Ripped off

Just got my hydro bill. Every two months I am reminded of the back-handed ways that business and governments screw the average Joe who is just trying to make it to the next day. While we are being chastised for not stashing enough money under the matress to make up for the lack of fiscal responsibility within the Canada Pension Plan, every level of government and every type of business just reaches deeper into your and my pockets to make up the difference. Never mind that real wages have not increased in years, we are somehow expected to do what our masters seem unable or unwilling to do themselves.

Case in point - the old Hydro bill. Now, I have tried to be frugal, turning lights off, keeping thermostats low, and plugging the cracks in this old house of mine. Yet - when I get my hydro bill, it clearly states in the weasel-worded fashion of the day - just how sleazy and brazen our sacred institutions really are. Artificially capped, nonetheless, the bill shows that my frugality paid off (to a point) as in 60 days I used a reasonably small amount of electricity in a 3 bedroom house in the city. Actual usage is stated as $179.00 - not bad by any means. Add on the "delivery" charge of $92.61 (like I could pick it up in a basket)? and a "regulatory" charge of $19.49 as well as the wonderful "debt retirement" charge of $19.62 means that HALF of my bill is a fabricated web of lies to soaqk the public who has no more money, and fewer options when it comes to heating, cooking, hot water, lights and all the other "luxurys" we enjoy in this modern society.
Noe Dalton McGuinty and his crew want to "stimulate job creation" and make us all "more competitive" by introducing the Harmonized Sales Tax - which will fill the irresponsible government's coffers while draining the meagre reserves of the citizens of Ontario. Great.

So -= Happy New Year - and if you do anything to change your fortunes in the new year I ask that you just once - not roll over this time. If the people spoke up as they did during the push for negative or reverse billing by the cable companies - or the rebuke of the John Tory Conservatives over full funding for religious schools - who knows, maybe these "civic leaders" and "business hirearchy" would learn to live within their means - like the rest of us.

Just don't bet on it.

crime pays

depending
on who you know
what you know
the colour of your collar
the shade of your skin
depending
on who it was
you took it from
and how you hid the evidence
crime pays
sometimes
depending

Browners and Oaskies

When I was a younger lad at the end of the seventies, I was attending what was known as a senior elementary school at the time - grades 7 and 8.

Now, these are very formative years, and on hindsight I believe the space free of massive trend influencing and peer pressure a secondary school enviornment is very beneficial to a 14 or 15 year old. Likewise, the rate of maturation during these years means being held in an institution trying to teach children from kindergarten up.

The scool at that time was quite overt in the classifications of students, and the seperation of the advanced from the delayed students via a numerical-alphabetical system 7A, 7B, 7C etc. The advanced students were in 7A and 8A, known as "Browners" - for the conception that these students were rear kissing suck ups, an undeserved elite as it were. Likewise, the 7O and 8O were known as "Oaskies" for no other reason than the letter O was the affix, designating them as slower learners.

This got me thinking about symantics (sic) and the connontations words envoke and how the origin, true meaning and place within the lexicon pales in comparison to the emotional baggage certain words carry with them.

From a distance, words like retarted are very PC. I cannot think of a more non-derisive, scientific word to mean otherly abled. The fact that the use of such a word will send so many into a recoil of horror tells us that it is not the word itself - but the power it conveys - but what is that power?

I believe it is the fact that such words used en masse, eventually begin to have a gravity all their own. The individual begins to lose individuality in the face of the collective. In doing so, the word used during a certain timeline begins to represent all the negativity absorbed through institutionalization leaves a bad taste in too many mouths.

So we invent a new word. Clean of the past's ignorance and intolerence to represent a new understanding I guess. Either way, I only assume that in a century or so these words too will be seen as distasteful, and a new generation will put their stamp on the same thing.

I think so anyway.

Rube's Game

Marketing. Market Research. These are the lynchpins of everything that happens everywhere in the world. Trust me when I tell you. no cardboard box, or Federal spending initiative moves an inch without six feet of data purporting to support such a monumentak decision. Millions of dollars are spent basically covering asses - and as we can all attest - there are a lot of big asses to conceal in both the public and private services.

The problem is, this information is quite often bullshit. Or better put - horseshit. Companies desperate to secure and maintain business (read:money) will bend over backward to produce the results that the client fully expects to see. Regardless of the prevailing winds, these companies will blow and blow until the framing of questions, selection of demographics, and outright fradulent methodology ensures that everybody is happy - except a great deal of resources have been wasted to legitimize a bastard.