What's My Sign?

After the city's long recovery from "Technically Beautiful" (rightly) being laughed out of the park a decade back, Ottawa's National Capital Commission is again on the hunt for a new city slogan. Ummm, an official one.

The old one, you will recall, left itself hanging wide open to the fair and obvious question, "If you're only technically beautiful, what are you, really?"

After that fail - the poor thing only absorbed about four months' hooting before it crawled, whimpering, battered and bloody, into a dumpster - the NCC's committee thumbsuck will, no doubt, be epic.

The Petfinder's business columnist sees this as a problem. He's probably right. First, because these guys are mostly business-oriented, and figure the slogan to attract business. Yawn! Second, committees above a certain size - and you can count on this committee being above a certain size - level creativity into radioactive wastelands anyway. Members fancy themselves creative with a certainty that, mathematically, works out to be the inverse of their actual abilities. Cubed.

Oh, they consult. They collect options. Then one of a couple of things happens: One is that they each champion something different. In the inevitable verbal brawls, some peacemaker suggests that fatal word, "compromise", so they take what looks like a promising slogan, and keep grafting on bits of other, lamer, ones until the thing is DOA. But everybody on the committee can boast about their "important input". The other is that they quickly, ecstatically agree on the absolute lamest option, then skeeve off to Hy's for celebratory expense-account triple scotches.

On that note, I want y'all to know that us coyotes are creative. With a certainty that, mathematically, works out to be the inverse of our actual abilities. Cubed. And our fave slogans are, in no particular order:

• Ottawa: Funner Than Stephen Harper's Sex Life!
• Ottawa: Not Enough Porta-Potties on Canada Day!
• Ottawa: Not Fucking Toronto!

But our committee is soliciting as many other options - with exclamation points to punch 'em up - as possible. Triples all 'round!

Dispatch from the culture wars

I tried to file this post earlier, but all the boomtastic artillery barrages convinced me to hunker in the trenches awhile and picnic on delicious, delicious Spam instead. We coyotes like our bushy tails (and their attached asses) and are not above saving 'em by sittin' on 'em... I digress. It's a trademark. Deal with it.

Anyway, the big guns wheeled out a couple weeks back when an independent pollster interviewed on CBC was asked what he'd advise the Liberals to do in the face of recent government actions. He dropped the catchy soundbite, "Culture War!"

Conservative reaction was a collective howl to lynch - well, really, anybody not conservative - for even bringing the idea up.

Not long after, a conservative senator felt the need to tell pro-choice aid organizations to, quote, "Shut the fuck up" before they lose (even more) government support. Meanwhile, others in another quarter felt no such need for prudent silence - they held a big anti-abortion rally on Parliament Hill.

In the followup sideshow, CBC struck a panel to investigate itself for anti-Tory bias. This although pretty much every major private electronic and print media chain is currently held by proprietors much more conservative than not.

This speaks to semi-mythical coyotes of the onset, proper, of witch hunting season in the hamlet of Ottawa. The PM's backlog of spite and venge, and his unusual enthusiasm for blunt instruments wielded fast and capriciously, has a lot of semi-important, formerly semi-independent, people in this hamlet cowed. The truth of what "arms-length body" actually means in the face of a determined attack is sinkin' in.

Social conservatives everywhere seem to have gained a grandiose sense of aggrieved entitlement to an unbalanced concept of redress. Even in power, they plead that they're victims. The cognitive dissonance must be truly crippling.

But us coyotes, even with our semi-mythical tin hats jammed firmly down, don't have any trouble seeing who's pulling the firing lanyards on the heaviest cultural artillery in a generation. It really does look like a cultural war from out here in the trenches - just not the quite the one toward which the party in near-power is trying to misdirect your attention. It is well to remember that no matter how big the lie gets, ya gotta always pay attention to that guy behind the curtain... and not shut the fuck up about it.

It's time for a Google Poem!

* It's time for some planning

* It's time for regions in Nova Scotia to actively promote what they have to the world.

* It's time for a little intelligent dialogue.

* It's time for Change!!!!!!!

* It's time for the Jewish community to put farber out to pasture and consolidate his organization into another usually more sane voice like B'nai Brith.

* it's time for dinner

* it's time for the Astros to stage a revival.

* It's time for the city to be fully transparent on our tax increases, explain why they're going up, and seek public input on how to rein in spending and expenses.

* Now, it's time for him to stand up and really be a contributor.

* Perhaps it's time for us to swallow our collective pride, and give the guy a decent second chance.

* It's time for Chicago's establishments to step up on behalf of the Bulls.

* And now....., it's time for some damned lies.

* It's time for everyone to help out in its time of need.

* It's Wednesday, so it's time for the Wednesday Minute

* With the US soccer roster named, it's time for Coach Bradley to get to work.

* It's time for Soderling and Roddick to make a move.

* Although most of the Devil's long time veterans still have a good number of years left in them, I think it's time for certain players to move on.

* It's time for Tiger to “lawyer up.”

* It's time for me to scare you.

* it's time for me to log off for a bit.

* After two lovely, if ordinary performances, it's time for Crystal to go big again.

* It's time for REAL CHANGE!

* Maybe one smoke before it's time for me to go?

* It's time for your yearly Comcast Project Infinity video on-demand update

* Hank Haney says in a statement to the Golf Channel that he enjoyed working with Woods but he thinks it's time for him to step aside as his coach.

* It's time for Jewish leaders in Israel, America, and around the world to grapple with the difficult truths of Israel's occupation and its treatment of the Palestinian people

* It's time for President Obama to lead on clean

* It's time for our weekly baseball picks for online MLB betting action.

* it's time for that attitude to change

* It's time for cycling accidents in Ottawa.

* It's time for The Insider's Best and Worst celebs for Tuesday!

* Facebook's Gone Rogue; It's Time for an Open Alternative

* it's time for new window displays!

* it's time for the government to act

* Tired of the run around, maybe it's time for the BBB.

* It's time for war

* Panasonic's KX-TG9300 series DECT phones also boast a talking alarm clock that will tell you when it's time for lunch

* It's time for a little '90s anime nostalgia!

* Now it's time for relaxation. Lie on your back and bring your feet together. Allow your knees to splay apart. You can also extend your legs and come into corpse pose

[Source]

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.