Brightening a February day
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Maybe it's the midwinter blues. Several things have been annoying me. Take the passing of the one cent coin. The poobahs said it cost more to mint it than the metal was worth. So what? It was the convenience of the coin that mattered. A cuppa cost $1.31 at the local restaurant. If we didn't have a penny we could take one from the handy box by the till, or toss a couple in for the next customer.
Do you suppose the operator will eat the loss? Why should she? The sensible thing would be to raise the price of coffee a couple of cents and round up to the nickel.
Too many Canadians scorned the penny. They didn't understand that throwing it into a snowbank cost them, or did when the mint had to replace all those coins taken out of circulation.
The amount of savings from dropping the penny is piddling in the total budget. It's about enough to ship a limo to India. Rounding up, you may be assured will cost a lot more than we save on rounding down.
A couple of weeks ago it was announced there are gazillions of earth-like planets out there, some of them closer than you think. Maclean's asked, "How quick can we get there?"
Same sort of ignorance as trashing the penny. The grasp of astronomy is on a par with economics. Anyone who gets there will never get back to talk to us as Chris Hatfield does from a stone's throw over our heads. As Stephen Hawking remarked, life forms out there may welcome a nice new snack. Besides that, even at light speed it takes a lot of earth years to make space voyages. If they get home they won't recognize anybody, even if our descendants have avoided annihilating the species.
Remember Planet of the Apes?
A letter to the editor of the London Free Press praises Mike Harris for scrapping Grade 13. Saved us millions! "Were Ontario students that far behind the rest of North America that they needed the extra year?"
Well, no. There was no extra year. Actually they were a year ahead of the rest by earning the first year of a four-year degree while living at home. We in ignorance of the function of our school system didn't think of explaining our advantage to the rest of North America. It cost us millions.
The change put a lot of kids into university culture before they were mature enough to handle it. Mental depression was one result for a lot of lost souls.
Wiser students have opted for a victory lap, taking a fifth year in secondary.
Closer to home, the folks of Corinth are sick of being flooded every time there's a big thaw or a gully washer. Must really amuse them to face an election most of us didn't want. An appointment would have freed money to do a lot of drains. Too bad the penny didn't drop.
Educators for a generation have boasted we don't teach facts. We teach how to think. These examples show that educators have not cleared the fog of human logic. If anything it's more miasmic.
Bayham is proud of the submarine, and rightly so. The lack of economic sense in this venture, however, is on a par with throwing money at attracting a ferry to our port.
I have a vision like the end of Moby Dick, a demented sailor reaches up from the roiling sea to nail a seagull to the mast as it disappears under the waves.
I wonder what Ishmael will ride a coffin to safety to tell the world how Bayham sank under a burden of debt?
There, have I brightened your day?