I wake up every morning with coffee and the Globe and Mail. I have done so pretty much without deviation from my routine since I was in university. If for whatever reason this routine is somehow broken, that’s it I’m done for and so is anyone around me. The rest of the day is a write-off. Sometimes I manage till the next morning, bit I’m not happy about. No sir! I don’t like, I don’t like it all!

On this morning I was gladdened to see that open of my favourite commentators, Rick Salutin, was once again, after a long hiatus, going to share some of his bon mots. Now Rick, he let’s me call him that, yes it’s a first name basis relationship, as I was saying, Rick is in my opinion spot on, Jeffrey tends to be, but too often writes about not so interesting subjects. This morning Rick was not only spot on, but he was dead-on centre target. I would tell you about it but this is one I want to share with all of you. When you’re done, the title of this entry will make sense. Here goes.

“The Globe and Mail - National Edition July 11, 2008

Maybe it’s Canada’s role, or that of today’s white dominions, to be more imperial than the Empire long after the Empire has relinquished its crasser forms and learned a few lessons. I mean, who still celebrates Victoria’s birthday? Trust me, it’s not the Brits.”

And there it is folks. Our Prime Minister, kaki shorts, safari hat and all. May nature have mercy on our souls.

Welcome to the City of Orleans website. We’re glad you could drop by for a visit. The “City of Orleans” website is an unofficial site that tells people about what is happening in this great community just east of Ottawa.

The website is not run by any organization, association or commercial venture. It is owned and operated by a few residents that share a passion for the community and want to get that message out.

You will find no commercial advertising on this site but if you or your group has a meeting, function or an event, please use this vehicle to assist you. The important goal in this website is to share ideas, thoughts and viewpoints. We would hope that you keep it civil and clean so all people can read without being offended.

We want to read what you have to say about our politicians, their agendas and their vision of our community. We want to read what it is you like and dislike about our community. What is it that we, as a community, should we focus on as we prepare the city for its’ future.

Let’s share our pride, our accomplishments and our special people with everyone in the City of Orleans. Our residents have always been quiet and modest in their accomplishments but these are world class people doing world class things. Let us share those successes.

From time to time we will post articles and stories about almost any topic. We encourage you to contribute by sending your stories to editor@cityofOrleans.ca . We are free from any sponsorship or ties of any kind so feel free to speak your mind. The site is open to any language you wish to use but we will hold articles until content is verified if you choose to use a language other than French or English.

This site is open for you. Talk to each other like as if were neighbours sitting out on our front step. This is our home. This is not a blog where people can vent angry, rant filled responses laced with pronfanity. A little humour is nice but clear, concise thought is always the order of the day.

Thank-you again for visiting

O.P. Miner

• She was an early investor in Apple… the fruit.
• She actually robbed Peter to pay Paul.
• She was a fluffer for the Kama Sutra.
• She got a senior citizen discount to see Birth of a Nation.
• Her social security number is 9.
• She’s the third drawing from the left on the evolutionary chart.
• She remembers the mini-mall they tore down to build Stonehenge.
• She won’t give her real age because she pre-dates counting.
• She remembers the best thing BEFORE sliced bread.
• Methuselah dumped her for a younger woman.
• She remembers when Helen of Troy’s face had only launched a couple of ships.
• Her favorite hobby: Respiration.
• She majored in Spanish. Not the language, the Inquisition.
• Pre-menopause, she had geologic periods.
• Social life: Not Speed Dating — carbon dating.
• Likes older men, but there are none.
• First job: a papyrus route.
• She’s so old she remembers when: If you looked green around the gills you REALLY did.
• Old Faithful was new and unreliable.
• Tuesday was hump day.
• Incest was just called “sex.”
• There was only one way to skin a cat.
• In school Geology was called Current Events.
• The Twin Cities were Sodom and Gomorrah.
• Amphibians were just called “show-offs.”

Ok, I’ve waited long enough. Now that generalissimo Hillier has taken to greener pastures rather than the killing fields (actually I like the guy. Anyone who doesn’t give a rats ass what Harper says or thinks is ok by me) I gotta say, are we nuts or what? I know we live in Orleans or are as some “cutely” offer up, CFB Orléans. But, come on who in their right minds wants to go to war. This is not a war to defend our way of life, unless by that you mean consuming like it was 1965, and we’ve seen where that’s gotten us. This is a war to free up Americans troops so they can go defend their oil interests. Yet I’ve heard it from everyone, from intelligent mothers to devout Catholics, “oh my, but if we want to bring peace order and good government to Afghanistan”, …because we’re not so presumptuous as to think we will make the world safe for democracy, “we have to be there”. Or here’s a good one, “we’re there becasue we have to stop them from treating women that way”. It never fails, that that last one always comes from the - women should be barefoot and pregnant and in the kitchen - conservative who has discovered his own inner female to take care of that inner child. Please! Give me a break!

This war is not only stupid and wrong it is stale or rather its justification is more fabrication than anything else, seems to be unable to come up with a single novel idea about how to sell it. No, really! The clichés are so old that pretty soon we’ll be waiting for our doe boys under the apple tree till Johnny comes marching home. But my favourite one is the patriot card. Oh, you gotta love that one. You cannot have an opinion or a point of view that deviates from established and acceptable patriotic fervor. Why, I ponder? “Because they are making the ultimate sacrifice and protecting the values and beliefs that have made this country the envy of the world”, they tell me. Now here’s a thought. Perhaps our soldiers might serve that purpose better if they came home and protected us from Harper and his neolithic apparatchik that have been dutifully dismantling Canada with their weapons of mass delusion (WMS).

When I was a boy I had a friend whose father was from Latin America. When I was over at his house his father would be watching a news item on T.V. that depicted the horrors of the Vietnam War and my friends father would exclaim that the world is like a “flea Market”. He was a very explosive man, given to fits of rage, but with a warm and caring nature.

Years later when we were in our late teens I asked Mr. Enrique why did he always refer to bad things on television, specifically in the news, as a flea market. He look at me and said it was an expression in Latin America. A flea Market is called a “cambalache”, but a cambalache, as he used it, is more. “you see, a cambalache in my country is a flea market full of people that would do anything to sell anything. They are “traicioneros”, trators, they will cheat you if they can. So, the whole flea market is “traicionero” treasonous. “Our world, my friend, is a cambalache where production and profit are worth more than a human being”. “Soon” he said, “we will only be a part of that greater machine. The worth of a human being will only be measured by his or her ability to produce something of value. Even nature will only be there to be exploited by production and profit”. He seemed to lose some of his famous energy and his gaze had a faraway look as though he was at once looking into the past and the future.

Long after Mr. Enrique had passed from this cambalache, I had a feeling of overwhelming anxiety while studying for an exam in a course in the Politics of the Middle-east at university. I remembered Mr Enrique and took a break. I decided to check-out his song so I went to the card catalogue and looked up the word Cambalache.

It was in fact the title of a book and in it there was Mr. Enrique’s song. And it was translate.

I read it through three times and I only wished I spoke and read Spanish because if the English version was any indication, we are in fact as Mr. Enrique put it, all in a cambalache.

Here is an excerpt from Cambalache

The world has been and is rotten this I know in 1506 and the year 2000
There always have been thieves, traitors and victims of fraud, happy and bitter people,
the real thing or a cheap imitation.

But, that the twentieth century is a display of insolent malice, nobody can deny it anymore.
We lived sunk in a fuzz and in the same mud all well-worn…

Twentieth century bazaar, problematic and feverish!
If you don’t cry you don’t get fed and if you don’t steal you’re stupid.

Go ahead! Keep it up! That there, in hell we’re gonna reunite.
Don’t think anymore, move out of the way.
Nobody seems to care if you were born honest.

It’s the same the one who works, day and night like an ox,
than the one who lives from the others, than the one that kills or heals
or than the one who lives outside the law

Something to think about!

If you would like to hear the song in Spanish go to
http://www.planet-tango.com/lyrics/cambalac.htm

I have followed for some weeks the growing Ottawa discussion over impending property tax increases as the post-freeze scenario resets to current market values. At the heart of the story is the fact that urban, core properties will reset higher while the suburban rates lower or at least remain relatively static. In this tale of two cities, cries of ‘unfair’ may be heard on both sides: those on Frank Street overlooking the canal claim their long-standing dreams of an urban haven are at risk as market muscles flex; those on Rue Topello in Orleans can firmly and pragmatically suggest that if you want to dance, you should probably pay the fiddler.
There is no fair. There is, however, some reality to discuss. Unless someone puts a working model on the table where an alternative to property appraisals is applied, and I haven’t seen one short of a Stalinist scheme, the insatiable city bills will be paid. The tax cards will fall where they may, and some of those extrapolated ‘mays’ happen to include the verifiable notion that specific property values vary for specific reasons.
I have lived on Frank Street. It was the seventies and I was a Carleton student, mostly cashless and carefree, more likely ravenous than Raven on any given day. It was the time when somebody figured that if you cleaned the snow off the canal you could skate on it. It was the time when a quick walk across the bridge to St Patrick’s College would get you a free hop to the Carleton campus on one of the seemingly immortal blue and white Mercedes shuttles. It was the time that a bakery would flood the neighbourhood with those wonderful sweet, doughy smells every morning; the nut and fun-loving black squirrels could be mistaken for fat cats. A short walk over to and up Elgin was always fun, and the return down a tulip-laden Rideau was comforting in the civilized sense. My monthly budget was $400 and that was stretched to include tax, title, tuition, rent, books, brew and sometimes food. And it worked. Not quite halcyon days, but closer to the best of times than the worst.
Is that today’s reality? Tuition costs alone across the country hover around 5K. Canal skating is now closer to an institution than a lark. The bakery is gone as is the free bus. My former nest on Frank housing my single room for double-digit rent, is probably more desirable than ever in the quaint sense, and probably unreachable without going to six digits.
Do times change? Sure they do. Except for the squirrels, of course, those kitties on the Rideau. Last time I indulged the canal with a stroll, seems like their numbers may have edged up.

Time to second mortgage the house, or the like: the new Senators jerseys are hitting the street and buying a pair doesn’t come cheap. Fancy never does. I recollect paying less for a semester’s tuition at Carleton. But I was struck less by the cost ( I mean isn’t fancy worth it?) than by the casual mystery in the presentation. Why are the Senators represented by the Roman soldier? A warrior, it is addressed by the design team, who is grittier and more determined than the predecessor. One more representative of the new team which, it is clearly noted, is supposedly on the verge of winning, of accomplishing something. So how does a Senator convert to the ranks of the Praetorian Guard? Or, more to the point, why?

Not too much of a stretch to the Forum on the Rideau. Elect a few folks to manage the budget, sometimes the fancy of senators, and you end up with the whole crew guarding their favourite pork, to invoke an equivalent prevalent in a tired republic to the south. So while we thought the councillors were making sure the police and firemen were paid, that human waste still rolled downhill, and that the occasional bus ran on time, or what we might refer to as a basic city services, it turns out that the real agenda was the defense of social services, city transportation strategies to take us into the next ice age, and of course a plan to defeat the mother of all municipal insurgents, trans-fats. As you might have guessed, yes the latter items tend to drive up taxes.

Nope, fancy is never cheap. And…stuff…adds up. Perhaps the toilet tissue question is lost on this covey that actually claim they are going to try something new like hire city staffers based on their competence rather than a profile. What imagination, but I digress…the toilet tissue option: there are three ways to manage the process of preparing the tissue and getting the job done. You can fold the tissue in the palm of your hand. Or, you can roll it repeatedly about the spread of your extended fingers, or you can give the roll a godawful rip and just mash the whole mess into your hand. Needless to expound, but even a casual evaluation of these three methods shows a marked tendency to waste as you translate from folder, to roller, to masher.
So, from Senatorial folder to Praetorian masher. Ante up in the tax game.

My last over the fence conversation ended with a nasty declaration of “punks” and it was spoken with no lack of emphasis. My neighbour was referring to the authors of some graffiti she’d seen on the drive home. “Why would they do that?” In her mind it was an unerasable scar, an affront, the first step on a slippery slope to de-civilization. She was miffed.

My own thoughts are a little more tempered and mostly recollected. Coming out of Montreal on the southbound Amtrak in the seventies: the trackside graffiti alone were entertainment for hours. Or how about that afternoon at the old GCTC on Sunnyside, sprucing up the walls, covering a declaration in bright red and yellow spray paint that “Jeremy Rules…Long Live Jeremy.” These recollections seemed to point more to pained authorship than criminal mischief, and that mystery and profundity may be locked in every aerosol can. There is an urge all right and it is likely youthful; it is texting in very large and public fonts.

“Urge?” Instinct might be closer to the centre of the target. Every time I look at the cacophonous and over-subscribed boards of an NHL rink I am reminded how strong the will is. It is the corporate need to be recognized and claim the space. And we allow it, practically demand it. It is not advertising. I don’t watch the game and have a sudden desire to leave and make a quick bank deposit or buy a doughnut. It is graffiti, paid for by the square inch and consumed by the square mile.

There has to be a sequence on the genome that demands such displays. They have been around forever. Stonehenge a mystery? Not really. What were those large stones displaying when the priests and locals met for a little ritualistic foreplay and pagan worship? The paints and pigments have long worn off but I can see the message as clearly as an electronic billboard: “ochluk…the best in elk horn knives.” The next year it would have been simply “ochluk.” Then the exclamatory “och,” which has survived. There it is.

So I say give them a space. Give them some raw concrete or the side of a building. Do the Orleans Berlin wall. Give them the yourspace fence. Let it out. Remember, Jeremy rules.

T.J. Snodgrass

Elections are much like chinese food, you have just finished eating and you are full of it.

But then you see the fool that was elected, like our federal MP, then you cannot wait to engage again in an election.

You then get to eat your fortune cookie, and you read your fortune “…may we live in interesting times”

Aah summer! Unlike some red-green climate change doomsayers I for one look forward to a warmer climate, exotic plants and animals and an ocean beach that only takes me an hour to get to on a Sunday afternoon in March. And then there are the secondary benefits.

There is nothing quite as inspiring to the male “drive” than the flip-flop clad red toe-nail painted feet of a beautiful woman on a beach by the ocean…or anywhere for that matter. I say let’s herald in the coming warming trend and spew out those Green House Gas emissions into the atmosphere. Never mind the increase in medicare cost caused by more people with respiratory problems coming to the emergency wards. With summer starting in April and ending in October, and I do mean summer not Spring and Fall…summer, and the horizon festooned with red toe-nail, flip-flop wearing lovelies the more SUV’s we buy the quicker we’ll get to that ocean-beach playground, probably sooner than the city of Ottawa and its amalgamates will build an LRT system.

But hold on, we don’t have to wait for the flip-flops and hotter air. After all this is Ottawa and these days there is no greater concentration of GHGs than in the Nation’s Capital. And some people don’t think that CO2 emissions are caused by human activity! Nowhere, I might, add, is this warming trend more concentarted than in Ottawa-Orléans, and no one wears the flip-flip, sans the red toe-nail polish - thankfully, better than our own M.P. Royal Galipeau.

So how is it that Monsieur Galipeau wears a flip-flop so well? In a recent public information pamphlet M. Galipeau says that he will not bring jobs to Ottawa-Orléans because those jobs are simply a way of “…awarding federal jobs for political reasons either to reward a faithful, federal riding or to buy votes in a coveted riding.” This is of course consistent with his insistence that if people want jobs in Ottawa-Orléans they “…should vote Liberal”. Oddly he may actually get his wish. But what is really odd is that in the same pamphlet M. Galipeau says he will promise “new Jobs” from the “New Economy”. Then he has the temerity to say that “Steeling jobs from other Canadians to move them to a coveted riding used to be in vogue, but is unfair and outdated.” Indeed, unless you’re a Conservative. Flip-flop!

Well M. Galipeau, perhaps you should tell this to your boss Mr. Harper. How happy would the boss man be with his straw boss if he knew you would suggest to him that the Portrait Gallery was stolen from Ottawa and moved to Calgary? I think the RCMP should start an investigation right around the middle of the next election about allegations of the theft of art from the National Capital.

And then there is the cape crusader’s side kick, that boy wonder of the “New Government of Canada” Pierre Poilievre, born in Calgary Alberta by the way, who stole the RCMP from Ottawa-Orléans to put it in his west-end riding of Nepean - Carleton “Holy Liberal License Stephen!”. Flip-flop!

And finally M. Galipeau seems to think anytime jobs are created they are somehow allocated according to some pre-established criteria. I think he will find, if he can keep staff long enough to do the research for him, that there is a kind of economic criteria that the conservatives use to justify their “thefts”. It’s called neo-classical economics and it suggests than under the stupid theory of marginal utility and the sterile calculus of neo-con economics it makes perfect sense to steal because it makes economic sense. Or wait! Maybe the conservatives are just so vengeful that they felt it necessary to do the eye-for-an-eye thing and offset Jean Chretian’s Shawinigan art gallery nonsense in 2003. However, we should be reminded that that was not a permanent gallery and does not own it’s own collection like the portrait gallery now in Calgary. Anyone out there who thinks that jobs will accrue for Calgarians raise your hands. Do Calgarians need more jobs? Now everyone that thinks so raise your hands. I thought so! Is this not political favoritism? Flip-flop!

You see M. Galipeau ensuring economic development for Ottawa-Orléans is a part of the reason we elected you and apparently according to your pamphlet you seem to understand this.. You say you have new federal jobs for Ottawa-Orléans? M. Galipeau I know you have some inkling of what a zero sum game is therefore it strikes me as contradictory or at least flip-flopish to suggested that any jobs accruing to our riding will somehow not impact other ridings in Ottawa or Canada for that matter. Better check with the boss on that one. Or perhaps you are going to personally train people to give tours of the House of Commons since by now you must have a thorough knowledge of the highlights from the ahem resources you “borrowed”. But perhaps that would take you away from your more important responsibilities, like being substitute speaker. This, in fact has no doubt been a priority for you, witness the pride with which you wear its garbs in public outside the House of Commons. Wow! Can you do that or did you buy your own for effect? Unlike the priority of bringing new jobs to our area, one which you seem to have suddenly discovered, your tenure as M.P. has been an unmitigated promotion of your own political careerism. Flip-flop…well done!

M. Galipeau stop contributing to Climate Change. And if you want to be seen wearing flip-flops please make them the foot wearing kind, sans the painted red toe-nails…please!