Jim Poling Sr.'s Blog, page 7

When you go to a 10-pin bowling alley you have to put up ...

When you go to a 10-pin bowling alley you have to put up with a lot of noise.

That’s why Prince Harry’s book Spare, released this week, seems so appropriately titled. Accusations roll thunderously like bowling balls. Family confidences topple like bowling pins.

The book is much noise about things of little concern to most people, and no value in solving real problems. It’s a misery memoir written to rack up attention and make a heap of money.

It’s a book stuffed with little pieces of silliness designed to excite the chattering classes. Like how he lost his virginity to an older woman in a field behind a pub.  

Another flaky excerpt tells of almost freezing his penis on a trip to the North Pole. And, of meeting with a clairvoyant who said she could feel the spirit of his mother, Princess Diana.

He recounts smoking marijuana as a student at Eton College. 

Excerpts from the book have me wondering whether he’s still smoking it, and maybe inhaling too much, too deeply. 

Back in 2016 he consumed magic mushrooms to “redefine” reality and help him see “the truth.” But during one session he went to a washroom where he encountered a talking toilet. 

He also writes that he used cocaine as a teenager, but says he did not like it and any suggestions that he was a drug addict are false.

So perhaps it wasn’t drugs that have made him a bit wacky. Maybe he was just born, like many British royals, a bit dim.

The most dimwitted writing in the book is about his six missions as a British army helicopter pilot in Afghanistan. He writes that he killed 25 Taliban insurgents, saying: “These were chess pieces removed from the board.”

That has stunned and upset military people. Major General Chip Chapman, a senior British military official, called Harry “naively stupid” for breaking military standards and values - stupidity that could threaten the security of the United Kingdom and Harry personally.

Much of the book is about the Royal Family’s treatment of Harry and his American wife Meghan Markle. He has said his older brother William, the heir to the throne, called Meghan difficult, rude and abrasive. 

He also says that an argument about Meghan resulted in a scuffle during which William knocked him to the floor.

He writes that his father, King Charles, was antagonistic towards Meghan and feared being overshadowed by someone charismatic and popular with the people. Charles said he would not support Meghan financially because the royal family was “not made of money.”

Harry accuses his father, his stepmother Camilla, now the Queen Consort, and his brother and sister-in-law of feeding the press negative stories about he and Meghan.

Harry and Meghan ceased Royal Family duties three years ago and moved to the United States. 

Since then Harry has spent much of his time airing grievances against the Royal Family. These have hit a crescendo in the last couple weeks in an organized leadup to the release of Spare.

Harry has given a basketful of interviews to handpicked media, has had a documentary on Netflix and Meghan has been doing podcasts. All of which is contradictory considering Harry’s hatred of the media, notably the British tabloids.

He blames the paparazzi for his mother’s death in a 1997 car crash. The paparazzi were following a car carrying her and her boyfriend Dodi Fayed through a traffic tunnel in Paris. Their chauffeur was speeding, drunk and on prescription drugs when he lost control and crashed. Diana was not wearing a seatbelt.

Harry’s publicity campaign is paying off substantially, in financial terms. Sales of Spare are expected to be in the millions.

It hasn’t helped his image, however. Polling shows 64 per cent of Brits now have a negative view of the prince. Only 26 per cent see him in a positive light.

Meanwhile, as he counts his book royalties, Harry might want to consider one of life’s most important rules: Whining about how others treat you never makes life any better. Suck it up and move on with building a better life for yourself and anyone you can help.

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The celebratory shouts of Happy New Year! are but faint ...

 The celebratory shouts of Happy New Year! are but faint echoes now, pushed into the past by the realities of today.

Today’s realities unfortunately remain the realities of 2022, which was the saddest and most worrisome year of recent times. 

Worries over viral diseases, climate change, rising prices, and Russian, Chinese and North Korean aggression have left us a society very unhappy with itself. 

Gallup, the global analytics organization, reports that its surveys show global unhappiness at a record high. People feel more anger, sadness, pain, worry and stress than ever before, Gallup says in a new book titled: Blind Spot. The Global Rise of Unhappiness and How Leaders Missed It. 

Leger, the Canadian research and analytics company, reports that 40 per cent of people it surveyed feel things will not change in 2023. And 22 per cent said things will get worse.

All this unhappiness appears to be behind a noticeable rise in bad behaviour. Community violence has risen in many cities, as have reckless driving, alcohol and drug consumption and unruly passengers and customers.

Some blame the rise in bad behaviour on the COVID-19 pandemic. However, various studies indicate an unhappiness-incivility trend was developing long before Covid arrived.

The new year brings hope for less misery, more happiness and better behaviour. But hope is simply hope. Action, not hope, will bring it to us.

The most needed action is demand and pressure for more effective leadership in various aspects of our lives. Gallup has noted how world leaders missed rising global unhappiness, which leads me to believe they have missed other things.

Gallup and others contend that leaders are missing things because they rely too much on objective indicators. 

Business leaders make decisions based on share prices and stock growth. Government leaders rely heavily on economic indicators such Gross Domestic Product and unemployment to figure out how they should be looking after their citizens.

They should be paying more attention to human development indicators and the feelings of people. How are their lives going? How do they feel about their wellbeing? 

They would learn much from measuring the state of people’s happiness or unhappiness and the reasons for it.

Objective indicators are important. However, they might show a country’s economic situation is rosy while its citizens are down in the dumps, unhappy with how their lives are progressing.

Too much of today’s leadership is outdated. They hold onto old-fashioned thinking not effective in today’s changing world. 

Part of the problem is that leadership training is outdated. Various studies over the years have shown that the billions of dollars spent by corporations and government on leadership training have done little to produce more effective leadership. One study showed that billions spent on leadership training improved productivity by only two per cent.

We need visionary leaders who are years ahead of us in their thinking and human enough to understand that firmness and flexibility are equal partners in directing people. Leaders unafraid to step back and make corrections when their questionable decisions are challenged by others.

Where do we find these leaders? They are out there and it is up to we citizens to identify them, and encourage them to step forward. A good New Year’s resolution for all of us is to devote more time and energy in promoting new leadership.

This is not to say that we have been living with totally inept leadership. The world, despite all its problems, has made advances in becoming a better place. 

There have been remarkable advances in producing solar energy to help reduce burning of polluting fossil fuels. Huge successes in recycling have been a part of what has become a green revolution. 

But the leadership needed to achieve even greater successes needs to be better. The only way for that to happen is for all of us to become less focussed on our individual lives and more involved in helping to produce new, more effective leadership.

As the author Vernon McLellen has written: “What the new year brings to you will depend a great deal on what you bring to the new year.”

By Jim Poling Sr.(This column is a story I have written ...

 By Jim Poling Sr.

(This column is a story I have written and told many times. Christmas without it again would not be Christmas.)

—

Fresh fallen snow protested beneath the crush of my gumboots breaking trail down the unploughed lane. Dry, sharp squeaks, not unlike the cries of cheap chalk cruelly scrapped against too clean a blackboard. 

Skuur-eek, skuur-eek.

The boots ignored the sounds. They moved on, ribbed rubber bottoms and laced high leather tops creating a meandering wake in the ankle-deep snow. To each side of the trail, drifted snow leaned tiredly against the backsides of the bungalows, dropped there to rest by an impatient Christmas Eve blizzard. 

Faint strains of music joined the squeaking as I approached our back fence. I stopped to hear the music more clearly, now identifiable as singing voices escaping through an open window. I shuffled forward and listened to the notes float out crisply and clearly, then mingle with smoke rising from the chimneys. 

Notes and smoke rose together into an icy midnight sky illuminated by frost crystals set shimmering by thousands of stars, and the frosty moon. 

I held my breath to hear better and determined that the music was the Christmas carol O Holy Night, and that the notes came from the window in my grandmother’s room. It was open to the cold because most people smoked cigarettes back then, and at gatherings cracked a window to clear the air. 

They sang the first verse, and when they reached the sixth line, the other voices ceased and one voice carried on alone:

“Fall on your knees! Oh, hear the angel voices! O Niiii . . .iiight Diii…vine! . . . .” 

That’s the part where the notes rise higher and higher until the singer reaches an awesome note.

The solo voice belonged to my grandmother, Louise LaFrance, and she hit that high note while sitting on the edge of the bed that was her prison. She was crippled with limb-twisting rheumatoid arthritis and suffered searing pain and the humiliation of being bedridden, a humiliation that included needing a bedpan to relieve herself and having her son-in-law lift her into the bathtub.

Each time she hit the high notes at the words ‘O Night Divine’, a shiver danced on my spine.

When she finished singing O Holy Night, the other voices started up again, this time with Silent Night and other favourite carols. I went into the house and found Christmas Eve celebrants – my mom, dad and some neighbours – crowded into the 10-foot by 10-foot bedroom that was my grandmother’s world. They sang long into the night, mostly in French because the neighbours were the Gauthiers who seldom spoke English to my grandmother and mother.

The crippling arthritis had attacked my grandmother not long after my birth sixteen years before. It advanced quickly, twisting her fingers like pretzels, then deforming her ankles and knees. 

She took up smoking to ease the pain. Late into the night I would hear her stir, then listen for the scrape of a wooden match against the side of a box of Redbird matches. Then the acrid odour of sulphur drifted into my room, followed by the sweetness of smoke from a Sweet Caporal. 

Sometimes I would get up and go to her door and see the red tip of the cigarette glow brightly as she inhaled and I would go in and we would talk in the smoky darkness. Mostly the talk was about growing up and sorting through the conflicts between a teenager and his parents. 

After the singing ended that night, my mother served tourtière, which I slathered with mustard. Then we gathered at the tree and opened our gifts. 

I have long forgotten what I got that Christmas, and it doesn’t matter. My real gift came many years later, and was an understanding of how that frail and twisted body came to produce such powerful and sweet notes. 

My gift was the realization that those high notes were not solely the products of the lungs. They were driven by something stronger than flesh – an unbreakable spirit. 

They came from strength far beyond anything that a mere body can produce. They came from the will to overcome.

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What the world needs now are more dog walkers like Row Il...

What the world needs now are more dog walkers like Row Iliescu.

Iliescu is the Toronto woman who spends a lot of her time picking up litter while walking her dog in the city’s parks.

Most of the litter is cigarette butts which she sucks up with a handheld battery-operated vacuum. She estimates that on an average outing she picks up 300 to 400 butts.

She also picks up other litter. If she spots a discarded takeout coffee cup while vacuuming butts, she feels she can’t really not pick it up and toss it in a trash can.

I read about her on a blog post and then watched film clips of her on the television news.

Hearing about her volunteer anti-litter efforts got me thinking that we really need people like her in Haliburton County. Then I realized that we do have them.

Kennisis Lake Cottage Owners’ Association has organized roadside cleanup drives, as have other community groups and individuals. Many Saturdays or Sundays you will see someone with a spiked stick and garbage bag working a ditch or roadside somewhere in the county.

And, thank God they are. The amount of garbage we toss out vehicle windows onto our roads and highways is shocking and sickening. If some of it wasn’t being picked up by volunteers, the ditches would be full.

There are no accurate statistics on how much litter is dropped, or how much is cleaned up, every year in Canada.  Without a doubt hundreds of thousands of pieces of litter are dropped on our roads every year. And, roughly three-quarters of people asked in various surveys have admitted to tossing a cigarette butt, or dropping a gum wrapper or other piece of litter onto a roadside.

It’s a blessing that we have volunteers trying to keep our roadsides clear of litter. But the real answer to having litter-free roads is to find ways of stopping the litterers.

Most litterers don’t think about the serious problems caused by litter. Yes, it is unsightly, but it also is dangerous. A study done back in 2004 found that road debris and litter causes as many as 25,000 vehicle crashes a year on North American roads.

Litter is especially dangerous to cyclists, who are using highways more than in the past. A cyclist moving deeper into a traffic lane to avoid roadside litter risks being struck by a car or truck.

Animals run out onto roads to get discarded food products and end up being run down by a car or truck. Or, they eat discarded food gone bad and become ill.

Cigarette butts, cigarette packages and other items related to smoking are among the most littered roadside items. A discarded cigarette butt takes 12 years to break down and in doing so leaks cadmium, lead and arsenic into the environment.

These chemical components are taken in by plants, insects, animals and marine life.

Beer and pop cans also rate high in litter counts, and aluminium cans take centuries to break down. The U.S. non-profit organization Keep America Beautiful reports that its 2021 study found roadside beer container litter has increased 27 per cent since 2009.

Personal protective equipment such as masks and gloves also are becoming major litter items since the COVID-19 pandemic began.

The frustration of litter is that there is no need for it. Laziness and carelessness are two main causes of littering. To get rid of those causes you have to change people’s attitudes.

That’s no small order, especially in Canada where we live surrounded by incredible natural beauty but ignore it, often living like pigs.

The World Bank has estimated that Canadian waste generation is the largest of any country in the world. It has estimated Canada’s annual waste total at 1,3235,480,289 metric tons. That’s roughly 36.1 metric tons per person each year.

The World Bank also estimates that global waste generation will increase by as much as 70 per cent in the next 25 to 30 years.

Canadians should be leaders in eliminating waste, but we’ll never be seen as leaders when we continue to allow our roadsides to become garbage pits.

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From Shaman’s RockBy Jim Poling Sr.The wind off the lake ...

From Shaman’s Rock

By Jim Poling Sr.

The wind off the lake is furiously slapping the flag on the pole anchored in the little flower patch out front my place.

There’s nothing noteworthy about a flag moving in the wind. Except that it seems to be happening more often these days.

My flag is seldom still, even in the evenings when you expect it to be still. It often flaps during the night, waking me on occasion.

There’s no official data on whether we are experiencing more windy days, but we do know that wind speeds have been increasing. Researchers report that the global average wind speed has increased six per cent – from 7.0 to 7.4 miles per hour – since 2010.

Increased wind can be bad news. It can cause visible damage such as fallen trees and damaged buildings. There are other less visible, but serious, implications such as soil erosion and water evaporation.

The good news about more frequent, stronger winds is that we finally realize wind is an important energy alternative to pollution-producing fossil fuels.

It took us a long time. American naturalist Henry David Thoreau realized it almost 200 years ago, writing:

“Here is almost incalculable power at our disposal, yet how trifling the use we make of it! It only serves to turn a few mills, blow a few vessels across the ocean, and a few trivial ends besides. What a poor compliment do we pay to our indefatigable and energetic servant!”

Today, using wind to make electricity is a growth industry. The wind power market is up an estimated 14 per cent in the past 10 years.

The Global Wind Energy Council has reported record growth in the last two years. But the council says the industry is not growing fast enough to meet climate change goals set by governments.

It is not that there is not enough wind. The challenge is harnessing and distributing it.

The International Energy Agency says there is enough offshore wind to produce all the world’s future electrical power needs 11 times over. However, we don’t yet have ways of harnessing offshore winds and distributing the electricity they produce from miles out in the ocean to land-based power grids.

Wind energy may help reduce fossil fuel use and its environmental impacts. It does have its own environmental problems, however.

Environmentalists are concerned about the noise created by wind turbine blades. They also worry about visual aesthetics – wind farms spoiling views of beautiful landscapes. Large wind turbines are visible for 15 to 20 miles in clear and relatively flat areas.

Birds and bats flying into turbine blades is another problem. Joel Merriman, a wind specialist working with the American Bird Conservancy, says that 1.17 million birds are killed each year by wind turbines in the United States.

The is not much evidence to show harm to other wildlife, or to humans living near wind turbines. Some people believe that low-level turbine noise results in headaches, irritability, fatigue, dizziness, tinnitus and even more serious health problems.

There also is concern that with the growing number of wind turbines some could end up in locations that interfere with radar systems. These systems are widespread across North America and are important tools in air traffic control, weather forecasting and national air defence.

Numerous studies are being conducted to document any serious negative effects of wind energy, and how they might be mitigated. Finding turbine sites where good wind energy can be produced with minimal impacts on wildlife, humans or radar systems is a key part of that research.

It might all come down to having to accept some negative effects in exchange for a less polluted world and the increased destruction expected from continued global warming.

Environmental activist David Suzuki accepts that bird and bat kills are a part of creating necessary alternative energy. 

“Global warming will kill birds and bats, as well as other species, in much greater numbers than wind power,” he has said.

There’s a lot of thinking and work to be done to sort all this out. Thankfully, none of it has to be done by me. 

On nights when the wind blows hard, threatening to keep me awake, I’ll simply lower the flag.

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Who will stop the Russians?From Shaman’s RockBy Jim Poli...

 Who will stop the Russians?

From Shaman’s Rock

By Jim Poling Sr.

If I throw stones at my neighbours relaxing on their backyard patio, other neighbours witnessing the crime will rush in to stop me.

If I take wire cutters and cut the power lines bringing light, heat and electricity to cook food, police will take away my cutters, put me in handcuffs and drag me off for punishment.

Sad Vlad Putin continues to fire hundreds of missiles into Ukraine, killing thousands of civilians, but Ukraine’s friends and neighbours have done nothing to stop him. 

Some countries have imposed sanctions, but these are aimed at damaging the Russian economy and have not stopped the killing. It’s like taking credit cards away from a mass murderer.

More than 6,500 Ukrainian civilians have been murdered by Russian armed forces and their weapons since Russia invaded the country in February. That figure comes from the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

The Ukraine prosecutor general says that 437 children have been killed and 853 wounded in the Russian onslaught. Another 200 to 300 have gone missing and thousands have been deported to Russia, some of them put up for adoption.

Nicholas Kristof, a respected American journalist, reported last week that some Ukrainian children were enticed by Russian occupiers to attend a free summer camp. They were taken to Russia and not seen since.

This is a war against Ukrainian civilians. Putin wants to eliminate their country, their language and their culture. (Sound familiar?) 

He wants them to be Russians living on land transformed into Russia. 

The Kremlin admits it is making civilians suffer, but only because their government refuses to submit to Moscow’s wishes.

Putin is bombing and shelling Ukrainian apartment buildings so the people have no place to live. He has bombed infrastructure that provides light, heat and water. By depriving them of food shelter and warmth he hopes to terrify them into accepting Russia.

As of the first week of November, 7.8 million Ukrainians have had to flee their county, according to the UN. This has created Europe’s largest refugee crisis since the Second World War.

No country has taken any direct action to stop Putin’s massacre for one reason – fear. Putin has threatened nuclear war if any country tries to stop him from overrunning Ukraine. We are all terrified that he will start setting off the Big Ones.

Maybe he will. Maybe he won’t. But we should not let his nuclear bomb threats stop the world from taking whatever action is needed to end Russian atrocities in Ukraine.

If Putin’s nuclear gambit is successful, and he destroys Ukraine without other countries trying to stop him, he will have encouraged other nuclear-armed totalitarian states. 

China continues to threaten Taiwan. North Korea continues to threaten South Korea and others by test firing missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads to North America.

The longer Putin is allowed to get away with his Ukraine savagery, the more these others smile, thinking: “If Putin can get away with it, so can we.”

Yes, stopping Putin could start a nuclear war. 

We’ve been living with nuclear fear since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis when the Soviet Union began installing nuclear missiles sites in Cuba. Our nuclear anxiety heightens as more totalitarian regimes, ruled by psychopaths like Putin, develop nuclear capabilities.

The question for the world is clear: Do we continue to tsk, tsk the Russian killing, maiming and overall horrid suffering inflicted on innocent Ukraine civilians and their children? Or, do we step in with military or whatever else it takes to stop Putin’s massacre and risk nuclear war?

It is immoral to stand by watching the horrors of Russia’s war on Ukrainian civilians.

World leaders appear to be hoping that Russians themselves stop the war against Ukrainians.

There is an anti-war movement in Russia, but anyone hoping it will stop Putin is only dreaming. Restrictions on protests, including arrests and jail time have resulted in it being ineffective.

Many Russians who do not support the invasion of Ukraine have moved from their homeland because they cannot speak out against it. Close to one million Russian citizens and residents are said to have emigrated, many fearing criminal prosecution for opposing the invasion or being conscripted to fight in the war.

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Whenever I read about global problems, I note climate cha...

Whenever I read about global problems, I note climate change, serious pandemics, wars-military conflicts, poverty and hunger always top the list.

I’d like to add one: social media. Nothing has done more it the last two decades to spread disinformation, misinformation and manipulate the way people think. 

Social media is being used to increase political conflict, promote instability and create atmospheres for violence. Its influence becomes stronger by the day.

An estimated 4.74 billion (billion, not million) people, or almost 60 per cent of the world’s population, are active social media users. Those figures come from DataReportal.com, which collects and distributes data on digital information usage.

Canada has an estimated 35 million social media users, which is roughly 90 per cent of the population.

There are dozens of social media platforms, the most popular being Facebook, YouTube, What’sApp and Instagram, each with more than two billion users. Twitter, which is in a state of chaos, has just under four million users.

Few will deny that social media platforms spread tons of information that is twisted or simply not true. There is talk of better policing, or even of banning social media platforms.

That’s just talk. It will never happen because the most outrageous pieces of bad information get the most attention. Misinformation sells and keeps social media platforms in business. Clicks mean money and money talks.

It’s impossible to police social media posting because there is so much of it. There are said to be hundreds of thousands of comments posted on Facebook worldwide every minute and 300 million new photos every day. Six thousand Tweets are sent every second.

Social media platforms lack professional fact checking. There are no editors ensuring that posts are fair, balanced and done with context that provides meaning and clarity to the message.

Despite that lack, many people are turning to social media for their news, and away from traditional professional news outlets like newspapers, which are suffering big readership and revenue declines.

So a lot of the “news” that social media users are absorbing is misinformation or outright disinformation.

Some of the inaccurate information is unintentional but some is intentional; deliberately put out there to influence thinking, or an event such as an election

Sadly, even some of the people who are supposed to be providing us with good leadership are distributing bad information

Two recent examples: Twitter owner Elon Musk recently posted for his 112 million Twitter followers an unfounded conspiracy theory about the attack on Paul Pelosi, husband of U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. 

Musk deleted the Tweet later, but not before it received tens of thousands of retweets and likes.

Then earlier this month, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau distributed on Twitter false information about mass death sentences in Iran. His Tweet referred to false reports that the Iranian government had sentenced nearly 15,000 people to death.

Trudeau tweeted that Canada “denounces the Iranian regime’s barbaric decision.”

The Tweet was deleted later, with Trudeau’s office explaining that it was based on initial reporting that was incomplete and lacking context. No one explained why the initial reporting was not checked for accuracy before the prime minister made a fool of himself.

Social media can be positive. It allows us to build friendships, keep in touch with family and friends and share helpful information. It also can be an important business tool.

However, bad information distributed on social media creates confusion. When people find a situation confusing they often simply ignore it, leaving it to get worse. For instance, when health authorities say vaccines are important and social media says virus threats are a hoax, people become confused and tend to simply ignore an important health issue.

Without question social media is shaping our world in many different ways, too many of them brutal and vulgar. We need to start recognizing this as a major problem.

Once we recognize it as a serious problem, we can start finding ways of fixing it. We need to lift social media to a higher level – a level in which information posted is important, accurate and capable of building a better world. 

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I’m not one for rewatching a movie, no matter how good it...

I’m not one for rewatching a movie, no matter how good it might have been. Especially if it is a remake.

I made an exception recently and ordered up the 2021 remake of West Side Story, the classic tale of gang rivalry and young love in 1957 New York City. I did it because most remakes are bad, and I wanted to see just how bad this one was.

What a surprise! This remake is every bit as good as the original, which starred Natalie Wood, Richard Breymer, Rita Moreno, George Chakiris and Russ Tamblyn. In some ways, it is even better, which is not a surprise because it was directed by Steven Spielberg, who gave us blockbuster successes such as E.T., Saving Private Ryan, Jaws and Schindler’s List. Spielberg’s version is more inclusive and more representative of today’s world.

The original West Side Story had a core message: in a world torn by poverty, cultural differences and outright racism there is hope that love can overcome all.

The West Side Story 2021 remake continues that message, adding a couple of its own while putting the classic Romeo and Juliet story into today’s American social context.

One is that today’s road to achieving the American dream is more strewn than ever with hardship and tragedy. Gun violence, racial hatred and decaying urban structure stand in the way of building better lives, especially for immigrants.

However, hope for a better America comes from the performances of two young newcomer actors – Rachel Zegler and Ansel Elgort who were 18 and 25 when the movie was filmed. 

Interestingly, both young people, who star as Maria and Tony, do their own singing. In the original 1961 film, ghost voices sang for stars Natalie Wood and Richard Breymer.

Probably the biggest change in the 2021 movie version is the reappearance of Rita Moreno, who played the vivacious Anita in the original. She returns as the elderly Valentina, widow of Doc, owner of the drugstore where members of the Jets youth gang hang out.

At 90, Moreno sings the powerful Somewhere!, which dreams of a time and place in which people with differences live and love together in peace.

Moreno’s reappearance 60 years after the first movie was filmed is a lesson for all: Don’t toss anything aside just because it is old. Old things and old people still have much to offer.

Valentina’s Somewhere! offers hope for change, while knowing she will not live to see it. She is near the end of her life but sings of hope for the young people who are struggling to make good lives for themselves.

Someone has been singing Somewhere! on stage, in film or in a recording studio for 60-plus years. The lyrics of the tune are haunting, but hopeful:

“There’s a place for us
Somewhere a place for us
Peace and quiet and open air
Wait for us somewhere

“Someday
Somewhere
We’ll find a new way of living
We’ll find a way of forgiving
Somewhere!”

Sadly, despite all the passing years and all the singing, we still haven’t found that “somewhere.” Hatred, racism and violence remain a big part of our lives. North American gun violence is totally out of control. There have been roughly 500 mass shootings in the United States so far this year.

We Canadians consider ourselves much purer than the Americans. However, Statistics Canada has reported that police-reported crimes motivated by race or ethnic hatred increased 80 per cent between 2019 and 2020. Black, Asian and Indigenous people were the main targets of the 1,594 Canadian hate crimes during that period. 

Instead of finding a new way of living, we are well into a new time in which sane centre-based politics is being taken over by insane extremism, on both the right and the left. Fact-based information and intelligent discussion are being replaced by misinformation and disinformation. 

West Side Story is a sad story that ends tragically without the “somewhere” being found.

However, like the two young lovers and the elderly widow Valentina, we can’t stop hoping that it’s out there and one day our crippled societies will find it.

I have confirmed that COVID-19 is not a respiratory dise...

 I have confirmed that COVID-19 is not a respiratory disease. It is a mental disease that makes some people more stupid than they already are.

I confirmed this during yet another call to our federal government, which increasingly is badly operated by empty pumpkin heads.

I called Canada Post because when I went to gather my daily mail, I found our two neighbourhood mail boxes replaced with two newer looking ones. The old ones looked and worked fine, but the feds always are looking for ways to waste our money, so I just shrugged.

I shrugged until I went to use the new mail box. The mail space assigned to me was so small that there was barely enough room to get my hand in to retrieve my mail.

Well, we all are being asked to live with less these days so I closed the slot and proceeded to mail four letters. I scoured the new mail boxes but could not find an outgoing mail slot. That’s when I called Canada Post. 

To be accurate, I asked my wife to make the call. I hadn’t taken my morning blood pressure medication, and having The Big One during a conversation with a federal bureaucrat would be the ultimate indignity. 

The Canada Post help guy told my wife there is no outgoing mail slot because they no longer are picking up outgoing mail in our area.

“No one advised us that,” said my wife.

“They don’t have to tell you, ma’am,” he replied.

Why are you stopping outgoing mail pickup, she asked. The reply: The trucks are not large enough to handle both delivery and pickup.

When she asked where we are supposed to mail our letters, he said he would happily look up the addresses of nearby outgoing mail boxes. Most of those he supplied were in far-off places, an hour or more drive away.

My wife’s cell phone was on speaker so I shouted: “What about Dorset? It’s six miles down the highway and has an actual post office.” 

He said he had no record of that place and added that he was stationed in southern Ontario, and didn’t know much about the north. Although, he had attended a Boy Scout camp in the Haliburton area.

He asked for our actual address, then said Canada Post had no record that the address existed. That despite the fact that it has been delivering our mail here for the last three years. 

At that point I had to race home to take a double dose of blood pressure pills. This was my second encounter this year with a numbingly dense federal bureaucracy.

Late last year I filed my writing business HST report to Revenue Canada. In March, I received a reply that they had mailed me a refund of $450, but to my old address in Barrie. We had moved a few months earlier to our cottage near Dorset. 

That would not be a problem, however, because I had paid Canada Post $108 to forward my Barrie address mail to my new address.

It was a problem. The cheque, like a bunch of other expected mail, did not arrive. 

I called Revenue Canada where I learned the cheque appeared to be lost and they would send me a pile of paperwork to fill out for a new cheque to be issued, if the old one was not found within six months. 

The Revenue Canada help guy asked for the new address. I gave it to him, noting he already had it because I had sent a change of address form to Revenue Canada months earlier.

He said he could not find the address, and in fact the road on which I live did not exist. I protested and he said he would check Canada Post. When he came back on the line, he said Canada Post informed him that there is not such address anywhere in Canada. 

“But Canada Post delivers mail, including mail from Revenue Canada, to this address,” I said.

“Well, Canada Post has no record of that address,” he replied.

I slammed down the phone and went looking for my blood pressure medication. 

Maybe it’s Covid. Maybe not. But we live in a world gone mad 

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The lights dim. The audience turns to other spectacles.Na...

The lights dim. The audience turns to other spectacles.

Nature’s annual autumn show is over. It was a spectacular one. Certainly one of the most vibrant in years. Crimson and golden hillsides seemingly competing to take our breath away.
There are many theories on why the autumn leaves were so dazzling this year. People cite drought, followed by ample early autumn rain. Others say low night temperatures, but without frost, are responsible.

Weather factors such as temperature and moisture do influence leaf change, but research tells us the most important influence by far is the calendar. Shorter hours of daylight and longer dark and cool nights set off biochemical processes that cause leaves to change.
No one really knows everything about why trees act the way they do each autumn. Not even the scientists who study these things.

We do know what causes trees to abandon their healthy green foliage. In spring and summer trees produce green chlorophyll to help them convert light into chemical energy that results in sugars and starches. This is all part of a food production process known as photosynthesis.
In the fall, green chlorophyll production slows, allowing reddish-orange carotenoid pigments and red to purplish anthocyanin tints to appear

The reds and maroons displayed by sugar maples, sumac and some other tree species are derived from anthocyanin pigments formed from sugar stored in the leaves. The yellow to golden orange hues of birches, aspen and hickory come from carotene chemicals that give colour to corn, carrots, pumpkins and egg yolks.
But we know nothing about the reason why trees change their colour. What are they trying to achieve?

“This is both surprising and puzzling, since Nature seldom wastes energy to no purpose,” writes James Poling (no relation), author of Leaves: Their Amazing Lives and Strange Behavior. “Yet as far as botanists can determine, the chemical energy that goes into the painting of a leaf is of no benefit at all to the plant. The colors seem merely to herald the end of a leaf’s life cycle.”

There are some theories about why trees change their leaves, but none scientifically proven.
One is that the change in leaf colour is a warning to insects such as aphids who want to burrow in trees for winter. If leaf colours indicate chemical defences are present, then insects will avoid the tree.

Then there is the theory of photoprotection in which anthocyanins protect the leaf against the harmful effects of light at low temperatures. Supposedly this allows the leaf to live a bit longer.
Then of course there is a longstanding belief that trying to maintain photosynthesis during the low light, cold, high winds and snow of winter is just not worth the effort for trees. So they decide to take a winter break and drop their leaves.

Or, crazy as it sounds, are the trees doing it for us?

Studies show that fall colours can lift our moods. Some psychiatrists advise patients that a walk or drive through the autumn woods is therapeutic.

The contrasting colours of autumn leaves stimulate the mind. They are an exciting transformation after months of seeing just the bright greens of spring and summer trees.

Autumn colours signal the brain that change is happening. And, change can be exciting, even inspiring us to do different things – like taking up a new hobby or setting goals.
They are a reminder that change must happen before new things can begin. And, of course, a reminder that nothing lasts forever.

All said, I suppose it doesn’t matter that we know what purpose a tree has in changing the colour of its leaves. Time spent trying to figure that out probably is better spent just relaxing by taking in the fall spectacle.

Watching the leaves turn is a great reminder of how lucky we are to have four seasons and the beauty and differences that each brings.
Autumn, despite its signals of harder times ahead, is for many folks the absolute best of the seasons.

I like the way autumn is described by Winnie the Pooh, author A. A. Milne’s fictional teddy bear.
Autumn, says Winnie, is “a time of hot chocolatey mornings, and toasty marshmallow evenings, and, best of all, leaping into leaves!”