The Yawn of Flash and Dash

Have you noticed how advertising for 'performance' car and truck  is looking more and more like a James Bond movie?  Trucks pull enormous boulders or other behemoths across terrain the like of which no buyer will ever encounter. Cars race up snow-covered mountain pathways or tear down alpine hairpins at insane speeds.

The best car I ever owned was an Audi Quattro. It ran well and was the safest thing I've driven on our winter roads. But the current "Land of quattro" promotion, with its acres of deep wilderness snow which should never see anything mechanical that doesn't have tracked propulsion, is absurd. Gone are the ads for sensible Swedish Volvos which save you in that roll into the snowy ditch that we Northern drivers all face at some point. Instead we have Vorsprung durch Technik which resembles a Mars Lander on steroids.

To counter this Euro-Japanese souped-up-dodgem-car hutzpah, American manufacturers extoll the virtues of the automobile as infotainment centre. Anything your laptop/tablet/smartphone can do can be done en route in comfort. Never mind drugs and booze for getting high while you drive. You can get all the kicks you need from your dashboard. Connection is always in. No need to feel lonely or worry about what's going on outside.

Everyone knows today's road vehicles are reliable, durable and much safer. So what's left to say about them other than hyperbole...and 'Zoom, Zoom'?

Multi-ism

The major Toronto local coverage  newspaper this summer did a piece on the shifting ethnic composition of its Greater Toronto Area.  A not untypical online comment:  "Great story about how quickly things can change when we open our doors to people from all over the world. We need them all here, anything to dilute the white bread existence our English/Scottish uptight ancestors imposed on us. It's a much more exciting place than it was 50 years ago, and it's most welcome." As a bona fide 'white-bread' (but the ancestor of only a handful of Canadians), I marvel at how easy it is to dismiss what white-breads 'imposed'.  Law, order and good governance for example. Plus the English language, today's lingua franca. 

If as is predicted we 'uptights' are soon  to be supplanted as the majority by immigration from currently dysfunctional societies like Somalia, the Arab countries, Haiti and Pakistan or totalitarian China, one cannot but wonder how long those core values that underpin the Shangri-La that multi-culture fans believe we are building will last. We could certainly be living in an 'exciting place' but in the way that say Brazil is exciting  with its pollution, environmental over-exploitation, business and government corruption and crime. Time will tell but our scale of immigration (highest in the Developed World), and the accelerating accompanying integration and acculturation difficulties make me doubt it is going to be an all-fun filled adventure.

The Blame Game

We blog here about the experience of being a boomer.

One of those experiences is to function as whipping boy for the ills of the generations behind. A national columnist called Gary Mason leads the local newspaper blame brigade. His latest tirade starts: “When is an economic recovery not an economic recovery? When you’re among the hundreds of thousands of young people being left out of any revival in the jobs market.”  Follow along and once again one quickly finds it's all our fault as selfish and uncaring boomers.

The comment thread on this particular rant is huge and much of it is about just who's to blame.  I especially enjoyed this riposte by a fellow calling himself  'Cosmic Wheels': -

Love Your Library

"A library in the middle of a community is a cross between an emergency exit, a life-raft  and a festival. They are cathedrals of the mind; hospitals of the soul; theme parks of the imagination...they are the only sheltered public places where you are not a consumer, but a citizen instead."
Caitlin Moran, The (London) Times, Dec 8th, 2011

Despite my professional qualification in library science, in mid-life I rarely went inside public libraries. A quick visit to a chain bookstore or to Amazon took care of my literary cravings.

Yet today libraries are a favourite hangout of mine, either online or, better, there in the flesh. In an era where none of us need venture beyond our digital e-readers, I'm thrilled by the sight of books and media piled up on racks and shelves in a cornucopia of delights. Once back home I pore over newspaper book reviews and e-mailed library lists of new additions.

What I can't get on inter-library loan, I may find in used book and recorded music shops. There's little that beats an hour or two pleasantly shuffling along shelves or into racks with an eye out for a gently-used bibliographic or audio gem.

When the hard-nosed mayor of our metropolitan neighbour, Toronto, announced that he would limit library access as a budget measure, he was soon put to flight by famous international author Margaret Attwood using her Twitter account to foster outrage. Libraries may be the only places where teenagers and children spend quality time in a restful setting with older folk about. They are custodians of local culture and the church of the literate.

Limping into Retirement in a High Tech World

"... many people will have to get more serious about saving money. They’re the ones who are determined to retire at 65, who have health issues that will prevent them from working longer or whose employer or profession doesn’t offer much opportunity for older workers." This retirement dilemma summed up by Rob Carrick (a personal finance columnist worth following) resonates with this writer. I certainly wasn't planning to go to grass, but my industry no longer offers opportunity. Nowadays I have to admit, when people ask, that I'm in a state of  'involuntarily retirement'.

You could be thinking I'm out of one of those rust belt industries? Not so - I was in biotechnology, a truly C21st discipline where once Canada was a major player.