I’m becoming increasingly frustrated by society’s inability to deal with the fact that my wife and I are one entity. It started a few years ago when the public library wouldn’t let my wife or I pick up each other’s book reservations. It’s now expanded to the point where we can’t do the simplest things for each other, like check with stores on transactions, or take things in for returns.

The other day I was out in the yard hauling the trailer out of the underbrush. Suddenly my wife is holding out the phone; she tried to inquire about the end of our car lease and was told they could only speak to the registered owner of the car.

The Bible talks about marriage this way: “the two shall be one flesh” a phrase that literally means indivisible, one unit, one entity. But today, primarily because of legal reasons, society increasingly treats married couples as separate people. We’ve gone from a presumption that a married couple has no secrets to the presumption that they have them in almost every area of life: real estate, automobiles, bank accounts, credit cards, library cards, etc.

It’s no wonder we have so many couples splitting up when society encourages them to cultivate separate lives on every side.

Mayor David Miller has repeated his call for a handgun ban. This is completely unecessary, misdirected, mischevious and will in no way result in any reduction of the shootings taking place on our streets. Keep in mind that although the person who shot another last weekend was in possession of a legally-registered firearm he was carrying it ILLEGALLY and therefore engaging in criminal behaviour.
I would like to weigh in with a couple of my own bans, specifically strip clubs and alcohol. This would have an immediate impact for good on the streets of Toronto, if not in the pocketbooks of those who demean, use and abuse women and our illustrious Liquor Control Board of Ontario.
I venture to say it would also have a healthy impact on families.
If we are going to go to all the trouble and cost of enforcement of a ban, let’s at least ensure there will be some positive results at the end of the day.

So my 18-year-old son is looking for an apartment. We go on a site that has pictures of apartments and see one that is of interest. It looks bright, clean, spacious.
He makes an appointment, goes downstairs, and finds the apartment is the size of a dollhouse.
On the one hand, the ability to put pictures online enhances the user experience of searching for a place to rent. On the other hand, he and I will never look at apartment pictures online again without wondering just how wide was the wide-angle lens that took the picture. The benefit of a technology is rarely as strraighforward a proposition as it seems.

It’s hard to recall an election campaign in recent memory that was as botched up as this one. All John Tory had to do was remind voters of Dalton McGuinty’s broken promises and present himself as a distinctly different alternative. That’s the way the campaign started, and the conservatives were close enough to turn this into a real race.
But I am not onside with those who think the faith-based school funding issue sunk the Tories in Ontario. This was a miniscule issue, involving a small amount of money and affecting just 50,000 students. Sure, they could have done a better job explaining the concept. Sure, they should have thought twice about bringing it up in the first place given the liberals and the (liberal) media’s rabid reaction to anything involving the words faith, belief, christianity or choice.
No, what took the air out of this campaign with a great big sucking sound was John Tory’s flip flop on the issue. For three weeks he had maintained this was an issue of principle, that it was the right thing to do, and a matter of fairness and equity. Then, all of a sudden, it wasn’t.
The clarion message was that Dalton McGuinty and the liberals had been right all along, that the issue was divisive, and it not only made Tory look weak and indecisive, it sent the signal that deep down inside he was just the same as Dalton McGuinty. Immediately, his passionate attacks on McGuinty for breaking his promises were blunted; it was just the pot calling the kettle black.
With no clear alternative, voters decided to stick with the previous administration.
Although there has been a huge amount of hand-wringing about sheep-like voters blithely voting the liberals back in without thinking, I don’t think that’s fair criticism. Voters know what the liberals are all about; they will tax and spend, and say anything to get elected.
But they hold conservatives to a higher standard, as they should.
It didn’t really matter what the burning issue of this campaign would turn out to be, voters were looking to see how Mr. Tory, with no track record as an elected leader, would handle it when it came. It happened to be faith-based funding, and it exposed deep weaknesses in a man who would be premier.
You should have stuck to your guns, John. You might have lost anyway, but you’d be able to say you’d done the right thing.

From what I see and hear, our premier is in for a bit of surprise come the provincial election. You can only push the electorate so far, and Dalton McGuinty has Ontario voters squished right up against the wall.
His latest hare-brained idea, to give us another statutory holiday in February, positively reeks of pre-election bribery. As opposition leader John Tory asks, if this is such a great idea why has Dalton waited until the end of his mandate to bring it up?
To me, it seems like just yesterday that Dalton promised “No new taxes” moments before he brought in our beloved health care premium. I’ve been savouring for four years the fact that I’m going to have the chance to let him know just what I think of politicians who break, not one, not two or three, but virtually every promise made during the last election campaign.
But he and his team think we’re stupid. He thinks we’ve forgotten what happened and that by trying to buy us off we’ll wander into the voting booth in love with his liberal machine.
Sorry, Dalton. Come November, you’re toast!

It hasn’t taken Mayor David Miller and his band of socialist sycophants long to start applying the powers they have been given to tax the citizens of Toronto. On the table is a proposal to add a municipal land transfer tax as well as a vehicle registration fee. And the thinly-disguised “green tax” on garbage was more of the same.
The whole campaign run by Miller and his associate Premier Dalton McGuinty to blame other levels of government for their own shortcomings has been wildly successful. Instead of having to clean up their own acts, they just point the finger at the next convenient target without reining in their out-of-control spending.
And as if the taxes themselves weren’t enough to ruin our days, we have to put up with an arrogant, father-knows-best mentality from elected people who are actually public servants!
They work for us, not us for them.
My fear is, since it is beyond most people’s ability to simply pull up stakes and leave the city for cheaper pastures, that we are about to enter a period of frosty relations between the citizens and their local government. Unable to change the situation, the people of Toronto will hunker down and we will lose the ongoing conversation that is the hallmark of a well-governed city.
That will be a real shame, and a very poor legacy for any mayor to leave behind.

White text on a black background on the band Boston’s website says it all. I never met Brad Delp, Boston’s lead singer, but I watched him four times in concert and listened to him many many thousands of times more. He died Friday at the age of 55.
Anyone of my generation (I’m 47) knows the lead-in chords to Boston’s classic single “More Than A Feeling”, the song that played first on their debut album, which went on to become the best-selling debut album of all time.
A classic rock song, it sounds as good today as it did in 1976 when it was released. The Boston sound is unique, the result of a perfectionist mindset by the Band’s founder Tom Scholz, not incidentally a MIT grad which gave those of us not into Rock ‘n Roll an excuse to make an exception for Boston.
Brad Delp’s voice was also unique, with an amazing range and tonal quality. When he hits the high note on “More Than A Feeling” shivers run up and down my spine.
A band like Boston can not be compared to a band like the Rolling Stones, and thankfully so to those of us who are fans. Boston was (is) always about the music, not fame and fortune. How fitting then, that among the memories flooding the web since the news of Brad’s death are many recollections of how he was just a down-to-earth guy with lots of time for the “little people.”
I, and many other people for whom the song “More Than A Feeling” is the greatest song of all time, will miss the chance we thought we would have this year to hear Brad Delp belt out those memorable lyrics one more time. Live, that is.
We’ll have the recordings of his voice forever.

Who needs reality TV when you’ve got teenagers living at home? Not me. Here’s a list of some trials and tribulations mine have brought to the table in recent weeks:
Stephen has figured out how to excel at a new computer game. I learned this when I asked why his computer was humming away with a fan blowing on it while he was at school. My wife informed me that by leaving the game in a certain configuration with what looks like his player’s head bumping against a brick wall he can build up “points.” Time to have a talk with him about the electricity bill.
My daughter Rachael is beautiful, talented and artistic. In fact, she’s going to be the handy one around the house. Lately her drawings have been springing up and decorating our refrigerator. So what is she taking at school for a non-compulsory course? Welding. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Adam and I have entered an NHL pool at high school for fun. For the first couple of months of the season he was in first place and over the moon. However, we have such a “hate” on for the Ottawa Senators that not only did we not choose any current players but passed over any player that had ever played for Ottawa.
Now in sixth place in the pool, we’re getting hammered by Heatley, Spezza and Hossa and our discussions on why we hate Ottawa so much have had to become more frequent.

I find it fascinating to watch the media create something out of nothing. It’s as if they are afraid of becoming irrelevant unless they have a BIG, WEIGHTY, IMPORTANT issue to flog. Global warming fits perfectly into this category, as do superbugs, avian flu and a myriad of other issues we constantly hear about but rarely encounter.

Perhaps people feel more comfortable trying to deal with something over which they can have no control; it affords the illusion of doing something, without demanding actual results.

I had the occasion to return two universal remote controls in the past couple of weeks, and it was extremely frustrating to realize that because they were both encased in incredibly strong plastic for the dual purposes of marketing and preventing theft, that they would probably have to be shipped back to the manufacturer to be re-packaged.

If they had come in boxes, as almost everything did in the past, they could have been returned right to the shelf they came from. Of course, it’s more space-efficient to hang ther remotes, another reason for the plastic. Think of the energy that will be expended returning these products to the manufacturer!

In case I’ve lost you, my point is this: There are so many things we could be doing to reduce waste and save energy but they are not being done because they are inconvenient, or would reduce market share, or would make it easier for thieves to steal products.

We need to think less about glaciers melting in the north and more about why the number of garbage bags at the end of the driveway is increasing with no end in sight.

Having held the distinction of being the father of four teenagers for a period of about three years, I think the most important thing my wife and I have learned is that each one of them is different. Wildly different, outrageously different, kind of “How could these kids come from the same parents?” different.

You can get easily fooled by superficial facial features and mannerisms into thinking that there is some commonality between your children, but this is not true. When dealing with their various challenges nothing is more prone to lead to disaster than using something that worked with one child on one of the other ones.

There is nothing particularly new about this. But I’ve found it helps immensely to have a firm grasp of this fact of differences before formulating any plan to deal with one of  my children.