete with movie publicity stills instead of, like, actual news photos. Maybe he could have thought the other way around, instead of trivializing his content. Now the paper's latest owner, Canwest-Global, tries to economize by half-gutting local newsrooms to centralize its newspaper chain's content, inappropriately like the network feed for its TV stations.

These band aids and others do not play to the strength of a good paper, which is to reflect and record local thoughts and events and people. Placing them well within in their larger regional, national and global contexts, yes, but with the aim of really good local coverage. People trying to understand themselves, and their place in the world, are constant. I think.

I'm not saying that that newspapers need to be all serious. There's plenty of room for playful print. But there should be room for context and analysis too. And maybe they could back off a little from brain-dead takes on LiLo and Amy W. That's what the Net is for.

Ottawa Housing Market: Up or Down?

The spring housing market is upon us, and I have some friends who are now looking to buy property, and I thought I’d turn this discussion to thoughts on Ottawa’s real-estate market.

Garth Turner, who has just published, “The Greater Fool: The Troubled Future of Real Estate” says no-one should be buying a home now. Others disagree. Loads of economic forecasters say the market will keep rising, although perhaps slower than before. Others say we could be in a condo bubble. Others that condos are solid because of our aging population base. Others say the U.S. economic meltdown will soon hurt our own housing prices. I also find myself wondering about all those people who rushed, as speculators, to buy in Calgary/Edmonton. Forecasts now are that these markets have flat-lined.

It’s a gamble. An old house on my street (Central Ottawa) just sold for well over $500,000, and I thought it was worth about $350,000. These new owners must think it’s worth it.
Well, for those of you who want to buy, but really, really don’t want to lose money – and are not made of it -- here’s my thoughts (okay, I’m no expert, but nonetheless):

First, don’t go into the suburbs. Everyone’s into minimizing their carbon footprints, and that means inner-city neighbourhoods are in. For several years now the city core neighbourhoods have been climbing in value faster than the outlying areas, and I think this trend will continue and intensify. (Besides, studies tell us that suburb life makes people fat and a little less happy than they would have been, country homes excluded).

Second: if you can at all manage it, buy a house that actually has a yard. There are $600,000 properties out there with no yard, and there are $300,000 ones with beautiful back yards. As the city grows, that urban yard will become much more valuable, plus it gives you room to expand (when you can afford it) without having to move.

Third: If you must buy a condo, see #1 and be even more stringent. That’s uber-urban core, and by this I also mean the hip-urban core of areas like Westboro and the Glebe. Places where there’s not a lot of crappy homes/old warehouses that could get torn down for future condos to compete with yours (and glut the market). I’d say, make sure your condo is within a 10 minute walking distance to three coffee shops. Let’s say that two will suffice if said condo is also within a five minute walk to water.

Fourth: Try not to be directly on a busy street. Don’t buy on Main St., or Parkdale, or Holland, or Scott, if you can avoid it. It might seem like a good deal now, but it’ll be hard to sell in the future, especially if there’s a downturn, plus all that carbon-monoxide and extra stress will take years off your life. Not a good deal.

Fifth: Don’t buy somewhere where you can clearly hear the Queensway hum. Again, it’s not just noise pollution, it’s also that carbon monoxide stuff taking years off your life.

Sixth: Do buy in the “annex” neighbourhoods, the poorer cousins to the rich ones. So: Dow’s Lake, Bronson-West/Little Italy/Hintonburg (Mechanicsville), which annex the Glebe and Wellington Village/Westboro. Preferably seek out a neighbourhood that has a cool and already vibrant “High Street”. A main drag that looks like it could develop further. For the strong-willed and smaller budgeted, I’d also suggest Vanier, but close to Beechwood, not MacArthur.

What do you think, are prices going up or down? What Ottawa neighbourhoods are the best ones to buy into now?

What really matters

Postcards From the Edge *

(* Or Beyond. Hey. Sudbury, for chrissakes...)
Day Five:: Sneak into a rehab counsellor's office this morning and log on, real quick and stealthy, to webcast yet another urgent plea for chocolate. (Where the hell is it? Startin' to get desperate around here. There's a murder of pizza-addicted crows, busted for brawling behind a dumpster in Sarnia and sent here for court-ordered treatment. They're getting really ugly in group. And that damn horse in the corner. Nobody seems to know why he's here. He just keeps staring at me.... won't say anything. Just stares. Creepy. I digress.)

Anyway, imagine my shock when I find out out that damage to a single submarine carrier cable under the Mediterranean has crapped out two thirds of the Interwebby goodness normally available in the Middle East and India. Apparently vital commerce on at least two continents has ground to a crawl. Imagine the chaos for them: no LOLCats! No Onion! No Facebook! For us? No access to highly outsourced call centres! The humanity!

More important than any of this, though, is the still-unknown fate of the New Delhi, Ahmedabad, and Dubai chapters of the Coyote Fan Club. My every thought is with you in this time of tribulation and sorrow, even if the net ain't... and, like, send chocolate if you get this...

Mumumelon® biz model: down the ol' flusher?

Aggie reports this just in from the CBC: Lululemon stocks appear to be taking a bath after an investor's private lab analysis discovered that a new line of clothing purported to contain beneficial health-inducing seaweed additives, turns out to be, ummm, maybe, less than likely to carry this enhancement. Could the venture be (fish?)tanking on the market?

Loyal ESI readers will recall that our nascent Mumumelon® venture was closely modelled on lululemon® -- in a matter/antimatter kinda way, since we're using many of the same marketing ideas to corner the exercise-wear market for the exact opposite somatotype. (That'd be the 'endomorphs', or to us new-age, workout-challenged lay-types, the potentially-lucrative Pillsbury Doughboy® contingent...)

To head off any financially-ruinous speculation among our main investors, I, as Mumumelon's® chief spokescoyote, just want to take this opportunity to assure the market (Huh? Whaddaya whispering at me? Oh! Them...) ...and our valued family of customers... that every mu'umu'u we produce is absolutely guaranteed to be factory-drenched in lime Jell-O®. If you start feeling a blood sugar emergency, say, after climbing the stairs or something, you can just suck on the hem until your head stops spinning and your glucose levels return to normal...

After all, the well-being of our bank accou... uh, customers, is paramount. Thank you.

Image: Toiletology.com

My Latest Rant

WELCOME GOOGLE SEARCHERS:
Your search probably brought you here because you were wondering what that LCBO/RAO means on your credit card statement. Don't worry it's legit. When you were in Ontario, Canada do you remember going to a Liquor Store? Yes. Well, you put your purchase on a credit card. Now get back to your AA meeting.

Every year I do the mature and responsible thing and add up all my expenditures for the past year just to find out where my money is going. To help track such matters I tend to put everything on my credit card. Using cash requires too much day-to-day tracking of spending and I’m too lazy for that. This brings me to one of the more common line items on my Mastercard statements this past year: LCBO / RAO #0212 OTTAWA ON.

Ontario’s Crown-owned liquor distribution retailer, the LCBO, was one of my biggest suppliers of goods and services this past year – to the tune of about $1,000. At first, I thought that’s a lot of spending, but I found out through Statistics Canada that I’m about average for a full-time employed male when it comes to spending on booze. No need for an intervention just yet.

Having conveniently parked the health issues related to my consumption in the closet of denial, I turn to the economic issues. Though $1,000 a year is a fairly typical expenditure for a typical Joe, it’s still a lot of money. This is where I get my back up against the wall when it comes to the LCBO’s pricing. According to their last annual report this monopoly paid a “dividend” to the Ontario government of over $1 billion (this is above and beyond any taxes collected on booze). Not a bad profit for a retailer. In fact, hands down, the LCBO is probably the most profitable retailer in the food and beverage industry in North America (maybe even the world!). Their net “profit” is about 33% of net sales. To give you a benchmark, Walmart, considered one of the best retailers in the world, had a net profit of about 5 % last year. And that was with a labour force paid close to minimum wage, whereas the LCBO provides a good union job (north of $20 an hour last I heard). I don’t mind that the price of my booze supports well-paid union jobs. That’s fine by me. What I don’t like is paying for monopoly profits above and beyond those well-paid jobs. And by my calculation, it’s costing me an extra $250 a year.

But maybe there’s hope.

The LCBO recently started to market affordable, yet classy-looking foreign beers that can be purchased one can at a time. Lately, I’ve been buying Holsten Premium at $1.95 for 500 ml can – a very good deal that can be paid for with a toonie. The downside is that I’ve reverted back to paying with cash – coins no less. So not only am I losing track of where my money is going, but every time I stop by for a purchase, I’m appearing more and more like the beggar outside the store who pays with quarters and dimes. And yesterday, he and I had the exact same purchase.

I’m ready for that intervention now.

Introducing the Metasexual

Metrosexuals are so last decade. Now, apparently, the übersexual tag is jostling for alpha-male position among social pundits. This intelligence from no less an authority than Guy Stuff, appearing on Global TV at the flagship time of 2 a.m. weeknights, not too long before something called Booty Boat, about which I'm sure 4th Dwarf knows.

Large, distracting moving CGI greenscreened into the set design help them to do wonders with their $1.95 production budget, and the nine guys in the tiny audience corral look rapt -- probably because their bug-eyed insomnia is worse than mine.

Anyway, we know that pundits propound these kindsa social labels because if they can coin one, write a very thin book about it, and hook it into the prevailing American zeitgeist, even for a nanosecond, well! The route to wealth via the lecture circuit, bookstore self-help sections and guest appearances on Oprah, The View and Dr. Phil is assured. (Extra points if ya can crack CNN or Fox News. And Canadian channels, sadly, count for nothing. Market's too small.) You know, explaining that metrosexuals are narcissists who pluck their eyebrows and wax their backs (very good reason why coyotes don't go that route...), whereas übersexuals are less sexually-ambiguous "guys' guys" types, say, like George Clooney or George Clinton.

Since ESI: The Sock Puppet Movie seems to have stalled in pre-development, and a dog's gotta eat, this scam interests me. As more of a punster than a pundit, I propose we create the Metasexual category: Just off the top of my (unwaxed) head, those of any gender who are not back-waxers, are totally into self-referental wanking in Emergency Meetings, are more concerned with quasi-analysing the relationships of others than their own, and are given to lengthy circular theorizing, at least when their collective Attention Deficit Disorder is properly medicated. And obsessive-compulsive about blogging. Did I mention blogging?

Metasexual. Ya read it here first. A meta category so fresh, even Wikipedia doesn't have it yet. But we can fix that...

Image: BBC North Yorkshire

Daddy needs a new cocktail shaker

The banks are having a rough time. Bad publicity about layoffs despite unquestionably handsome profits. Chief NDipper Jack Layton slamming those $1.50 Interac fees. Scurrilous bloggers taking well-aimed potshots.

But there's a golden opportunity to turn things around: Vegas-style cash machines.

Imagine . . . every 500th customer gets an extra $20 bill with their withdrawal.

You're the 10,000th lucky stiff in the queue? A cool $100.

And if you happen to be that most fortunate one millionth button-pusher, get set to walk away with a thousand bucks!

These little prizes would amount to pocket change for the big banks. And, heck, everyone would be so enthralled that the cigar-smoking brandy swillers could quietly jack up Interac fees to $3 a pop.

The Latest Numbers

Earnings for the Bank of Montreal (BMO:TSX) in 2006: $2.66 billion

Total compensation package paid in 2006 to its CEO, Tony Comper: $10 million

Number of employees that need to be laid-off because BMO says it didn't earn enough: 1,000

Number of words in a BMO press release explaining why they need to earn more money by laying off 1000 employees: 533

Number of words used in the same press release cautioning its shareholders that BMO may not neccessarily know what it is doing in order to avoid any litigation: 646