I don't get paid enough to create Google poems

* I don't get paid enough to deal with this guy!

* I don't get paid enough to fix it.

* I don't get paid enough to do this job

* I don't get paid enough to potentially get blown up by an IED and be away from my family for a year ($2250/mth right now), but I do it anyway.

* I Don't Get Paid Enough To Blog (2), I should know better then to do meta

* I don't get paid enough to even consider it.

* I don't get paid enough to explain this, but I promise twenty, thirty or fifty years from now, a house bought will be worth more than you paid for it today. You'd have to be stupid as a zombie to keep paying rent...

* I don't get paid enough to kiss your a**!

*You ruffle too many feathers, and at the moment I don't get paid enough to handle the stress of that kind of feather-ruffling on my front page with my name over the top of it.

* I would definitely take my tantrums elsewhere, but I don't get paid enough to.

* I don't get paid enough to be abused.

* I don't get paid enough to put up with the crap that people are giving me.

* I don't get PAID enough to spend as much time as you do here.

*I don't get paid enough to put up with a toddler that gives me bruises and bites the hell out of me every time he gets put in time out.

* personally, I don't get paid enough to be a judge for everyone in the blogosphere.

* I don't get paid enough to touch used panties, and I won't do it.

* I don't get paid enough to live in fear of being hacked by my fellow co-workers.

* I don't get paid enough to think.

The colour of poppies

A day or two ago, one of this city's newspapers rapped a local peace group's white poppy campaign for civilian war dead, disparaging it as "a bunch of hippies giving big group hug (sic) and hoping for peace." Editorial reaction elsewhere is nearly as churlish, leaning toward telling "the peaceniks" to butt out of the official red poppy drive. The Royal Canadian Legion is unamused. It apparently has the poppy copyrighted. And maybe poppyrighted.

One can find an individual veteran or two who sees nothing wrong with the idea, but most news seems to hold crankier quotes, working up a fine lather in the week before Remembrance Day. Discourse in this country has gotten impolite everywhere, not just in that asylum on the hill.

Canada's last veteran from that long-ago unpleasantness just died recently, but when I was a slightly younger coyote, there were still any number of people who had served in the First World War, living their lives. They dwelt on future walkers, wheelchairs and care homes rarely, if at all.

One, whom I happened across quite often as he hiked in the foothills near Calgary, was one of the most pacific men I have ever met. I don't think he ever raised his voice about anything. I do not recall that he spoke about his part in that conflict, either, except to mention that he'd spent two years at a sanitarium in southern Ontario, recovering from tuberculosis after the war ended. He also mentioned humourously, in passing, exactly once, how he and other soldiers in the trenches would amuse themselves holding cootie derbies and laying penny bets, after picking lice off of themselves to race up broomstraws. There wasn't much else amusing going on, obviously. He never spoke of war otherwise, and when others did around him, a quietly pained expression crossed his usually-happy face.

He always kept a red-flocked paper poppy pinned to the lapel of his topcoat. I, being a coyote, did not trouble myself as to why. But one who knew him told me he felt bound to honour his old comrades beyond November 11. And in the way it has with semimythical coyotes, the west wind told me even later that he had been invalided out of the trenches of northern Europe just at the end of the last miserable winter before the Battle of Passchendaele.

There's not much more to go on but supposition. But I think he may have been - by the simple good luck of nearly dying from tuberculosis at the right time - one of the few in his regiment to live after the generals ran it into the machine guns. And that he wanted, as long as he could, to carry the standard of their memory. On the unspoken evidence, he seemed to value civilian lives just as highly as military ones. I think he approved highly of peace. I rather suspect he would see no difference between white poppies and red ones. But then, we dogs are colourblind...

Maman walks The Line

You have no doubt heard news of the National Gallery's new acquisition, One Hundred Foot Line, planted of late on the foothills of Nepean Point.

I understand that, nominally, it represents a bare, limbless tree. With the right lighting (read: "brooding and dramatic") it's pretty spectacular. It is a tall pointy metal stick to be reckoned with, but not for wimpy, mild cirrus-cloud summer days. Yet I was also kinda jealous when the guys over at OttawaStart.com came up with the line: "A huge monument to sticking your tongue to a cold pole."

The other day, after each of us had wandered down serially to look up (waaaaaay up...) at it, Robin K. from Watawa Life and me had a lengthy philosophical discussion about the phenomenological and epistemological implications of really humongous public art.

Long story short, Robin said he still far preferred Maman, out front. He's cooler on stainless steel toothpicks. Or in his words, "Who wouldn't like a statue of a giant spider?"

About then, some semimythical idiot piped up thoughtlessly, "...but has no one considered how cool it would look if Maman was climbing that steel tree? Epic, in a King Kong on the Empire State Building kinda way! But more spidery and metallic…!"

It was at that fateful point that Robin fatefully uttered the fateful words: "Agreed! Send her up."

Genius.

About last night....

That'll do. As you were.

Vote. Just vote.

Y'know, it's been a long four years. You'd never realize it from reading all the crap I've posted here, but us coyotes hate blogging politics.

Unlike the mayor himself, who somehow always manages to word things so that he squirms away from taking any actual responsibility for anything negative that occurs on his watch, I blame Larry O'Brien. He has been so egregiously bad that something hadda be said.

Being a yapper, I said it. Now I'm nearly hoarse. Well actually, I'm still a coyote. For those among you who are not trained aesthetes, horses are bigger 'n dumber, kick ya in the slats when offended, and have way less awesome ears than coyotes. But I digress.

All I really want to say here is that Monday is municipal election day in Ontario. I really don't even care who the hell you vote for. Just vote. Because the way it's supposed to work is that the more people participate, the more representative are the decisions they make. Theoretically. If some schmucks happen to be elected - and schmucks very likely will be elected - at least they will represent everybody.

Tomorrow. Just vote. You'll make a very old, hoarse semimythical coyote very happy. I'm pretty sure after tomorrow I can finally shut the hell up about egregiously bad mayors and get back to my true calling: bloggin' mumumelons. Chasing your cat. Stuff that matters. It's time.

Lawn sign credit: firelarryobrien.com. In no way affiliated with the Elgin Street Irregulars, but some of us like their style.