Sounds of summer

Casa Coyote's entrance is beneath a fencepost right where four downtown highrise properties meet. This, felicitously, means that if the relevant property management companies ever notice, they're gonna have trouble agreeing on the legalities of eviction. They hate each other. And I'm proactively lawyered-up... but I digress, already. Possibly a speed record, even for me. And I just digressed, there, again. Dammit, this isn't starting well.

No, this screed's subject is, ummm, green yard care companies. Four property managers, so four contractors. What they have in common besides motley fleets of green trucks full of implements, is what looks to dumb coyotes to be a fanatical hatred of actual plants.

Anything green that isn't a truck disturbs 'em. They assault quiet with fanatical will. Platoons of beefy college and university students are their foot soldiers. Ill-muffled chainsaws, chemical sprayers, lawn mowers, edgers, hedge cutters, sweepers and blowers are their weapons. Based on the number of noisy, reeking little two-stroke motors alone, it's safe to say that they don't really like nature much. It's stunning the environmental damage one motor of a couple of tablespoons' displacement can spew in a few minutes. You could look it up. These guys have full-on arsenals. The irony of them purporting to be green-care gardeners is not lost on me.

Spring's opening attack is to serially butcher trees on the property lines from all directions, chainsawing potential overhangs until any hint of shade is gone. I'm pretty sure they're paid by the pound, because all of 'em buzz and chip trees regardless of whether they've already been ummm, pruned by their brothers in arms.

Then they gear up for summer: serial waves of earmuffed infantry hit the different properties, spraying noxious-smelling stuff, cutting, and blowing up a storm. They leave lawns no nappier than pool tables. They force shrubs into smooth lollipop shapes. And interestingly, they lavish more love on parking lots than they do on herbiage. Complete pressure-washing after winter, weekly sweeping, vacuuming and blowing through the high season to make sure not a pebble, grass or hedge clipping mars the hot asphalt.

I imagine someone thinks they make things look nice, but the constant noise and the half-burnt petroleum and dust that hang in the air throughout the summer kinda belie this.

Now, ya don't have to be a coyote to know that cities are about noise. And crap. Wake up any weekday before 6 a.m. to swivel your (pointy) ears, and you'll hear Ottawa's duller overnight hum crescendo to a full-blown roar by no later than 6:30. It's what cities do. But if each of these allegedly green companies have to issue their foot-troops with earmuffs to keep 'em from damaging their hearing, waddaya think it does to nearby denizens of high-rise condos - and low-rise dens - who hear all of 'em? And who are left to suck up the smog that squelches any nostalgic aroma of new-mown lawn?

I'm just sayin'...

Will we be truly a-maze-d?

The Brits have a penchant for misnomers. There are no juggling clowns at Piccadilly Circus. Nor any wrought iron at Notting Hill Gate.

In true colonial fashion, same thing with Lansdowne Park. No green to be seen, unless you count the astroturf or the crisp market veggies that appear in warmer months.

So why not a hedge maze to enliven the redevelopment of Lansdowne, make it a genuine wow-factor magnet and put some actual park in the ol' parking lot?

We could even give the verdant passages homey names like the Larry O'Brien Logic Loop and The Zoning Bylaw Biway. Of course, we'd save a special moniker for the most tricky, dense and confusing lanes: The Light Rail Rigamarole.

Cabbages and kings

Even a casual flip through the collected history of Canada's prime ministers makes it evident that almost the entire lot have been kinda cranky, whatever their public personae. And even a casual flip through the Oxford Big Word Thingy, Canine Edition, shows that we coyotes define "kinda cranky" as, pretty much,"venal, manipulative, backstabbing sonsabitches".

Protestations of the heartwarming benefits of public service aside, I'm not sure what drives people to seek the job. Lately politicians score somewhat below coyotes on measures of public trust. And as long as I'm bloggin', I'll be doing everything I can to keep it that way... I digress. And you're shocked, shocked, I know.

If you know this blog at all, right now you're prolly asking, "Coyote, if they're all kinda cranky, why do you dislike this one, so?" Good question.

I think it might be his attitude. People who are as sure of themselves as Stephen Harper appears to be, seem to me to be lacking a vital bit of humanity. Questioning oneself is a good thing. And in most democracies, compromise, however abhorrent it is to any one high-rankin' individual, pleases more people than does dictatorship by fiat.

A year ago, as the prime minister spouted patent nonsense about coalition governments being unconstitutional, I thought he was just spinning his sound bites for - how to state this delicately? - the dumbshits in his voter base. The ones who get wa-a-a-y too much of their cable edjumafication about government on Foxic News. How could he believe that crap?

Lately, I reach toward a darker thought. That maybe he really is the same kinda dumbshit as his voter base. That he does believe that crap. Maybe in Harper's mind, his election magically turned the prime ministership into an American-style imperial presidency and gave him a rather startling range of powers. Many of which never were foreseen by guys who actually, you know, crafted parliamentary government over the past few hundred years.

So, what if he thinks this makes him a law unto himself and dares the opposition to do anything about it? Well. If ya wanna look back past Canada's parliamentary history, even a, ummm, casual flip through Britain's history suggests that guys who tried to screw over the ascendancy of parliament did not end well.

But hey. If, in deference to the PM's tender feelings, we were to use an American example, the president who most epitomized this kinda thinking was ummm, Dick Nixon. Dear me. That did not end well, either...

Difficult as the concept seems to be for him, personally, the PM may wish to study compromise. It might be on the final exam.

999 Posts Later...

...do you love us just the same?

And I thought there was no 5th anniversary.

Coyote injures nose