Chris Potts Nails It

Collingwood / Council / Financial follies / Ineptitude and bungling / Planning & Policies / Publicity & Communications / Staff and administration3 Comments

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Nailed it! In his latest blog post, former Town of Collingwood employee, Chris Potts writes about our council’s ill-conceived plan to hire a “climate change specialist” to add to the already egregiously expensive and bloated town payroll that taxpayers are burdened with: The Town of Collingwood seems to just hire and hire and hire, the next time we see this the position will be a coordinator, or director and listed on the sunshine list. Lets get to the real point here, Collingwood is in a water crisis, a building crisis, a park crisis, a leader ship crisis, did you know ……… click below for more ↓

The Beatles: Songs and Lives

Books & Reviews / Musings / Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

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This week I finished re-reading The Beatles: The Biography by Bob Spitz, the best biography I’ve read of the group that defined music, culture, and style in the Sixties: the era I grew up in. I’ve read several other bios in the past, both of the band and of the individual members, although there are many more in print that I haven’t read. But this is the only one I’ve re-read. And it was well worth it, to recall in such detail those years. Almost all of the other books about The Beatles I owned have, over the years, been ……… click below for more ↓

More Secrecy, More Deception, More Conflicts

Collingwood / Conflicts of Interest / Council / deception & secrecy / Planning & Policies / Publicity & Communications / Saunderson's MPP campaign / Saunderson's Vindictive Judicial Inquiry / Utilities: electricity and waterOne Comment

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Once again our council scurried behind closed doors to discuss town business that should have been discussed in the open. But openness was never a watchword for this council. However, secretive and deceptive seem appropriate adjectives. Two of the three items on Friday’s (June 11) “special” council meeting were about or related to the job-and-revenue-killing interim control bylaw (ICBL) that was passed in late April without even the pretense of consultation with the public, with water companies, with developers, or with the municipalities affected by the bylaw who get water from Collingwood: Items for discussion: a) ICBL Amendments; b) Water ……… click below for more ↓

Musings on Reading Literature

Books & Reviews / Musings / Personal Reminiscences / What I'm Reading NowOne Comment

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There’s a passage from the novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog (by Muriel Barbery, Europa Editions, 2008, p. 116-117) that so delighted me when I came across it that I read it aloud to Susan: “Mildly hemorrhagic urine” is, to me, a form of light entertainment: it has a nice ring to it and evokes a singular world, a brief refreshing change from literature. For the very same reason, I enjoy reading the leaflets that come with medication, the respite provided by the precision of each technical term, which conveys the illusion of meticulousness and a frisson of simplicity, and ……… click below for more ↓

Saunderson Abandons Collingwood

Collingwood / Council / Disrespect and bad behaviour / Saunderson's MPP campaign / Saunderson's Vindictive Judicial Inquiry2 Comments

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In his latest email to PC Party members, Brian Saunderson predictably celebrates his anti-democratic appointment as candidate without having had to actually work for it. Our much-disliked mayor was rescued from likely failure in the nomination process by the intervention of the premier. But at the close of his email Saunderson writes, …it is time to turn our heads to an election in 2022. We know it will take a lot of organization, commitment, and effort. I will continue to keep you posted on the work ahead. I look forward to working with you in the future to build a ……… click below for more ↓

Saunderson: An Affront to Democracy

Collingwood / Council / Deceit / deception & secrecy / Disrespect and bad behaviour / Provincial Politics / Saunderson's MPP campaign / Saunderson's Vindictive Judicial Inquiry8 Comments

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PC nominee candidate Stella Ambler reported that her competitor, Brian Saunderson was anointed appointed as the party’s candidate for Simcoe-Grey without allowing the members to decide if they want him. Party members weren’t even given a warning that this was coming: the autocrat premier merely waved his hands and made it happen without regard to the desires of the party’s members. Ambler wrote in a recent email: This is a very disappointing development, and represents an affront to the democratic right of the members of the Simcoe-Grey PC Association to select their candidate. What she didn’t say, but seems obvious, ……… click below for more ↓

Musings on Shakespeare Guidebooks

Books & Reviews / Books about books / Shakespeare / What I'm Reading Now3 Comments

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Unless you’re an academic who has studied The Bard for your entire career, you really need a guide, a Virgil if you will, to enter the dark forest of Shakespeare and find your way about in it. At the very least, you’ll want a guide to Shakespeare’s language and wordplay to illuminate the texts. Fortunately, there are plenty of guides to be had in the printed world. From essays on a single soliloquy to books that explore the entire canon, there is no shortage of guides available, online and in hardcopy. Of course, I recommend the latter because, well, it’s ……… click below for more ↓

Books of Quotations from Shakespeare

Books & Reviews / Quotes & Mis-quotes / Shakespeare3 Comments

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A good book of selected quotations from Shakespeare is a nice complement to the collected works. Properly arranged, it lets you find relevant aphorisms, and speeches on a wide variety of topics; bon mots you can drop into conversations, emails, and blog posts. As is my wont, I have collected several of these books, and herein are my opinions of them. Note that there may be later editions than those noted here. First, I classify them as four different types of quotation books: Dictionary style (arranged alphabetically by topic such as politics, love, loyalty, fear, etc.; Topic or specialty style ……… click below for more ↓

Ignoring the Potential Conflicts of Interest

Collingwood / Conflicts of Interest / Council / Ineptitude and bungling / Saunderson's MPP campaign / Saunderson's Vindictive Judicial Inquiry / Utilities: electricity and water3 Comments

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A story in CollingwoodToday notes that council will hold a meeting on May 31 to consider exceptions to their job-and-revenue-killing interim control bylaw (ICBL). That bylaw abruptly ended all growth, building, and development because our inept council had failed to pay attention ever since they were elected to the water issue and the pipeline contract, despite staff reports about both. I wrote about this last month, pointing out how in 2015 the previous council killed the negotiations that began in 2014 under an earlier council. Had the negotiations been allowed to continue, we would have had a new contract PLUS ……… click below for more ↓

Musings on Reading the Bard Over a Year

Books & Reviews / Daily life / Personal Reminiscences / Shakespeare / What I'm Reading Now2 Comments

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Wonderful thing, the internet. You can type “complete works reading list Shakespeare” into a search engine and come up with dozens of lists with a recommended order for reading The Bard’s plays and poems over the period of a year. And none of them the same or seemingly made with the same logic. But, it seems, many have taken up the challenge. In almost no time, I had several lists to examine (here’s a PDF I made of the first few I discovered and collated) and consider in light of my own desire to read all the Bard’s plays (and ……… click below for more ↓

Council Fails Our Affordable Housing Residents

Collingwood / Council / Ineptitude and bungling / Planning & PoliciesOne Comment

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It’s ironic how Mayor Saunderson so loudly acclaimed the “Community-based strategic plan” last term (a document that was neither community-based nor a strategic plan) yet when a major issue arises around something important that was raised in that very “plan” he seems to be awfully silent. I’m talking about the disaster that is the low-rent/affordable housing apartments at the corner of Second and High Streets. According to a recent story in CollingwoodToday, with the understated title: “Residents irate about conditions of affordable housing building”* Tenants of Collingwood affordable housing hub, say they feel like ‘hostages’ in their apartments and are ……… click below for more ↓

Musings on the Complete Works

Books & Reviews / Musings / Personal Reminiscences / ShakespeareOne Comment

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When the Arden Shakespeare: Complete Works arrived this week (an early birthday gift from my wife who might have wanted to hide it until the actual date… oops… I saw the postie arrive…), I thought it might be time to put together a spreadsheet identifying some of the key differences between the various versions of the “complete works” in my library, and among those other editions I don’t own (but may in the future). This is meant to help me select which version I might want to read from at any time. In fact, it’s my goal to read ALL ……… click below for more ↓

As Important as Clean Drinking Water? Part 2

Collingwood / Council / Disrespect and bad behaviour / Ineptitude and bungling / Saunderson's Vindictive Judicial Inquiry / Utilities: electricity and waterOne Comment

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Remember last December, when the town’s CAO announced that the Saunderson Vindictive Judicial Inquiry (aka the SVJI) was “equivalent with the top priorities we have, like providing clean drinking water”? Today, that statement would seem to be egg on her face, given more recent events (and the public’s utter lack of interest in the SVJI). Priorities like “clean drinking water” certainly take on a new light, when you consider how long council ignored our drinking water until it suddenly became a “crisis” that required a knee-jerk reaction. Council quickly passed a job-killing, revenue-killing, growth-killing bylaw to deal with it. And ……… click below for more ↓

We’re Doomed. Doomed, I tell you.

Aging / Conspiracy Theories / Cults / Health & Medicine / Personal Reminiscences / Pseudoscience & Quackery / Social Order & DisorderLeave a comment

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While walking our dog recently, we encountered another couple “our age” (somewhere between 65 and 90) also walking their dog. While the two pets sniffed and frolicked, we chatted with them (at a safe distance, of course). And, as might be expected during a lengthy pandemic, one of the first questions we asked them was, “Have you had your shot yet?” Shockingly, they both answered, “No! And we’re not going to get one.” My first thought when I heard this, “We’re doomed.” These are people we’ve spoken with before while our dogs met. They aren’t friends, merely acquaintances. Yet before ……… click below for more ↓

Musings on Shakespearean Apocrypha

Shakespeare / What I'm Reading Now2 Comments

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When the First Folio was published in 1623, it had 36 of the Bard’s plays, listed in three categories: histories, tragedies, and comedies (it didn’t include his longer poems, or the sonnets)*. And even then, these were not all of his plays. Several were not included, although they were known to the folio’s compilers. For reasons unknown, there were several plays missing from the original canon, including Pericles, Prince of Tyre; The Two Noble Kinsmen; Edward III;  The Book of Sir Thomas More; Cardenio; and Love’s Labour’s Won. The latter two are “lost” (more on that, later); the rest are ……… click below for more ↓

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