Friday musing: people worry about the weirdest things

I've become obsessed by spiders recently after one wove an amazing (to me) web from the Morning Glory vines that grow up my small verandah. It's hardly a new phenomenon for a human being to be overwhelmed by the magnificence of a spider's web but consider me now among the absolutely besotted. My prior fascination was largely confined to watching Daddy Long Legs as a kid on summer days. I don't know what kind of spider this is, although the web is definitely a spiral orb web that glitters in the sun, and my spider's favorite position is at the very centre of her creation. I'm now spending my evenings examing photos of spiders, finding out how long they live, when they lay eggs, etc. etc. Is the weaving all left to females? I hope my buddy won't leave anytime soon and has a plan for survival once the frost hits. If I can get a decent photo over the next few days, I'll post it for arachnophiles out there so you can tell me what it is. (So far, I'm only getting a hazy blob, so don't hold your breath.)

I'm knocked out by what appears to be the No. 1 concern among people who research spiders on the web:

Do they lay eggs in the human body?

Whaaa-aaa-aaa????!!!? Of all the things I worry about in life, that fear somehow has eluded my list. But if I start now, I bet I could imagine all kinds of gruesome scenarios. It's not too late.

Apparently they don't.

Mayor Miller: TTC safe, well except for shootings

VINCE TALOTTA/TORONTO STAR

Toronto Police look for the suspects after the shooting of a teen on an Ossington bus Feb. 23.

Say What? In this category, Toronto Mayor David Miller takes the prize today. It's been a little nerve-wracking for riders of the Toronto transit system recently, what with a man pushing two teenagers into the path of an oncoming subway train and a shooting at a downtown station recently. Thankfully, nobody died. Yesterday, after a Wild West fight on the Ossington Street bus, complete with the shooting and pistol whipping of a teenager in the bus by at least two men, followed by another shot being fired in the residential street, the mayor described the TTC as "exceptionally safe."

Relatively speaking.

* * *

When Finance Minister Jim Flaherty talks do the banks listen?

Let's say not. Since last fall, the finance minister has been spending money on Canadian banks with the express purpose of encouraging them to open up the credit strings and lend to businesses and consumers struggling to survive this recession. Each time he spends money, as with a couple of chunks last fall totalling $75 billion, Flaherty makes it clear what the government hopes the bank will do.  Loosen up!

Again yesterday, however, Flaherty said it's tough because the very consumers and businesses he's been trying to help still have trouble borrowing money. "Even in Canada we have some credit restrictions now," said Flaherty, adding the banks are lending but being "cautious." He urged the banks to do more to ease restrictions on credit.

Wouldn't it have been a better idea to make taxpayer money available to the banks on the condition they lend money to, ah taxpayers? Just a thought. So sad to see the finance minister beg.

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Don't worry: likelihood of two ballistic-missle submarines colliding is slim

Military experts in Britain and France told Pulitzer prize-winning NYT correspondent John F. Burns the chance of a collision of submarines carrying nuclear-weapons is "a million to one."

Boy, lucky the odds aren't, say, 999,999 to one or there would be crashes every other day.

Why do the experts always say things like that after, the odds are just met? In this case, two submarines carrying nuclear weapons, one British, the other French, actually did collide in the middle of the Atlantic? Or somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean. A terrific reporter like Burns wouldn't leave it there, however, noting in his report:

"But military experts said the episode raised troubling questions about the safety of ballistic-missle submarines patrolling the ocean while hiding their whereabouts even from NATO allies."

I'll say.

* * *

GM and their retired workforce

The latest forecasts look dire, I know: GM will have to cut 47,000 jobs.

Like everybody else, that recent headline on the Toronto Star website gives me chills. The only thing that isn't horrible about the story is  there's no mention of cutting retiree benefits in this latest leak about the contents of GM's economic plan for the Obama administration.

Probably that shoe will drop too.

To penalize retired workers who laboured for years - sometimes for the better part of a lifetime - for a company, only to have their benefits slashed when they are older and less able to fight back is  unconscionable. In weekend reports about GM's pending plan, officials close to the talks suggested just such cuts are in the works (as well as slashing jobs).

We'll know soon enough exactly what GM is proposing, but hitting seniors is the lowest of the low - especially when I doubt all the best perks will be taken from executives at the top of the GM food chain. After all, they only sidelined their private jets after everybody started talking about how Big 3 corporate types flew them to Washington to plead with Congress for a bailout. Tacky, tacky.

(BTW, I don't really think the best solution for the Big Three would be to euthanize their retired work force as a recent Political Decoder  bit of satire suggested. I must say it was a shock to see some readers took it literally. Wouldn't that make me a rather nasty piece of work?)

A parable for a modern-day Scrooge

Okay, this is just my opinion, and it's not going to happen, but . . .

 Wouldn't it be nice if people suddenly had great flashes of insight into their behavior and acted upon it? Say somebody who'd made huge piles of money through actions that lost people their jobs.

 Robert Milton, for example. The chair of ACE holdings, Air Canada's parent, has no qualms about trumpeting his ruthlessness in having stripped the airline and other ACE holdings.  Milton said recently: "The parts of the airline were worth more than an airline would ever be."

 So there. Tish-tosh. Laid-off workers, lost homes, fear, uncertainty and dread. Not his problem. He's made a fortune, scooping up $43 million in salary and stock options in 2007, and is in line to receive another $10 million when ACE winds down this year. He's off to live in the U.K. when ACE winds down later this year.

 But, imagine - just imagine - he has a Eureka! moment. Snug in his bed and about to drift off, Milton sees a vision of the long line of former Air Canada employees snaking around the block in front of a food bank. He sees a little boy on crutches with one woman. 

 At that very moment, he suddenly thinks: "Hey, I don't need millions and millions of dollars for myself. I think I'm taking too much. Something is way out of whack here, and I'm going to fix it."

 From the next morning, like a modern-day Scrooge, Robert Milton made his life about giving back. And one day, well in the future,  Air Canada employees would speak with love and respect of their patron saint, Robert Milton. Pilots would stick small portraits of him in the cockpit to give them courage and hope, and Canadian airline passengers, enjoying the best service in the world, would bless the day he joined the Air Canada team.

Pay equity scorecard: Obama, 1; Harper, 0.

Two weeks into the job, and President Barack Obama signs pay equity legislation for federal service workers. Not bad. This new administration seems to frown on discrimination, and paying women less than men for the same job certainly qualifies.

What a coincidence. The Canadian government acted on pay equity legislation in the same week. But what did Prime Minister Stephen Harper do?  He signed off on a budget that promises to introduce legislation that removes the right to go to court over pay inequity and makes the matter of lower pay a matter for collective bargaining with public service unions.  Another swipe at women.

It was doubly disappointing because the Public Service Alliance of Canada worked hard to make its position known to the government. In November, PSAC national president John Gordon met to discuss the issue with John Baird, minister of transport, infrastructure and communities. He then followed up in a letter, obtained by the Decoder, that stresses the importance of levelling the playing field.  He noted the PSAC is pleased the government is "committed to pay equity" - a view he mistakenly got when he met Baird face-to-face. Wrote Gordon:

 "As pay equity is a fundamental human right, it cannot be negotiable. . . Pay equity must not be subject to bargaining table pressure tactics which might result in pay equity obligations being used as a means of extracting concessions or avoiding agreement on wage-related bargaining issues.

 "Pay equity is a systemic remedy to systemic, historical and persistent wage discrimination. The federal government should be a lead employer in implementing equal pay for work that has been empirically demonstrated 'of equal value' - and not rely on the value the market may attribute to the work."

Gordon stressed his willingness to meet again with Baird, concluding that "getting it right is in the interests of all Canadians, including the thousands of federal workers who serve the Canadian public and who deserve to be paid fairly."

Nice idea, but no go. Looks like Baird dropped the letter in File 13.

* * *

Fight all you want, just keep your hockey helmets on

Oh, this makes sense. I see the Ontario Hockey League (OHL) has ruled hockey players involved in fights must keep their helmets on, with chin straps done up, or face misconduct penalties.

Say what?

I'm far from the first hockey fan to point out the lunacy of this approach. What about banning fighting. I mean, for real, with serious  enforcement. I'm tired of hearing all that blather about the game not being the same without the blood-letting. It's the Canadian way, yada, yada.

Didn't we just watch outstanding hockey in the World Juniors without fighting?

* * *

(Today is end-of-the-week, no visuals odds and sods day. Bet you'd figured that out.)

- It's refreshing to see the word "hero" properly applied for a change. It's become a hackneyed term in our society - okay, with the media being  the biggest collective culprit.  Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger, the pilot who eased US Airways flight 1594 into a crash landing on the Hudson River yesterday - without losing any of the 155 souls on board - deserves the term. His co-pilot Jeff Skiles didn't do too badly either. I'd want to see either in the cockpit of a plane I'm on.

- Still reeling from that incident before Christmas when passengers sat in an Air Canada plane on the runway in Vancouver for 12 hours. Correcto,12 hours. It's too early to see what the fallout will be (a class action suit perhaps?), but if you are going to treat people so cavalierly in any country, doncha thinks Canadians would rank pretty high on the "we can get away with it" list? 

Hinterland Who's Who: Canucks are a polite and docile folk (except when playing hockey; see above) who live in northern climes and enjoy square dancing and sugar pie. 

- A website courtesy of my web surfer friend Lynne. Human rights, gender issues, all that jazz. . .

Have a great weekend!

Feed recalled meat to animals? Oh, that makes sense

Be reassured people. Everything is under control in the aftermath of the tainted meat scandal.

Paul Mayers, a senior manager at the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, says some of the recalled meat might be fed to animals. "I'm not suggesting that that is an option in this case. When product is recalled, then a range of options can be employed," he said, including destruction. However, he added:

"Product may go to rendering ... and through rendering, then that product can be reworked, the listeria would be destroyed and that product could then be used in the production of animal feed provided that the product meets our requirements."

Hmmmm. Feeding rendered meat to animals. Haven't we heard something about that before? Didn't I get on a plane to go to Alberta to cover BSE in that province? Or is mad cow disease no longer associated with animals eating animals?

I'm probably not the only one scratching my head in the fallout of the listeriosis outbreak. So many lapses in logic. It would be almost comical if people weren't dying and getting sick and families not worried about feeding children.

I could swear I heard Maple Leaf Foods spokesperson Linda Smith saying Maple Leaf Foods found positive swabs for listeria in their Toronto plant earlier in the summer, but that samples tested negative after the area had been thoroughly sanitized. So tell me why wasn't there a recall then? Is it because "positive results for listeria inside a food plant" are common? That's what CEO Michael McCain told reporters at yesterday's press conference, simultaneously declining to give details on listeria having been found at the Toronto plant. He did stress, however, that nothing was found "out of the norm" prior to the outbreak.

He's apologized and taken the blame for Maple Leaf, insisting it wasn't the fault of federal or provincial inspectors. A cynic might attribute that seemingly noble approach to a desire to avoid even further costly and time-consuming inspection hassles in future. But let's not be cynical.

If McCain won't give details on listeria swabs and won't say there should have been a recall, what is it exactly he's taking blame for? He said regulators weren't to blame, but stressed they were made aware of all test results and procedures at the Toronto plant. That seems to shift responsibility back to the regulators. What should Maple Leaf have done? McCain says it's hopeless to test all the meat:

"If you had a box of cereal and you took one tablespoon of cereal out of that box you would more than likely get a negative result, even though a bacteria may exist at the bottom of the box," he said. "It's like looking for a needles in a hay stack."

Where does that leave us? You can't test all the meat but apparently it's not reliable to test the environment at the plant either because positive results are common. Bummer. Overall, McCain seems to be moving to the maybe-we'll-never-know approach.

If they can't do better than that, maybe the public should take the maybe-we'll-never-eat-processed-meat approach.

A postcript: McCain swears he's not, but it sure sounds as if he's listening to lawyers. Or am I being too cynical?

Nude blonde at the gas station with Ferrari (with PHOTOS)

REUTERS

A customer to remember

A sleepy summer Monday so let's spice things up with some recent stories from the online English edition of Pravda. Once the go-to house organ of the Communist Party in the USSR, Pravda (at least online) has shifted from lengthy columns on wheat yields and five-year economic plans to steamier fare. "With photos," blared a recent story about a naked blonde in East Germany who visited a gas station wearing only stilettos, a thin, gold bracelet and a large tattoo on her back. (More we couldn't see.) She was in a Ferrari. Of course. Ever conscious of my readers, I helpfully provided a link to the story and a couple of photos.

Maybe it's not so far-fetched for Russia, given the country pioneered nude newscasters — with nude guests — an idea that proved ahead of its time.

Pravda has more, much more. To coincide with a recent visit to Moscow by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Pravda offered a scintillating report on marital difficulties between George and Laura Bush.

GRAIN OF SALT ALERT: Seems the first couple is divorcing after the next election because of George W.'s relationship with his secretary of state. Details include an alleged $20 million payoff to Laura Bush and a recent Freudian slip in which Rice started to refer to George W. as "my hus-" before snapping into "the president." If you're wondering why we haven't been reading all this in the mainstream press, the Pravda stories slips in, almost as an aside, that the source is the National Enquirer. Oh. Unassailable.

Other must-reads include:

• Muscular bronze stallion with weird human genitalia advertises provincial hotel
• I struggled for years with a fat belly, until I found this 1 secret.
• Crazy, wealthy Russians will soon purchase the whole of the French Riviera
• Another US family kills another baby adopted from Russia

Some may have a grain of truth, but the spin. Wowee!

Naturally, your faithful blogger doesn't read this kind of drivel. I must excuse myself and point the finger at the person who tipped me off to the Pravda site: Toronto musician, artist and Internet trawler, the very talented Steve Castellano. He has a number of interesting gigs going these days, including the recent launch of a jazzy, intellectually-bent podcast with a late-night feel. He promises his second post (maybe today) will have his entry to the CBC's search for a new Hockey Night in Canada theme.

Steve (who I must disclose is a pal) also has a cool website with existential feline cartoons. Really.

He's no John Lennon

CP PHOTO

Sir P earlier this year

What fun it is when Sir Paul McCartney talks about Canada and gets all muddled up in our exotic and complicated customs. Former colonies can be soooooo tricky.

Sir Paul once gave Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams the thrill of a lifetime. On TV. During a debate between the pair over sealing (Willians for, Sir P against) on CNN' Larry King Live, Sir Paul declared he was in Newfoundland.

"No, you're not," replied Williams. "You're in Prince Edward Island."

Never mind.

A series of photographs chronicling the gaffe hang in a place of honour in the premier's office in St. John's.

Sir Paul is coming to Quebec and that's drawn the ire of nationalists. How can he celebrate Quebec's 400th anniversary when his songs have English lyrics? (Hey, what about Michelle? That's a French name.)

In a couple of interviews before his trans-Atlantic flight, Sir Paul, who didn't reveal what he was smoking, advised "Quebeckians" to smoke "the pipes of peace."

To be entirely accurate, he said: "Come on Quebeckians, love me, baby."

John Lennon: Imagine

Paul McCartney: Love me, baby

Oh, and Sir Paul kicked off his comments with the proviso: "I hate to go off half-baked."

Hohohohohohohohohohohoho

Sir Paul performs Sunday in a concert on the Plains of Abraham. Maybe he can be persuaded Quebeckians would just love to see him dressed up for a lark as Gen. James Wolfe.

That's the ticket.

(Kidding, kidding)

Dogs die but nothing to do with off-leash debate - okay, sure

What is it with these City employees? Happy pills?

Twice this week, they've searched for that single, fragile thread of cock-eyed optimism where others see unpleasant reality.

Two dogs died and four others are sick after drinking antifreeze in High Park. Police suspect the poisonings are related to controversy over the Dog Hill off-leash area. Take it out on innocent animals, why don't you?

But as Nick Kyonka reports in today's Star, a top park official sees no connection whatsoever. According to the analysis of Robin Sorys, chair of the park's advisory committee:

"I think this is just an isolated situation. It just happened to come at a time when we were reviewing the off-leash area."

Say what?

And here's more reason not to worry: TTC streetcars are safe, as long as they don't jump the tracks.

Over the past 10 days, four people were hospitalized after one streetcar rear-ended another on the Queensway, and another seven were off to hospital, including the driver, when another two cars collided at Bay and Dundas, knocking one off the track.

A Prithi Yelaja Star story says TTC chair Adam Giambrone isn't overly worried because they didn't jump the tracks. That's a relief. Toronto has the best tracks in the world. Giambrone could get worried, but not now:

"If we get another two in the next two weeks then we begin to say at what point is it coincidence and at what point do you have a big problem?

So two, no problem. Four, a big problem.

Maybe it's just me, but what if there's a problem now?

And what about not pointing an easy finger of blame at the drivers? As in Giambrone's "these cases usually come down to driver error."

GM: kinda, maybe, sorta - but not really the d-word

In our continuing series on semantics. . .

General Motors workers lifted their blockade of company headquarters in Oshawa early this morning as instructed by the court. However, in his ruling last Friday, Mr. Justice David Salmers of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice noted GM's parent in Detroit had shown "deceit-like behaviour" in announcing the shutdown of its truck plant two weeks after its Canadian negotiators signed a three-year contract with the union.

The judge also used the term, "almost deceitful business practice."

If a reporter were to hand in copy using terms like, "almost deceitful" and "deceit-like," an editor would demand: "Is it deceitful or not deceitful? Say what you mean. Help our readers out, why don't you?"

Maybe not quite in that language.

Of course, if it's in quotes, editors don't do that. They just shake their heads.

We understand the language of the law is fraught with connotations and consequences, potentially expensive consequences, beyond the ken of the layperson.

Let's just have a collective head shake, shall we?

Say What?

In the say-that-again category, let's review Chuck Strahl's recent comments on Attawapiskat. The Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development met with children from the James Bay community last week and listened to first-hand reports of problems at their elementary "school." One uses the term judiciously because it evokes images of noisy children running into real buildings, books stuffed into backpacks. It doesn't quite suit 8 portables for 400 children, with doors and windows that don't seal, a single bathroom inside a classroom and kids getting sick because they've got to dash from portable to portable in the snow.

"We keep getting sick," Shannen Koostachin, 13 and in Grade 8, said in an interview.

"(The portables) are not a health and safety issue," the Conservative minister later insisted to reporters. As he told the children in his office, he's seen worse.

Strahl said he has 40-plus First Nations in his own Fraser Valley riding in B.C., and "just because they're in my riding, I can't make them a priority."

He concluded: "The facilities in Attawapiskat (are) not as high up as some unfortunate schools that are in worse shape."

Oh, okay. Sounds like a reason to me.

But here's a crazy thought. The preliminary federal surplus projected for 2008-2009 is $10.2 billion. It's wild, but any chance some of that money could fix First Nations schools for children whose futures are held so publicly dear by politicians?