Category Archives: News and politics

Now that the ruckus regarding Tiger Woods is settling down, we can wade in with our reasoned overview.  Upfront, we don’t know what actually happened, as we weren’t there.  For that matter, the media wasn’t there either.  The only two people who were there aren’t talking, so we’re into the land of wooly speculation, supposition and juicy guesstimation.

First off, Tiger Woods is worth somewhere near 8 Zillion dollars.  He doesn’t fly economy and doesn’t stay at a Super8 motel.  He has people who do things for him that you and I have to do because we don’t have personal assistants, aides, or ‘people’ who look after the minutiae of getting around and doing things that we all have to accomplish in the course of a day.

Secondly, Tiger Woods is a professional golfer.  He hits a ball with a stick.  It isn’t like he’s causing World Peace to break out, or finding a cure for cancer.  He doesn’t carry the launch codes in his wallet and his involvement in third-world political stability is about the same as yours and mine:  That would be None for those keeping score at home.

Let us assume that the events went down as advertised.  He and the Missus were discussing relationship issues when things went off the rails.  Perhaps there was a disclosure or two that were not received well.  Someone lost their temper and took a golf club to someone else.  One of the participants hopped in the car and tried to drive away with some alacrity, possibly under a barrage of club swings, shattering glass and general emotional mayhem.  It would seem a tree and a fire hydrant were parenthetically involved, then police.

The media involvement happened moments later.  As soon as you mention Tiger Woods is involved, the media descends like nattering gnats gnawing on the purported half-truths, suppositions and fourth-hand speculations from people who weren’t there.  Serving up an order of perspective here, if it was Buddy Jamoke who got de-assed from the house by his missus because he played some away-games, it wouldn’t even rate a page seventeen police blotter note.  

Which comes back to why do we care?  Yes, Tiger is a celebrity and a damn fine golfer, but his direct input on all our lives is about three-ten thousandths of sweet frig-all.  Which also means our input on his lifestyle choices is exactly the same; .0003 over SFA.

The same math applies to his relationship issues being ‘our’ business:  Mathematically insignificant.  So close to zero as to be a rounding error.  Null.  Zip.  Nada.

Let us let Tiger and the wife figure their stuff out.  In private.  Without our input.  We would never presume to tell him how to golf and we should never presume to tell him how to run his private life.

At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month we take a moment to remember those who served and gave their lives.  We do this by taking a minute to stand in silence, in remembrance of their sacrifice.  All those who have fallen have ever asked is for us to remember. 

We owe them if only for the freedom we have right now to read this, in reasonable comfort and safety, in our homes, offices, or on the streets.

We owe them that moment of silence and honour. 

We owe them.  Remember.

I have decided to join a global movement that is bringing much needed attention to prostate cancer.  I’m doing this by growing a Moustache this Movember, the month formerly known as November. 

My commitment is to grow a moustache all November to change the face of men’s health and I want you to join me.  The funds we raise during our Moustache journey go to Prostate Cancer Canada.

What many people don’t know is that 1 in 6 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in their lifetime. Prostate cancer is the most common cancer to afflict Canadian men with 25,500 diagnosed and 4,400 dying from the disease each year.  Facts like these have convinced me I should get involved. 

To join my Movember team called ITS-Mo go to http://ca.movember.com/register/20340

Once registered you’ll be sent all the information needed to get donations and get growing as part of my Movember team. Learn more about Movember by watching the Intro Video at http://ca.movember.com

Together we can change the face of men’s health.

There have been several changes in the personal life that have prevented my posting in the last few weeks.  First off, I’m in mid-move from Toronto, back to Ottawa, unloading three and a half years of detritus and preparing to hand off the keys at the end of the month.  Second, I have a new job in Ottawa, still in the high-tech sector.  There has been a number of back and forth trips, shuttling belongings and getting into the swing of a new job.  Which isn’t an excuse, just the simple reality.  Which is why I’ve given Mason Baveux the password again.  May The Deity have mercy upon us.

Davey say I can do some more bloggery, so’s I sharpened up the pencil and got me some new carbon paper, so’s I can keep a copy.  You never know ya know so that if Hollywood comes lookin for someone to fix up some writin, I can do’er up a treat.  Davey even put that Winders Live Riter on the ‘puter for me, so’s technically I don’t need no carbon paper, or a pencil, but, I’s always writ her out longhand, then typed’er up, so’s why change now?

Seems our Canadian troops have been gettin’ killed regular, havin the IUD’s blow up under their LAVs over in Afghanistan.  Now this is something what pisses me off.  Not that our Boys and Girls are over there, as I think there doing something important and good, but that they keep gettin killed.  I think someone should be remindin the Afghanistans that we’re not over there to get in their business, except to keep them from killin each other long enough to turn over Osama Bin Laden.  Oh, and to do some Democracy.

Maybe we shouldn’t be there no more.  Seems they don’t want to turn over Osama and they don’t want to stop killin each other.  And they said ‘shove you Democracy up your arse, friggin infidels, unless there’s money on the table, then we’ll take off the hats’

Well, if they don’t want our help, don’t want to stop killin each other and won’t sit down to talk unless we build them a well, five schools, a hospital and give’em all Facebook accounts, then we should pack it up and go home.  Ya can’t help someone what doesn’t want help.  Frig them.  Our soldiers are worth more alive in one piece, than any nine of them you care to mention.  One of the lads has a nephew over there twice and says they change sides about every 20 minutes, depending on whose got money or food or the family held hostage.  Ya can’t work with crazy people. I know this fer shure.

Harper is doin his electioneering again.  This time arsehole’s got an ad what says Iggy is a lyin gravy-sucker whose going to run back to Harvard if he’s not made Queen in the next election this fall.  Iggy hasn’t been listening to his advisors, and in his television commercial actually cracks a smile.  Iggy looks like he’s a before picture advertisement for the British Dental Association.  Meanwhile Jack Layton is wanderin around inside his head, listenin to the voices again.  Gil Dousheppe is still in existence, with actual Members of Parliament workin for the Block Cuebec.  Oh and there’s Betty May, for the Greeners.  Jeezus Henry Christ, we need another election, like we need ingrown intimate hairs on the rear porticulus.

Oh and Daveys gone and took a job in Ottawa, so he’s moved back there and out of the apartment in Mississauga.  Just as well too, as he never did care much for Toronto.  Can’t says I blame him, as the nicest think about Toronto is the 401, goin East or West, the 400 North or the QEW Southbound.  Not to say that theres anything wrong with Toronto, except the traffic, the housing, the stores, the weather, the taxes and most of the people. 

You see on the news there that Barry Obama, the missus and Oprah went to Copenhagen to get the Olys lined up for Chicago in 2014.  Then the Oly folks said “No way we’re goin there.  Rio’s be it this time.”  I’m all for Rio as we’ll see some of the shapely competitors in Brazillian bathing suits, which would be enough to get me through the winter of 2013 just thinkin about it.  As for the Brazillian Wax, I’m all for it.  Especially the Carnuba, as that whats gives you the shine when you buff it.  Davey just told me a Brazillian Wax isn’t quite what I’s thinkin it was.  I suppose my comment about the buffin’ still applies tho.  Just a different buffin for the muffin. 

Anyways, Davey says I can write some more later, but he’s finally got his stuff unpacked in Ottawa and can find his toothbrush, so he’s set.  Seems a nice family of Muslims bought most of his furniture from Toronto on the last day of Ramalangadingdongdan and he didn’t have to move too much back.  Just a van full, which is about right.  I’da helped him move, but with the back problems and the disability, about all I could do was offer spiritual support.  So’s I did.  I took his bottle of Bushmill’s and drained’er, as liquids are heavy to ship and glass can break. 

But you’ll be glad to know I recycle, so the landfill is one glass bottle less today.  I tossed the empty onto the GO tracks from the apartment.  Once a year the Scouts come by and clean up the ditch near the transit, so the glass will get picked up in April next year.  I might not be a Greener Keener, but I do my part and always bring the empty 2-4 bottles back to The Beer Store.  That’s where the keep the Beer don’tcha know.

Since there is more utter nonsense being spewed south of the border regarding health care, it is incumbent on us to de-clutter the rants and peel away the fear-mongering.

First off, I’m Canadian.  That means I have cradle to grave health care.  I’m old enough to have used our health care system for chronic, elective and emergency reasons.  I have enough friends south of the border who use the private systems that I know how that side works and I can comment from a position of a consumer of health care.  Not a doctor, not a lawyer, not an insurance carrier.  Just a consumer.

Here’s how we did it:  In 1954 the people of Canada decided that everyone should have universal, comprehensive, no-charge, health care.  A combination of the Federal government and the Provincial governments would administer it.  In exchange for cradle to grave coverage, we pay higher taxes, federally and provincially, when compared to most Americans. 

The simple rule is this:  Medical care costs money.  How it is paid for and who gets covered are the questions.  In Canada, it is through taxes and everyone is covered. 

So let’s take a typical injury:  You trip over your own feet, fall and break your ankle.  So far, a basic, non-emergency kind of injury that happens all the time.  Your life is not really at risk, you need some x-rays, some plaster, Tylenol-3’s and a set of crutches.  You’ll need some physiotherapy in a few weeks.  And your lovely tan will be ruined.

In Canada, you go to Emergency at any hospital.  You are triaged by a nurse and after a bit, you get x-rayed.  A doc looks at the x-rays and says “You’ve broken your ankle.  We’re sending you for plaster and here’s a scrip for T3’s.  No dancing please.  Check in with your General Practitioner to get an appointment for physio.  Your GP will take it from here.  If you don’t have a GP, I’ll write you a referral for physio here at the hospital.” 

You get your plaster or fibreglass cast, a pair of crutches and you hobble away.  Cost to you?  Perhaps $20, as some hospitals cover crutches, or charge you a nominal fee for them.  You go to any pharmacy you want, hand over the Rx and pay about $11 for a wad of T3’s.  You go home, take the medicine, put your ankle up and cuss your lack of basic motor skills.  Done.

Notice something there?  Was there a “Death Panel” or rationed care, or some clerk coming by to measure your wallet?  Nope.  If you have supplemental coverage, through you employer for example, you probably have the Rx covered 100% and the crutches are likely covered as well.  The only thing you actually pay for is the parking at the hospital, which can be a nasty shock in some cities, but odds are if Emerg will stamp your parking ticket; even the parking might be free.

Did you get treated immediately?  Depends on how busy Emerg was.  If there was a bus-orphanage-propane tanker incident, you will be waiting for quite a while.  It is called Triage, meaning, doing the critical patients first.  This is decided by doctors and nurses using rules of Emergency medicine.  Got the sniffles and a sore throat?  You will be waiting longer. 

In many hospitals in the US, you get treated based on your insurance coverage.  Those well-covered go to the head of the line, even if their ailment is minor.  Those uninsured go to the end of the line, unless you have a spear through your head, at which point there might be some jiggery to move you up a bit.  Hospitals generally don’t like to see people with a spear through their head perched in the waiting room for several hours, bleeding all over the paying customers.  Tends to put people off.

Just to stretch it out a bit, let’s assume you’re an American tourist, in Canada, completely uninsured and you trip over your feet, fall and break your ankle.  Do you know how fast you’ll get treated? 

Exactly the same as any Canadian, with (or without) supplemental coverage.  You’re treated based on medical urgency.  After you’re patched up, someone from the hospital will want your particulars of course and will send you a bill.  They’ll charge at Medicare/Medicaid rates.  You won’t have your wallet measured.  You won’t have to fill out a credit application, or leave one of the children behind as collateral.  Somewhere between $500 to $1,000 would be my guess.  Not $16,000 or so, which is the going rate for a broken arm in the US. 

So far, any rationing of care, clerks telling the docs how and what to treat, or being refused service because you’re uninsured?  Nope.  Doesn’t happen here.  The medical decisions are made by medical people.  Clerks, actuaries and bean-counters make medical decisions in an HMO.

In simple language, America already has a group of self-appointed idiots telling doctors, nurses and hospitals what and how they can and cannot treat under the (chorus of angels here) Great Private Capitalist Health Care System.

Do we have problems with our health care system in Canada?  Of course we do.  Wait times are sometimes too long, but we’re working the problem.  Elective surgery can often be bumped by emergency surgery.  Funding for cosmetic surgery is tightly controlled.  If you were disfigured from a car accident (as an example) you’re fully covered, no question there.

However, if you want a set of 40 DD’s, you pay for them at going market rates, unless there is a real medical reason why you need the 40’s.  Being a pole dancer doesn’t count as a medical reason by the way.  We have a problem with hospital beds being occupied by people who should be in long-term chronic care facilities but that’s a problem of bureaucracy and foresight, not the actual delivery of health care.

Can you choose your own GP or specialist?  Sure can.  Can you go to any pharmacy?  Sure can.  Can you get an MRI on a moments’ notice because you have a sore arm from excessive self-pleasuring?  Nope.  If you came in with a spear through your head, absolutely, no problem and no question either. 

Again, the issue, specifically with MRI, was a failure of bureaucracy and foresight, not the actual delivery of health care.  We’re working the problem as best as can be expected in a system that is taxpayer funded.  It isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty good.

Is there ‘rationing’ of health care?  Nope.  There are limitations on funding for certain procedures, as the province can’t throw all money at all things, all the time.  My eye surgery two years ago saw me on a waiting list for nearly four years.  Adult cosmetic strabismus surgery is not critical; it isn’t a life-threatening situation, so I waited and I understand exactly why. 

If it was infant strabismus, it would have been done right away.  Even so, getting my eye squared up, didn’t cost me a cent.  My taxpayer funded cradle to grave health care covered the whole thing.  I even got free parking, as the day-surgery folks get their parking passes stamped by the hospital.

Do we cover alternative treatments?  Sort of.  If the alternative treatment is somewhat proven, then sure, it’s covered.  If the alternative treatment is watercress enemas four times a week to cure Multiple Sclerosis, then probably not.  Having said that, most of our cancer clinics are reasonably holistic in their approach to treatments, including mental imaging, diet, exercise and emotional support along with the chemo and radiation therapy.

Do we ‘penalize’ drug companies?  The health coverage for pharmaceuticals is big dollars, no matter how you look at it.  Generic drugs are used where medically appropriate.  Vancomycin is Vancomycin, if it is made by Lilly or Apotex, so unless there is a real, medical reason for a more expensive brand name that your doctor specifies in the prescription, then you’ll probably get a generic.  Note who decides:  The Doctor, not the insurance carrier.  All the brand-name pharmaceuticals like Celebrex, Cialis, Prilosec and the various statins (Lipitor, Zocor, Vytorin) all exist here and the pharmaceutical companies make good money off them.   

In our broken ankle case, the Rx will most likely be for Co-codamol or Atasol Codeine which is essentially Tylenol with Codeine, a good, effective pain killer for mild to moderate pain.  You can get OxyContin (from Purdue Pharmaceuticals) if the objective is to make hillbilly heroin and you lie through your teeth to the doctor. 

To sum up:  Is a cradle to grave health care system perfect?  No.  Do we have clerks and accountants telling medical staff how to treat people?  No.  Do we pay higher taxes?  Yes.  Is it better than an all-private system?  Now there’s a question that is answered by two questions.

If you believe that everyone should have health care coverage, regardless of income, then you’re in favour of it

If you believe that it’s their own damn fault they fell down/got sick/developed MS, then you’re not in favour of it. 

You tell me.

With the World Aquatics Championships long over in Rome, the controversy over the swimsuits is persisting.  Here’s the short form:  Speedo, Arena and Jaked make swimsuits for competitive swimmers.  The objective of the swim apparel was ostensibly to cover the primary and secondary sexual characteristics of the human form with at least a scrap or three of cloth. 

When the science hobbits from the swimsuit companies got involved, the found ways to help high-performance swimmers go faster by applying the sciences of fluid dynamics and aerodynamics to the suits.  Essentially the new super-duper-wonder-suits use polyurethane and some serious squeezing to be more buoyant and to slim down the profile of the swimmer going through the water.  Smaller profile means faster times, at least theoretically and faster times means more World Records.

At the same time, if you don’t have the wonder-suit, you will not win, no matter how good a swimmer you might be:  They’re that much of an advantage at the high performance end of the spectrum. 

For me, who can swim, but only if confronted with drowning as an alternative, the wonder-suit would offer no advantage whatsoever, as well a $600 – $1,000 hit to the wallet and the half an hour to actually get into the suit.  Incidentally, the suits are estimated to last only three or four meets.  The wonder-suits are not especially durable.

The whole swimsuit issue brings up the question of what is an unfair advantage in sports?  One could argue that Michael Phelps is an unfair advantage, as even his eyebrows are fit, toned and super-efficient cardio machines.  The same could be said about any number of high-performance athletes at the lower levels of competition.  To get to those levels, your job is being an athlete, with the total dedication that only the obsessive can truly appreciate.

Some commentators have pressed the amateur button, conjuring up dreamy images of a Baron de Coubertin era of competition in the purest sense of amateurs seeking to achieve remarkable results. Note to self:  de Coubertin, the putative father of the modern Olympic movement, thought that coaches crossed the line into ‘professional’ sport. 

What Pete de Coubertin really wanted to do was to keep lower-class riffraff out of the competition.  His Olympic vision was a place for rich, white, upper-class sportsmen to mingle and occasionally dress up in sports togs.  Perhaps they might break a sweat, but that would be a bit declasse, as L’important dans la vie ce n’est point le triomphe, mais le combat, l’essentiel ce n’est pas d’avoir vaincu mais de s’être bien battu.  (The important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle, the essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well.) 

Which is utter bosh according to our society:  We want winners.  We want them faster, higher, stronger, meaner and leaner than anyone else.  Coming second means you’re the first loser.  Bending the rules using anything that makes you win, is perfectly acceptable.  Then we get all coy about steroids, EPO, blood doping and all the other shenanigans.  Which is also utter bosh.

Here’s the real answer:  Do whatever you can do to win.  As long as the competitor can cross the finish line intact and survive long enough to reach the podium for the medal, then it’s done.  If you can find someone stupid enough to pump full of amphetamines, have implants powered by nuclear reactors and chemically jacked neurons that sound like a 12 gauge when they fire, so be it.  As long as they can get to the podium alive, then let the games begin. 

Yes, we might see 4 second 100 meter times, humans in a singlet out-gunning a Porsche at the stoplights.  We will also see some grisly implosions at the pool, or in the ring, but if that’s the price we pay for our ‘competition’ and ‘winning’ then it would seem that society is perfectly willing to pay that price.

There will always be parents who are willing to fund their kids’ pharmaceutical-medical-mechanical enhancements.  Their kid can be the first in junior rec league badminton to fatally impale an opponent with a serve.  They can cheer from the sidelines, pointing and hollering “That’s my daughter! She’s Number One!” as the paramedics drape the opponent’s lifeless form.

Unfortunately, my vision is all too possible.  Be it a wonder-swimsuit, a racing bike that weighs four ounces, or a regime of meds that shaves tenths off a competitor’s time, as long as we insist on winning only, someone will do it. 

Let’s at least be honest about it.  No more asterisks next to the records.

Another learned study has come out, placing a large red circle around texting while driving.  According to research conducted by the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute a driver is 23 times more likely to get into a car accident if they text while driving. 

According to their research over 18 months, text messaging forced the driver’s eyes from the road for the longest period of time, about 4.6 seconds out of a six second interval.  Doing some fast math (44 feet per second = 30 miles per hour) means someone texting while driving in the city, is not watching what they are doing for just over 200 feet, (202.4 if you want to get precise) or a tad over two-thirds of a North American football field.

Which makes sense.  Texting calls for more visual acuity and dexterity than talking on a cell phone.  What it really calls for is the complete redirection of the driver’s focus from driving to tapping the correct keys on a miniscule keypad to reply to the deeply important msg of u suk2 n ur mama iza ho.

I think we all understand, even with hands-free operation, simply talking on a cell phone is a dangerous distraction.  Some studies have implied that being piss drunk while driving (+.08) or talking on the phone while driving is more or less the same thing when it comes to driver inattention.  Both aren’t smart.  Texting is even worse.  However, it begs the question, what are we going to do about it?

Fourteen states and a handful of provinces have prohibited texting while operating a motor vehicle.  Boston and Los Angeles commuter rail services have forbidden their operators from texting while operating their trains, as a result of two nasty crashes.  The cause and effect of distracted driving is well known and well researched.

Driving home this evening from the office, I counted the nostrils of those with a cell phone in use while driving in Toronto rush hour traffic.  After dividing by 2 (generally, two nostrils = one human) there were more than 100 drivers I was able to spot, driving one-handed with a phone glued to their heads.  The distance from the office to the apartment?  15 kilometres.  Or 6.6 morons per kilometre.  23,100 pounds of vaguely controlled motor vehicle per kilometre, using an average of 3,500 pounds per car.

Now on the scale of ‘truly dumb’, we need some context, something to compare with:  Which is more dangerous to life, limb and reputation? (choose one) 

A) Driving a car on the expressway while texting, handling phone calls and email.  B) Engaging in an act of intimacy with a giraffe at the Metro Zoo, over the noon-hour with the media in attendance.

Either action can get you killed.  Giraffes do kick.  Reputation harm however, is a little more prominent if you’re on the noon news being led away by the police from the giraffe house.  You’ll also get a free psychiatric evaluation, probation for a couple of years and quite possibly be studied by mental health professionals to see if you are as deeply twisted as your actions might indicate.

Getting a ticket from the police for using your phone while driving will cost you a couple of hundred bucks and some minor annoyance.  This is assuming you don’t actually bang into something by running a red light and killing a family of four.

So which act is worse?  It depends on the perspective of society.  I humbly submit that relations with the giraffe is not the more ‘wrong’ act.  At worst you become a social pariah, labelled as a very sick individual and are prohibited from going to the zoo. 

Using your phone while driving means you’re a multi-tasking serious business person, plugged-in, focused on the bottom-line, customer first…yadda yadda yadda.

The giraffe relationship-artiste is not a well person by any measure.  But the cell phone driver is actively going out of their way to provide a violent and potentially deadly threat to others with 3,500 pounds of rapidly moving steel. rubber, glass and plastic aimed by a clueless hump. 

The giraffe lover is annoying the giraffe and wrecking their personal reputation, but not a whole lot more. I don’t know of anyone who has been killed, maimed, horrendously disfigured or permanently injured by someone who has banged a giraffe. Not that I know anyone who has, or would admit to it.  I travel in mainstream society thanks.  

A distracted driver?  That would be a different question that is answered on the roads.  Paramedics mop up the leftover parts every day.

Having been the owner of a cell phone for a number of years, my voice mail has always said “I can’t take your call right now, as I might be driving, teaching or in a meeting, but I will return your call as soon as possible.”  I simply refuse to use my phone while driving.  It’s too distracting and too dangerous.

If it is a ‘critical’ call, I put the phone down and pull over:  Loop into a parking lot, or head for the roadway shoulder, get out of the way, stop, then talk.  Realistically, there haven’t been that many ‘critical’ calls in the years of cell phone ownership, perhaps a dozen in fifteen years. It’s not like I have the only copy of the launch codes and NATO needs them immediately or the world will end.

Which comes back to our original story.  Even deducting half for media inflation and fear-mongering headlines, someone texting while driving is (after the math) 11.5 times more likely to get into a car accident than someone who isn’t.

Hang up:  It isn’t that important.  Or go to the zoo around noon. 

At least at the zoo you won’t be hurting anyone but yourself.

Odds are most of you never knew Les Lye.  You might have heard of (or seen) that kid’s show on Nickelodeon called “You Can’t Do That On Television” and if you have, you’ve seen Les Lye, who passed away on Tuesday at 84.  Les played Ross and Dad.

A bit of the background here.  YCDTOTV was produced at CJOH-TV in Ottawa, when I worked there in the 80’s.  I was in commercial production and Les was a staff freelancer, so we worked together more than a few times.  Les was one of those people who was naturally funny:  Just being around him was a lift to your day.  He had an encyclopaedic knowledge of jokes, bits and humour, but could still sit down and talk over the trivialities of the day.

One Les Lye story will suffice.  On occasion we’d semi-collaborate on some of his movie reviews, which he did as part of the late news.  When the film version of “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas” came out, in 1982, he didn’t want to actually say ‘whorehouse’, the gag being the station management wouldn’t let him say ‘whorehouse’ on the air.  It wasn’t true, but that was going to be the gag.

He was able to find a few synonyms for ‘whorehouse’, but knew that I was a font of excruciatingly useless information and seemed to be able to find the obscure and archaic terms.  (Remember this was pre-Internet days)  After a few hours, I had 38 synonyms for ‘whorehouse’ and these were duly incorporated into the script.  I think Les managed to work about 30 of them into a five-minute review.

Les’s partner in real crime was Bill Luxton.  Between the two of them, they did 22 seasons of Willy and Floyd.  Ostensibly a children’s show, the genius of Willy and Floyd were the jokes that could be taken at one level by the kids and a whole other, much raunchier, level by the grownups. 

Actually, the rehearsals for Willy and Floyd were perhaps the funniest things ever created in the known Universe.  Les and Bill were both so talented that the ad libs in rehearsal would leave your bladder a crippled spasmodic wreck as you tried not to piss yourself laughing.  I was fortunate enough to write a couple of Willy and Floyd’s.  I actually found one of the scripts a couple of years ago. 

Les worked with a lot of folks and his career spanned decades in radio, film, television and stage.  He also gave back as a very active member of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. 

We’ve lost a very warm and talented man.  Thank you Les.   

One of our regular readers on the Facebook side posed an interesting question, which I will quote:  Still, I’ve been waiting all these years for someone to make a really good argument for the value of the space program. I’d love to hear what you/others might have to say!  That’s a deep and important question that deserves a reasoned answer.

Here are some factoids:  2007 NASA Budget $16.3 billion.  US Pet Toy Industry in 2007:  $31 billion.  US Alcohol industry in 2007: $58 billion.

Computers:  In 1962, when the space race more or less started, a computer was the size of a small house and needed fourteen guys to run it to play a game of tic tac toe. 

By the time of the Apollo program, computers were the size of a shoebox and could be flown in space.  Apollo essentially flew and navigated on a Commodore VIC-20 by way of a comparison.  That progress took six years from a small house to a big shoebox and was driven entirely by NASA’s needs for a small, power-efficient, anvil-reliable computer.  

The computer you’re using right now has several million times the computing power of what went to the moon 40 years ago.  It could be argued that the entire computer industry was NASA-fuelled and there is some truth there. Some of their work was figuring out how to “network” Cape Canaveral/Kennedy and the Johnson Space Center in Houston together and do a hot swap 10 seconds into the launch, without so much as dropping a signal.  

Evans and Sutherland (ask an animator) one of the first ‘computer graphics and animation’ companies was a direct offspring of NASA.  It could be argued that animation would still be cel and ink based if it wasn’t for NASA needing real-time rendering engines for training simulators.  Yes, the early ones were low-rez polygon primitives, but they led to things like the opening credits on Monday Night Football, or the upcoming District-9, which is almost entirely rendered in an virtual environment.  “No film was exposed in the creation of this movie.  It’s all computer generated.”  Alright, it also created “Tron”, but we’ll forgive that.

Watching the BBC World Service.  If we didn’t have cheap, broadband digital satellite links, the BBC World Service would still be radio, over shortwave, if the ionosphere didn’t get in the way.  We would have to wait months for Top Gear or Corrie Street to ship tapes to North America for broadcast.

Speaking of tape, Time Code.  SMPTE Time Code was a direct result of NASA needing a way to identify video frames down to the 1/30th of a second, as well as edit it after the fact.  SMPTE Time Code is the international standard of frame coding and editing. 

Every TV frame you see has a time code and in editing that ghastly Shamwow commercial, the editor used the time code to electronically edit the segments together.  If you occasionally see a line of white dots across the top of the screen of your old tube TV, you’re actually ‘seeing’ the time code.  Seeing the time code that way means that old tube TV is badly misaligned and the frame masking is waaay off.  Time code is normally invisible to the viewer.

Optics:  Want to know if Vladimir Putin dresses left or dresses right?  Ask the US Department of Defence.  They have camera lenses that they admit to, that can read license plates in the Kremlin, from Low Earth Orbit.  That technology links directly to the Hubble and Cassini telescopes.

Do you have a GPS enabled phone, a Tom-Tom, or a Garmin GPS?  The Global Positioning System was a direct NASA offshoot hijacked by the US Military to provide non-inertial navigation for cruise missiles. Using that same NASA-originated technology, you can download the turn-by-turn directions from your place to Phil’s Original BBQ on College Street.

I think we both agree that the weather this summer sucks, at least in Toronto, and the reason is El Nino.  How do we know that?  Weather satellites thanks, taking readings of sea temperatures and heat flows in the Pacific.  Want to model global climate change?  Where do you think the technology came from to model the location of planets in the future?  The massive computing power needed to render long-range weather predictions comes right off NASA’s bat. That also includes the technology needed to model and decrypt the human genome, as well as sequence DNA.

If you bought a new house, odds are the water pipes are what is called PEX (cross-linked polyethylene), instead of copper tubing.  PEX is a space spinoff.  A hiker’s water purification system, like the MIOX, uses an electrified brine to treat untreated water.  A space spinoff, from Skylab, to treat non-potable water from the energy cells.

Now there have been things from space that truly suck.  Tang comes to mind.  Freeze-dried ice cream is just wrong.  So were Space Sticks, a simulacrum of the long-term shelf-stable goo that ‘the astronauts’ allegedly ate.  Imagine beef-flavoured toothpaste that doesn’t quite taste like either beef or toothpaste.

To put it in perspective, NASA has spent money, a lot of it and we’ve got our money back, several thousand times over. 

Being of the appropriate vintage, I do remember the moon landing, forty years ago today.  You’ll see all the clips played over and over again.  NASA has even restored some of them, so you can see more detail.  In the day, video was very low-fidelity from small cameras at the best of times and sending the signal from the Moon was an incredible effort just to have moving pictures. 

Forty years on, we haven’t done much with the Moon.  The two lunar Rovers are still there.  Astronaut Gene Cernan (Apollo 17) is of the opinion that we could go back, bring some old skool batteries, power the Rover back up, then skedaddle around just like old times.  He’s probably right, but it doesn’t quite answer the question of “Now what?”

There were all kinds of wild speculation that we would have extensive habitation, mining minerals and growing peaches the size of basketballs in mammoth greenhouses.  The first generation of space-born children would all be over seven feet tall (no gravity, or very little gravity to push against their bodies) and would view Earth as some quaint blue planet that Grandpa came from.

Of course all that wonderful speculation was just that, speculation.  There really wasn’t a way to make money off the Moon.  It wasn’t as if there were huge gobs of gold just sitting below the dusty surface, or strange clumps of Unobtainium waiting for the clever engineers to wrought into miraculous machines for our salvation.  If you wanted dust, regolith, or powdered basalt, the Moon was the place to go, but the economic model didn’t work.  We haven’t been back since Cernan and Apollo 17, in December 1972.

There will always be that percentage of the populace that are absolutely positive that it was all faked.  Such things as evidence don’t matter to them and they’re collectively dusting off their black helicopter decoder rings and secret handshakes to ‘prove’ once again that the entire space race was done on a sound stage at Nellis, or Black Lake, or White Sands.  We should just them rant, as they’ll run out of air and settle back down in a weeks’ time.

The Moon Landings happened in a time when humans were still capable of doing good, big, important things.  If JFK threw down the gauntlet of “Landing a Man on the Moon and returning him safely…” in a speech today, the CIA would have a net over him in a second and whisked off to the loony bin for a long course of electro-convulsive therapy.  We, collectively, don’t do heroic anymore.    

However, some night, when the Moon is full and the skies clear, take a moment to look at the Moon.  Really look at it.  People walked up there.  We went there.