A Heck of a Family

My youngest recently celebrated his High School Grad. We took the oportunity to get a family photo

Hating Toronto?

Hating Toronto

It seems to be the national pastime in this country to hate Toronto. Or at least resent it. There are plenty of reasons why, it seems to be the attitude of many Torontonians that the rest of the country is superfluous. That all decisions in this country come out of Bay Street.

The resentment seems even more severe in Western Canada, especially in Alberta, where it is particularly rabid. Albertans seemingly believe THEY should be the center of the universe.

I like most Canadians have spent time in Toronto, and of course have relatives there. Indeed I have been there numerous times; in fact I have been in Toronto twice in the last few months.

As you are probably aware if you visit this Blog, I am a professional fire fighter. I recently visited Toronto for the International Association of Fire Fighters convention. During this time I was able to get a good look at downtown Toronto and meet quite a few people

To be honest I was amazed at how well we were greeted by the City. The people were much friendlier then I expected, however I was aghast at the number of people living on the streets.

I presume, in the final analysis that Toronto, like all big cities is a contradiction in terms; a large friendly booming city, relatively crime free. Yet one that tolerates many, many unfortunates sleeping in the street.

Windows Defender

Microsoft does something right this software, which incorporates Microsoft (Giant) Antispyware in a suite of utilities that not only blocks spyware from getting on your computer in real-time, but can do scheduled scans AND remove any malware that is already on there.It is currently available in Beta from this website:www.microsoft.com/athome/...fault.mspx

Warning: for any software pirates you must install MS genuine advantage (that checks to see if you have a legitimate copy of windows) in order to download this program.

Windows Defender will apparently come standard with Windows Vista upon release    

The Best Movies

Here are my favourite films, in no particular order:
   

The Seven Samurai	1951	Akira Kurosawa
L.A. Confidential	1997	Curtis Hanson
The Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers	2002	Peter Jackson
The Maltese Falcon	1941	John Huston
Blade Runner	1982	Ridley Scott
Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back	1980	George Lucas
Chinatown	1974	Roman Polanski
Monty Python and the Holy Grail	1975	Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones
The Searchers	1956	John Ford
Saving Private Ryan	1998	Steven Spielberg
Some Like It Hot	1959	Billy Wilder
Aliens	1986	James Cameron
Cool Hand Luke	1967	Stuart Rosenberg
The Wild Bunch	1968	Sam Pechinpah
Arsenic and Old Lace	1944	Frank Capra
Snatch	2000	Guy Ritchie
Heat	1995	Michael Mann
Yojimbo	1961	Akira Kurosawa
Last Of The Mohicans	1992	Michael Mann
Training Day	2001	Antoine Fuqua
A Fish Called Wanda	1988	Charles Crichton
Reservoir Dogs	1992	Quentin Tarantino
Three Kings	1999	David O. Russell
Red River	1948	Howard Hawks
Hombre	1967	Martin Ritt
The Commitments	1991	Alan Parker
Terminator 2: Judgement Day	1991	James Cameron

 
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Lessons From Katrina

   As a member of the Emergency Services I was amazed by the response to Hurricane Katrina by all levels of government, but especially by the federal government.

  Now this is perhaps understandable in the case of state and local agencies as Louisiana in general and New Orleans in particular have legendary levels of corruption, and hence incompetence.

  However in the case of the US government it is rather more dismaying.
The US federal government spends massive amounts of money and much air-time convincing Americans that they are doing everything humanly possible to keep them safe. They created a whole new Dept after 9/11, The Dept of Homeland Security.

  FEMA the Federal Emergency Management Agency, formally an independent body was put under the auspices of this Dept. Mr Bush then appointed a man with no experience in Emergency Management to lead this group.

  The US Government's and FEMA's response to Katrina was woeful. Even once the full extent of the disaster was known it was painfully slow. Now Mr Brown has dutifully fallen on his sword and at least someone more qualified went into his position but it still leaves several major important questions to answer.

  Homeland Security's budget is almost immeasurable. New Orleans is a relatively small city. What would happen if a major catastrophe were to occur in New York, or Los Angeles, or Chicago? How could the government adequately respond to the having to deal with millions of homeless or injured?

  Rita has shown that agencies are learning from their mistakes, but the chilling question remains that we are ill prepared for a major catastrophe either natural or man made.
  

What's Wrong With Network TV

What has become of Network TV? Viewership is dropping rapidly and, for the most part the powers that be don't seem to be capable of doing anything about it.

In my opinion the bottom line is that the crap that is churned out by the major American networks is, for the most part unwatchable. Yet at the same time cable TV is offering television that is constantly breaking new ground and evolving. Programs like The Sopranos, Sex In The City, The Shield, Deadwood, The Wire, Rescue Me and others offer TV that rivals the best in Hollywood movies.

The failure of Network TV I assign to 3 reasons:

1- First and foremost, I blame the problem on Conservative special interest groups, nothing even approaching reality can be shown by the networks without being inundated by complaints from "the moral majority", clamoring that it be taken off the air lest innocent children are corrupted by it.

2- Secondly, stupidity. All of these networks are run by businessmen, who know nothing about art, and less about good television, as such everybody is attempting to copy whatever format was successful last season.

3- Lastly, the bane of all that is good in television "REALITY TV" which of course in really has no connection to reality, but has one great redeeming quality for programmers, its cheap, no actors to pay you see?

So for the foreseeable future I predict a continued downward spiral for the networks, in fact unless they completely reinvent themselves they will soon be totally redundant and unnecessary. In the not to distant future they may well be totally replaced by cable networks that are leaner, meaner and quite frankly much better

The "Burden" Of Equalization

Ontario Premier Dalton McGinty is upset with Ottawa. You see he claims his province is unfairly burdened by the Federal Governments Equalization scheme. It seems Ontario's budgetary debt has suddenly risen to over 6 billion annually, shocking indeed. Now Mr McGinty's seems unwilling to deal with this problem, by either cutting back OR raising taxes because, well because its everyone else's fault. You see he feels the debt wouldn't be there, if only Ontarians didn't have to support the rest of Canada. Thats right Ontario, by the sweat of its brow is propping up all those lazy bastards in the rest of Canada. Who new?

Now if Mr McGinty has problems now, think how bad they would be if not for the fact of the tens of thousands of FEDERAL employees who live and work in his province.You see he fails to mention anything about that, perhaps he thinks its his god given right to hoard all those Federal employees, each of which pays substantial taxes into Ontario provincial government coffers.

I tell you what Mr McGinty. I live in one of those provinces that benefits from equalization benefits. You give us all the federal employees in Ottawa, and we will give up our equalization, if fact we might even throw a little back into the kitty. We could pay you some equalization, and we wouldn't even complain.