It’s not the town doing this: merely staff

Collingwood / Council / Ethics and behaviour4 Comments

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“Collingwood laywer (sic) says town won’t sign confidentiality agreement regarding Collus employee information” says the headline in a story in last week’s Collingwood Connection. Yes, it really does say “laywer….” (ah, proofreading…) Well, that’s wrong: it’s not “the town” that won’t sign, but rather merely three members of the administrative staff. The Block recently replaced the town’s experienced, democratically-appointed members with staffers in order to push through The Block’s destruction of the relationship with PowerStream. But it’s not “the town” behind it at all. They would sign it if instructed to by council. But council is controlled by The Block. So that ……… click below for more ↓

Opportunities Collingwood has lost

Collingwood / Council / Ethics and behaviour / Planning & PoliciesOne Comment

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I spent two days in the trade show at the AMO conference this week, looking at the booth across the aisle from me. It constantly reminded me of the opportunities for Collingwood this council has thrown away, of what great opportunities we have lost this term. The booth across from me was announcing the upcoming merger of four of the province’s top utility companies – Horizon, Enersource, Hydro One Brampton and PowerStream. This will make it the largest LDC (local distribution corporation) in Ontario. The four most innovative, customer-oriented, conservation-minded, efficient and forward-thinking utilities are merging. You remember PowerStream? They are our ……… click below for more ↓

Why is this man still working for Collingwood?

Collingwood / Council / Ethics and behaviour3 Comments

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I am appalled and disgusted, and you should be, too. In what seems only minutes after council and staff received a remedial presentation on roles and responsibilities that emphasized the MAYOR speaks for the town, no one else, the interim CAO was at it again. Speaking out about town issues and events when it is the mayor’s role and responsibility to do so. Not his. This breach of etiquette should not be tolerated. It shows no respect for the mayor, or her office, let alone the actual events. Such insubordination undermines her authority. In a story in this weekend’s Collingwood Connection, interim ……… click below for more ↓

What did the former council ever do for us?

Collingwood / Council / Humour & Satire / My WritingLeave a comment

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TIM: What exactly are the demands? BRIAN: We’re giving Powerstream two days to dismantle the entire apparatus of the Collus utility, and if they don’t agree immediately, we execute the shotgun clause. TIM: You mean, cut their nose off? DEB: Cut all our noses off. To spite our collective faces. Show them we’re not to be trifled with. BRIAN: Also, we’re demanding a ten foot mahogany statue of the former mayor with his conflicts hangin’ out. KATHY: What? They’ll never agree to that, Brian. BRIAN: That’s just a bar– a bargaining counter. And of course, we point out that they bear ……… click below for more ↓

Time for council to learn the rules? Nah…

Collingwood / Council / Ethics and behaviourLeave a comment

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Being a councillor is hard work. You have to scurry around in dark corners looking for places in which to hold secret meetings, you have to plan the destruction of town facilities and services, you have to spend whole minutes calculating how much to raise taxes, you have to wrack your brain for hours trying to determine the best way to discourage business, offend developers (except those who are your in-laws), you have to spend countless hours listening to staff drone on and on and on about boring stuff like planning and finances before you can get back to figuring ……… click below for more ↓

The destruction of Collus

Collingwood / Council / Ethics and behaviour / Planning & Policies3 Comments

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There’s a story in the online Connection that highlights how much this council has spent on lawyers and consultants to further its vendetta against Collus-Powerstream: more than $400,000 so far. Half of it was spent in 2015 (I have seen a document that shows more than $249,000 spent in 2015) and the cash register is still ringing. By the end of this year it may well top $750,000-$1 million. That’s $400,000 of your tax dollars already spent for nothing. Not in town, not on local companies or services. We got absolutely no benefit from that expense. It wasn’t spent on anything for the greater ……… click below for more ↓

Fowler for the 21st Century

Books & Reviews / Grammar / Language & Grammar / Style & usage / What I'm Reading Now / Words & etymologyOne Comment

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On the desk of every writer, every reporter, every editor, every PR director and every communications officer is a small library of reference books. A good dictionary (Oxford, American Heritage, Merriam Webster, Random House but gods forbid, never a generic Webster’s). A thesaurus (likely Roget’s). A style guide (CP for Canadians, or AP for Americans… Canadians likely have both).  A dictionary of quotations (because the print version is reliable as a source, and the Internet isn’t). And a usage guide. That’s de rigeur for these professions, and the very minimum that they likely have in front of them every time ……… click below for more ↓

These Old Bones

Literary pretensions / My Writing / Personal Reminiscences / Poetry & LyricsOne Comment

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These old bones; You wouldn’t think they’d cut a rug jitterbug dance between the rain drops but once I could. Once I did. Danced to the music, lover in hand, that time in the park when we didn’t care laughing in the face of the storm. The rain, the wind, splashing in the grass. The music was all in our heads, our breath, our hearts beat with the tunes we sang inside. I remember every line, every lyric. These old bones knew music. These old bones knew the hotcha rhythm of the dance. You wouldn’t think them spry enough, not ……… click below for more ↓

Where is Che now that we need him?

History & Biography / International politics / Politics / Social Order & DisorderLeave a comment

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Maybe it’s simple nostalgia, but it seems to me the world was a lot better off when the Soviet Union was around. Really. Bear with me while I explain. When the USSR was the main enemy of our loudly-proclaimed free and democratic society, we struggled to measure ourselves against its yardstick. If the USSR claimed to have the best chess players, we had to beat them with Bobby Fischer. If they claimed to have the best students in math or science, well we had to show we had the whizzes. If they claimed their medical system was better, their workers ……… click below for more ↓

Designing Type

Fonts & Layout / Typography / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

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Karen Cheng’s 2005  book, Designing Type, is the third of the recent books on typography I have received*. Of the three, it is the most technical, appealing to the typophile and design geek more than the average reader. But it’s also a reference for layout and graphic artists looking to choose a specific font for a work. If your goal is to actually design a typeface, she helps appreciate the subtleties of design that differentiate and separate typefaces and letterforms. But it’s not a book about design. Most books on type and typography focus on the result: working for the combination ……… click below for more ↓

Whatever became of that angry mob?

Collingwood / Council / Ethics and behaviour / Planning & PoliciesLeave a comment

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Last term, council was presented with an angry, 14-page screed from the “Friends of Central Park” (aka “Build the YMCA a Taj Mahal at Taxpayers’ Expense,” later called Better Together Collingwood…yes, you know who was behind them both!). The mouthpiece attacked the honesty, the credibility, competence and the behaviour of the former council – all because we chose to build new recreational facilities that were not the expensive option a group of well-off residents demanded we build. And because we didn’t raise taxes or incur significant debt in our choice. I realize it’s not often one gets lambasted by taxpayers for not raising taxes, ……… click below for more ↓

Electing atheists

Atheism & Spirituality / Critical Thinking / Faith / PoliticsLeave a comment

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A recent story on Religion News discusses the DNC’s concerns about former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders’ religion. Not that he was Jewish, but that he might be a closet atheist. And that send the DNC-crats over the roof. Scary, eh? You can’t elect an atheist in America. You can elect liars, cheats, adulterers, misogynists and creationists (and sometimes all in the same person…). But not atheists. Even Donald Trump, whose murky religious beliefs remain cause for much speculation, overshadowed by his overt worship of power and money, hasn’t strayed into atheism, at least publicly. And it’s been that way since ……… click below for more ↓

Everything Flows

Books & Reviews / Culture / History & Biography / Literature / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

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Tonight’s book-with-wine discussion is about Vasily Grossman‘s novel, Everything Flows (New York Review Book, USA, 2009). It was his final work, and left unfinished at the time of his death, in 1964. It’s not a difficult read, only 250 pages, but it isn’t easy. Readers unfamiliar with Soviet history, particularly the Stalin era, will not understand much of it. And it’s hardly a cheerful work. Not that everything Russian is a slit-your-wrist work, but it’s certainly Dostoevsky-like in its darkness. Grossman was a Soviet war correspondent during WWII and travelled with the Red Army through Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk then into ……… click below for more ↓

Frutiger vs Palatino

Books & Reviews / Fonts & Layout / Typography / What I'm Reading Now2 Comments

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In a recent review of Sarah Hyndman’s book, Why Fonts Matter, I casually commented that, You can no more adequately comment on the relevance and impact on the viewer of, say, Frutiger versus Palatino, without discussing the design and layout in which it is set… The point of which was not to single out those two typefaces as much as to suggest the debate between how readers respond to sans-serif and serif faces (respectively). Fruitiger is a modern, humanist sans-serif type designed by Adrian Frutiger in 1975. Palatino is a serif type designed by Hermann Zapf, in 1948, to simulate ……… click below for more ↓

Reading Letters: Designing for Legibility

Books & Reviews / Language & Grammar / Typography / What I'm Reading NowOne Comment

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The human brain is truly a remarkable machine.* We can see a bunch of lines and in that same brain turn them into an M and know it’s not a V or an N or a K or W. Yet M isn’t a ‘thing’ – it’s an abstract representation of a sound that itself has no concrete meaning outside the Mmmmm of meditation. When you mentally assemble a bunch of other lines and sticks and squiggles, those sounds form a larger abstraction: a word: MOON. Now we have substance. And that can be used to create even larger collections of ……… click below for more ↓

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