Let’s start by standing up and giving our heads a shake until our brains fall out. As you will note from the following two lead sentences, published in a front page story in The Globe and Mail on Friday, May 6, the Liberals have already done that:
“The House of Commons will vote within two weeks on a motion calling on the government to resign after the Speaker of the House of Commons ruled against Liberal attempts to scuttle the vote. But government House Leader Tony Valeri announced the Liberals would not call an election should they lose that vote, because they don't consider it one of confidence.”
To repeat: if a majority in the House of Commons votes to adopt a motion calling on the (Liberal) Government to resign, the Liberals will not consider that to be an expression of non-confidence.
Which kind of makes me wonder just what kind of statement it will take to make them understand that the House has lost confidence in their ability to govern.
A regular Baby Duckling occasionally sends me stuff with the accompanying note, “These people need a good thumping with the clue stick.”
The Speaker in the House of Commons has access to a large ceremonial object known as The Parliamentary Mace.
http://www.wsd1.org/SargentPark/JrHigh/JH_Main_Heritage_Fair/hfair2000/mace.htm
When the vote on the motion to resign carries, it is my fervent hope that he takes the Mace in hand, strolls the full length of the Government side of the House, firmly bashing each and every one of them (starting with Mr Valeri) wherever in hell it is that their brains are located, all the while repeating, “Get the $@%#!! OUT OF HERE!!!”
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Three little words.
Nat King Cole rendered the thought with the lyrics:
“Three little words
Oh what I'd give for that wonderful phrase
To hear those three little words
That's all I'd live for the rest of my days…”
and parlayed it into a monster hit.
Mr Cole was singing about “I love you”. But in our case at home, we’ve also started with three little words: “Fix the porch”, and we’ve also parlayed them into a monster hit.
A monster financial hit.
A bit of background. It began several years ago when we noticed cracks had appeared around the edges of the top landing on our porch. Now, I don’t know what image enters your mind when you hear “porch”, but for it to reflect the one on the front of our house, you need to think of something akin to a fortification that a medieval army would think twice about attacking, even with siege towers and battering rams. It’s a massive structure that combines an enormous elevated concrete platform reached by a half-storey of concrete steps and which is surrounded on three sides by brick walls a foot thick, and whose fourth side is the front of our house. Close to ground level, the concrete steps give way to several large stone steps, and a five-foot square stone landing from which you turn a corner to descend to another stone step before finally reaching our driveway. In other words, it’s like an advertising poster for the entire “masonry” section of the yellow pages covering cement workers, stonemasons and bricklayers. Determining its total weight would require a scale graduated in tonnes. Many of them.
One grim day several years ago, we finally realized that the entire upper concrete platform was slowly sagging towards the centre and, in the process, was pushing outwards on three boundary walls – the two sides and the front face. Further complicating the problem is the fact that one of the porch’s side walls is irrevocably bound into the brickwork in the wall of our house that frames our side door. Its outward pressure was also slowly pulling that part of the brick veneer out of line as well. So we contracted with a bricklayer who coincidentally was building a new school gymnasium a couple blocks away. He tore down a portion of the brick, re-laid it and patched the cracks. Actually, he didn’t so much re-lay the bricks according to any plumbline as did it in such a way that they came gradually back to where they needed to be. The visual result, if you eye-balled the side wall in just the right way, was what a tradesman would call a “wow” (a word I now think derives its etymological roots from “Way-Out of-Whack”). He told us it was probably good for about five years before we’d need to get it “seriously rebuilt”.
That was about six years ago.
Early last year, we contracted with a building designer to blueprint the structure and give us an estimate of what it would cost to have his company rebuild the porch. He blueprinted the structure, sent us a lavish invoice for same, and then told us that he’d changed his mind and was no longer going to do that kind of construction work in his business. (If anyone in the National Capital Region is looking for the name of a contractor with whom NOT to do business, drop me a line, but I digress.)
So this year, at the first sign the snow was indeed gone and the spring thaw complete, we turned to a trade rule of thumb – if you’re going to have anything done in brick, stone or concrete, find a guy whose first name ends in a vowel. This we did, and after the briefest of back-and-forthing (because he’d already done a fantastic job for us on an indoor ceramic floor tile project), we agreed to have Nino and his company do a complete porch replacement.
On May 2, he embarked on Day 1, during which time he managed the astonishing feat (to me, just because I had figured that what took him a day should actually have required about three) of tearing away everything that was brick.
At that point, had Nino been a surgeon and had the project been a minor appendectomy, he would have leaned forward over the patient’s incision and said, “Uh oh”, only to break the news that the patient needed multiple internal organ replacements.
As it was, he had uncovered scads of evidence of what can only be called “cutting corners” when the porch had been first built. At the end of the day, as he walked me through the many construction failings on the old porch, I was truly amazed that the entire structure hadn’t long ago collapsed under the dead weight of its own slipshod assembly.
The removal of the brickwork revealed, for example, that the back edge of the porch abutting the house was supported in its entirety on the butt end of a 2-inch diameter pipe protruding from the wall. One entire side wall of the porch had been built up of cement blocks – as was the whole structure, but in this case with a single intermediary layer of brick, apparently for the sole reason that it was sitting on a slightly lower part of our sloping front yard and the original builders, rather than level the land to match the porch’s opposite wall, had simply (and stupidly) thrown in an approximate equivalency in unrelated brick. (It was red brick; our entire house is bricked in grey. Once in place, it had been plastered over to remain hidden until the day after May Day 2005)
Nino also found that the bricks appeared to have been mortared with something not a whole lot stronger than wet sand, because tearing it down required no machinery whatsoever, indeed most of it could just be pushed over. A “foundation”, as such, was non-existent and the entire porch was supported on nothing but crumbling cement blocks. Also, no accommodation had been made for drainage and there was water pooling among the bottom courses of those same cement blocks.
Nino sounds a bit like Chico Marx, and so I heard a litany of things like, “I’m-a-gotta tell you. I have-a NO idea how cumma this-a thing no falla down before now.”
(And you can no doubt see exactly where this is going.)
“I’m a-gotta tell you, this-a gonna take about tree times da cement I first thought; plus we gotta build a foundation all-a da way aroun’, four foot down, one foot up; plus-a we gotta add four new support posts because-a nothin’ is a-holding uppa da whole top platform.”
* Ka-ching * (That’s the sound of the original estimate having about a third of itself added to the bill.)
So now we’re going to have a new front porch that I’m pretty sure costs more than my parents paid for their entire house some 35-odd years ago.
“But it’s-a-gonna be a good one!”
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Why government news releases are landfill-clogging tree killers:
Here’s roughly half the lead sentence from a recent Government of Canada news release announcing a Government of Canada announcement:
“The Honourable Eleni Bakopanos, Parliamentary Secretary
to the Minister of Social Development with special emphasis
on Social Economy, and Member of Parliament for Ahuntsic,
on behalf of the Honourable Lucienne Robillard, President
of the Queen's Privy Council for Canada, Minister of
Intergovernmental Affairs and Minister of Human Resources
and Skills Development, today announced…”
Sheesh! If just the “Who” part of “W5” takes that many words to spit out, is it any wonder that the typical government news release gets fired across an assignment editor’s desk into the wastebasket so swiftly?
(Shades of the way the dangerously buffoonish Ugandan dictator Idi Amin used to have himself introduced – and no, I am not making this up: “His Excellency President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea, and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular.”)
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The people of North Point Douglas, Manitoba, should really get out more. The town is home to one of the most painfully acronymed groups I’ve seen in a long time: Sisters Initiating Steps Towards A Renewed Society: SISTARS. (reported in The Winnipeg Free Press)
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As the old adage has it, Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Well, newspapers hath seen no fury like that of Star Trek fans when they read a technical error. Obviously, such fury was visited upon The Newark [New Jersey] Star-Ledger in the wake of a story they ran last month, witness the near panic evident in this apology. (Nod to an April 13 entry at a website entitled “Regret The Error / Mistakes Happen”, found at www.regrettheerror.com )
“Attention, Star Trek fans: No more calls or e-mails, please! Captain Kirk did not often "cloak" the Starship Enterprise to make it invisible, as was erroneously reported in the "Biz Buzz" feature in yesterday's Business section. In fact, the first known use of cloaking technology was by the Romulans in 2266, according to "The Star Trek Encyclopedia: A Reference Guide to the Future." Kirk and Commander Spock were sent on a mission to steal a cloaking device from the Romulans in 2268 during the first Star Trek series. And Klingons used cloaking in the movie "Star Trek III: The Search for Spock." This prompted theories of a Romulan-Klingon alliance, in which the Romulans may have traded their cloaking secrets for warp drive, reports An-swers.com. The Star-Ledger really, really regrets the error."
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And in the continuing world of odd typos, this was the very large-font headline on an Associated Press story that appeared in The Globe and Mail’s online edition April 27:
“Bush wrecked in bid to beat Sri Lanka train”
The story was about a bus / train collision that resulted in many of the bus passengers being killed, so obviously that first word should be “Bus”.
Makes me wonder if AP – or maybe it’s The Globe – has set its auto-correcting spellcheck to assume that every time one of its stringers types “Bus”, he or she really meant “Bush”.
I know mine makes that same automatic correction whenever I accidentally type “$#@!!!ing pathologically dangerous spawn of Satan!”.
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Echoes of George Carlin and his famous “Seven dirty words you can’t say on television” schtik: (Did I say “echoes”? I meant out-and-out plagiarism.) This little note appeared on a blog called The Wonkette:
“I received these e-mails from my Career Development Officer at the Department of State, and from the E-Mail System Attendant: ’Hi Everyone – You may have just gotten a message that I was trying to send naughty stuff through the e-mail. It turns out that the computer program seized on the description of how blood will be drawn at the health fair, which used the phrase ‘finger prick’. Evidently that was enough to set off system alarms. If you want to see the notice, go to Dept. Notices on the intranet. I’m certainly not going to try sending it again! Have a good weekend, NAME REDACTED”
(For the record, on Mr Carlin’s album, the line was “And while it’s OK to prick your finger, just don’t finger your…”)
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I just read (John Barber, “Toronto’s own Bridge of Sighs”, The Globe and Mail, May 4) that the cost of NOT building a land link / bridge from the Toronto waterfront to the Toronto Island airport is going to run to about $35 million in penalties for cancelled contracts and the like. Cancellation of the project was included among the current Mayor’s election promises a couple years ago.
But the budgeted cost of building the bridge, before Mayor David Miller persuaded the Toronto voters it wasn’t needed because Toronto had so many other priorities before reducing Bay Street financiers’ commuting time, was $22 million.
What’s that old Red Rose Tea commercial tag: “Only in Canada, you say? Pity.”
Piti-ful.
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Here’s a bit of trivia: Who was the first President of the United States? George Washington, right?
Not necessarily. The answer depends on the date from which you accept the existence of the United States of America. And if you believe it’s November 15, 1777, when the Continental Congress first ratified the Articles of Confederation that followed the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, then George Washington is actually the country’s ninth President. Between that date and Washington’s Presidency, no fewer than eight Washington predecessors served in the office: John Hanson (1781-82), Elias Boudinot (1782-83), Thomas Mifflin (1783-84), Richard Henry Lee (1784-85), John Hancock (1785-86), Nathan Gorman (1786-87), Arthur St. Clair (1787-88), and Cyrus Griffin (1788-89).
But if you date “The United States of America” from the year it adopted that “ensure domestic peace, protect the general welfare, establish a just legal system, and provide for a common defense for the current citizens and their heirs” thingie, then the country was officially brought into being on March 4, 1789, the effective date of its first Constitution. Shortly thereafter, the House of Representatives met for the first time and elected as its first President on April 6, 1789. George Washington’s inaugural took place on April 30.
Just be sure when you challenge a whole bar full of well-lubricated Sam Adams drinkers to pay up when you win your “John Hanson was the first President of the United States” bet, you’re armed with an unarguable documentation of these facts. Or a well-filled wallet to buy all the losers a consolation drink.)
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Uh… Globe and Mail editors (1):
“The Liberals are attempting to rally their wagons in the face of a possible no-confidence vote from the Conservative opposition, which could come as early as this week.” (Globe and Mail online, May 2)
The spelling’s fine, but it’s circle the wagons, or rally the troops. The only way the Liberals can “rally their wagons” is by entering them in the annual Monte Carlo race of the genre, or one of its clones.
- 0 -
Uh… Globe and Mail editors (2):
“The allegation made by Mr. Guité against Mr. Martin is based on hearsay from someone who has since died and cannot be called before the inquiry.” (Globe and Mail online, May 5)
(You can safely delete those last seven words.)
Uh… Globe and Mail editors (3):
“As well, the proposed changing the format of the debates, saying the original way the political talks ran.” (Globe and Mail online, May 5)
Hellllllllllp!
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And finally, there’s a very sociable gentleman who works as a commissionaire at the security desk at the entrance to our office tower. His shift changes most days just as I’m returning from my lunch break, so I usually have a word or two as he’s putting on his jacket. Mostly a variation on some joke about these “long days” he puts in where he gets to go home in the early afternoon. Recently, prompted by all the coverage attending the opening of the new Canadian War Museum just across the river, I asked him if he was planning on attending any of the related events. He said he was going to wait until the crowds thinned, but there were a couple of exhibits he wanted to see because they reflected some of his own experiences. “Oh?” I said. “Were you stationed overseas?” He leaned a little closer, and said, “I was wounded three times.”
“That’d be a yes, then?” I concluded, before wishing him a very good afternoon.
Here’s a PS in this 60th anniversary year of the end of World War II to anyone in government who receives a request from a veteran. Grant it, immediately. Men and women who have watched comrades die or suffer permanent disability for their country have too much respect for the memory and the courage of those comrades to ask for anything unreasonable or undeserved for themselves and their surviving relatives. The same applies to veterans of more recent service, who might not necessarily have seen combat, but who most certainly will have seen hardship, simply by virtue of serving in Canada’s woefully underpaid and badly equipped armed forces.
For the record, a good many of those veterans who now are looking for help and support from the government of Canada actually bought this democracy, paying in blood, so that you are able to sit on your… chairs and pass judgment on the value and validity of their petitions.
What a veteran will ask for – without exception – will only ever be fairness. Keep that in mind, please.
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