B is for Brocrastination

Okay that was a cheat. But B is for bed-ridden, blurry-eyed and.... Bengals.

Bengals as in Bengal tigers - as in the Jr. B lacrosse team that landed in the middle of my life about the time I disappeared from blog world, and swept me away.

An old pal - we'll call him - LaxMasterMind has quietly become an internationally elite lacrosse GM and coach in the fifteen years since we were associates with the Chiefs Jr A team. Oh wait - I blogged about this two years ago.

Long story short: I was dragged out of my Total Lacrosse Retreat by LMM with the news of a local Jr B team which he was basically running and which I did not even know about (this community has spawned previous junior lacrosse enterprises over the years which emigrated to nearby communities). I saw a game, was amazed at the new elevated caliber of Jr B lacrosse, felt inspired to write about it, but was at a complete loss how to do so. One: I have changed so much in the intervening years and competition, winning and losing have become so very uninspiring compared to such higher-evolved things - like creativity for instance, and generosity, which are for me important elements of lacrosse. And two: I was no longer an insider. I knew nothing of the current lacrosse community and its peoples. How would I write as an outsider?

Fast forward April 2019 and LMM speaks up again: the team is looking to fill new exec positions including Director Marketing and Media Relations. I seize on that one. It's my way back in. I take it on faith that I will find a way to write about it. And god knows I should have the time for it given the 101 important projects I've been blissfully ignoring (B is for blissful ignorance).

"I'll be your director media marketing," I type back after literally about 20 seconds of deliberation. I was intentionally bold. Take it or leave it.

He took it.

The task I took on for myself; the goal, is enormously ambitious. The work I cut out for myself is potentially endless. And I admit I don't know how to accomplish the goal, if indeed it's possible. But I trust in finding useful components and pursuing them on faith that they will be part of the final solution. More on all this some other time.

Was I crazy to take this on given I can't keep up with anything currently? Here's my weird rationalization: To take on a world of work which is unlike most of my current work in that there are tight schedules and outside stakeholders, which means I will be properly motivated to Get It Done, which may be just the thing to re-teach me a proper work ethic. When the season ends in a few months I can move my new work ethic and apply it to my own works.

Well that time is now.

So I'm back.

I say that I am here to stay. Fingers crossed.

And by here I mean blog world, yes, but I mean much more. I want to really be here. Being present again. Being productive. Making a difference. Being the person I should be instead of the loser I have been for the last year and a half.

This morning I arose after 6 hours of sleep (not bad! though sleep remains a critical Needs Improvement Area) picked up Chess Champ, met up with The Healer, journeyed to Station One former fire-house turned cafe and there met Sweetproserpina and the Ponderer for a joyful write-in. Here I am. The Ponderer's partner is beating her cancer. The Healer's mate has finally become employed again by a college where I worked for awhile. And Chess Champ has finally released some writing to the semi-public sphere. A big step. I really look forward to finally giving him a read. Given sleep and eye problems I have not really read for this year and a half. Another Needs Improvement Area.

Continuous improvement. Every day. Am I back? It would be nice if I were back.

Love Fwig

Front Page News

Top headlines from Monday’s Scooterville Speculator:

(These are the accurate front page headlines from today’s paper with genuine copy below, but severely abridged and with generous poetic license...)

Christine Elliott concedes leadership to Ford

“I’m worried about Kathleen Wynne, not Christine right now,” Ford told reporters. “We’re going to defeat Kathleen Wynne and bring extra special elite prosperity “back” to extra special elite master citizens of Ontario at the lethal expense of the planet and the human race, and do it with just a teeny tiny bit more transparency then the way those extra-sneaky wolf-in-granny’s-clothing Liberals do it! Because it’s funnier and more insulting that way! Ha ha ha ha ha!”

“Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha haaaaaa…!”

“MUAAA-HAHAHAHAHAHAAAA!!”

Auto body shop scams doubled repair costs

TORONTO -- Workers at auto body shops deliberately damaged cars, installed used parts but billed for new ones, invoiced for phantom repairs etc., according to an investigation by a Canadian insurer that is calling on government to help curb the problem.

Says every garage owner and mechanic everywhere: “Hey! I don’t scam customers any more than every other garage scams everybody. Why pick on me all of a sudden? That’s not fair. You’re just like all these damn women who let their husbands batter them for years and then all of a sudden complain! What the hell? If you’re going to get the everliving shit beat out of you for years and years then you have sort of given permission, haven’t you? And why should the government help you? They invented the racket of cheating everyone everyday in order to get stupidly rich!”

Hamilton ‘angel’ set to donate kidney to stranger

Christi Nolan of Hamilton is rather modest about giving a kidney to Toronto woman Jennen Johnson. Rather than draw sarcastic parallels to Hamilton’s reputation for taking care of most of the GTA’s migratory needy in terms of social services for decades, let’s just say… Christi, you’re awesome, and one hell of a legitimate human being within a culture of greed and fakery!

For the Love of Locke

Deanna Edmondson hands out hot chocolate from Goodness Me during Love Locke Day Saturday, as neighbours gathered in support of the street’s businesses following last weekend’s vandalism spree. Says landlords and tax-hungry local government officials: Unfortunately we don’t recognize Love Locke Day. Over-regulation and quadruple rent rates shall remain in place, thank you very much! We need to drive up property values and prices and bolster the coffers that are needed for corporate subsidies! And don’t worry. There are no victims from this system. The perpetrators were not victims, just random scary vandal monsters with no reason to be angry. That’s right. No victims here. Move along people. Go show a little love to the big box stores!”

Papal pansophy and Obi Wan-liners

Unfortunately the vast majority of quotes circulated not only on FB but literally everywhere are falsely attributed (mostly unknowingly), and the more famous or polarized a person is, the more quotes are invented or re-attributed to them by people more eager to push their agenda than to be honest. For instance 99% of published Hitler quotes were faked by those who wished to paint the words of their opposition in the worst light. And Yogi Berra rarely had anything intelligent to say. Most of the quotes he's attributed were redirected to him as a joke; a way to poke fun at him for all his authentic malapropisms and other ding-battery.

The human penchant for misquoting came about well before the internet by the way. Those captured in respected books and on posters are just as likely suspect. The only quotes you ever see that are more likely to be true than false are those that are published along with the full context (place/date/occasion/publication as applicable) which unfortunately is the only fully responsible way to share a quote.

This is a dilemma, I know. Naturally we want to share good ideas and we want to have integrity and thus to attribute them fairly. But we live in a world of rampant misinformation and it's important to me that people realize it, in the hopes we will demand better some day and achieve a sane society.

The comfort is that every quote is real in that it came from somebody! The answer, I suppose, is to check Snopes or such and add in the context if verified, and if not, change it to "attribution unknown." Unfortunately it takes a lot of work to be real in a world that mostly isn't. On my good days, when I succeed, the reward is worth it.

Front Page News!

Top headlines from today’s Scooterville Speculator:

A true statesman and “kindhearted” man

Expired former mayor of Scooterville Bob Morrow is remembered today as one who loved his community, loved his church, and loved his organ; who indeed loved everything except for hyphens.

Ex-neighbours locked in battle over cedar trees

Vince Campisi launches a law suit against neighbour Russell Danby over the death of cedars he planted along their shared fence-line. Says the judge regarding this bizarre, newsworthy, unheard-of phenomenon where two neighbours stunningly do not agree on everything: “It sounds unthinkable to have a neighbour who somehow does not see eye-to-eye with you on everything but I guess it can be hard to see eye to eye with all them cedar branches in the way. You could try standing on ladders maybe.”

Joey’s still turning on the taps

Joey Hollingsworth wins Ontario Black Lifetime Achievement Award for his contribution to tap dancing and for breaking the tap dancing colour barrier. Says white columnist Jeff Mahoney: “If everyone tap danced there might not be any more wars, or at least they’d be happier, better looking wars.” Yes, Jeff, between all the gunshots and tap shoes it would be a very snappy war indeed! And the soldiers would all wear tails and fancy dancy dress pants with diapers for when they shit themselves while dying and screaming for their moms - screaming into the rat-a-tat-tap-tappy happy cacophony.

Chips for her

PepsiCo is creating Doritos for women. Sadly, many women did not know that they could be arrested and jailed for eating the traditional sacred male-only Doritos, just in case choking down stale acerbic corn shells and getting powdery crap all over your fingers and house dress wasn’t punishment enough.

Not precisely the 15 minutes of fame I might have hoped for!

By the time he reached the end of his mile long walk Saturday morning, Rich Landriault wasn't sure he was going to make it.

It wasn't just that his feet hurt. Every muscle in his body ached.

"Everything hurts," the Hamilton man said, moments after finishing his tour around the Pen Centre shopping mall as part of the Walk a Mile in Her Shoes event to support the Gillian's Place Women's Shelter. "That was so much more difficult than I expected. It's like a workout."

Landriault came to St. Catharines to join the team of walkers put together by Tory Gillespie of Thorold to raise money for the sheller.

Gillespie said he put together his group, called Judy's Gentlemen, for Walk a Mile in Her Shoes because his mother-in-law had been a victim of domestic abuse, and supporting the shelter was a way to show solidarity with her.

Judy's Gentlemen, along with a host of other teams and individual men who donned high heels to march around the mall, raised more than $86,000 for the shelter.

Community development manager for Gillian's Place, Nicole Regehr said the funds will allow the shelter to keep operating. The facility is only 80% funded by government sources, leaving Gillian's Place to fundraise the remaining 20%. However, Gillian's Place is the midst of a five year funding freeze, making the Walk a Mile event, it's largest fundraising effort, all the more important.

"We have a funding freeze, but costs keep going up for everything. So this is absolutely vital. When someone comes to the shelter and hits a light switch, the lights have to come on. We have to feed 30 plus women and children every day," she said. "So we have to include this fundraised money in our budget. Without it, we couldn't operate."

The total for Saturday's event was down from last year's $125,000. But Regehr said 2013 may have been an anomaly.

"We were aiming for $120,000 but it may be that we blew the roof off it last year, and it is difficult to reproduce that every year," she said. "The $86,000 is in line with what we raised in 2012."

The 40 member team from TD Canada Trust raised the most money of any participating team, bringing in more than $30,000.

The St. Catharines Standard team was a distant second, with more than $5,000, most of which was raised by publisher Mark Cressman, who raised the most of any individual who took part.

Event emcee and radio personality Tim Denis, said the unfortunate reality was that Walk a Mile was such a necessary charity, but that the ongoing support for the event was heartening.

"Your support means a woman in crisis will have a place to turn to if she needs it," he said. "And your being here is saying to them that they are not alone."

Thank you, Microsoft

So… Windows 8 is so super spectacular it actually knows everything I hate and gradually alters its processes to make my experience as awful as possible.

For instance, as soon as I turn on my laptop and enter my security password it immediately displays the latest Rob Ford update. Seriously. Every time.

 

It so happens I really don’t care about the latest RobFord particulars. I don’t care what he has to say. I don’t care if he sinks or swims. I don’t care if Robford donates $1000 and a balloon-poodle full of crack to every boy and girl in the western hemisphere. I don’t care if he grows two new heads and flies to Phaelon, sneezing sea monkeys the whole way, and gets married to Chewbacca. Even if I’m invited to the wedding, I still won’t care. And I certainly won't go. And I'll only RSVP for Chewbacca's sake.

I don’t care if robford lives or dies. Hell, I don’t even care if Toronto elects Keith Richards as their new mayor.

If you don’t believe me, here’s a picture of me not giving a shit:

 

Oops. That’s me in my thong. Stupid Windows 8.

Crazy like Fox

Dear CRTC, 

I am outraged to contemplate the possibility of forced subsidization of Fox News North through mandatory carriage. Please do not let this happen.
--
Rich Landriault
Dundas, Ontario
  
Re: CRTC #2012-0687-1

I sent this message care of Avaaz.org, along with 37 thousand other petitioners, to the Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission and to Sun News Network to protest the latter's bid to recoup $17 million in well-deserved losses by making the Fox News North network mandatory across Canada. The CRTC has intentionally welcomed this public forum before making a decision.

That this racket has anything to do with the original Fox News disgrace that has made an irreparable catastrophe of American media and politics is reason enough to be horrified of this proposal. That this channel (which few around here apparently want to watch) is run by a former top aid of a certain skunk of a prime minister who's name I will not speak, is no comfort either.

That the network is failing here (thank god) is no credit to superior "Canadian" sensibility or anything like that, at least by my accounting. "Canadians" enjoy a much smaller population which simply means fewer of everything, including morons.

You can speak up here: http://www.avaaz.org/en/stop_fox_news_north_2013_rb/?cTLPFab

Pulp fiction

Fairly regularly someone will be talking to me and refer to some news event or another; local, national or global. Usually it sounds like this: "Isn't it terrible that [insert personality] did [insert misdeed]?" or else "Isn't it sad what happened to [insert victim]?"

Then I reply that this is not a matter in which I've been involved.

Then I get looked at funny. "Oh but it's in the news." This usually sounds accusatory, as if I am an irresponsible citizen if I do not keep up with the news. And I might even find a shred of legitimacy in that judgement if only I had a shred of confidence in the media machine for being either fair, honest, thorough, intelligent, useful or in line with properly noble interests.

Unfortunately, the opposites to these ideals are the rule according to my observations which I make rarely, but regularly enough to keep my understandings of the matter hopefully current and legitimate!

While major newspapers and news radio programs offer bit pieces designed to extend good advice to readers, which can be often quite useful, their coverage of events is their bread and butter and is woeful by any angle I look at it. And sure, there may be many limitations, financial, logistical and otherwise, behind the woefulness, but excuses for being useless, as good as they may be, does not change the quality of being useless. There are no points for effort.

The problems:

Material which is political or with political applicability is slanted in favor of the party of choice of the media entity's ownership. This has always been obvious. So has their penchant for spinning everything to appear as sensational and controversial as possible.

If you've ever been present at a newsworthy event you've probably watched it later on the news and been horrified how the newscaster's angle is utterly foreign to your own experience.

And if you've ever watched CNN or Fox News cover any matter Canadian, you know how completely idiotic and laughable their messed up ideas are. Are we sure their more local reporting is any purer?

There is a complete lack of usefulness with regards to learning from the news event so as to garner wisdom or to service endeavors toward prevention of bad events from happening again.

The most obvious intelligent questions which should arise from a given report are so often absent without explanation or apology.

The journalism process leaves itself prone to inadvertent reporting of lies. Worse is the creation of its own deliberate lies as Fox News has been caught doing and without the slightest repercussion for reporting complete fiction. They were literally taken to court where the judge ruled that news agencies are not legally required to tell the truth. In short, just because something is in the news does not mean it is true.

The media is corrupt in that it quietly tows the line of the ruling power while reporting inconsequential items to the contrary in order to come off as government watchdogs and earn undeserved trust. The ruling media are corporations prone to the same pervasive corruption uniformly plaguing all the ruling structures of our society and is as much to blame as any of them for keeping this mindless economic machine grinding away; this system of economic and mental slavery in drag as freedom.

Note that much of that corruption is evident in what newspapers choose NOT to report. But this is invisible to people who trust main stream news as their only source. There are more independent; more trustworthy sources on the Internet.

The media limits its capacity for enlightenment to that of the average jerk. It asks few if any questions from a global context and accesses no perspectives outside the lame social prejudices of the day. It knows its average purchaser is basically dull, if not outright stupid, and lives in that realm, encouraging potentially intelligent people not to bother thinking critically.

The main reason I no longer have any interest in so-called news is because what we call news is rarely, if ever, new. Event after event, it's just the same principal manifestations of human instinct that have been happening over and over and over again since humans first evolved into the world-plundering sweethearts we are.

Using media to learn the scant particulars of these latest manifestations accomplishes what? Mostly, I see that it helps us service our tribal instincts which is very detrimental to the evolution of consciousness that we, as a race, desperately require. Why do I say this? Because people read the news and immediately blame the badness in the world on the perpetrators of the day and feel all happy with themselves for being a good guy. And this, to me is complete crap.

I don't see the average newspaper reader as being any better than the average criminal. The average newspaper reader is committing harmful acts against the world and its inhabitants daily but most of those are socially approved and overlooked. The blame for these detrimental acts lies with the very same illusions of consciousness and the very same domination instincts which cause so-called criminals to commit so-called (non-society-approved) criminal offenses. The only difference I see between we and the villains-du-jour is circumstantial. Cause and effect have put them in a more dire cocktail of situations than we.

If you deny this by saying, "Hey, no way! If I was in that circumstance I would not have committed that act!" it is only because you do not grasp the all-pervasive and staggeringly incremental natures of cause and effect; a common and crippling human condition caused largely, I assume, by our completely false feeling that actions stem from conscious choices.

Here's my actual point: Reading the news, for most people, does not make them responsible. The key learning available from troubling news events can really only occur by looking at the behavior of the humans in front of our own face and by looking inward at our own personal susceptibilities to evil. Newspapers do nothing to encourage this. I personally work at this daily and I don't need arbitrary newspaper stories to make this happen. I already know what the human being is capable of. I know with fine clarity the whole morbid roster of it and I know there is no usefulness in blaming nations or individuals. The blame is right here in our DNA; yours and mine. We all need to evolve.

Who are you to condemn another's sin? He who condemns sin becomes part of it, espouses it.
- Georges Bernanos

Nothing can be more contemptible than to suppose Public Records to be true.
- William Blake

...You're watching television. You're watching the news. You're being pumped full of fear. There's floods. There's AIDS. There's murder. Cut to commercial. Buy the Acura. Buy the Colgate. If you have bad breath they're not going to talk to you. If you have pimples the girl's not going to fuck you. It's a campaign of fear and consumption and that's what I think it's all based on, is the whole idea: Keep everyone afraid and they'll consume.
- Marilyn Manson

I laugh for the newsprint nightmare; A world that never was, where the questions are all 'why', and the answers are all 'because'.
- Bruce Cockburn

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