Thursday, March 27, 2008

Crispy Frickin' Chicken

Help! Somebody wake me up and get me out of this nightmare. I’m seriously starting to believe that surfing the net can adversely affect a person’s (mental) health. Consider some of these news item lifted from across the web.

Mar 5, 2008 Bordeaux, France (Reuters)
Cemetery full, mayor tells locals not to die

The headline says it all, folks.

According to the article from Reuters, “The mayor of a village in southwest France has threatened residents with severe punishment if they die, because there is no room left in the overcrowded cemetery to bury them.”

An ordinance posted in the council offices warns the 260 residents of the village of Sarpourenx that "all persons not having a plot in the cemetery and wishing to be buried in Sarpourenx are forbidden from dying in the parish," adding, “Offenders will be severely punished."

The 70 year old Mayor, Gerard Lalanne, claims he was forced to take drastic action, saying, "It may be a laughing matter for some, but not for me." Planning on going somewhere soon, Mr. Mayor?

I wonder just what the ordinance means when they say, “Offenders will be severely punished." What additional punishment can you inflict on a dead man?


Mar 26, 2008 The Evening Standard (London)
Protecting the children

Hall Primary School in Clacton, Essex, decided to protect the children from pedophiles by covering their faces with “smiley faces” in the schools on-line newsletter.

Frank Furedi, a sociology professor at the University of Kent, said the school was being alarmist. "Every time a school takes silly measures, it says we see the world through the eyes of a pedophile. They think that any innocent picture of school children will somehow be subverted and manipulated.” Uh-huh.

The school has, apparently, taken down the controversial pictures from its website. A message on the website says: "Our newsletter section is undergoing maintenance. Back soon!" Uh-huh.


Feb 28, 2008 AP Altoona, PA
Crispy Frickin' Chicken

The Associated Press article advises that, “A convenience store chain's billboard, advertising its fried chicken sandwich, is ruffling the feathers of some residents.” The sandwich, known as the “Crispy Frickin’ Chicken” sandwich had apparently upset some residents with its fowl language.

(By-law) enforcement officer Fran Calarco said "There was a lady who left an angry voice mail, and a man called and said he had small children and didn't think they should be exposed to that type of language. I told him I completely understood and agreed."

The convenience stores are owned by Sheetz Inc., based in Altoona and operating stores in Maryland, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia and West Virginia. They took down the billboards a week later when the ad campaign was scheduled to end.

Maybe I should post an “Adult Content” warning on this site to keep the frickin’ assholes out?

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

The Moral Statistician

I was browsing through an old copy of “Popular Mechanics” I had stashed on the top shelf of my bedroom closet the other day. When I say old, I mean old; the pages yellowed and brittle. The date was November 1919 which was ironically, the year of my father’s birth and one of the reasons I have kept the magazine around so long.

The magazine contains a full page ad touting the advantages of quitting smoking and offering a smoking cessation program for less than $2.00 (plus postage). Apparently, the tobacco prohibitionists have been around for a long time.

Later, while surfing the net, I came across the following essay by Samuel Clemens (better known as Mark Twain) on a smoker’s choice web site. Mr. Clemens didn’t care much for the anti-smoker fanatics in his day either.

Both the graphics and the essay are in the public domain, so I reprint them here for your consideration and amusement.

The Moral Statistician
By Samuel Clemens
Originally published in Sketches, Old and New, 1893

I don't want any of your statistics; I took your whole batch and lit my pipe with it.

I hate your kind of people. You are always ciphering out how much a man's health is injured, and how much his intellect is impaired, and how many pitiful dollars and cents he wastes in the course of ninety-two years' indulgence in the fatal practice of smoking; and in the equally fatal practice of drinking coffee; and in playing billiards occasionally; and in taking a glass of wine at dinner, etc. etc. And you are always figuring out how many women have been burned to death because of the dangerous fashion of wearing expansive hoops, etc. etc. You never see more than one side of the question.

You are blind to the fact that most old men in America smoke and drink coffee, although, according to your theory, they ought to have died young; and that hearty old Englishmen drink wine and survive it, and portly old Dutchmen both drink and smoke freely, and yet grow older and fatter all the time. And you never try to find out how much solid comfort, relaxation, and enjoyment a man derives from smoking in the course of a lifetime (which is worth ten times the money he would save by letting it alone), nor the appalling aggregate of happiness lost in a lifetime by your kind of people from not smoking. Of course you can save money by denying yourself all those little vicious enjoyments for fifty years; but then what can you do with it? What use can you put it to? Money can't save your infinitesimal soul. All the use that money can be put to is to purchase comfort and enjoyment in this life; therefore, as you are an enemy to comfort and enjoyment where is the use of accumulating cash?

It won't do for you to say that you can use it to better purpose in furnishing a good table, and in charities, and in supporting tract societies, because you know yourself that you people who have no petty vices are never known to give away a cent, and that you stint yourselves so in the matter of food that you are always feeble and hungry. And you never dare to laugh in the daytime for fear some poor wretch, seeing you in a good humor, will try to borrow a dollar of you; and in church you are always down on your knees, with your ears buried in the cushion, when the contribution-box comes around; and you never give the revenue officers a full statement of your income.

Now you know all these things yourself, don't you? Very well, then, what is the use of your stringing out your miserable lives to a lean and withered old age? What is the use of your saving money that is so utterly worthless to you? In a word, why don't you go off somewhere and die, and not be always trying to seduce people into becoming as ornery and unlovable as you are yourselves, by your villainous "moral statistics"?

Now, I don't approve of dissipation, and I don't indulge in it either; but I haven't a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming petty vices. And so I don't want to hear from you any more. I think you are the very same man who read me a long lecture last week about the degrading vice of smoking cigars, and then came back, in my absence, with your reprehensible fire-proof gloves on, and carried off my beautiful parlor stove.

Friday, March 21, 2008

Springhill, Nova Scotia

I was playing some old records the other day, listening to some folk music from the late fifties and early sixties. One of the songs on the record was an ‘a cappella’ arrangement of “The Ballad of Springhill”. It’s one of the finest versions of the song I’ve ever heard; which is not really surprising. The song was both written and performed by Peggy Seeger and Ewan MacColl.

Bono and U2 are among the many who recorded the song. They did a version as recently as 1987. OK. So it wasn’t all that recent.

Anyway, back in the winter of 58/59, I was going to SMH (Sydney Mines High School). I believe I was sitting through an early morning latin class when we heard the whistle from Princess Colliery signaling trouble in the pits. It was a long eerie blast, frightening actually, that sent shivers down your spine.

Most of the class, myself included, just looked around with raised eyebrows wondering just what the hell was going on. Some of the kids knew, either briefed by their parents or perhaps having listened to the radio that morning before coming to school. And, it didn’t take a lot of explanation for the rest of us to understand.

“They’ll be going to Springhill.”

When you live in a mining town, within a quarter mile of the pit head, you don’t need any more explanation. You just start wondering; how bad and how many?

The October 23, 1958 “bump” at Number 2 coal mine in Springhill was the worst in North American mining history. You’ll need a geologist to explain what a bump actually is or what causes them. But, you can imagine the death and destruction wreaked by a small underground earthquake, especially to miners labouring deep in the bowels of the earth. There were three distinct shock waves from the bump in Springhill, shaking the entire region.

Draegermen and teams of barefaced miners immediately began the rescue effort. Teams began to arrive from other coal mines on Cape Breton Island and Pictou County, to help with the rescue of trapped miners. The first of the rescue teams encountered survivors at about 13,000 feet down the slope, walking or limping toward the surface. Rescuers were forced to work down shafts either in a partial state of collapse or blocked completely by debris.

The last of the survivors were brought to the surface on Sunday, November 1, 1958. There would be no more in the days that followed. Bodies of the dead were placed in airtight aluminum coffins before being brought to the surface due to the advanced state of decomposition.

Of the 174 miners in Number 2 colliery at the time of the bump, 74 were killed. The remaining 100 were rescued, with some spending as many as eight days trapped underground.

We had just gotten our first television set and CBC affiliate CJCB-TV usually started broadcasting around one o’clock in the afternoon. However, when I got home for lunch that day, Dad was already glued to the black and white “portable” in the living room. If I recall right, some of the men he’d served with in the North Novies were working in the Cumberland mine.

The disaster became something of a milestone in television history as the first major international news event to appear in live television broadcasts. That kind of stuff is “old hat” these days, but in the fifties it was high drama.

A week or so later, when the last of the survivors were being brought to the surface, a reporter rushed to ask one of them “what he wanted most” after having been trapped underground for eight days. Without hesitation, and with the whole world watching, he replied "A cold 7-Up."

I remember the old man laughing and saying “That bugger just got himself a job for life.” I don’t know how long the job lasted, but the 7-Up company did hire the guy as a spokesman.

Following the disaster, the Springhill mines, once the town’s economic lifeblood, were closed, never to reopen.

The Ballad of Springhill
In the town of Springhill, Nova Scotia
Down in the dark of the Cumberland Mine
There's blood on the coal and the miners lie
In roads that never saw sun nor sky
Roads that never saw sun nor sky.
by Peggy Seeger & Ewan MacColl

Thursday, March 20, 2008

Liverpool Lou (nacy)

The McDonald's Happy Meal could become a thing of the past in Liverpool, England. The city council is planning to outlaw the meals on the grounds that they are damaging the heath of children, particularly as they offer free toys in order to encourage parents to buy junk food for their children.

Council’s Childhood Obesity Scrutiny Group is proposing a by-law that would forbid the sale of fast food accompanied by toys. Councilors say the promotional items are used to boost sales through something they call "Pester Power" - children pestering parents for Happy Meal toys. Liverpool Council claims they are contributing to the epidemic of childhood obesity.

For the full story, see my other blog, Stand FAST

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

A (bigger) piece of the pie

The Gibson Guitar Company makes guitars; very good guitars. Activision makes computer games; very good computer games. So, why is Gibson suing Activision? What do they have in common? Well, that’s a long story; a very long, complicated story.

Guitar Hero is a computer software program that simulates playing guitar in a concert setting. It’s a very popular game and the people producing and selling it are making lots of money. The company currently, making all the money is Activision, who have made over a billion dollars since acquiring rights to the game.

Activision believed that Guitar Hero would give them an early leadership position in music-based gaming, which the company expects to be one of the fastest growing genres in the coming years. So, in 2006, they bought the company, Red Octane, which published Guitar Hero. They paid a miserly $100 million. Red Octane, prior to being bought out by Activision, signed a deal with Gibson Guitars to use designs of some of their guitars as controllers to be used with the game.

But, the game originated with Harmonix, a developer of music based games, who signed a deal with Red Octane to publish the game. The developer, Harmonix, recently launched a lawsuit against Activision who now owns Red Octane for failing to pay royalties under the terms of the Harmonix/Red Octane publishing agreement. But less than a week after launching the lawsuit, Harmonix withdrew it in favour of reaching an amicable agreement out of court.

But, a week later, Gibson Guitars sued Activision, the parent company of Red Octane, for patent infringement. The row started in January, when Gibson attorneys sent Activision a letter accusing it of violating a 1999 patent titled "System and Method for Generating and Controlling a Simulated Musical Concert Experience." A copy of the patent included in the lawsuit describes a device that lets a user "simulate participation in a concert by playing a musical instrument and wearing a head-mounted 3-D display that includes stereo speakers."

Activision disagrees with the applicability of the Gibson patent and wants a legal determination.

Gibson wants to sue Activision for patent infringement on an idea that they must have forgotten they owned, or they wouldn’t have signed the deal with Red Octane in the first place. It took Gibson three years to discover that a company with which they were partners (Red Octane) was breaching one of their patents (Gibson’s). So now they’re suing the parent company (Activision), who didn’t actually buy the company (Red octane) until after they had signed the deal with Gibson. Follow me?

The question that has to be asked is whether or not this is an actual patented invention, or an inappropriate attempt to patent an idea. In Europe, patents are not permitted on software applications. These are protected under copyright laws. In the US, the patent office has been accepting software patents for many years, but there has been no judicial ruling as yet and the legality of such patents is in question.

Songs, books and computer code can be copyrighted; but just how do you go about patenting an idea or a theory without specific music, words or code.

For example, could I patent an idea for a song about a man who catches his girlfriend cheating with another man, shooting the pair of them and then being sent to the gallows for murder. Could I then sue anybody who actually wrote such a song for patent infringement, even though I had never written a single word or note of music? But, that appears to be what Gibson is doing.

It’s hard to believe that Gibson actually wrote computer code or developed gaming hardware in 1999, six years before signing their deal with Red Octane. We’ll have to wait and see just what’s happened in this case.

Guitar Hero sold 14 million copies in North America alone in 2007, earning over a billion dollars in the process. Not hard to understand what this fight’s all about.

Thursday, March 13, 2008

No skates - no hockey

It was in the fall of 1958 that my name appeared in the sports section of the Cape Breton Post. I’d gone three for five with three RBI’s against a team from Glace Bay in the Babe Ruth League semi-finals. Our manager, Joe Scott, who worked at the government store, was an hour late for the game. Must have been payday. And, he forgot to have someone bring the gear and the team from the Bay was insisting that the umpire award the game to them by default. They refused to let us use pretend balls or bats.

Roddy Tobin saved our ass. He ran home and came back with enough equipment to let us start the game. I played the first three innings with Roddy’s left-handed catchers mitt (I was right-handed) and a 40 pound catcher’s mask last used by Roddy’s grandfather sometime in the 1800’s.

We taped the bat handle up real good so the umpire couldn’t see the cracks and some old guy (he must have been at least thirty) in the stands went to the co-op and bought us a brand new Rawlings baseball.

We lost. That was the last year I’d play any organized baseball. In ’59, I joined the Bras D’Or West End Arrows in the men’s softball league.

No. No. I’m taking about baseball here, dumb-ass.

In hockey, you score goals, get assists, bruised shins, black eyes and learn to swear. Besides, I never played hockey because I never learned to skate. Yes, the bog which served as the local hockey rink was right at my back door, but we couldn’t afford new CCM’s and I had no older brother to pass his down to me. Neither did my younger brother, Tom. Well, of course he had an older brother; what he didn’t have was an older brother with a pair of skates to pass down.

I almost had a pair of skates once. My buddy’s older sister, Dorothy, gave me a pair of CCM’s that actually fit pretty good. (My God. I just had a belated revelation. Her feet must have been big; perhaps even in direct proportion to her bra size. Strange; I never paid any attention to the size of her feet back then.)

Anyway, she was kind enough to offer her old skates. She had no younger sisters to pass them on to; her sisters Ethel and Mary both being older. They were white figure skates with a furry fringe on the top of the boot. Embarrassing!

So, I scuffed the leather up, applied several layers of boot black and used an old straight razor of the old mans to shave the furry white stuff off. But I was always too embarrassed to wear them to the bog until after dark. By then, everyone had gone home, so I never did learn to skate.

But, there were times when I was just as happy that I hadn’t learned to skate. For example, the winter of ’58-’59, the year we almost lost the Crow.

A bunch of the guys were playing hockey on that part of the bog just behind Mikey LeBlancs. Jimmy “Crow” Walsh had just broken up a play and the guys had turned to skate back in the other direction. Somebody turned around to wait for a pass from the Crow . . . but he was nowhere in sight. While everyone was focused on the bull rushes thinking he might have taken a header, Crow’s head bobbed up out of the ice, er . . . water, with Crow stammering, “Ge . . . ge . . . get me outta here, it’s fu . . . fu . . . freezing.

Did I mention that Crow stuttered.

To be sure, it was not a funny state of affairs. But, yes, some of us began to laugh before we realized the gravity of the situation. “Heh-heh. What the fu . . . Oh, shit.”

Some of the older guys had already started a line to form a human chain, but someone (I think it might have been Ricky Vickers) remembered the ladder behind LeBlanc’s barn and raced to get it. He damn near took a tumble himself when, skating like a madman, he ran out of ice. But, they had the ladder on the ice, and Crow out of the water, in a matter of minutes.

Just as well too; we needed him at third base in the summer of ’59.

Monday, March 10, 2008

Kids fight & so do grown-ups

Fighting back

Fighting comes quite naturally to kids, although fighting well may take a little instruction.

My “old man” did a little boxing while serving with the North Nova Scotia Highlanders. He was normally an easy going type of guy, who could usually see the humour in situations that really weren’t all that funny.

Like the night I went with a couple of friends to a dance at the Odd Fellows Hall. Before heading out, we’d pooled our financial resources to invest in a bottle of port wine, 999 or some such, from the local bootleggers. Inexperienced drinkers, we consumed the contents of our acqiusition down by the towm dump. Quickly. I was still drunk when I got home.

With Dad sitting beside the front door, the mission was to get past him without staggering or giving him any indication that I’d been drinking. I was smiling as I walked into the kitchen, having said hello to my parents; pleased that I had made my way through the living room without giving them any hint that I was slightly inebriated.

That’s when I ran into the rinky-dink little refridgerator that had replaced our rinky-dink little ice box, and went ass over tea-kettle. I expected a somewhat more violent reaction than the suppressed giggles coming from the front room.

I should note that my father was not normally a violent person. Ma was the one who usually got upset when one or another of us came home with a black eye or a split lip. Dad was usually unperturbed by such things, as long as you were still mobile. That is to say, if you walked through the door under your own steam rather than having someone carry you in on a stretcher, he figured everything was alright.

He didn’t seem to care who had won or lost. He wanted to know if you were hurt (bloody noses, black eyes and bruises didn’t count), if you had stood your ground and whether or not you got a few licks in. Unfortunately, standing your ground often led to black eyes, bloody noses and a considerable amount of bruising.

My old man saw no percentage in talking to a bully’s parents and maybe getting into an altercation of his own. So he chose to handle matters more indirectly.

Like the time I came home with a black eye, a dented nose and no bruised knuckles. The old man came home from his job at the Naval Base, a few days later, with two pairs of boxing gloves. Not those compact little eight ounce jobs used by Marciano and Joe Louis. No. No. These were the big 16 ounce “training” models. Extra padding so you didn’t get hurt. Yeah. Like you could use a mattress to cushion the fall from a ten storey building.

But I learned to box a little, although it was a matter of survival just surviving the boxing lessons.

You’ve got to learn to defend yourself. Thump. Keep your hands up and your elbows tight to the chest. Thump. Da, I’m getting a headache. Thump. It’s for your own good. Thump. Thump. Hey Da, how about we skip the boxing lesson to-day and I go take on the grade seven class from the catholic school. Thump.

All kinds of bullies


The school yard isn’t the only place you’ll find bullies. Bullying is a fact of life; and you’ll have to be prepared to fight back. One of the new bullies on the block is the non-smokers rights groups and the tobacco prohibitionists. These clowns have declared open season on smokers.

They are not content, nor will they ever be, with simple public smoking bans. Recently, they have advocated firing smokers from their jobs, denying smokers rental accomodation, declaring smoking parents “child abusers”, and a host of other initiatives designed to force smokers to butt out and kiss their collective ass.

Learning to box won’t help you.

The way to fight back is to arm yourself with information. Challenge the bullies to prove their outrageous claims about secondhand smoke with honest scientific evidence. Don’t ignore the discrimination and intolerance directed at smokers. You might be the next target on the bullies list.

Check out my new blog: Fight Anti Smoker Tyranny

Thursday, March 6, 2008

Childhood hero

I think the first time I ever heard the name Mickey Mantle was while sitting on a pop crate in the back of Frankie Legatto’s convenience store/ ice cream parlour. That was back when Frankie still used his back room as a storage area. Later on in the fifties, he would clear out his storage area and put in a juke box to give the older kids a place to hang out and listen to rock’n’roll. But you still had to sit on pop crates.

Frankie was a friend of the old man’s; one of the “originals” who served in the North Novies with Dad during WW2. I was sitting with Francis, Frankie’s oldest son, and Bobby Gordon listening to the Yankees and Dodgers duke it out in that annual ritual known as the World Series.

We didn’t get to actually see a game back then; TV was still a few years off, at least in our neck of the woods. Of course, you could pick up some of the highlights on the (really) big screen at the Saturday morning matinee at the Odeon . . . if you paid attention during the newsreels.

I was still a kid and Francis and Bobby were both older than I was, maybe twelve or thirteen.. But I often got to hang out with them, maybe because I was big for my age, or, maybe because, even as a kid I was a decent little ball player. I was usually one of the first to be picked in local pick-up games in the schoolyard behind the catholic middle school (St. Joseph’s), often ahead of some of the older guys.

I really didn’t know much about “major league” baseball back then; I could name more players on the Glasgow Celtic football club than I could on the New York Yankees. But, the name itself fired my imagination, and Mickey Mantle became one of my first childhood heroes.

The Yankees won the series that year, 1953 if my fast failing memory serves me right; a year or so before we moved from Guy St. to Bog Row. Mantle would go on to pick up seven World Series rings in his eighteen year career, all played with the Yankees.

In 1956, Mantle won the Hickok Belt as top professional athlete of the year. These days, sportswriters and baseball pundits might refer to it as his “career year.” It was the year he won baseball’s “Triple Crown”, leading the majors with a .353 batting average, 52 homeruns and 130 runs-batted-in, on the way to his first of three MVP awards.

In 1961, Mantle became the highest-paid active player of his time by signing a $75,000 contract with the Yankees. Joe DiMaggio, Hank Greenberg and Ted Williams, who had just retired, had been paid over $100,000 in a season, and Babe Ruth had a peak salary of $80,000. That salary pales in comparison to the multi-million dollar contracts awarded to many of to-days overpaid, under-productive ball players.

One of the most fascinating things about Mantle was that he played his entire career in pain.

Following an injury during a high school football game, Mantle's leg became infected with osteomyelitis, a crippling disease that would have been incurable just a few years earlier. Fortunately, Mantle was able to be treated with a newly available wonder drug, called penicillin, saving his leg from amputation. He suffered from the effects of the disease for the rest of his life, and, according to some, it probably led to many other injuries that hampered his accomplishments.

In 1974, as soon as he was eligible, he was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame; his uniform number “7” was retired by the Yankees. In 1999, "The Sporting News" placed Mantle at 17th on its list of "The 100 Greatest Baseball Players."

His stats might have suffered as a result of his injuries; but, I don’t believe they hampered his accomplishments. And, the only drug he abused was beer. No steroids, folks.

Monday, March 3, 2008

I came back

I’m still here
I suspect no one out there in cyber space has noticed, but I’ve been away for a while. Last month I broke a promise to myself and accepted a position on the Board of Directors at the co-op in which I live.

The last bunch apparently thought they were running a Sunday morning social club instead of a 21 million dollar corporation with a 2.5 million dollar annual budget. Anyway, it will be my responsibility, as Chairman of the Board, to help stop the financial bleeding and put things back on track. Hopefully, after a flurry of activity over the past month, I’ll be able to get back to writing my web log.

It’s my choice
I’m not much of a joiner, on the web or off, but I recently joined an on-line club called MyChoice. It points out that smoking, no matter how despicable you may find the habit, is a matter of choice. The anti-smoker crowd is whipping the public into a frenzy which is reaching near hysterical proportions. People are now permitted to discriminate against smokers in a way that would not be tolerated against any other minority. And, to do it, they are using bullshit, bafflegab and outright lies.

Enough already. It’s time to fight back

WHO study withheld
This article is based on a story printed in the London Telegraph, and other newspapers including the Ottawa Citizen, back in 1998. So why are anti-smoking groups and politicians permitted to claim that a link exists between lung cancer and secondhand smoke? The evidence points in the other direction. And why does the national press, in both Canada and the US, allow the deception to continue? What, or who, are they afraid of?

The World Health Organization apparently tried to withhold from publication a study which showed that not only might there be no link between passive smoking and lung cancer but that it could even have a protective effect. The British press announced that the largest statistical study on Environmental Tobacco Smoke and lung cancer ever conducted did not generate the expected results. It was buried by WHO until a request for the study was made by the British press under freedom of information legislation.

The WHO was forced to make the report public, although some of their personnel at the time were denying the very existence of the study. The WHO study was published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute in l998.

The WHO and its supporters continue to insist that statistically insignificant relative risk factors were significant.

A complaint was filed with the U.K. Press Complaints Commission against the Telegraph (London), who broke the story, alleging it had misrepresented the results of the WHO study. The Telegraph stuck by its story and by October l998 the Commission found for the Telegraph and rejected the complaint vindicating the newspaper.

For a synopsis of this disturbing episode in the history of the WHO, and more information on the study, visit davehitt.com