Phoning it in

For about six-odd millenia, human behaviour has more or less baffled us semimythical coyotes.

It is September. A neoconservative prime minister has his, ummm, fully transparent mitts, fully wrapped around the sooty levers of federal power, manipulatin' dog-knows-what with 'em. Summer's green leaves are beginning to turn colour. And perhaps most foreboding of all, our medicinal dark chocolate stash is damn near empty. We are necessarily forced toward the philosophical. You know -- cogitatin' on the big unanswerable questions.

Take the ever-thinner smartphone. Now so impossibly thin that it cannot spoil the drape of that summerweight silk Italian suit or Chanel shift that every smartphone owner wears. Because you can afford to own those, even after you sign your soul over to Satan, who administers all of the more serious phone data plans. I digress. Oopsy.

Nude, the latest devices would dance comfortably beneath a ten millimetre high limbo bar. Ummm, so, basically, so thin and delicate that many of the fone phashionistas (at least the ones on the Route 14 bus...) feel an urgent need to wrap their statusy, ever-so-svelte electronic fetishes in even fetishier stretchy rubber slipcases. Roots' f'rinstance, clocks in at three millimetres.

Since most of these elegant devices apparently now barely power themselves through an average working day before collapsing in an anorexic puddle of melted lithium ions somewhere just slightly south of your early afternoon Starbux break, would not that extra three millimetres you're gonna add to the thing anyway not be better dedicated to, say, battery space? Just askin'.

And I've also been lately pondering: why lately am I so attracted to the comfort of hot soup? And if I and my similarly disgraceful friends make off to a Chinatown eatery to demolish huge bowls of soup, are we guilty of wonton destruction?

Just askin' the big questions... it's what us coyotes do right now.

(Flickr image by Quosquos, licensed under Creative Commons)

You've been warned

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?

Coffee with Mister Sloppy

When I dropped by Mister Sloppy's Centretown lair the other day to wish him a belated happy new year - or whatever passes for "happy" among elite-level evil geniuses - he was frenetically stuffing mailer boxes with gift coffee mugs. Given the guy's "It is Better to Swipe Outright than to Give or Receive" schema, it seemed out of character.

"No, no. Not really," he grinned, blue eyes bright with merriment and the usual insanity. "Didja read that news item the other day? The one about the transatlantic flight making an emergency landing because the pilot spilled coffee?"

Suddenly wary, I eyed the stacks of mugs sporting myriad famous high tech logos, and reached for the Rolaids. Sloppy was up to no good again.

"You, ummm, had something to do with that?" I asked.

"Not a thing! But it gave me a great idea! Every major lab in the world is fueled with caffeine. Heck, I've even been known to abuse the stuff slightly myself, on my own projects! So I just figured, you know, anonymously send all the researchers gift coffee cups with their company logos on 'em."

"Aaaaannnnddd?" I asked. When Mister Sloppy is happy, there's always an "Aaaaannnnddd?"

"Of course there is," he said impatiently, apparently reading my thoughts.

"Creepy," I thought. "I might need to check into that."

"No. You don't," Mister Sloppy said out loud. "It's a whole other thing. Nothing to do with this. Lookit, I'm proud of these. Every science guy in the world takes their coffee cup everywhere. These mugs are my new memory-enhanced nanoceramic. They're programmed at the atomic level to scan nearby computers or test equipment, then transmit a quantum-burst packet of all their data to my stealth server farm. Oh. Then they spill hot coffee on everything and short it out."

"So you're actually stealing...?"

"The sum total of the world's latest research. It's all good!

Maybe for evil geniuses. I declined a complimentary gift mug on the way out. And behind me, Mister Sloppy's laughter echoed like cats fighting in an alley...

Putting the "Anti" into Social Networking. . .

Mister Sloppy had left an urgent summons in my voicemail. Wise coyotes do not casually deny evil geniuses of his calibre. I hoofed it across Centretown.

When he buzzed me in, I followed the whooping to his secret subterranean lair, where his manic keyboarding – two computers at once – gave me pause. So did the plethora of vintage mega-sized Jolt Cola empties. He only cracks his stash when he's kickin' coding old-school. Which is never good for the state of world.

"Ummm, so, how long you been at this?" I asked.

"Since the Prime Minister got hisself posted on YouTube three days back" he said, keyclacks barely slowing. "If Jurassic politicos are pretending to use social media, it's finally jumped the megashark. They think they’ll go viral, I’ll give ‘em freakin’ viral! It's almost ready!"

"What is, Sloppy?" I asked.

Fevered blue eyes blazed.

"The Next Big Thing!" He purred, grinning, well, evilly. In capital letters. "AntiSocial Media! Facebook and Myspace are tossing net privacy under the bus, people are sick of tweeting, dorks who don't understand social media are trying to warp it back into old paradigms they do understand. So it comes to this! Is my new Antisocial Networking site not genius?"

He waved at his monitors. "Here! You can only set your relationship status to, "Alone", "It's complicated" or "None of your damned business"! It automatically rejects all friend requests! And the only reject options are, "No response"; "Ewwww"; an LMAO emoticon; or an autogenerated phrase saying, "I'd rather...." followed by a random act of self-mutilation!

His speed and pitch rose.

"You can’t control your own friends list, but all other users can remove anyone from it! When you comment on someone's status, or insult ‘em on a comment thread, it’s visible to anyone except them!

"And get this! There's no way to just follow anyone. It's only got a "stalk" option! A bot program pops up your photo on every website they browse. An automatic search for every web photo of them slams together a tribute album site that auto-links to every page that references them. The album background wallpaper can be either candles or hand-scrawled protestations of love.

"And only by paying for a premium license do users gain the power to file virtual restraining orders on their stalkers! But they only limit how many times your stalkers’s pictures pop up on websites you browse – you can never block ‘em entirely! Cool app, or what!!??"

"I love it!" I yelled, trying to match his fevered tone as I edged back up the stairs. "For masochists!"

He didn't notice. At the rate he was going, I figured he might safely pass out in a few hours. At least until I heard another Jolt fizz open. Ol' Slop was bellowing, somewhat musically, something like, "Yo ho ho, I'm gonna rule the w-o-o-oooorld!", as I let myself back out.

I hadda admit right then, that insanity other than my own can be kinda disconcerting...

Stuck Inside of Riverside With the Richmond Blues Again

It's coyote season again!

Local media have returned to the evergreen story of coyotes (gasp!) eating cats in the 'burbs, and of death squads hunting us down. The only new twist is that the killers are trying to appropriate the touchy-feely language of psychobabble to explain how they 'manage' coyote/human interactions by 'establishing boundaries'.

I guess maybe guys who murder stuff for a living have a lot of trouble with their karma. And, this being Ottawa, they've decided to try to re-spin the cosmos.

The one on CBC Radio One's Ottawa Morning positively squirmed when Kathleen Petty cornered him into admitting out loud that 'managing' pretty much means 'killing'. He drove the semantic bus straight back to 'management' as quickly as he could, but you could practically hear Kate's eyes roll when he did.

I still find it fascinating how many urbanites want houses with all the perks of country living, as long as they don't have to, you know, deal with the actual messy ruralness of it all...

So I just wanna say, in coyotes' defence, that these suburban excursions ain't exactly our fault. You saw this morning's news story about car companies falling over themselves to licence Bob Dylan's voice for their in-car GPS systems? They didn't make it out to be a done deal, but since Bob is the Head Coyote, I'm pretty sure that our contractual confidentiality agreements can be loosened to let you know that we coyotes have already been beta-testing it.

So those coyote encounters? It ain't us, babe. The test version, like Bob, has, ummm, mumbly moods. Any coyote that has not ingested massive quantities of hallucinogens at some recent point in their life has got no hope in hell of translating the incomprehensible blithering.

Hey. That incomprehensible blithering is why he's our oracular spiritual leader in the first place...

But we, like, you know, end up lost in places we shouldn't be, starving and eating cats to survive. As you may imagine, our karma suffers terribly from this. However, I'm sure they'll fix it in the production models...

Ottawa River Crash: What They're Hiding

In the past couple of days, humorous speculation on this very blog has stumbled uncomfortably close to the truth. Ummm. Confession, here. Somebody's been a very bad dog. Again.

It all started earlier this week, when I realized I had only days to remove a, ummm, surplus military vehicle, acquired more or less on the up-and-up in the 1960s, from the sorta disused garage where I stored it (maybe a little less on the up-and-up) at Rockliffe Air Base. Which sadly, is closing July 31.

I just want to say that back in the 60s, I definitely scooped the cream puff. The low-flying lemons went to the US Air Force and the Smithsonian Institute. In fact, for some reason I strangely can't remember, they thought the thing never flew that well. Heh. It's come in really handy. I mean, how the hell do you think I keep evading Temporary Mayor DT's coyote posse?

It's been parked most of this summer - convertible, y'know, and all this rain. But when I started it up and backed it out that night, headed toward a new rented garage in in the west end, it totally purred. It ran so well, I scooted it up to eight or ten thousand feet and started honking up the Ottawa River in the dark. Much like the local Canada geese.

Up there, I am afraid, my natural semi-mythical exuberance got the better of me. When I remembered the parachute flare in the glove box, it just seemed natural to light it off the cigarette lighter and toss it over the side.

Big mistake.

Sigh. You know most of the rest of it. 911 calls. Constabulary and flashing lights and rescue boats and divers and stuff, all over the place. Then the beefy guys with sunglasses and black suits showed up. You know, the ones with inexplicable military license plates on their black Suburbans, and little radar scanners on top. I rather think the cops were politely asked to lay off for reasons of, ummm, national security.

It's all glossed over now, but I'm pretty sure they haven't stopped looking for me. Forty-five years, and they're still cranky about losing their saucer. Some people never know when to give up. Don't tell, 'kay?

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...

Stunned?

Many of you know that we of the Elgin Street Irregulars are big on lists of, ummm, five. If you don't, read our archives. You'll figure it out.

Some may also recall that I take a dimwitted quadruped's dim view of high voltage electrical discharges applied to living creatures. Especially since the Vancouver death of Robert Dziekanski after he was tasered - five times, it turns out - in October 2007.

With a full-on enquiry into the man's death, Taser International, cops in general and the RCMP in particular all seem to be heavily vested in denying that Tasers, police, Dziekanski and deadness are in any way linked. These may be honestly held opinions.

But I admit that my first uncharitable thought, when I heard about the Alzheimer's-like testimonial trend at the inquiry was, "Yeah, right. Stonewall away, guys...." Because, I reasoned, these talking points may also exist because if any of 'em did hint at regrettable liability, there could be legal and financial hell to pay, in Vancouver and elsewhere.

But faced with RCMP Commissioner Bill Elliot's plea for the public to walk a mile in his police force's spit-polished boots before rushing to judgement, I am now wondering about the real victims here. Could it be that the guys behind those electric stun guns really are victims, and worse off than Dziekanski?

Because after standing nearby while one of them pulled the trigger - did I mention, five times? - all of the Mounties present seem to have suffered catastrophic memory loss about the event. I don't wish to be uncharitable and suggest that they made their original statements under the mistaken assumption that no bystander had video-recorded the entire incident. Which would now place them in a position of having to explain why their statements and that video seem to part ways on several, ummm, crucial points...

No, we coyotes will take the high (voltage) road, and a charitable view of such memory loss. Obviously, the poor sunsabitches' neurons were fried by the weapon's electrical fallout. One weeps! To think of all the incidents in which police will be medically unable to remember why they zapped anybody! We could lose respect for the Mounties. And the legal system would surely descend into chaos...

Mister Sloppy's hard drive hygiene hints

Of a recycling eve, I often meet a guy we'll call "Mister Sloppy", due to the perpetual cloud of kitty litter crumbs surrounding him. And because evil geniuses need snappy pseudonyms. And because he refuses to be called the traditional "Doctor Sloppy". Go figure.

Mister Sloppy often carries a computer or two rescued from recycling, because he's wiring together some kind of junkyard supercomputer with which to take over the world. The mounds of grubby beige boxes crammed into his place would confound Michael Dell. I avoid asking exactly what 'ol Slop plans, because the thought of any world run by him horrifies me. He, discretely, eschews details.

But he does tell what he sees on these castoffs when he fires 'em up to wipe off Windows and load his personal homemade Mister Sloppy World Domination Operating System (MS-WDOS). The latest find was exemplary: right on the desktop, two PDFs, each a filled-in loan application form. Birthday, income details, mother's maiden name -- bog-standard identity-theft stuff, really. Not very well hidden in the directories were about a quarter of a sizable hard-drive's worth of pirated MP3s, mostly bad thug rap and Britney's and Christina's (and Bananarama's) sappier stuff. Another quarter-drive was, ummm, educational literature and videos. Or possibly pornography. The rest comprised a truly astounding variety of worms, viruses, trojans, keyloggers, scamware, scumware, pestware and the like. Guess that's what ya get for piratin' dodgy MP3s and porn.

Oh, and a mess of Internet chat logs. Didja know MSN automatically archives a plain-text transcript of every personal text conversation for just any old evil genius to read? Not hard to find, either. The guy who owned this computer apparently had five or seven girlfriends on the hop, judging by the logs. And the photos. He left a startling number of JPEGs of himself, getting slitty-eyed drunk with buddies and appearing to behave somewhat better with young women. I say "appearing" because also in there was a 120-page PDF file disclosing full techniques for boffing one's companion for the evening on the first date, whether she wanted to or not.

Now, Mr. Sloppy has no interest in following any of this up for purposes of penny-ante evil. He has, ummm, far bigger fish to fry.

But I just have to give an advisory shout out to this guy (whom we'll call Pete): PETE! Although the personal information you left hangin' out in the digital wind ironically suggests that you work in a supervisory capacity in a security-related field, I do believe you're insecure (in many senses of the phrase). Don't you know that there's both information and all sorts of free program downloads on that same Internet you so enthusiastically trolled for movies of [redacted] sex and incredibly bad music? That, like, wipe files and hard drives in such a way that interested (or disinterested) snoopers can't read them? Mister Sloppy tells me they're easily available at download sites like this. And this.

Now, certain schools think industrial shredders, shotguns or explosives are the only certain ways to ensure that personal data on hard drives are erased beyond redemption. But I disapprove of firearms, and have better uses for explosives. So, Pete. Next time ya kick a computer to the curb, do yourself a favour, search out one more tiny little download from Bit Torrent, and cover your ass in all senses of the phrase. Because right now, Mr. Sloppy and I know way more about you than is good for any of us. And while he has deleted it to get on with his own thing - you don't know that, do you...?

Ottawa Transit: Straight to Plan F

I see we're trying to roll out yet another Plan B on the Transit Plan thing - again. This time, $7.2 billion buys the city a couple of rail lines that don't get where a lot of transit users want to to go, And! A! Light! Rail! Tunnel! Downtown!

Hey! The times cry for boldness! Does a real city need to dig some crappy rail tunnel? They're so 19th century, and our visionary mayor is really a 20th century kinda guy. Heh. I know we've we've suggested a few Plan Bs ourselves, but now I think Ottawa just needs to leapfrog straight over all that dithering, and skip straight to the big enchilada: Plan F!

Hear me out. I've been looking into motorized para gliders, and $7,200 buys a nice one, with bulk discounts. More than adequate. Our budget buys a million of 'em. Do it! Lend them out for a minimal fee to everyone who needs to use one, just like those communal bicycles in Paris and Amsterdam. Cutting edge thinking. No need to dig a tunnel. No more buses clogging the streets. We put all that free wasted airspace to use. Utopia! Well, except for the pigeons.

Our mayor is obviously big on the cult of the amateur. He applauds when the city fires those elitist managers. He's proved willing to pitch in micromanage things himself. And since being elected, he's more than fulfilled his ripe early promise as an ultimate amateur. So I think he'll agree when I say that although these things technically fly, we don't need no stinkin' pilot licence requirements. Anybody with a toonie or so should be able to use 'em. And to show my faith in him, I think he should be the first to test the system. Do we need Plan F right this minute, or what?

Carry Phone and Answer Machine

Unlike Harmony (whose blog I will truly miss) I have been waiting for the technology that she has scrapped since I was seven years old.

I could not wait to have my own carry phone and answer machine just like the ones described to me in my cherished Childcraft encyclopedia.

But, the one thing I am still waiting for is my jet pack!








Images taken from the 1968 edition of Childcraft : The How and Why Library published Fields Enterprises Educational Corporation.

Newsflash: Harmony is no longer blogging

Harmony's Singing in the Shower blog is no longer. I was about to comment on her latest posting -- basically to tell her that she's hot -- when I was shocked to discover that the blog was no longer there. I emailed her immediately, and here is her email response:

From: Harmony
To: Aggie
Sent: October 18, midnight

Subject: Re: Where the hell is your blog?

Thanks for noticing!

I deleted it.

Various reasons, none important, but I was about done with it, as I was with my cell phone about 6 months ago...

I'm now Facebook free, cell-free, blog-free, and if i had my druthers, internet-free..

---------------------------------------------------
I mean, did she think about maybe taking a little break? Or, maybe doing a little non-blogging experiment? I don't know anyone who has deleted her blog....Ok, maybe just one...
Anyway, I have offered to blog about her non-blogging, and she seems ok with this idea. I'm happy for her. She's free now. I'm still shackled and chained.

Rogers or Bell?

Discuss.

Saving trees with Larry

So it seems that His Nibs Larry "Potatoes" O'Brien has concocted a new crackpot scheme, ummmm, visionary idea to try and make up the potential loss of that pesky, $2 billion Siemens AG lawsuit, hanging there since he led the charge to scotch Ottawa's original light rail project.

This one involves making city council meetings paperless, which if my pointy ears didn't mislead me on this morning's newscast, hizzoner estimates will save $150,000 and a couple-hundred-odd trees a year. Wonder where those certified-accurate figures might've come from? I digress. Again. Never mind. Now, our very own Woodsy and her tree fairy friends are safe. Our mayor is so green... and technology is always good. In the incomprehensible words of business geeks everywhere, it's a win-win-win!

Or is it? I really hate to rain on the parade of progress, but according to CBC,

"The paper documents would need to be replaced by computers and other equipment that was expected to cost around $150,000. However, O'Brien estimated the cost would be recovered within three years from savings in printing costs."

Right, then. But, uhhhh, Larry: any LAN administrator worth his/her Algonquin College certificate will tell you that computers are full of toxic stuff. And they become obsolete and need scrapping and replacing how often ...?

For whom the Bell tolls

My cell phone conked out in the middle of a conversation today. No problem, I thought: I will use the nearby pay phone.

I inserted a quarter. The phone display told me I had a credit of 25 cents, and requested another 25 cents.

Yes, folks, it now costs 50 freakin' cents to make a pay phone call!

I understand that phone technology is still in its infancy, having only been around for a century. And that Bell Canada is a small startup with poor cash flow. And that people are always willing to shell out more for basic services because, hey, we like doing that.

But this is ridiculous. Yeah, everyone has a cell phone, yada, yada .... no, wait, not everyone does have a cell phone. And the people who don't probably don't because they can't afford one.

So how does Bell make life easier for these poor folks? By dialling up a 100 per cent increase.

Talk about a disconnect.

More than your line is dead

Message left on Chair's answering machine:

Hi, it's Mom…I tried to phone the cable company, but you know what, I think I’m gonna have to get you to do it for me because they keep saying things like "you pressed the wrong button"…I don’t understand what’s going on…and I tried and tried…and all I got was something like a zombie that was coming on…there was nobody there and they kept saying you have to do this and you have to do that…and I kept trying and I couldn’t get a person on the phone…so I’m going to need your help.

Ottawa Transit Plan B's

So it looks like Ottawa’s transit plan is about to be de-railed. Anyway, if it looks like Mayor Lex Luthor and his posse are about to fully capitulate on the whole idea of public transit, I offer the following plan B’s for consideration.

Idea#1 – Very, very, very-light rail



Did any of you ever visit Upper Canada Village as a kid? Or maybe even as an adult? It seems every year of my life between grade 2 and grade 7, our annual school trip took us to that wonderful pioneer world just off the banks of the St. Lawrence River. I hated it, of course. At the time, I wasn’t into history and found it all very boring. But the cool thing was the miniature train. I’m sure it doesn’t cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build. Once the Feds and the province back out, it may be all we can afford. On the plus side, I imagine we can build enough track to cover all major coordinates on the compass. Imagine taking the North by Northeast Line and transferring to the West by Southwest line to get from Vanier to the Airport. Cool. Of course, we would have to have mandatory tunnels on all lines to appease the coolness factor for the kids. I imagine most of the materials could be provided from a mini-putt supplier.

Idea#2 -- Everyone Loves a Parade

What is the only fun one can have while driving at 5 mph? Answer: when it’s a parade. Under this scheme we don’t do anything to the road infrastructure. Instead, the Queensway commute officially becomes a parade 5 days a week (and anytime there is a Senators home game). I’m pretty sure we can hire those Shriner guys with the go-carts for a song, and Max Keeping is probably good for a couple of shifts a week as parade marshal. Throw in a brass band and some bag-pipers and we’re all set. The Pride-Week commute alone could make it all very entertaining and enjoyable.

Idea#3 -- Return the Rideau Canal to its roots

Before pleasure boaters and skaters monopolized that swath of waterway that cuts through the city, the canal’s main purpose was for transportation (namely to by-pass hostile American waters of Loyalist times). Why not resurrect this function? I like the idea of a high-speed hydrofoil connecting the Rideau Centre to Carleton University, but that’s mostly for the selfish desire that we get a James Bond film shoot in town someday. That said, this whole scheme could be completely self-financing with the tourism spin-offs. First, we would have to dismantle the NCC seeing that they would never support anything so fun. And maybe send Randall Denley on a sabbatical. Wow. This would solve several problems in this town.

Just some ideas, City Hall, in case you're too busy figuring out how to spend your big fat raises on Christmas presents, instead of trying to run a municipality.