John Tory’s Legacy of Hypocrisy a Gift to Ford

Amidst a sudden and unexpected office relationship scandal, Toronto Mayor John Tory has resigned his post. He was to be Toronto’s longest-serving mayor following a third mayoral campaign victory last October. He had, however, previously stated that he would seek to hold office for no more than two terms. This contrast between actions and statements will be his unfortunate legacy.

The man who succeeded the scandal-plagued and ill-fated Rob Ford was touted as the sure bet and the steady hand for Canada’s largest city. Throughout three mayoral campaigns, Tory’s brand never wavered. He was to be responsible but considerate of other opposing views, consistent but welcome to change, and above all unabashedly boring. 24 hours ago that had largely remained true, but now none of it matters.

Taking over from former Mayor Rob Ford, Tory had a low bar to hurdle. With a self proclaimed mandate to restore respectability to the recently beleaguered office, the goal was simple: don’t smoke crack, don’t run into councillors or cameras, and don’t make off-colour jokes about marital bliss. All of those seem like unlikely actions now, but the last one leaves a particularly sour note.

While he has certainly had his detractors over the years, Tory’s love for the city that he was born in was apparent to anyone. He spoke loud and often of how much he loved Toronto, even fitting it into his emotional and very abrupt resignation speech. He attended ribbon-cutting openings around the city, ventured to the top of Toronto for the CN Tower’s EdgeWalk and even presented the Raptors the Key to the City after they won Toronto its first major league trophy in recent memory.

But, speaking of memories, what will Torontonians bear in mind when they next step to the polls? The last change of power was tinted with scandal, and this one even moreso. Tory did not vacate over health concerns; he immediately fled the office as soon as his hypocritical abuses of power were brought to light. All that talk of bringing respectability to the office was for naught, and the mayor’s chair is more tarnished than it was when he took his first seat there. Voters will remember Tory for participating in a now redundant municipal election that cost constituents millions and that possibly overlapped his career-ending affair.

So what does this mean for the city? Over Tory’s tenure the Ford dynasty has not waned in power. Premier Doug Ford’s Ontario PCs have thrived at the failings of their political opponents, winning overwhelming majority after overwhelming majority. Besides some very obviously shady relationships with real estate developers that threaten the Greenbelt, Ford has also not been shy of tipping the scales of power that affect Toronto. From cutting council in half (during an election, no less) to more recently granting the mayor “strong mayor” powers, the seat has been groomed as the lynchpin for the Ford family, more now even than when Doug’s brother held it.

During the last mayoral election there was a clear favourite and few serious candidates to compete against. There was also overwhelming voter apathy that led to record low turnout ratings. This could change, especially since not only will Tory not run but he will (if he has any sense left at all) not endorse anyone, instead preferring a life of quiet oblivion. Will the Fords proffer a candidate, possibly Michael Ford (formerly Michael Stirpe)? Doug Ford doesn’t need another MPP in his pocket and his nephew is no stranger to resigning from one recently elected post to go for another.

Toronto surely would deserve better than this, but they’ll get what they vote for. Scandal after scandal this city has endured more than most, with the most recent one seeming to layer insult upon injury. If it is lucky, Toronto may see its residents turn their apathy into action and vote for a candidate who believes in Toronto more than they believe in themselves or their stakeholders. Time will tell, but in this regard Tory did not do his beloved city any favours.

An Unnecessary Exercise

We are now just days away from Canada’s next official election on September 20, and like so many other happenings over the course of this pandemic it seems like an undesirable and avoidable event that nobody wanted or asked for.

The difference between this election and lockdowns or vaccine appointments is that the election was going to happen eventually, regardless. Not only that, but our prime minister acknowledged that nobody wanted an election during a pandemic and that it would be irresponsible to trigger one unnecessarily. Yet he did it anyway.

Justin Trudeau was so immensely proud of his work during the COVID-19 pandemic and his government’s response that he couldn’t wait for his reward and instead decided to dissolve said government in order to see if it would return to him, bigger and better than ever. If you love them, let them go, it is said.

So, while an election would have happened at some point no matter what—other leaders repeatedly express their lack of confidence in Trudeau, or his government—this PM was so confident that he had the love of the people that he thought it best to call the election now and get it over with. This from a man who had to strap on a bulletproof vest right before a speech last election because that’s how high tensions were without COVID. The mind boggles, yet hubris knows no bounds.

This election comes at a time where divisions in Canada are at an all-time high, and tempers are flaring. Gone are Trudeau’s Sunny Ways, and he is more likely to paint a picture of doom and gloom under PC leader Erin O’Toole than to speak of any light at the end of the tunnel. O’Toole portrays himself as the rational and right-handed alternative to Trudeau, whereas Trudeau seems to be getting more emotional by the day and his opponents are quick to point out his opportunism and failed promises.

Fortunately we are not America, and there are other options. However, those options do more to simply temper the power of the eventual governing party than to actually pose a threat to the two main contenders (excluding Quebec, which has a more unique political atmosphere).

The NDP has momentum and its leader Jagmeet Singh shows undaunted optimism, but it is nowhere near its former strength in 2011 under Jack Layton. The Greens still have their base and talk of the moral high ground, yet their leader Annamie Paul recently faced a pointless, debilitating assault from within that weakened her and the Greens in the public spotlight. Meanwhile the People’s Party of Canada has quietly built itself up as a party that is against masks and public health mandates, and that’s good enough to earn the vote of a frightening proportion of the population.

On a personal note, this election marks the first time I voted strategically. Prior to my move last year I was lucky enough to reside in a diverse neighbourhood with an equally diverse base of political opinions, and most options seemed viable. Yet now I know the sting of the bile that rises when writing an X next to a representative for a party you don’t personally align with.

This election has been an unnecessary exercise and the pain suffered on voting day could quite easily have been postponed to next year or the year after, but for the arrogance of our leader. Whether he still hold that position a week from now remains to be seen.

A Postmortem of the Leafs 2019-2020 Season

This year has been a wild one so far what with the COVID-19 pandemic upending our lives and creating a singular focus for the world to fight against. Consequently, sports were put on hold indefinitely as was the dread that tends to accompany the last few weeks of the regular season for the Maple Leafs.

It was by no means guaranteed that the Leafs were going to make it to the post-season at all, and had all the traditional signs of a nail-biting finish that involved watching other teams' results in the standings as much as watching the Leafs’ performance (or lack thereof). In the 2018-2019 season they finished with 100 regular season points. Such a result would have been mildly amazing this year considering they finished the shortened season with 81 points after 70 games. This is an unimpressive result for a team that management would suggest had all its pieces in place, particularly after hard bargaining by its stars and the firing of former coach Mike Babcock, replaced by Sheldon Keefe.

Incidentally, this set the stage for a best-of-five series with Columbus, who shared the exact same games played and points stats as Toronto, but were absolutely stunning under coach John Tortorella last year as they swept the heavily-favoured Tampa Bay Lightning in a best-of-seven series, ultimately losing the following round to Boston.

Yet all of the pieces being in place doesn't make a bit of difference if the pieces don't want to play. Much has been said over the past 24 hours about the battle between skill and will, and while the Maple Leafs are certainly loaded with talent, they often fail to deliver on that and pass it off with a shrug. For a team that has been crafted to be as offense focused as possible, losing 3 of 5 to a defensive team and being completely blanked on 2 out of those 3 games just isn't good enough.

John Tavares seemed to have the answers, suggesting that they were close -- "about an inch or so" -- from getting a goal and making it a game worth actually watching. But again, that's just not good enough. People have been locked inside for months perfecting parlour tricks ranging from balancing acts and acrobatics to trick shots and musical skills, and I'm pretty sure that one of them could have found a way to throw a puck into an open net from a couple of metres out. That, and John Tavares has 11 million reasons to not make excuses. I believe the line he was looking for is "I should have had that one." Plus like most sports, hockey can be a game of inches. The edge of a stick, the tip of a skate, it all matters, and that is often the difference between winners and losers.

It's not just the abysmal performance that was last night's so-called hockey game, during which point Columbus got a second goal over Toronto during a line change that would have been called a disaster if it happened in the regular season, let alone a knock-out game in the playoffs. It's not even the fact that they played as if this was their third game in as many nights and they didn’t actually have to worry about being unceremoniously dumped from the postseason in the first round (again) if they didn't manage to get a goal, or two, or three.

It's the fact that nobody in this franchise, from the top to the bottom, gives a single damn about culpability. No one is stepping up to say they should have done more, or that they screwed up, or that they're sorry. The Maple Leafs are as nonchalant about failing miserably as they ever have been, and as it stands that may never change.

Soon, the NHL draft lottery will take place, with Alexis Lafrenière being the top prize. Even being in this lottery is a consolation prize for the Leafs, and one they barely deserve. If they happen to win it and pick him, I hope they do not consider this to be a victory of sorts. But likely they will, and little attention will be paid to the fact that this house of cards that General Manager Kyle Dubas has put together was always too unbalanced to stand. What needs to change doesn't have to do with coaching or talent. It has to do with culture. And the culture of the Toronto Maple Leafs has long been far too toxic to succeed in this league, where competition and spirit can take a team much farther than a flowchart or an Excel spreadsheet can.

Whether the team wins the top pick overall is irrelevant at this point. Dubas got all of the players he wanted, and his proof of concept fell flat. For all of those negotiations and calculations, the truth is all the team managed to do was make it to a 24-team expanded playoffs, by not being one of the worst seven teams in the league. That's not good enough and at this point the whole organization should know that, and perhaps even try admitting to it.

COVID-19 - Survival Tips

So you're worried about COVID-19. Who isn't? We're being told to hunker down as much as possible and socially distance ourselves from one another. Obviously the best choice for everyone is to stay home, turn on Netflix, maybe see when that box of dehydrated mashed potatoes expired. But while it's good advice to tell the public to avoid non-essential trips outdoors, avoid human contact and stay inside, sometimes it's just not possible. Maybe you need to get some fresh air and stretch your legs, or maybe you just fell victim to the sudden (and inexplicable) rush to buy toilet paper. Regardless, here are some practical (and non-medical) pointers for what to do if you have to venture out of your own personal quarantine zone.

Function over fashion.

Wear Gloves
I know, you heard about the buying frenzy over face masks and now you have a bunch of those. You beat the system and nothing can infect you, right? Wrong. It's been stated by many medical professionals that face masks are more effective at keeping the virus in than out, which means that if someone who's sick is wearing one then that's good for everybody. But wearing one yourself won't necessarily protect you from the virus. That's because the odds of a sick person coughing in your face are fairly low, compared with the odds that they will cough or sneeze on their hands, then touch something, then you touch that thing, then you touch your face and infect yourself. Wear gloves for an extra layer of protection, and please don't touch your face while wearing them.

Minimize Contact
Even with gloves you'll want to minimize your contact with objects to prevent your hands/gloves from getting infected. Remember when those accessible door-opening buttons were mostly for lazy people and the differently abled? Well not anymore. Hitting one of those with an elbow or arm is much preferable to slapping it with your hand, or pulling the door open manually. There are also times when you'll need to hit other buttons to continue on your journey. Elevator buttons, touchscreens and similar interfaces can be activated with a knuckle rather than a fingertip, and again gloves are much preferred. Also, remember the social distancing thing? It's not just a catchphrase, it's a measurement: six feet, minimum.

Go Cashless
Speaking of avoiding contact, there are few objects that pass through multiple people's possession quite the way that physical currency does. Bills and coins can have numerous owners just over the course of a few hours. Minimize your risk by going cashless. Use tap, Apple Pay, e-Transfers or whatever other means you can use whenever possible. Or take this as an opportunity to cut down on your transactions and cut down on your risk of transmission while saving some cash along the way. It's win-win. Some businesses have even taken the precaution of limiting transactions to just debit and credit anyways, and the likelihood of banks waiving transaction fees for the good of our health and their own PR is quite high.

Disinfect
Now that most people on Earth are paying more attention to the things that they touch than ever before, perhaps it's a good time to also think about how clean those objects are? It's now a cliche to talk about how filthy everyone's smartphone is, and I'd bet a 24-roll of Charmin that you touch that more often than you wash your hands. So consider disinfecting your phone, doorknobs, taps, remotes, game controllers and any other objects you might touch many times in a single day. Clorox wipies are good, but if you didn't get some before everyone went nuts and bought everything in sight, there are other options. You can use Purell or rubbing alcohol or many similar solutions on a rag or paper towel and use that to wipe things down. Don't feel like you're embracing paranoia. Cleanliness is next to godliness, and this is a pandemic. Every little bit counts.

Wear Gloves
Are you wearing gloves yet? They're a great way to protect yourself and your fellow humans. You are? Well good, now get another pair. If your other pair is washable then wash them. If they're disposable then consider disposing of them. Dollar store gloves are cheap enough that you can buy a few pairs easily and even throw them out without worry. This is important when you consider that germs and other biological hazards can live within the material long after you've taken them off. Plastic, latex, or even rubber gloves are also a practical but less fashionable option. And for taking them off, it's best to pull them off from the fingertips rather than to reach inside and yank them off that way. And once they're off it's time to go wash your hands again.

Ford PCs Continue Campaign Of Cuts Despite Low Approval

The Doug Ford PC government started out with priorities that were unsurprisingly identical to those of it’s newly-minted leader, and it has continued to act on those unabated despite public polls revealing a steep drop in approval ratings earlier this week.

A Mainstreet Research poll revealed a net favourability rating of negative 21.5 per cent for Ford. It also revealed that, despite the disapproval, the majority of voters would still vote for the premier.

The Ontario PC government, led by slick businessman Ford, started out of the gate by cutting Toronto city council as its leader had promised. This was actioned as a priority item as it was fueled by the new premier’s rage at those who had once scorned him while he was employed as a Toronto councillor. The irony of that is that many of the survivors of the municipal culling were those who Ford had specifically named as targets, socialist pinkos that are so far left that they can’t tell wrong from right.

(Interestingly, while many left-leaning councillors had to battle each other Hunger Games-style to see who would survive, one casualty of this short-sighted plan was Giorgio Mammoliti, a councillor who had actively opposed those same Ford foes. While he and former Mayor Rob Ford had frequently clashed, he largely toed the Ford line and frequently agreed with brother Doug.)

Further, this plan was touted as being able to save $25 million from Toronto’s budget, over a 4-year span. That breaks down to $6.25 million a year, less the money each of the 25 remaining councillors would have to spend on supporting staff now that their wards had close to doubled in size. For context, in last year’s sudden spike in gun violence, Ford promised to hand out more than $25 million dollars to tackle the gun problem, albeit through unspecific means.

Now the Ford government has quietly charged ahead with its “cut costs above all else” strategy, with the frontlines being shifted to those of Ontario’s education system.

The first blow would seem to be the Liberal government’s loan-to-grant conversion scheme that allowed many to take out OSAP loans that did not have to be repaid at all. However, that would be ignoring the fact that in November of 2018 Ford decided to scrap established plans to develop post-secondary French language programs and even a new Francophone institution. So those who had looked to the chance to embrace both higher education and bilingualism were really the first cohort of students (or potential students) to feel the sting of rejection by the PC government.

Now, however, anyone who relies on OSAP or was planning on taking advantage of the free tuition program can count themselves among those left behind by Ford and the PC plans. This includes those who had signed up based on the promise of a more affordable plan and are now potentially two years into a three- or four-year program, who now have to budget around large loans they weren’t expecting to need. Those loans will also now need to be paid off on the day the student leaves the program, quite likely also at higher rates.

It is worth pointing out that the plan was declared unsustainable by Ford. This is true. In an effort to try and please everyone and draw attention away from her many political mis-steps, former premier Kathleen Wynne (also former Ontario Education Minister) decided that anyone who qualified for OSAP should qualify for the loan-grant conversions. The problem is that students could qualify for OSAP so long as their households had a combined income of less than $120,000. Like many proud new Tesla owners, high-income families managed to save money they had readily available to spend so that a sinking government could make promises that were doomed to be cut short. Today students of Ontario are left with a student loan system that pleases very few and discourages most from even embarking on post-secondary studies. (Wynne is presumably still sorry, not sorry.)

The central theme here is optics, and a matter of politics over principles. This battle of party versus party and all versus nothing needs to stop. A government does not and cannot please everyone, but that doesn’t mean that it has to cut its nose off to spite its face. (Lord pray Ford’s crosshairs never fall on his own beak.)

Kathleen Wynne leapfrogged the NDP to go even further left in an attempt to sway discouraged voters into scratching her name on their ballots, despite their apprehensions. It did not work, and Doug Ford was handed a super-majority and the right to do whatever he wants for the next four years. And now, Ford wants to show PC veterans and traditional party supporters that he knows the script and will stop at nothing to cut corners and make those books shine.

Next on the chopping block is full-day education for children aged 5 and under. While Ford has been forced to dial back his rhetoric on the matter, he has also maintained that his priorities lie with the deficit and that class size caps are likely going to go. The premier always seems at his strongest when his foes are incapable of fighting back.

And all of this in just the first weeks of 2019. Plans to privatize healthcare were also leaked, but the premier stated that the province’s healthcare system is the “backbone of the province” while also admitting that the government drafts proposals on all sorts of things, including two-tier healthcare.

Ontarians deserve better than this. No citizen deserves to be caught in the middle of a tug of war between political poles, and yet in a world of Brexit and border walls, it seems we have grown all too used to it. We no longer vote for who we approve of (assuming we approve of anyone anymore) but vote against those who we perceive as standing against us.

Thankfully Buck A Beer is back to help us forget what is really at stake here.

Sanity Saving Sonic Pilgrimage

Here's another one from the school files. It's a bit of an old piece and it is about a trip that happened years ago. Still a fun time though...

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It was 2013 and I was starting to feel stagnant. Something needed to change. My twenties were ending soon and I felt like I hadn’t gotten out to have an adventure in too long. The monotony of city life without reliable access to a getaway cottage or campground a couple times when it’s warm enough was getting to me. Sometimes I was lucky enough to get away in a year, but I guess it had been a while. It felt like forever since I’d gone to Chicago or New York.

So maybe it was America that was calling. Or at least the idea of that great Kerouac-inspired frontier image, a big sprawl of road with fun and excitement and then more, more road. So when my friend Tony told me he was interested in checking out a music festival called Bonnaroo, I looked it up.

There were well-known bands and a few genuine rock stars. Tom Petty was the big headliner, well him and Paul McCartney. Tony and I went to college and studied journalism with the guy who did Sir Paul’s pyrotechnics, so it seemed like an interesting trip. We’d catch up, listen to some live music, and drink some beers together again in a new environment. Plus it was in Tennessee. I’d always wanted to go there… well not really. But I had wanted to see more of the continent and check out some new states. The map said that the drive would take me quickly through Michigan, into Ohio for a good long while, down through Kentucky and finally into our destination state of Tennessee. (I was genuinely interested in seeing the green rolling hills of Kentucky after watching Justified, a show based on an Elmore Leonard creation.)

The tickets weren’t so expensive, even when translated into the relatively poor Canadian dollar. It was a little pricier than I was used to at four or five hundred (as I’ve never had a lot of money to throw around) but I thought it was worth it at about a hundred dollars a day. Plus it was a camp site, so that was lodgings too. That meant we only had to worry about the cost of food and gas. Well, and alcohol and cigarettes. But priorities first. Oh, and places to stay there and back. Plans started to form.

I mapped it out on Google, finding out how many kilometres it would be (adding about 200 for detours and crap), what the current price of gas was (factoring in currency conversion costs), and what the estimated mileage (or kilometrage) of the likely rental car would be. Then I doubled it for our there-and-back-trip and got within probably about $40 of what we ended up spending. Probably because of overthinking finances like that I was the only one of us who had the credit to actually rent the car. I drew up some more numbers and got our final budget estimates.

Tony thought that was neat, and asked if he could drive the car. He couldn’t get on the rental without a credit card, so no, I said. Otherwise the credit card insurance doesn’t work and I’m out a car that costs 10 times as much as this trip if you crash, I said. I had my G2 for about two years, maybe a little more, and Tony drove to and from work for like 12 years. Life’s not fair sometimes I guess—I know insurance companies aren’t. “Nope,” I said, “I’m driving.”

The car was a beauty though. It was that year’s model Chevy Impala and had less than 2,000 on the odometer. I took a picture of that number, because we’d double that before we took it back. It had that new car smell and everything, and space for four passengers (or two with a bunch of luggage and camp crap). I looked under the hood and it looked like the workings of the USS Enterprise. I knew nothing about cars, but it would definitely get us there.

So midway through that flattened-out eternity of roadwork they call Ohio I got into my first altercation with a state trooper. I’d been driving about 8 hours by now and it had been night for a while, but I was hyped up with traveller’s euphoria. Unfortunately what I had not done was read the damned manual on how to change the speedometer from kilometres to miles when crossing the border. On account of that it was a little hard to make out what exactly I was doing in the metric to imperial conversion on the fly.

This country fought to get away from the Empire, I thought to myself. Why the fuck are they still using Imperial measurement?

The kid in the cool uniform walked up to the driver’s-side window, his car’s lights still strobing intimidatingly in the background. A flashlight, a Maglite with brand-new batteries no doubt, blinded me briefly.

“Hello officer.”

“License and registration, please,” replied the humourless voice, slightly higher than expected. We’d gotten into accent territory too, apparently.

I explained that I was from Toronto, showed the rental papers and my license, and he explained to me that the state of Ohio had a hand-in-hand working relationship with the province of Ontario and I would be held accountable if I didn’t pay up even if I never returned to Ohio and my license would be suspended if I did not comply with the terms of the citation.

“Great, loud and clear. What was I doing?” I asked. He told me I was doing 68.

“This isn’t a 70 zone?” He told me it was 65.

“Sorry, my dial’s not showing miles, should I just drive a little slower?” He told me to drive 65. Great, it’s an upper and a lower limit. I thought.

Nerves rattled, I managed to make it about an hour more before we found a place to pull over and rest up. They had free wi-fi and American television, which was a treat in how it’s strangely different from Canadian television. I guess it’s the same way with the billboards along the highway. Suddenly they’re advertising guns and fireworks and booze, so everything’s mostly the same but just a little different, in a way you can just feel.

It was good to take off the mantle of responsibility, if only for a few hours. I think I’d picked up the car around noon and it was now well after 1 a.m. (Tony had been late to arrive, so we only really got out of town around 4.) We’d made no stops other than to slow down and check through the border, and so this was the most driving I’d ever done.

We strolled across the street to the gas station to get some walking in and pick up some beer and we were glowing from that fresh vacation perspective. The beer was something like 6 for $8 or 12 for $10 or some crazy ratio like that, so of course we got the 12-pack. We didn’t drink them all, but we stayed up and went over our inventory of stuff and the lineup of acts we wanted to catch and watched highlights of the Stanley Cup playoffs while we were still in a state that knew what hockey was. We felt simultaneously like we were waiting for the holidays to start and that we were far from home, and felt an in-betweenness that was more of a relief than anything else.

The next day we got up and looked for a place to have breakfast. We wound up at a Cracker Barrel, which is junk food to Americans, but once again the little differences were what made it for me. For one thing, biscuits and gravy really should have taken off here a long time ago. For another, a breakfast place with a built-in gift shop that sold rocking chairs just brings a smile to my face.

We finally made it through to the bottom of Ohio, after going through several long stretches of construction. You realize how important it is to know the dimensions of your vehicle when your lane suddenly shoots left to divert between two concrete barriers that stretch on for miles and have a surprising number of curves to them. Navigating between those while trying to maintain 55 MPH with an eager trucker in an 18-wheeler behind you can be jarring.

At the bottom of Ohio on the Kentucky border is Cincinnati. It’s where a few rivers meet and the rolling, forested hills start to form to the south. There’s bridges everywhere and even with my focus on the road the city looked gorgeous. I wish we’d stopped, be we had tracks to make. Past the last bridge I saw a water tower on the other side that proudly proclaimed “Florence, Y’all!” We were in the South.

Driving through Kentucky was a breeze. Not only were the roads wider and in better shape, but the scenery was breathtaking. The air felt fresh and lively, and the landscape seemed untamed. You looked out at it and it was hard to imagine anyone ever thinking that they could rush in there and set something up and get it connected to everything else. But somehow they had, as there were little towns with people who’d smile and greet us and ask us where we were headed whenever we stopped to stretch our legs and have a smoke.

One of the stops we made was in Louisville. Growing up playing baseball and always relying on a Louisville Slugger instead of one of those aluminium things, and going to college idolizing Hunter S. Thompson, I felt a connection with this place. Again, we didn’t stay long. We got gas and found out where the Walmart was so we could get the last of the things we needed for the trip.

“It’s not here, it’s nearby though,” the attendant said. “E-town.”

I asked him to repeat that. “E-town,” he said.

I eventually figured out that E-town was Elizabethtown and it was on the way. Walking back to the car, Tony had struck up a conversation with a couple of girls in the car next to ours. They wore bright colours and big smiles and their car was loaded with camping gear. It turned out they were going to Bonnaroo too, and they were from Toronto. They seemed pretty cool, but we didn’t get their numbers and we didn’t see them again. We had not yet liberated ourselves of the hangups that keep city-goers from talking to one another at length without knowing each other first. That would come later. Plus we had a goal in mind, and city folk love goals.

After a couple of wrong turns we managed to find the massive Walmart. We found hats to try and protect ourselves from the Tennessee sun and realized that you can buy beer at Walmart in America. And why not? You can buy it at gas stations. Our shopping diversion ended up taking more time than we thought it would, and our tempers were starting to flare a bit. Fatigue and road-weariness were setting in, as well as the doubts that come with being in a foreign place with nothing but a vague destination and a map from Google. Maybe it was the massive superstore with the sprawling parking lot with the unfamiliar rental car somewhere nearby, or maybe it was the lack of food kicking in. We found the car, found some cheeseburgers, and made our final push towards our destination.

We crossed into Tennessee and decided to head straight for the farmland that the festival was held on. We’d had aspirations of seeing Nashville, but we were too close to our destination. American highways seem to pull you along at a surprisingly quick clip, but maybe it’s the same in Canada. One day I’ll make that Canadian road trip, but it seems that America is a lot less linear in terms of where to go and how to get there. From Canada, nobody ever wants to go straight north, and if you go straight south you wind up in the States.

Soon we spotted lines of cars, sections of highway just backed up with cars festooned with stickers and loaded with camping junk and alcohol and who-knows-what-else. In the sky there were helicopters, and on the ground police from different levels of government everywhere were directing traffic and letting us know who was in charge. I considered how much different their accents would be down here. Like Ohio State Trooper but with more “Florence, Y’all.”

We got in the lineup of cars off the highway with the sun beginning to sag under the weight of the early June evening, and by the time we actually got to the gates it was full dark. Along the way we’d passed a number of farmhouses with locals smiling and waving. Apparently some of them rented out rooms to visitors who didn’t want to rough it and didn’t mind the B and B experience.

I was about to learn what we were in for with this five-day festival. I’d never driven in the US, never been south of New York, never gotten a speeding ticket, and hadn’t been camping in years. But I’d checked a bunch of things off my list and gained some confidence along the way. And the fun was just about to start.

The next few days would be a mad rush of making friends, discovering new music, running from one end of the farm to the other to catch that one act everyone was talking about, chatting around outside the food truck circle, checking out the arts and crafts plaza, hiding from that high Tennessee sun, laughing our asses off at nothing in particular, and generally appreciating truly and wholeheartedly what it was like to check your baggage at the gate and just live for the sheer moment and take it all in through a filter that made everything appear warm and sparkly and accepting.

I’d soak it up, and I would return to Toronto with a fresh perspective. And a yearning to return to Roo, and to relive that sanity saving sonic pilgrimage.

Ontario Election - Doug Ford Casts Vote

On June 7, Ontarians gathered to cast their ballots and elect the next government of Ontario. Among them was Doug Ford, just a couple of months into his tenure as leader of the province’s Progressive Conservatives.

Ford was grinning broadly, making his way to his own polling station with his family. A reporter asked a simple question.

"So Doug, today's the big day. Do you know who you're voting for?"

Ford laughed in his charming and easy-going manner. Never one to be taken by surprise, he answered quickly and confidently.

"Absolutely, the choice couldn't be clearer. Ontario has been waiting for a long time for a government that it can trust, one with a proven leader, one that will take it in the right direction into the future." He paused, his face suddenly taking on a meaningful clarity. "That's why I'm voting NDP."

There were gasps from his supporters who had joined him on his march to bring in a new government and sweep aside 15 years of Liberal mismanagement. His family stared at him, aghast. One of the blonde ones fainted. Someone asked him if he had lost his mind.

"Maybe! After all, a few months ago I thought Torontonians would want me as their mayor," he responded breezily.

"But the truth is that there will be other elections. There will always be a new opportunity to elect a new government if the next one fails us. Even if this doesn't go my way, I know that the electorate will hold the next government accountable regardless of whether it's a minority or majority, and everything will be just fine in the end.”

He paused in uncharacteristic contemplation.

"Plus it gives me the time I need to learn what provincial politics is all about, maybe come up with an election platform. Time offers endless possibilities."

---

Sadly Doug Ford did not get his way this time. Less than an hour into the tallying of the votes it was clear that his party would get a majority. This was largely on the efforts of the Liberals, whose reign could easily be summed up by the smug indifference displayed by Wynne in her poorly advised #SorryNotSorry campaign.

After a decade and a half of doing whatever they wanted—consequences be damned—the Liberals opened the doors for another government to do the same. It seems that voting has become an act of electoral retribution rather than a means of changing things for the better.

In the long run, this may turn out to be a good thing for the province, a warning similar to the one to the south where rage overturned reason (and the political climate is admittedly different). In the short term, at least the beer will be cheaper, which is one way of softening the blow to a province whose apathy is unfortunately understandable. Cheers!

Book Review - The Shallows

Hi everyone, and welcome to my digital book report! To begin, I have to admit that that I was a little apprehensive about doing this project. I used to be an avid reader, and always put together great written book reports. So what’s changed?

Wanting to investigate that question is what led me to choose the book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains. The book is written by Nicholas Carr, a tech writer who has been critical of the technological advancements and proclamations coming out of Silicon Valley for the past 15 years or so. His articles have been widely read and debated, and as proof that he is not just a mere cynic or naysayer, this particular book was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize back in 2011.

The Shallows by Nicholas Carr.

The fact is, more people are reading thanks to computers and, in particular, the Internet, but books account for a much smaller portion of the reading these days. However this is more than a contemporary study of a current technology. Carr takes us through the evolution of human thought patterns and how they have been influenced in the past by technological developments. The most important of these is, unsurprisingly, the advent of writing and the written language.

This expanded the scope of human thought and imagination, and eventually evolved into cartography and mapping. As Carr says, we went from drawing and describing only things we could see to more abstract things and places that were beyond our immediate vision. This led to other developments that allowed us to chart courses across oceans we had never crossed. Somewhere along the way we gained the ability to make precise and portable time pieces and opened humanity up to the wonderful world of scheduling.

The next invention that changed human thought patterns was, again unsurprisingly, the printing press. What is notable about this invention is that the significance is not in a change of how much or even what people read, but how they read. With the spreading of the written word, reading transformed from an oral, often group exercise, to a silent and solitary one. This caused the mind to focus inwards, to shut out external stimuli. The words on the page now occupied all of our minds, while we shut off our senses and went against our mammalian survival instincts to become truly literate beings.

The Gutenberg printing press.

Skipping ahead some, Carr says that what the Internet has done to our brains, more so than unconnected computers alone, is to reverse that process. Now we are less concentrated. Now our brains are reprogramming themselves to take in more sensory inputs     again. We are reading more, but comprehending and storing less. The distractions pile up and prevent us from efficiently digesting the information that we gather from our new, ever-present, ever-more-demanding media.

Carr focuses particularly on hyperlinks and how hypertext was once touted as a way of increasing comprehension and information digestion. Instead, they have been proven to have an opposite effect. He illustrates this by using a thimble to symbolize short term or working memory, and a bathtub to symbolize the capacity for long term memory. To move knowledge from the faucet of a book to the bathtub is a simple (yet time-consuming) process. To move it from dozens of sources would be even more time consuming, and result in a great deal of spilled water.

The Shallows has some great asides too that build on the central thesis, bits where Carr compares his mind to the AI of HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and how he is self-aware that his thought patterns are changing and sacrifices are being made without his consent. These are contrasted with other pieces where Carr talks about ever-rising IQ scores, but how these scores have stemmed from increases in certain intellectual areas and drops in others.

All in all the book reads less as the condemnation of technology that I expected, and more as a matter-of-fact study on how this new and unstoppable media will shape our brains and thought patterns for generations to come. Hopefully, in the epilogue, he states that technology will never be able to replace human creativity.

Human Ingenuity at work.

This book is full of great insights, and is expertly written to appeal to both experts and lay persons alike. Carr effortlessly picks up heavy topics like neuroplasticity and easily segues to discussions on McLuhan’s theories of media versus messages. There’s something for everyone in here, from computer historians to anthropologists to digital media theorists.

Not only that, but the book is thoroughly populated with endnotes and contains a comprehensive index for those who want to quickly look up a particular topic or browse for some further reading. Of course, given that it is now 2017, some readers may be wishing for some more hyperlinks and fewer pages.