Author: CLARION

PLACING BETS ON TOWN COUNCIL

I’m not a betting man.  If I was I’d be a poor betting man.

I know betting’s all the rage now, especially with how easy it is, using your phone and, hell, even being able to place in-game bets.  Even Wayne Gretzky is all over it, a guy who is right up there with Tim Hortons and their Roll-Up-The-Rim contest in terms of Canadian identity and popularity.

Money lines, point spreads, over-under, parlay bets, teasers and props, middle, future, and live bets, there’s no shortage of ways to get fabulously rich, or if you’re me, fabulously poor.

Luckily for me, I don’t have the kind of money to engage in this activity.  Losing a single $5 bet would have me in apocalyptic circumstances, so I stay away.  I don’t even buy Lotto 649 anymore because I feel it’s too risky.

That said, I know others absolutely love the action, and are willing to place money on the most trivial of things, mostly in the world of sports.  But sports betting has it’s drawbacks, especially if players, coaches, officials, etc go to the dark side to influence how a game goes, or how much court-time a player gets, or ice-time, or at-bats, or carries, etc.  

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LOSING ANOTHER FAVOURITE SINGER

I first came across James Morrison as I ambled through a Winners store on Merivale Road, awaiting my appointment to get my eyes lasered.  I had things on my mind, so wasn’t really paying attention to much, actually finding myself in the house and home section of the store, a section I don’t really ever find myself gracing.  In effect, I was just killing time before the main event arrived later that afternoon.

Over the store’s music system a song was playing that managed to cut through my pre-op fog.  It caught my attention enough that I whipped out my phone and engaged the app that identifies songs playing from other sources.  The app came back with James Morrison, and the song was Fix the World Up For You.  Nothing earth-shattering there, I just filed that info away and went off to my appointment, which for the record was successful and eye-opening.

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BROWNS COME UP BIG IN THE SNOW

What a time to jump onto the Cleveland Browns bandwagon.

As Thursday dawned, I believed that I may be one of that team’s newest fans, given their record, given their futility, given their injury situation, given their, well, everything.

Plus, it’s Cleveland.

My very first game loomed later that evening, as the 2-8 Browns hosted the division-leading Pittsburgh Steelers, the Steelers coming to town with their 8-2 record.  I’ll be honest here, it didn’t look the best.

I watched anyways, determined to be a stalwart fan, the kind that digs in through thick and thin, mostly thin.  Not a fair-weather fan, because, how could there be any prospect of fair weather with a team like this?  Plus the weather sucked.

The game, being in Cleveland, had the Browns wearing their brown over orange home uniforms, finished on top with the orange helmet.  And as much as it hurt to have that colour combination as the uniform of my new favourite team, I have to say that I liked them as soon as I saw them.  Sure, I’ve seen photos online, watched some video, and have even seen the Browns play — I think — on television before, probably while sifting through channels to find another game with better-dressed players.  But I liked them as soon as I saw them, in fact loved them.  That brown, and that dark, almost burnt orange.  Seal brown and safety orange to be exact, or RGB 49-29-0  and RGB 255-60-0 to be even more exact.  And man, do they pop.

They even look good in the snow.

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CHINA’S COLLAPSE WILL BE FELT RIGHT HERE AT HOME

The clock is ticking on China, and my question is, what do we intend to do about it?

The demographic numbers are appalling for the Chinese.  That nation of some 1.2 billion people has roughly 500-600 million people of an age that suggests that their death rate is going to skyrocket.  It’s like that in Canada, too, with our own population top-heavy with people age 60+ making up the lion’s share of the demographic pie.  But we’re not going to lose half a billion people as a result of it.

Some would argue that China’s problem is China’s problem, and while certainly tempting, there’s a bit more to it than that.  Right now, China produces about half of the world’s finished products, at least from a total value perspective.  Halving your national population cut in half through natural aging will have an impact on that, for sure.  Yes, China will still be a colossus, but the Chinese economy is scaled to the much larger population of over a billion.  When you pull that 600 million people out of the equation, that means that you theoretically lose over half of your domestic market for your own finished manufactured goods, not to mention the impact that may have on your productive workforce.  And the impact that all of this will have on the global economy.

An impact that will be felt right here, an ocean away, in Canada.

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NEW DEVELOPMENT PLANNED FOR RENFREW EAST

I remember when I was a kid how I’d spend time with pencil and paper and sketch out my development plans for our family home and property should we ever strike it rich by finding oil in the backyard.  I guess it was all part and parcel of being an introvert, and therefore a loner.  And I guess it passed the time on those summer holidays of my youth.

So when Eric Withers, Renfrew’s Director of Development and Environment/Town Planner/Deputy-CAO — a truly acronym defying title — opens his microphone to reveal planning progress involving development of town lands, my interest in a town council meeting literally sky-rockets.  It’s worth the price of the ticket right there.  If they let you in.

Director Withers shared with council plans for the development of an area of town referred to as Renfrew East, a quadrilateral parcel of lands bordered by O’Brien Road to the northwest, Gillan Road to the southwest, the town boundary to the southeast, and Highway 17 to the northeast. So, basically, from a person-on-the-street perspective, go to the Walmart/No Frills corridor along O’Brien Road, and sort of look the other way, across the street, at the lands on the other side.  Or maybe even better, take a walk down the Algonquin Trail, which runs right through the centre of the proposed development.  These two descriptions are not completely adequate or accurate, but it’s enough to give one a general idea.

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I’VE LOOKED THINGS OVER AND DECIDED TO GO WITH THE BROWNS

I’ve decided I need an NFL team to cheer for.

It took me long enough.  I’ve been a fan of football forever, played it as a kid, was actually not bad at it, yet still, among my peer group I was the only guy who didn’t follow a team. At least in the NFL.

Back then all my friends would cheer for the Steelers and the Cowboys, probably because at the time those two franchises were the class of the league, alternating championships between them.  But I couldn’t very well cheer for either of those two, because that’s just not the way she goes for me, bandwagon-jumping not something I’ve ever been good at.  When pressed for social reasons or to just fit in, I would say that I cheered for the Oakland Raiders, mostly because of their uniforms and their bad-boy kind of mentality.  Names like Jack Tatum, Ted Hendricks, Pete Banaszack, and Jim Plunkett were my answer to Terry Bradshaw, Mean Joe Greene, Jack Ham, and Jack Lambert of Pittsburgh and Roger Staubach, Tony Hill, Tony Dorsett, and Drew Pearson of Dallas.  But still, I had to look the Oakland names up, except for Plunkett, to remind myself who I “cheered” for, whereas the Steelers and Cowboys players I could remember without assistance.

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PUTIN ADDS NEW THREATS TO AN ALREADY LENGTHY LIST

Good morning everyone, good to see you.  Hope today is the treasure and blessing that all days ought to be for all people.  I wish you the very best.

I’d like to build today’s opinion piece around this carefully considered, deliberately crafted statement that I feel eases me into today’s topic.

Vladimir Putin, aka Russia’s Potato Head dictator, is a world class, five-star, blue-chip, blue-ribbon, card-carrying asshole.  He’s also a BFB, delicately extended to mean “Big F**king Baby.”  I searched the internet to come up with a Russian phrase that would capture the same sentiment and could only come up with Vladimir Putin, so there you go.  It’s built right into their language.

So if I die of polonium poisoning, or if I’m found thrown to death out of a window of my home, or if I blow up in a plane explosion, you can bet it was the Russians.  For the record, I live in a bungalow and rarely fly, so some small degree of comfort there.

President Joe Biden has finally given Ukraine permission to allow long-range American missiles to be used against targets inside Russia itself.  Before they could only be used to blow up things on Ukrainian soil.  But now the gloves are off, and Vlady’s pissed, again.

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TRANSPARENCY AND STANDARDS: WHO MAKES THE CALL?

At first, I thought it was just me.

I had encountered something that was increasingly frustrating about attempting to get some simple questions answered from anyone associated with Renfrew’s municipal government.  Frustrating, and almost conspiratorial, although that word might be a bit of an over-reach, since my little local conspiracy doesn’t involve pizza shops, the deep state, or the World Economic Forum.  Nevertheless, when you reach out to both political and administrative types within the organization, and you are universally ignored, then it does lend itself to the notion that there is some form of organized obstruction at play.  I’ve now backed off that initial suspicion, mostly because I’ve seen all the actors in action, and now believe that any organized effort in that, or seemingly any other direction, would be simply beyond their scope of capabilities.

When I went over the materials for last Tuesday’s council meeting, I happened upon an item listed under correspondence.  That item featured an email chain of back-and-forth between a local citizen and senior administrative staff.  And it was a carbon copy, albeit featuring different issues, of what I had just witnessed for myself when I had made my own enquiries.  Even the staff responses to the citizen were virtually identical, with a boilerplate response modified to fit the circumstances of the issue and the person requesting the information.

In a small way, I felt better, knowing that it wasn’t personal.   Bad guys would say that in the movies before killing a guy, that it wasn’t personal, it was just business, which to me always seemed like it would be pretty personal for the guy about to get two behind the ear.  Like small comfort there.  As in  hearing that, the guy’s gonna say “Oh, okay.  Completely understand.  What a relief.  Carry on.”

Still, when you are comprehensively ignored, knowing you’re not the only one brings no significant measure of comfort.

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