September 2010 Archives

The world is flush with bad ideas.  'Course a bad idea to me may be a great idea to you.  We can agree to disagree which some people think is a bad idea.  Personally I think it's a good idea as long as we can respect each other's point of view.

Now a couple of what I think are bad ideas have reared their less than attractive noggins the last little while.  The first is the talk that the federal government is prepared to ante up 175 million dollars to help build a new arena in Quebec City.  So why am I suffering from arena anxiety?  Well, we seem to be creeping up on a federal election.  The ruling Conservatives whould would like to make a dent in the francophone side of our 2 solitudes.  What better way than to offer a perk at the polls giving the hockey mad habitants false hope that the NHL might return to the city it spurned years ago. 

175 million for an arena to accomodate athletes who make more in a year than the people picking up the tax tab can hope to make in a life time.  Hardly seems fair does it?  If we were in a boom ecomony, okay let's ponder a puck palace.  But we're not.  The economy is troubled.  In the grand scheme 175 million may not seem much.  But 175 mill is a leery theory when we have record numbers of people on unemployment, welfare and using foodbanks.  Right now we can't afford it.

In Toronto there's a bit of tiff (not the film festival) over a proposed metal palm tree that's in the plans to go up in a mid-town park.  Price tag?  120 thousand.  This is another bad idea.  If you want to put up a 120 grand metal palm on your front lawn then go coconuts.  It's your money, you earned it, you can waste it. But this is tax money.  Again in better times I wouldn't be arguing this.  What troubles me is that the politicians who are willing to write the check are responsible for the money and can dictate it's destination are like kids in a candy store.  Instead of getting numb on a sugarplum they're blowing Laurier's and Mc Donald's out of their butts.  Our Laurier's, our Mac Donalds.  120 grand?  Not when kids in Toronto are going to school without breakfast.

Don't you think it's time to think.  I'm not preaching "bread not circuses".  I preaching common sense with our common cents.

Some British researchers have figured out which dance moves make men more attractive to women.  It's all about strutting your stuff. Bein the cock of the walk.  It works for a lot of species in the animal world and no matter how sophisticated we think we are, we are animals. You shake your booty for the bounty.

What they did was video men 18 to 35 and mapped their movements onto avatars.  Gender neutral characters with no features of any kind so women would have to concentrate on the dance moves and not what moves them.

Now, my introduction to dancing was the school dance.  Every second Friday in the school gym.  Here's how is played out.  The guys, or at least the ones who thought they were cool, would line up along the wall.  You never sat, you were always erect.  And you watched.  You watched the girls dance with girls and then you'd whisper something into you buddies' ear.  It was like window shopping.  You'd stare and ogle. You knew you wanted to but you never had the "moxie move"  to walk over and close the deal.  Worried, of course, that when you tried to open the door, the door would be slammed in your face.

There were the odd guys who would dance.  Mostly the arty types who were forever getting the lead rolls in the school plays.  Flambouant, uncanny, unconventional and as far as  we were concerned, uncool. They danced, we didn't.

The study, born out by these oscillating avatars, showed that women like the men who could move their trunks and necks to the beat of the music.  I can get my trunk moving and I can get my neck moving but not necessarily at the same time. I learned how to head fake when I played high school basketball. The idea is to get the opposing player going in the opposite direction. Got pretty good at it.  That move doesn't work so well at a spring cotillion.  You give a girl a head fake on a crowded floor when the lights are dim and you'll get her going in the opposite direction. Truth is my neck is a wreck and trunk got no funk.

Dance has always been a mystery to me.  Well, not so much dance but rythm. I don't have any.  I can, on occasion, unravel the bugaboo of boogie, almost always at a wedding reception, New Year's Eve or the occasional office Christmas party.  Of course by the time you summon the courage you've turned into a buzzed Baryshnakov or an inebriated Nuryev. It's "So You Think You Can Dance" gone terribley wrong. 

The study also says that size counts.  The size of the movement of the aforementioned fneck and trunk as well as the left shoulder, left wrist and the right knee.  I can be a minimal multitasker.  I can meander and masticate at the same time. You ask me to co-ordiante 5 dispartate body parts like the neck, the trunk, the left shoulder and wrist and the right knee I'll need a quart of vodka to get 2 of them on the same page never mind 5.

In reality, all men can dance.  Very few can dance well.  That's why high school gyms have walls.  That's why they serve booze at adult parties.  A long time ago I realized that the tv series "Fame" lied to us.  They weren't going to live for ever and I was never going to learn to dance.  Well, not until New Year's Eve.

Took a drive into the small town I live close to this morning and on the way back I got caught behind a school bus making stops to pick up kids.  Usually you go on the spin cycle over something like his.  Every qauarter mile the red lights start flashing, the stop sign springs out of no where and you sit while the wee ankle biters climb on board for their daily sojourn to a life of  education.  But this morning it was different.  First day of school and all the parents were there to wave a tearful ta ta to their little imps. It was cute.

I don't remember much about my first day of my first year at school. I was probably in a sugar shocker haze from that double bowl of Count Chocula I injested at breakfast.  But I do recall my first few days in grade one.  The transition was traumatic.  Let me get this straight.  Kindergarten is a half day long and you get a nap.  Grade one is a full day, a break for lunch and the obligatory morning and afternoon recesses which are really a way to prep kids for coffee breaks when the real world comes calling.  But no naps in grade one.  What's the deal with that?  I couldn't sing, didn't count very well, the abc's were a mystery and I never quite got the subtle nuances of finger painting.  But I was a 40 wink wonder in kindergarten.

By the time I had made it to grade 5 it was decided that myself 5 others should skip a grade.  I knew right away that was academic insanity.  I actually went home and argued against it with my parents.  So much for their little prodigy.  They caved in.  Probably a good move because of the other 5 who skipped,  4 of them failed a grade before they got to grade 10.  So much for the schools acceleration creation.

I mentioned fail. When I went to school you could and did fail if you couldn't grasp the grade.  That made grade 8 pretty interesting.  Stuck in their final year of grade school were an assortment of academically impaired.  Mostly guys, mostly good guys who mostly didn't function with any distinction in a class room setting.  I sat beside one of them.  I was 12 he was 16.  He worked construction for his uncle during the summer and on weekends.  He had his learner's permit to drive.  In shop class he would take a soldering iron to his caluses.  He scared me.  Late in the year he fooling around in class and was told to go to the principal's office.  He lost it.  He started rocking the top of his desk back and forth until he ripped it off it's hinges.  Handed it to the teacher and told her..."I wont be back".  I never saw him again but became a mythological being after that. 

Obviously I was now fully unprepared to move on to high school.  I still remember that first day.  Never having a knack for numbers I forgot my 3 digit locker combination.  Not once but twice.  They called me on it the second time.  First day of high school, my first detention.  Now I stood 6 feet tall during my first year so when I got to detention class the teacher looked at me and decided I was older than my years and decided to seat me at the back with the grade 12 detainees.  These guys, and they were all guys, made my grade 8 reprobate buddy look like a Tele Tubby.  I've never been to prison but I always figured this had to be the school version of maximum security.  It was the best detention deterant I could get.  I never again forgot my locker combination.

I was a terrible high school student.  They told me I clocked one of the worst per centages in the history of the high school.  I failed every class that year with the exception of phys-ed.  Yes, I failed health.  No one thought that was possible but I actually did it.  So this kid who was supposed to skip a grade a few years before was now repeating grade 9.  Which made year 2 of year one pretty interesting. 

It's odd how being one year older when you're 14 can make such a difference.  Taller, stronger, wise in the ways of the system, I became a cult figure to my new class mates.  I was the "been there, done that guy". Someone to show them the ropes. Someone older but as they soon found out not much wiser even though I was taking all the courses for a second time.  What they didn't understand was, the reason I was doing a make over of grade 9 was because I didn't get it to on my first go-round. 

What I did manage to do was get my naps back in.  A decade after having them expropriated in grade one I found them again in english class.  I looked forward to english class where we could get a double period of reading.  Invariably it would be something by Charles Dickens.  5 pages in to Great Exectations and I was sleeping like cat. 

It eventually took me 6 years to get my grade 12.  Time well spent?  Well what school left me with was a thirst for knowledge.  I didn't learn it then but once I was out of school and in the world of the real deal  I read anything I could  find.  History, politics, science, religion.  It became a passion.  Not a good student in a class room but school did teach that learning is something you should never stop doing.  Do it right and you'll always find time for a nap.

Oh, and there is some irony to this.  Wednesday I start teaching at Niagara College.

As parents, most of us will tell our kids "Don't smoke!".  And when they get old enough we'll tell them "If you're going to drink alcohol do it in moderation."  There's no fool like a drunk fool and there's no fool like a smoker.   Except in Russia. 

Alexei Kudrin is the Russian Finance Minister and he's urging everyone to buy more booze and cigarettes, liver and lungs be damned.  Here's the pitch "Those who smoke, those who drink, are doing more to help the state."  Sell more fags and foam and all that tax you generate goes to the government to run social programs.  Nice sentiment but a noxious notion. 

'Course the spin on sin comes on the eve of Russia doubling the excise tax on cigarettes over the next 3 years and a new minimum price on vodka vending.  Never mind that a half million deaths a year are attributed to alcohol consumption.  To it's credit Russia does have a zero tolerance policy aimed at drunk driving.

Still, would you want to live in a country that promotes the continued and increased intake of things what might eventually kill you?  That alone would mean fewer people paying taxes although in the grand scheme I'm sure they figure you'll pass down those bad habits to your chugging cherubs and nicotine nippers.

Would you want to live in a country like that?  We do.  Sort of.  Our government warns you against smoking.  But wont ban it.  Drink in moderation we're told.  But booze is more available now than ever before in Canada. 10 minutes away from where I live is a variety store that sells beel and liquor.  It's open later than the actual LCBO that's 10 minutes the other way.  And of course every sip of the sauce and every waft of the weed gets taxed to the max.

I'm not trying to be prissy about this. The government is in the business of gathering tax.  Booze and butts play a signifigant role.  It's been my experience that people who can least afford them are the ones who do a large slice of the consuming.  I have a friend who continually tells me how tough it is making it from pay cheque to pay cheque what with groceries for the kids, utilities, transportation and the like.  But doesn't hesitate dropping 11 dollars a day for a pack ot tabac.  77 dollars a week.  Crunch the numbers for year.

A another sin that's a no win for us is gambling.  It started with a lottery here and a lotter there.  Now we can max out by winning a Max grand prize of 50 million. How could you not take the chance and dream the dream.  Ever watch the the 649 commercials?  They tell us about all those wonderful things that will happen to your life when you win and they sure do make it seem like it's just that easy to cash in on your combo.  You never do.  After 20 years of firing blanks you think about all the wonderful things you could have done with those wasted wagers.

Our government is taking, in essence our bets.  Don't they bust bookies for doing that.  Ah but bookies don't pay tax on their take.  Do it the government's way and it's only to pickpocket punters.

I've heard is said that you know a government is in trouble when it relies on gambling income to balance the budget.  It's a risk venture and we take all the risk.  'Course there are exceptions. Remember the story a while back about Casino Niagara and Casino Rama, provincially owned, both losing tens of millions of dollars. That breaks the house rule that the house never looses.  I was once told by a financial wiz that the easiest way to lose money is to let the government operate it.  It's a slam dunk money pit.  And we take the hit both ways.  If we bet and lose, it's our money.  If the government hustles our cash and loses, it's our money.

I don't agree with Mr. Kudrin, the Russian finance minister.  Encouraging more smoking and more boozing for the good of the state is a little to blatant.  Then again I respect his candor.  I respect his honesty.  He wants your money and isn't afraid to ask.  Over here we're told, yes you can smoke but you really shouldn't.  Yes you can drink but remember, moderation with your libation.  One wants you to both and admits it.  The other wants you to do both to.  It just wont sanction the sins.