Dog On A Root

- jim Young “You can’t go home again.” - Thomas Wolfe. There isn’t much that is more exciting to a 7 year old boy than hanging around a construction site. Once the vivid imagination of a young boy begins to stir, the excavation for the basement will take him on a journey to China, the cement blocks of the foundation transform the hole in the ground into a formidable castle, scrap pieces of wood cut at a 45° angle become the bulky sails of a sailboat, the studded walls, as they are erected become prison bars that the young lad can escape through and rafters, when hung, will serve as monkey bars. At least that’s how it was for me. Most children are denied this experience today for the sake of safety. But in 1960 these opportunities were more readily available. And when your grandfather was building the house, even more so. That your grandfather might be building that house for you, well, that was the icing on the cake. I remember my grandfather letting me help him “build” our house. Und

- jim Young “There are many scams on Facebook now. Send me $19.95 and I will tell you how to avoid them.” - anon If you’re on Facebook chances are that at some point, if you haven’t already, you’ll be cloned by a Facebook Imposter. At the very least, you’ve likely witnessed several of your Facebook friends falling victim to Facebook cloning. Facebook imposters are the lowest of the lowlife among hackers, scammers and thieves. They are uneducated, unintelligent scum with no morals and no conscience. Their skill set doesn’t extend beyond their ability to clip and paste. Many of them cannot spell and their grammar can be atrocious. Most of all, they are too stupid to realize that most people on Facebook are onto them and they have about as much chance of successfully pulling off their scam as they do winning the lottery. They are not particularly dangerous but they are annoying. They are as annoying as a swarm of mosquitoes at a nudist colony. Generally speaking the mothers of Facebook I

- Jim Young “Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.” - Grouch Marx In April 2023, in an attempt to reduce their environmental footprint, the LCBO announced they would quit issuing paper bags to their customers, later that same year. The plan was to eliminate 135 million paper bags from the LCBO per annum. Calculated to save 188,000 trees each and every year thereafter, it was also estimated that 2,665 tonnes of waste would be diverted from landfills annually. Miles ahead of most other retail operations, the LCBO had already voluntarily eliminated plastic bags 15 years prior to that, shortly after the turn of the century. Even so, the LCBO’s decision to stop providing even paper bags to their customers altogether was not a novel idea. Many other retailers have stopped offering free bags, encouraging their customers to bring their own bags or purchase reusable bags which are said to be more environmen

- jim Young “When you have exhausted all possibilities, remember this: You haven’t.” - Thomas Edison Recently a Toronto Officer recommended “that people leave the keys to their vehicle in a faraday bag by the front door,” as a deterrent to home invasions.  The idea being, the car thieves are only interested in your vehicle, so once they find what they are looking for (your car keys), they will not proceed to rob your home or confront your family. So as wild as that may seem, that suggestion may actually be effective in reducing home invasions in Toronto; however it does nothing to reduce the car theft problem. Brainstorming, “a creative thinking technique for coming up with new ideas and solving problems” uses a process which encourages everyone to offer any and every idea they may have as a solution, no matter how wild it may seem. The hope is, from all the ideas, no matter how crazy they may seem, the collective group can strip away the craziness and piece together one sensible and