#468 Duller, Eh

So I noticed a couple of other things while I was in Canada. Well, okay, Victoria. Certainly no reason to assume all of Canada is like one small region. I mean, I don’t always assume an entire carton of white milk is white. Can you say homogenous? I was at a meeting, and I almost missed what I was supposed to do because the announcer was Canadian and he was telling us that on this form we were supposed to shed-yule our proe-gress on the proe-ject. Then he said something about having a-boat an hour and getting oat afterwards. I was all for that, I mean, I’d ridden a boat over to Canada and I got oat nuggets for breakfast. Fiber is just as important in Canadia as it is here. I changed my currency at a professional currency changing place. The American dollar is now equivalent to a dollar and eight cents in Canadian money. Unfortunately, the current sea of debt from the don’t-tax-and-spend-anyhow fiscal policy of the last few years has driven the American dollar under the waves of foreign current seas. The clerk at the exchange desk wasn’t above having a little fun though. Talk about a boring and unfulfilling job. Making change all day without selling anything. When I told him I wanted Canadian dollars he said are you sure, I have a special on Yen today. I said that’s good I have a hankering for yen and then in chorus we both said “or a yen for hankering…” When I got back after my trip I realized I had a pocketful of loonies and two-nies. They have one-dollar coins like brassy-looking oversized quarters with a pictures of loons on them. They have a two dollar coin too which is slightly bigger. And has one colored disc of metal set into another colored disc. In fact, a two dollar Canadian coin looks an awful lot like a denomination of a Mexican peso. It’s pretty scary when you can mint a coin and have it cost less than printing a paper slip. But today’s paper money is so loaded with security devices, implanted data, holograms, and chips, I’m surprised it doesn’t spend itself. Still, currency is only as good as the people who take it. On the way over, the Black Ball ferry clerk at the coffee shop waved away my Canadian quarters contemptuously. Which was a little odd, as the flag of the country of registry the Black Ball ferry flies is Canada. I looked at my Canadian 20 dollar bill for the first time carefully after I got back to the states. Cool! It has a picture on it of that lady who won the Oscars. Helen Mirren. Must be a Canadian actress of high repute. She’s made a lot of proe-gress. Finally humor is universal. I was a little worried. I wasn’t sure if my humor would convert to metric. We were at a specialty tea parlor and they had a variety called Library tea. I asked the clerk if it was easier to use Library tea to read fortunes. She groaned exactly as much as an American.
America, ya gotta love it

#467 Duh!

So I’m up in Canada recently. Actually just Victoria B.C. Your view of Victoria as you come in on the ferry from Port Angeles is a wonderful thing—antique buildings soaring seven stories up to the skyline, beautiful winter flowers and cabbages lining the harbor, the mountains of Vancouver Island rising majestic in the background, and rushing into the Strait of Juan de Fuca to greet you like some forgotten British imperial emissary of world domination, wide swaths of floating raw sewage. As the fetid nuggets of the commonwealth bob out to lap the sides of the ferry, you know you’ve arrived on the shores of a conflicted nation. On the one hand, leading the way in attempts to minimize global warming and in setting aside large areas of wonderful natural resources, and on the other hand active participants in industrial clear-cutting, over-fishing, salmon-poaching, and raw sewage dumping. When I checked into my room, there was one of those newfangled cards tucked into a fold of the turned-back sheet/duvet combination. Good idea: Cover your duvet on both sides with clean white sheets and then do some fancy folding to hold the whole darn thing in place. That way you know you’re not sitting on some bed coverlet that has never ever been washed like in so many hotels. And they should wash them too. If only because women set their purses on them, and as one great hygiene survey pointed out, the bottoms of women’s purses contain more fecal matter than the aquifers of cities like Lacey. And never get chlorinated. They have the fecal matter because women take their purses into public toilet areas and set them on the floor while they’d tending to other business. In any event, tucked into the duvet is a card that says the hotel is on a green water conservation program and as a result will only change bed linens every three days. As I’ve said before, I hope I didn’t check in on the third day. The cool thing about the card was that you knew you were in Canada because it was printed in English and French rather than English and Spanish. The card also said I could help, if I wanted to reuse my towel just hang it on the shower curtain bar. Um no. That’s what I do in Motel 6, not the Empress. If only because the really thick towels at the Empress would take too long to dry. But here’s what really got me about dear Canada. I’m in a public restroom at a coffee shop. When I’m washing my hands afterwards, there’s a sign above the sink. It says, “Please be kind to other patrons and wipe the counter afterwards.” Excuse me. I’m paying for your expensive coffee and you want me to do your janitorial service too? What’s next, a little toilet brush next to the can? Should I swim out into the strait with a feces net too? Please be kind to other patrons of the Puget Sound. Catch a clue. Made me think they should get a new slogan like our Say Wa. It could be Can-a-DUH!
America, ya gotta love it

#466 Driving Taxes

This whole welfare thing has to stop. People need to be self-sufficient. Giving them a handout is robbing them of their will to succeed. If you bail people out all the time, they’ll just start to take advantage. All of a sudden their demands will get excessive. They’ll be depending on you for everything. They’ll want you to do something really extravagant like—build them a new sports arena. Ha ha. Had you going. For a second there you were going, Oh my gosh, what happened to libertarian Funny Guy? He was starting to sound like Rush. And it wasn’t no Tom Sawyer. Well that’s the point, what applies to one, applies to the other. Now I think I understand that big corporations create jobs and those jobs pay people and the pay from those people gets spent on stuff like household notions and the taxes from the sale of that stuff fill the coffers of government full. And that those coffers are then emptied putting up roads and parks and the all important infrastructure. So I can kind of, sort of, almost, see Boeing coming to the government and saying: Hey, back off the sales tax on 747s, we do a lot to fuel the tax engine already. But what I don’t understand is, oh, say, Nascar coming into Washington and bringing all their big gun drivers before the legislature to cadge a few million to help them build a race track. At what point did South Sound Speedway and Grays Harbor Raceway get a big chunk of state dollars to put up their tracks? Is it because they’re smaller organizations and don’t promise to employ enough people? Is it, after all, another case of size matters? Is it not that the smaller raceways didn’t need the money but that they didn’t dream big enough? It seems to come down to arrogance. The baseball teams and the football teams and now the basketball teams are all looking for a handout. You kind of wonder why anyone would want to get into the sports franchise business. I mean, it must not be all that profitable if you always have to be going to the government to bail you out. Oh right. You skim off the profits before you go broke. Open up a nearby convention center, keep your revenues from concessions separate—little profit diverting tricks that make the construction costs seem too onerous to bear by one civic-minded sports franchise just trying to give their fair city and state a title of some sort. It’s really too bad. The small business is the backbone of American commerce. The small businessperson takes the biggest risks and has the most to lose. And cares the most about his clients. Cause they’re his neighbors too. The giant megacorps with their Enron sensibility and bottom line fancy bookkeeping suck the government corporate welfare trough dry. Then turn around and support political candidates who wring their holier-than-thou hands about all the deadbeats on welfare. Hey, maybe if you gave them a free Nascar ticket, they’d get a job...
America, ya gotta love it