Saturday, January 23, 2010

COC Up


The whole Olympic movement needs to take a pill.

Just relax, fellas.

Stop trying to own the world and run it.

Others have a right to live and breathe.

Like the Canadian Congenital Heart Alliance, for example.

This is the group that works with people who are born with heart defects.

My mother - may she rest in peace - was such a person.

The poor old Alliance has made the unforgivable sin of having for many years now a logo with a hand holding a small torch.

The flame of the torch is in the shape of a heart.

OK, so far?

Not if you are the Canadian Olympic Committee, who never saw a sleeping dog it could let lie.

Oh, no.

COC has got to rise up and make demands and threats.

Bully much?

A billion dollar party team gangs up on a long-existing, small non-profit society that struggles daily for money and provides life-saving responses for people with critical health problems.

COC needs to drop the viagra and take up all that methadone that's lying around.

'Nuff Said

It's Not Unusual


City workers are let go and given layoff notices all the time.

What is noteworthy on any given such occasion is who and what and why and when and where.

That's why they call it W5.

In today's case,

44 Vancouver city workers get layoff notices


a friend's wife, who is a recreation community centre worker got the pink slip.

This speaks to questionable choices by a government that could very well trim lotsa fat.

But this kind of worker has an important role in the lives of young people at risk and this worker is not very well paid.

Show me a 1000 city hall workers who are very well paid to do very little and I'll be at the front of the parade cheering them on into the real work of the private sector.

Don't Believe Everything You Read


Scare Canada is running full page color ads in newspapers these days.

The ads show a plane brightly festooned in PC green and Olympic doodlings.

It's a happy aircraft.

The body of the ad is 13 "quotes" ( I must put quotes around the quotes because we have no idea if they made this up or they really are quotes from the Handful of the Happy.)

The "quotes" are all from deliriously satisfied Scare Canada flyers.

Huh?

Is this your experience?

It is not mine.

I find their routing and timing for departures and arrivals consistently inconvenient, their telephone, desk and in flight service people consistently arrogant, superior and bored, and their prices ranging from incomprehensible to simply expensive.

But aside from all that they are wonderful.

So wonderful that my last five trips within Canada have been on WestJet and my next trip overseas is with British Airways.

Please comment.

You like Air Canada? You love Air Canada? You heart Air Canada?

You