Rockin' On: the Blog

Locomotives, pickles and coffee: all share one story

Recently I was told concerning the EMD lockout:

"For all the union bluster and condemnation about the enormous greed of Caterpillar, it is doing what all large corporations are required to do in law: act in their own self interest."

Well, that explains the recent pull-out of Bick's from Ontario by Smucker, the American owner. They didn't willingly choose this move, so destructive to the people of Dunnville, their hands were tied. They were only doing what is required in law.

Ontario tried coaxing the pickle company to stay in the province with sweet words made even sweeter by a $2.2 million Rural Economic Development (RED) grant. Smucker nibbled but didn't bite. They returned all the funds initially accepted and declined the remainder. They closed the Dunnville plant leaving up to 150 fulltime factory workers, 70 part-time staff, plus some seasonal workers out of jobs. Also affected were hundreds of area farmers and a state-of-the-art tank farm in Delhi.

According to Toby Barrett, MPP Haldimand-Norfolk, this was the last major industry in Dunnville. In the future, all Bick’s pickled products will be packed by unnamed “third-party manufacturers” and in expanded Smucker factories in Ripon, Wisconsin and Orrville, Ohio. All agricultural support moves to the States in 2012.

The National Post reports:

Bick's was founded in 1944 by Walter Bick, a young German Jew, 27, who had fled Europe just ahead of the Second World War. Walter and his wife Jeanny sold barrels of pickles to restaurants and army camps in the Toronto area before moving into retail in 1952. The company was sold to Robin Hood Flour in 1966. Robin Hood was taken over by Smucker in 2006.

"The plant closing has struck a sour note with former Bick’s employees. 'Americans come to Canada, buy a Canadian company, close it, and move it to the U.S.A. Shop for other brands, don’t help them screw us over,' reads a statement on Boycott Bick’s Pickles, a Facebook page created by disaffected former Bick’s employees."

The Electro-Motive Diesel lockout is grave but the story is not unique. I doubt it will be solved by the intervention of any well-meaning negotiators. I have watched this tale unfold in various permutations over and over, and not just in Ontario. Thanks to Google, I know that the story is even unfolding in Orrville, Ohio. Now, that's a surprise.

Orrville, Ohio has an expanded Smucker plant which replaced a 60-year-old facility, but the ''new technologies and efficiency improvements" results in more product being made by fewer people. Millions in capital investment eliminated 180 jobs or 40% of the Orrville work force. As production is ramped up at the modern plant through the summer of 2013, facilities in Memphis with 161 employees and in Quebec with 101 employees will be closed.

Robin Hood Flour and Bick's are not the only well-known brands to have been assimilated into the Smucker fold. Since 2001, Smucker has acquired Folgers coffee along with food brands Jif, Crisco, Pillsbury, Hungry Jack, Eagle Brand condensed milk and Europe's Best Inc., a private company headquartered in Montreal.

Unfortunately, growing the brand has meant shrinking the jobs. Take Folgers. Smucker acquired the coffee company from Cincinnati-based Procter & Gamble in 2008 for $3.3 billion. By 2011 the phase out of the Folgers Kansas City operation, with more than a hundred years of history and 179 employees and its Sherman plant with 95 jobs, was underway.

Missouri state Rep. Mike Talboy called the closings "extremely unfortunate" and said he hoped Folgers would reconsider. Talboy said he'd be working with the Missouri Department of Economic Development to see if there's anything that can be done to keep the plant open and keep the jobs in Kansas City. "I'm going to do everything I can to protect Kansas City jobs," Talboy said.

More nice thoughts. Nice thoughts by politicians, union leaders and newspaper columnists seem to surround and cushion these closures. As I wrote in my last post, folk like these should hold onto their nice thoughts, and they don't have to hold on too tightly. Those thoughts aren't going anywhere.

The Folgers KC closing also is accompanied by its own Facebook page.

EMD CEO's talk fails to mention London

"Money-losing" EMD expanded operations in China. Progress Rail CEO Billy Ainsworth shown.

Recently, I saw this tweet on Twitter:


Here's a link to The London Free Press column.

It's a nice thought. Cornies, and others like him, should hold onto such nice thoughts. I don't think they have to hold on too tightly. Those thoughts aren't going anywhere.

Maybe my expectations in situations like the EMD lockout have been soured by own experience working for a big, anti-union business – Quebecor – but I don't believe the Caterpillar representatives wants to sit down with the London workers at all.

The Cornies tweet was followed by one by late2game pointing out that although Caterpillar is well into the black as a corporation, its EMD subsidiary is a drain on the big Cat. Late2game linked to a source reporting EMD lost $16 million. Cornies replied to late2game: "Thanks; that's detail I was looking for before deadline Thursday, but couldn't find. Confirms my suspicions."

In a lockout situation, I have a hard time confirming anything in my own mind. I'm very distrustful of everyone involved. I'm especially distrustful of all the facts surrounding the crisis. The bargaining is no longer being done at the table but on the street, in the media.

As a long time investor, I'm well aware that money losing companies can be damn fine investments. I'm not saying the books are cooked, they aren't, but the bottom line is not the whole story. If a company is investing a lot of money to grow future profits, the present may suffer. This does not mean the company is in trouble, especially if it is a subsidiary of a much larger company – one with very deep pockets, like Caterpillar.

Electro-Motive Diesel CEO John Hamilton has made great strides in growing the once faltering operation. I don't believe that EMD, once the little engine that could, is now the little engine that couldn't (turn a profit).

In London, we like to think of EMD as having its headquarters and some production facilities in La Grange, Illinois and its assembly plant in London, Ontario – and that's it. Well, a few years ago that was true, but not today.

Today, EMD:

has opened a 740,000 sq. ft. assembly plant in Muncie, Indiana – that's 50 percent larger than the older, London, Ontario EMD facility.
is expanding and modernizing an existing manufacturing plant in Sete Lagoas, Minas Gerais, Brazil to assemble and manufacture Electro-Motive Diesel-branded locomotives
is producing EMD labelled locomotives at the Ciudad Sahagún Bombardier plant in Mexico.
is hoping to produce locomotives in the near future in India.
has opened a facility in San Luis Potosi, Mexico for traction motor maintenance and locomotive overhaul work.
is opening multiple warehouse operations in northeastern China supporting a growing fleet of 6000-horsepower EMD. The complete assembly of locomotives for the Chinese market is envisioned.
is the only diesel-electric locomotive manufacturer to have produced more than 72,500 engines.
has the largest installed base of diesel-electric locomotives both in North America and internationally.
has a presence in more than 73 countries worldwide.
and the list goes on

According to the Wall Street Journal, EMD recorded $1.8 billion in global sales in 2008-09, making it one of the largest builders of diesel-electric locomotives in the world. Is EMD losing money? If it is, the management of EMD is incompetent. I don't think EMD management is incompetent; I doubt EMD is in the slightest financial trouble. The red $16 million dollar bottom-line number is nothing to be concerned about.

When Electro-Motive Diesel president and chief executive officer John S. Hamilton appeared before the House Transportation and Infrastructure Subcommittee on Railroads, Pipelines, and Hazardous Materials Hearing, on April 20, 2010, he bragged a great deal but he never got around to mentioning London.

"EMD was a floundering subsidiary of GM, with a very questionable future. Today, EMD has witnessed record revenues, earnings, and investments. Exports have doubled. Factory productivity is up 20 percent," he boasted.

He continued, "Over the last two years, our exports to India and China were over 50 times greater than our imports from those two countries. Few, if any, large heavy manufacturing companies can say that. We estimate that in our five years as an independent company, we have single-handedly improved the United States trade balance by $200M."

"We employ 1,600 workers in the U.S.," he said.

Concerning high speed rail, he continued, if given the chance EMD "would make most all of the critical technologies [in La Grange, Indiana]. We have the equipment. We have 1,600 American workers ready to do this work and we would recall workers currently on lay-off to meet the additional workload. In accordance with Buy America, we announced last week a search for a facility in which to perform final assembly. [This would be the Muncie plant that is now in limited operation.]

EMD is a company on the move. The big question is: "Is their next move out of London?"

I talk the walk but talk is cheap!

I say that I hate mutual funds but I still own two: CIB512 and TDB622.

I like to say that I love ETFs. I do. I like to say I hate mutual funds. I do. I like to say I fear the risk of holding individual stocks. I do. I like to promote "couch potato" investing. But, I don't have nearly enough of my portfolio in ETFs. I have a big portion of my portfolio invested in two mutual funds and I've got a big slice of my portfolio pie filled with individual stocks.

Oh, did I say I like to stay clear of investing too heavily in one sector of the economy for fear of taking a big hit if that sector should fail? Well, that is my stated concern but you wouldn't know it from my portfolio.

My portfolio allocation is a financial road map to be followed during retirement but that doesn't mean I'm not willing to get off the marked route to take a scenic route for awhile or slip onto the freeway to cover some financial ground quickly.

Some time ago I dumped all my mutual funds but two. Not only did many of those funds fail to deliver the growth I was looking for, they paid very poor dividends. This was an unsustainable mix. My investments make up about 40 percent of my income in retirement. Clearly I had to make some hard choices. I did.

So, what are the two mutual funds that I kept? Both are monthly income funds and the one is the TD's offering and the other is the CIBC's. They are similar but different. I like 'em both. I have a huge chunk of my portfolio allocated to these two funds. In 2008 CIB512 lost all of 17.15 percent. Not bad considering the economy at the time. TDB622 lost more; It lost 23.4 percent. That loss, and the reason for it, was the cause of my temporary loss of confidence. I wasn't the only one damning the TD fund at the time but the fund managers made some important changes and are now back on track.

Today, CIB512 yields 5.63 percent and TD622 yields 2.92 percent. I have my mutual fund allocation split evenly between these two. Therefore, my mutual fund investments are yielding 4.275 percent in cash to fund my retirement.

The CIB fund pays out much more in dividends but does not show the same strong growth as the TD fund. I take the CIB money each money, no DRIP in place here. The CIB fund is down, at the moment, 1.72 percent for the year.

The TD fund, on the other hand, may not deliver the monthly payments but it has grown 3.57 percent year to date. I let the TD fund accumulate it's dividends and if I need the money, I cash some units in December. I try and keep the value of both investments close to equal.

When it comes to stock, I've got way more that I feel comfortable owning and my stock investments are way too concentrated when it comes to sectors. The Canadian financial sector and the Canadian energy sector are my big interests. I bought a lot during the crash of 2008 and have even added to my holdings since then. I did dump a little, it seemed wise, but the little I dumped would have paid me huge rewards if I had held on a little longer.

So I own some Royal Bank (and added to it when it hit about $45 some weeks ago), some Bank of Nova Scotia, some Crescent Point, some Penn West (and added to it when it dipped below $18 and wish I had had the funds to buy even more when it got below $14 recently.) I still have some Inter Pipeline but I lightened up when it climbed above $15. I had bought in at about half that and it seemed an opportune time to bring my allocation more in line with my stated goals.

I have a little Suncor (SU) but I am dumping it all when I get the chance. I got into Suncor through Petro Canada and I have never made money on that investment. It has been a loser since the get-go. There are better places for me to put my money in my retirement.

The rest of my portfolio is in ETFs and not one is a bond fund. I don't like bonds right now. They are not paying the yield that I need. When interest rates recover, I know that may take a few years but recover they will, the value of bond funds will go down as fast as interest rates go up. Bonds? No thanks.

That said, remember that both my mutual funds invest heavily in bonds. And one of my ETFs, Claymore S&P/TSX Preferred Share ETF (CPD), acts in a manner somewhat similar to bonds. CPD is yielding 4.75 percent at the moment as paying a monthly dividend. It is classed as a low risk investment on WebBroker.

I struggle to give my portfolio a bit of a mix. Not wise to have all of one's financial eggs in one basket. Think Nortel or income trusts or American financials. To this end I have bought ZUT, XRE, REM, XIC, XMD, SDY and a host of other ETFs.

I am up about one and a half percent for the year. I have been up more during the month but the last few days have seen some corrections in my holdings.

I worry about my portfolio but I also worry that in today's financial environment there are no easy answers. I worry that the famous "couch potato" portfolio, and others like it, wouldn't deliver the yield I so desperately need, and might be as prone to crashing during a financial disaster as my present mix. And so, I hold onto my investments, live on the yield and keep my fingers crossed.

One of my investments that bares careful watching is DRW. It may be on the mend.

Stop Mitt the Ripper

If you're a fan of Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart and not a fan of the present Republican front runner, you'll enjoy this add attacking Mitt Romney. It was produced by the Super PAC accurately known as "Americans For a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow," but called "The Definitely Not Coordinated With Stephen Colbert Super PAC" by the two Comedy Central late night television satirists.

The Apple didn't fall far from the tree

I read an interesting claim in today's paper by columnist Larry Cornies. Cornies was praising Mayor Joe Fontana's state-of-the-city address. With an attendance of about 1200, it is said to be the largest address of its kind by any mayor in any city in Canada.

Cornies reports Fontana said, "London's greatest assets . . . remain its people." No argument there. The LFP columnist expands on this thought, pointing out:

"Apple didn't locate in Cupertino, Calif., nor Research in Motion in Waterloo because of geographic location or persuasive politicians. They located there because that's where the ideas and human capacity were."

Whoa! I thought Apple is where it is because it founders had roots in the town. If you think about it, it only makes sense. You found a company where you are, not where you aren't.

Check out the map of Cupertino. Note where Steve Jobs grew up. Now, check the location of the Apple complex. You could walk from one to the other; The distance is less than 3 miles. One can drive from one to the other in seven minutes. If you don't want to take the freeway, it's about a ten minutes.

One can walk from Steve Job's boyhood home to the Apple Inc. complex.

According to an article in Time magazine, "Jobs led the world into the computing era, but physically, he rarely left a 20-mile radius that centered around his boyhood home."

RIM is a different story. Jim Balsillie comes from Seaforth, Ontario, while Mike Lazaridis was born in Turkey. Lazaridis's family moved to Canada when he was five, settling in Windsor, Ontario.

Before writing more on RIM, let's look at another famous company: the Ford Motor Company.

The Ford Motor Company was founded by Henry Ford, born on a farm near Dearborn, Michigan nine miles west of Detroit. He died 83 years later at his Fairlane estate not far from his place of birth. To this day, the FoMoCo head office is located in Dearborn.

I was going to play this listing game for awhile but a pattern quickly appeared. In the past, businesses were founded where their founders lived, often where they founders were born.

With the death of the the entrepreneurial owner, businesses are often cut lose, purchased by money from outside the community they shrink, or even closed. They moved away. They ceased to play a major role in the city of their birth.

Think: McLary Appliances, London Life, The London Free Press, McCormicks bakery, etc.

If you'd like a smaller, less famous name for the list, try Vytec. It was founded in 1962 by London businessperson Andy Spriet but was owned by the French manufacturing giant Saint Gobain when it closed. The production was taken to the U.S.

My Medtronic ICD heart monitor is made in China.

Skilled workers be damned. In truth, skilled workers are a dime-a-dozen (almost), if you are willing to relocate offshore.

I've written a couple of posts on this: Not made in London, Ontario and The Forest City: A rich past of fading memories.

Now, back to RIM. As I said, neither Balsillie nor Lazaridis was born, or even raised, in Waterloo. There are a number of reasons why Waterloo, Ontario was a good place for RIM to locate and the availability of folk with the prerequisite skills was certainly one of them.

That said, there is an interesting post by Ben Spigel: The future of RIM and the future of Waterloo. Spigel tells us that his PhD dissertation focused on the local social and cultural factors underpinning high-tech entrepreneurship in Canada. Spigel interviewed dozens of entrepreneurs in Waterloo, with a specific focus on their relationship to RIM.

The quality of the workforce played a big role in attracting RIM to Waterloo, but what will happen if RIM continues its decline. According to Spigel, if RIM has large layoffs of highly skilled developers and engineers, the majority will find other jobs in the Waterloo region. Google, Microsoft and the rest would love to scoop up RIM talent for their mobile divisions. Of course, some of the younger and unattached individuals will leave for greener pastures: Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, San Francisco or Boston. This will be a big loss for the community.

Spigel argues that today it is RIM and not the University of Waterloo that is the main reason for Waterloo being synonymous with high-tech. Spigel tells us:

"If RIM continues its decline and becomes a mere Nokia or Motorola, Waterloo’s image will be tarnished. If RIM can no longer take on the cream of UW’s co-op crop, Waterloo’s imagine will decline and fewer of the world’s best computer scientists will come to the city."

Skilled workers capable of performing many jobs are available all over the planet. Let's take another look at Cornies' Apple example. According to a story carried by PR Newswire:

"Apple sold 4.86 million Apple II computers from 1977 to 1984, all made in the United States. Then Apple introduced the MacIntosh, still one of the top-selling computers in the world. Apple sold 13.7 million Macs in 2010.

According to the New York Times, Apple's plant in Fremont, Calif., was producing 1,500 MacIntosh computers a day in 1984. Apple made about 1 million Macs in 1985 at its Fremont plant. According to the Los Angeles Times, Apple closed its Fremont plant in 1992 and shifted production to Sacramento, Colorado, Singapore and Ireland. The Fremont plant had a remarkable eight-year run.

Apple increased its outsourcing overseas when Jobs returned to the company as CEO in 1998. In 2004 Apple closed its manufacturing plant in Elk Grove, California. Now no Apple computers, iPhones, iPods or iPads are made in the United States.

Forbes reports that Apple has one of the highest profit margins of any corporation, 41.4%. The primary reason for this is outsourcing to China where workers are paid 15 or 20 cents per hour. Apple amassed a cash hoard of $76 billion, more than the U.S. Treasury had on hand in July of this year, according to Fortune magazine."

So, what is the biggest draw for a company today? Profit margins.

Don't believe me? Just ask the locked out workers at the Electro-Motive Canada plant in London. Oddly enough, the workers at the EMD plant in Muncie, where it is feared the London locomotive work may be transferred, might also agree. When they head home from work, it is reported that they head straight home. They are unable to afford to stop at the local bar for a draft with their co-workers.

There's a lot of stuff that drops by the wayside when you make only $12.50 an hour — like one's self esteem.

Canadian health care makes me feel lucky

Installing my Medtronic Carelink Monitor.

Americans are very down on government involvement in health care. Many, especially Republicans, worry the government will tell them what health care they can or cannot have. Instead, they willingly give that control to insurance companies.

I am not convinced insurance companies can manage my health care needs as well as my government, and I'm not saying my government is perfect. Stories of government foul-ups when it comes to our health care are a common staple in the media.

But, and I think this is important to remember, insurance foul-ups in the health care industry are a long time staple of the U.S. media as well. Neither system is perfect.

All of which brings me to the subject of today's post. This morning I took delivery of my Medtronic Carelink monitor. I was really surprised when I was offered one of these high tech units. The Canadian health care system has really done itself proud with the handling of my heath problems.

It was the summer of 2010 when my heart first malfunctioned bigtime. The doctors in emerg in Sonoma, California, said my heart was hitting 300 bpm (beats per minute). If I hadn't come to emerg, they told my wife, I'd have been dead within ten minutes.

They jolted me with 200 joules of electricity using a couple of electrified paddles. This, shall we say, rebooted my heart. With my heart beat back to normal I was rushed to Marin General near the Golden Gate Bridge. It was a fine hospital with a great staff. They kept me overnight and ran a small battery of tests. Finding no reason for my heart racing incident, they put me on a beta blocker and told me to drive home. Driving home meant driving from California to London, Ontario, behind the wheel of an old Morgan roadster.

My wife and I stopped in Winnipeg, Manitoba, half way home. There the heart surgeon, who had performed the robotic mitral valve repair of my heart a few years earlier, was now the head of the cardiac department. He checked me out, modified my drug regimen, and after checking out my car as well as me, sent me off home. Both the Morgan and I seemed to be fine.

The Morgan I could understand. But, me? That's another question. If I was in such good shape, why did my heart go on a life-threatening tear?

The doctors in London were great. Absolutely great. They started with the obvious and worked to the rare and weird. Using a T3 MRI unit, a rare and powerful beast, they took a look at my heart and discovered the problem; The right side of my heart was slowly converting from muscle to fat and scar tissue. The heart was losing strength and the right side had expanded, stretching the valve out of shape on my heart's right side. The expansion had played havoc with my heart's electrical system, leaving it seriously impaired.

My meds were changed and an ICD (implantable cardioverter-defibrillator) installed in a pocket in may chest. (I didn't have a pocket in my chest and it took the London heart surgeon a morning to make the pocket, install the device and run a wire down a vein to my heart where it was firmly attached to some healthy heart muscle.)

My ICD is the latest and greatest generation of these devices from Medtronic in the States. I tip my hat to their expertise. If my heart rate dips below 40 bpm, my ICD acts as a pacemaker and brings the rate up. If my heart rate should take off again, my ICD tries to gain control of the heart and drag the rate down. If this fails, it shocks my heart, much as the emerg doctors in Sonoma did. This reboots my heart, returning the bpm to my normal range.

Today I took delivery of my Medtronic Carelink Monitor sent to me by University Hospital here in London. My ICD runs a self test every day at midnight. If it should discover a problem, such as the wire to my heart has broken or come loose, it will wirelessly transmit this information to my Carelink Monitor which will automatically transmit this info to the hospital via a telephone modem.

Carelink sends info from my ICD to the local hospital.

If I should ever feel that my heart is acting oddly --- too slow, too fast, or whatever --- I have a mouse like device that I hold over my ICD and all info in the unit is downloaded from my device into the Carelink monitor and promptly transmitted to the hospital.

Until now, I have had to visit the hospital every three months to have my ICD unit checked. Now, I may be able to go a year between visits. This is more efficient for the hospital and easier on me.

I'm not saying everyone in Canada gets such good treatment. They don't. It depends to a certain extent on where one lives. But, uneven health care is the rule --- both in Canada and the United States.

When I drove through Nevada a year and a half ago, I stayed in a small town surrounded by desert. The town was almost a ghost town. The lady at the place I stayed told me when she and her husband needed a doctor they drove to Salt Lake City in Utah. This was a drive of a few hours.

Today I know more about my heart problem. I suffer from Arrhythmogenic Right Ventricular Cardiomyopathy (ARVC). This is a genetic disorder causing the right side of the heart to breakdown. Half of those with this condition die before their fortieth birthday. I feel lucky.

I feel very lucky. Lucky to live in London, Ontario, lucky to have the wonderful, caring medical staff near at hand that I do, lucky to live in Canada.

Interested in cities, check out this link

I've been interested in cities since I was a little boy. I used to ride my bike about the neighbourhood keeping notes as to where the streets went and, almost as importantly, where they didn't. I was amazed to learn that streets could be followed to their sometimes very quick ends. Streets ended when they ran up against other streets and railway tracks or even weed-filled fields. They often ended in Ts but sometimes they just came to a dead end, a cul-de-sac.

Streets had personalities. Some were residential. Some were industrial. The most interesting, to me as a boy, were the streets that ran through both residential and industrial areas and maybe disappeared into the countryside surrounding the city.

Cities were rich places filled with interesting stuff.

When The London Free Press started its series investigating London's identity, I was worried. What's London's identity? The very question irritated me with its shading of Richard Florida or the new urbanist team of Duany and and Plater-Zyberk. (I dislike all of them but I'm sure I didn't have to tell you that.)

I have found The Free Press series not only poor but despite being posted to the Internet, there is little of the promised interaction between the series writers and readers. Urban Sub on Tumblr had 11 posts in May, 3 in June and one, the last one, in July. The paper did not even have the smarts to shut down the Tumblr site properly. No final message. Nothing. It was just abandoned. Rude.

If Randy Richmond and The London Free Press articles on urbanism and London, Ontario are leaving you as cold as they are me, check out The Melbourne Urbanist for thoughtful, defensible musings on urban issues.

Enjoy. (Maybe Randy will stumble upon my blog, check out the link and get some ideas on how to tackle writing about London without the silly videos with poetic voice overs.)

Are London EMD workers facing a Hobson's choice?

Are the locked out EMD workers facing a Hobson's choice?

The London Free Press reporter Scott Taylor reported in the Thursday paper that the lock out at the Electro-Motive plant in London is a local conflict with global causes. The reporter quotes Anil Verma of the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management to back up this position. "Workers in China can make locomotives as well as they can here, so they're now facing the competition," the university expert told the paper.

I was puzzled. The threat facing the London jobs comes from Muncie, Indiana, and the last time I checked Muncie was in the United States and not China. In the expert's defence, my guess is he was given a cold call by the reporter and simply gave the caller a generic response.

Still, the paper reports that Professor Verma, "Thinks a deal can be reached . . . " Why? How? I was puzzled. Now, I have been working on a piece of the Digital Journal, so I decided to give the professor a call. It turns out that he is in Chicago at a conference and unavailable until next week for an interview. But, he graciously sent a brief response to my e-mail.

Anil Verma wrote:

"You are probably right in terms of the immediate threat. I referred to China as competition, in general, for a wide range of manufacturing jobs. I do not know enough about EMD's specific competitive position in the industry in terms of costs, productivity, quality, etc."

I was right. He was called cold, given little background to the story, and being a gracious gentleman, he gave the reporter his generic China response.

Let me take a try at looking at the specifics of the threat of closure facing the London EMD plant. A lot of the stuff that goes into the locomotives assembled in London originates in La Grange, Illinois. The city where the head offices of Electro-Motive Diesel are located. The parts are shipped about 685 km from La Grange to London, crossing the Canada/US border at one point. It is about an eight hour trip by truck.

Progress Rail Services has formed a totally owned subsidiary, Progress Rail Manufacturing Corporation, to produce EMD locomotives in Muncie, Indiana. The Muncie plant is less than 400 km from La Grange. A distance that can be covered in four and a half hours or less.

The Muncie plant, originally built by Westinghouse, then purchased by Asea Brown Bovery (ABB), has now been rebuilt by Progress Rail as a locomotive assembly plant at a cost of $50 million. The plant is massive, 740 000 sq. ft. with a main floor 1,960-feet in length, a 99-foot ceiling in the former transformer assembly area and locomotive-sized entry doors with railway tracks running through the building. It took only a year after its purchase for Progress Rail to hold the plant's opening ceremony.

Like London, a lot of what goes into the Muncie produced locomotives originates in La Grange, IL. Unlike London, the Muncie workers are non-union, always a plus in the Caterpillar/Progress Rail playbook. Recently, Progress Rail posted a job opening for an HR Manager at its new Indiana assembly plant, they stipulated that the candidate should have "experience with providing union-free culture and union avoidance." The job is now filled but the union avoidance line is still shown on the online posting as I write this.

Welding jobs at the new facility are reportedly paying from $12-$14 an hour. Do the math. That's $24,960 annually to start for a 40-hour work week. This places these workers squarely in the ranks of the working poor. There are a lot of working poor in Indiana according to The Working Poor Families Project.

Glassdoor, a site for employment information in the States, carries this comment:

"For a company [Progress Rail Services] that says that safety is number 1, they don't practice that. Employees are treated like dirt; both in pay and the softer sides unless you are a YES man. Unfair and inconsistent discipline and promotions, confidentiality is breached on a daily basis, safe work practices are bypassed in the interest of more and faster production, very little integrity in local management."

Why should the London workers be concerned about China when they've got Indiana? Companies like Progress Rail and its parent, Caterpillar, don't have to go to the third world, they bring the third world to North America. David Olive, of The Toronto Star, looked at this development in an article: America, the world's sweatshop.

Welders in London make a living wage of about $35 an hour. It's good money and a lot of it stays in the community. It is good for the worker and good for the community. And in return, the company gets good work — excellent work in fact.

This doesn't mean that Progress Rail is not taking advantage of what the third world has to offer. Working closely with Bombardier, the first order of 32 EMD diesel-electric locomotives has been assembled under contract at the Ciudad Sahagún Bombardier plant, Mexico. Progress Rail (South America) also has a new facility in Sete Lagoas, Minas Gerais, Brazil.

Before Progress Rail, and its parent Caterpillar Inc. came on the scene and purchased the entire EMD operation in 2010, all EMD locomotives were assembled in London, Ontario in one plant approximately two thirds the size of the refurbished facility opened in Muncie. Why was a new plant created in Muncie? — a plant almost 50 percent larger in floor area than the one in London and with a staff, when fully operational, approximately the same size as London's?

I fear that the EMD/Progress Rail/Caterpillar hierarchy of companies extended the contract in London in order to buy time to get both the plant in Muncie operational and the Bombardier plant in Mexico producing. A nice bonus to this gambit was that it put the workers out on the street in the middle of the freezing Canadian winter if they should were to vote to strike or be locked out by the company. I think of this lock out as winter weather torture.

If the London workers don't accept the pay cut and the present lock out begins to hurt the company's bottom line, maybe the company will fold, shelving demands that sound as if they'd be more comfortable in a book by Charles Dickens. But, when Muncie is fully staffed and producing locomotives, backed by a plant in Mexico, I fear the London facility will be shuttered.

If the workers take the pay cut, they will return to work but their lives will be in tatters. Mortgage payments, car payments, monthly food bills, possibly tuition for children in university, all will take massive chunks out of the vastly shrunken family budget. I'm sure there will marriages that fail under the stress. After earning a decent wage for years, it will be economic hell for the EMD workers.

And, in the end, the outcome could be the same: When the Muncie plant is fully operational, backed up by the plant in Mexico, the London facility could still close. I see this as a Hobson's choice. No matter what decision the locked out workers make, in the end they may find themselves out of jobs.

I'll let the professor know about this post and maybe get in touch with him next week. Maybe he'll have read my background to the situation and have an interesting viewpoint on the lock out. Then, I'll post a story to Digital Journal.

Locomotives: They're big, expensive and U.S. workers build 'em for $12.00 / hr. and up.

After the fences, comes the security detail

The Electro-Motive Diesel plant in London, Ontario, is showing all the signs of preparing for a strike or a lock out. First the fence went up. Yesterday I noticed the security gurards were in place. When I walked up to the fence to take a picture, a guard sitting in a car took my picture.

I posted a story about the plant to Digital Journal. This is a story that should be told to the world.

The fence is up. What's next?

A fence restricts entry to the Electro-Motive Diesel plant in London, Ontario

The fence is up and the question now being asked is: "What next?"

I talked with the plant chair in search of answers and I have posted a story on Digital Journal. If interested, please click the link.

There's more to this soup than Campbell's

As a boy a bowl of warm soup left me cold. It was awfully dull stuff. My mom's idea of a great soup was Campbell's frozen potato soup. I recall it was much better than the condensed variety but there's no way to check that today. Campbell's frozen soups from the '60s are no more.

It was not until I was in my thirties and visiting some friends in Connecticut that I had a memorable soup. It was a cream of vegetable soup that was came from a gourmet food shop. It was thick. I mean it was really, really thick. It was a soup with body, texture, and lots and lots of flavour. I was won over; I was a soup fan.

Fast forward to today. I am now married to an amazing cook. She makes soups on par with that oh-so-memorable Connecticut soup from three decades ago. Her cheese with broccoli and carrot cream soup is wonderful. It made a great intro to our family Christmas dinner and the following day it was lunch. With a slice or two of homemade bread, it made a great midday meal.

Before giving you the recipe, let me say that I have noticed my wife making great use of both her food processor and her large, stand mixer. Both are made by KitchenAid. For this soup, she uses her food processor to shred the cheese and chop the carrots. The soup, minus the cheese, is first heated on the stove and then the hot soup is puréed in the mixer. She whisks the grated cheese into the hot soup immediately before serving.

And both can be quite expensive but stay alert and you can pick them up on sale. Canadian Tire had a KitchenAid stand mixer on sale before Christmas for under $200.

Judy's Broccoli Soup

750 ml or 3 cups of broccoli coarsely chopped
250 ml or 1 cup of coarsely chopped carrots
250 ml or 1 cup of coarsely chopped onion
125 ml or 1/2 cup water
500 ml or 2 cups of cheddar cheese, old Canadian style
1/4 teaspoon of pepper
And here's the cheat: She adds two ten ounce cans of Campbell's condensed cream of potato soup, plus two cans of one percent milk.

— First, microwave the broccoli and carrots until soft.
— Then microwave the onions in the water until the onions are soft.
— Now, mix broccoli, carrots and onion/water mix together. Add two cans of soup and stir until smooth and follow this by adding the two cans of milk. The soup will be somewhat lumpy at this point.
— Pour the mix into a food processor and puree. Don't blend too much. You want to retain some of the texture of the vegetables.
— Microwave on high until the soup is bubbling hot. This should take less than ten minutes. Make sure to stir the mix at least twice while it is heating.
— Remove from microwave, stir in the grated cheese and the quarter teaspoon of pepper.
— Serve immediately.

I think my dear, old mother would have liked this soup. It contains Campbell's condensed soup. Ah, if only it was the frozen variety.

Rebranding

I don't think much of cities rebranding themselves. It can be expensive and, in most cases, I think it can be shown to not be worth the expense.

That said, the city of Oak Park in Illinois, the place than Frank Lloyd Wright called home at one point, hired the well known Tennessee-based company North Star Destination Strategies to rebrand their community. These folk have rebranded more than a hundred communities across the United States.

From the Chicago Tribune:

The new tourism logo for progressive western suburb Oak Park is meant to portray its people as “rebels” and “rule breakers.” Instead, some less sophisticated minds believe the logo’s tubular shape resembles a male body part.

Rich Carollo, president of the Oak Park Area Convention and Visitors Bureau, said the logo was presented to the Village Board as part of a larger study on reinventing Oak Park’s image to attract more tourists. The rebranding proposal, by North Star Destination Strategies, included billboards of famed Oak Park residents Frank Lloyd Wright and Ernest Hemingway, with the words: “Nonconformists” and “Boatrockers.”

The proposed slogan: “Oak Park: Step Out of Line.”

A commenter at the Tribune’s website said it best: "If your visit to Oak Park lasts more than four hours, contact your doctor immediately."

And a thank you to The Underground Conservative for this smile.

What's London; What's The London Free Press

I live in London, Ontario. I live here by choice and by necessity. The choice part comes from having moved here from Toronto back in 1976. I moved here; I stayed here; I raised a family here.

Celebrating family, I live happily in London.

The necessity part developed simultaneously with family. Both my daughters have stayed in London. They work here and they are raising their children here. With two beautiful granddaughters in London, my wife and I have pretty strong bonds with our adopted hometown.

It was with great interest I began following The London Free Press series examining London: What's London. Sadly, with every new installment my disappointment with the long-running series grows. At first, I blogged about the hollow claims being made by the paper — claims that could easily be disproved with just a few minutes of searching the Web and a few long distance phone calls.

For an example, read my post Hove to, actually. It is a classic example of shoddy reporting. When I pointed out to the paper that the claims made in the article were simply not true, the reporter told me: "Interesting how Hove and Brighton took a shot at another brand. The point," he continued, "was how Hove took a negative and made it a positive."

Huh? Doesn't the reporter realize he just smeared Hove and Brighton into one. The whole point of his What's London story was that "Hove, England, had a little identity problem . . . it was connected by name and geography to Brighton."

Randy Richmond, after a call to a Toronto professor, wrote about a fictional campaign to make Hove stand out as separate from Brighton. It was a campaign that never happened according to both local papers, a number of residents and others whom I contacted at some expense. The Toronto professor was dreaming, I was told.

I have one up on Richmond; I can make overseas calls. He can't. When I worked for the paper, overseas calls were not possible without a special code. Randy can call Toronto for a story on Hove but he can't easily call Hove to confirm the story.

The worse thing is, Richmond can't quit flogging the rebranding idea. "There's little interest among Londoners in branding ourselves the Food City, or Market City, or Agribiz City. Perhaps it's an inferiority complex," he writes. "Our neglect of our rural roots is understandable in a way. Since its start as a backwater town in the forest, London has always struggled to get and stay connected with the rest of the province."

What foolish talk. How many cities start as anything other than a little backwaters? Cities don't, as a rule, spring into existence fully formed. Toronto, a successful city in the eyes of the paper, was rebranded during its early backwater days by none other than Lord Simcoe. He rebranded Toronto as York. Simcoe, not known for approving of native names for new communities, declared the name Toronto "outlandish". We all know how well that turned out.

Why London would want to pigeonhole itself with an awkward moniker like Agribiz City, as suggested by the paper, is beyond me. To my ear, it sounds downright "outlandish".

Randy Richmond says the Forest City moniker is not true. Oh! Read the truth.

London was once a multifaceted, urban jewel. It was blue collar; It was white collar. It had factories and farms. London was a rich in opportunity and admired by other communities right across Canada. Today London, like the entire province of Ontario, is suffering through a horrendous economic decline.

It is true. My beloved London has problems, just as so many other cities and towns. The problems in London are not unique but they are severe. For instance, when it comes to jobs the unemployment rate in London is the second highest among major Canadian cities.

If the paper's series was simply a waste of newsprint, it would be bad enough but not worth concern. But, the series is posted to the Internet to be found by anyone searching the Web for information on London.

London is a town unable to "shake off (its) sleepy pastoral past", it's a place with "an inferiority complex", it's a town "in the middle of nowhere with the future passing (it) by." At least, that is what one might come away believing if one believed The Free Press.

The editor-in-chief of the paper, Joe Ruscitti, tells us London is a an island. Worse, it is composed of numerous islands. And, to a certain extent, Ruscitti is right. Where he goes wrong is in his negative approach to the paper's no-surprise-here faux discovery. All communities are, to varying degrees, composed of separate but linked "islands". We even have a word for these: neighbourhoods or districts.

Think Paris and think of the tight pattern of arrondissements and of the more distant banlieues. Many folk living in Paris have little need, and little interest, in traveling outside their own, unique neighbourhoods. They live in their own little section of Paris where they also work and shop. No one heaps scorn on Paris for this.

Children playing a few hundred yards from my front door.

I live in the Byron banlieue in London. It's a lovely neigbourhood that encourages strolling and chatting with neighbours. It is an especially welcoming walk whenever my little granddaughter, Fiona, accompanies me.

I also shop in the area. If I don't feel like walking, and I often don't, I can drive there in mere minutes.

The island community that is damaging to London is The London Free Press itself. Once known to those who worked there as "the mighty Free Press", the paper today is a pale of ghost of its former self. It is a shrinking presence in the city. Recently the paper laid off 17 more staff members, with at least four from the editorial department: three reporters who were also capable copy editors plus a multi-talented photographer with decades of experience. (I have been told, some work once done locally by Londoners at the paper, is now being outsourced as far away as India.)

The paper tells its readers about every layoff at every major employer except for those cuts made at the paper itself. When Pierre Karl Peladeau, the head of Quebecor, the ultimate owner of the paper, was slated to visit the newsroom recently, Ruscitti fired off an e-mail telling the staff:

“This would be a good time to look and act sharp.

“This would probably not be a good time to tell the boss how much better we would be if we had this many more reporters or this or that piece of equipment, etc.

“At least for those 90 minutes, you like the new emphasis on the mobile newsroom and the concept of the mobile multimedia journalist. You think the newsroom redesign will help us be that kind of newsroom. Etc."

The e-mail made it onto the blog of former Free Press editor-in-chief Phil McLeod. Ruscitti, to his credit, ignored the leak. PKP to his discredit, or so I've been told, couldn't. He pressed Ruscitti and Ruscitti pressed the newsroom. The source of the leak was uncovered and given a short suspension.

The Free Press likes to play shrink, putting London figuratively on the psychoanalyst's couch. This is a damn hard thing to do with a city of hundreds of thousands. But, this is an easier thing to do with a paper of only a few dozen tired, overworked staffers.

At a recent retirement party held to honour departing staff members, the most common word I heard to describe the newsroom was "hell". Maybe working in hell has soured Randy Richmond and the other reporters. Maybe Joe Ruscitti is not playing at the top of his game with PKP breathing down his neck. Maybe the sour view from The Free Press newsroom is tainting their series.

. . . and now for the rest of the story

It was coarse language vs slimy, slippery language. Coarse got slimed.

The front page story consumed just about all available space above the fold of The London Free Press, yet the story was sadly incomplete. The paper failed to tell the whole story, and it's a good story to tell.

Megan Leslie, MP Halifax (NDP), was critical of the Conservatives "for pulling out of Kyoto." Peter Kent, Minister of the Environment, defended his party by chiding Leslie: "If my hon. colleague had been in Durban . . . "

The problem with Kent's response was, as the Cape Breton Post pointed out, "The government blocked the opposition from attending the UN conference in Durban, South Africa . . . "

The National Post reported: "Trudeau became incensed after Kent suggested that Leslie should have been in Durban for the UN meeting, despite the minister banning all non-government MPs from Canada’s official delegation." As one source put it, "the minister (refused) them seats on the empty government Airbus!"

I think we can all agree Trudeau's angry reaction defending the NDP member was not a parliament-ready response but it does appear on close inspection that he was stating the truth.

Read this from Hansard

Mr. Justin Trudeau (Papineau, Lib.): Mr. Speaker, during question period the Minister of the Environment chided the member of Parliament for Halifax for not having attended the conference in Durban after he prevented any members of the opposition from attending in Durban. Therefore, I lost my temper and used language that was most decidedly unparliamentary. For that I unreservedly apologize and I withdraw my remarks.

Hon. Peter Kent (Minister of the Environment, CPC): Mr. Speaker, I too rise on a point of order. I understand that the third party, the Liberal rump, is somewhat out of sorts as this government corrects one of the biggest blunders the previous Liberal government ever made.

I am not particularly troubled by the unparliamentary language hurled at me by the member of Parliament for Papineau, but I believe he owes this House an abject apology--

The Speaker: I believe the hon. member for Papineau just did that.

Read Kent's words carefully. You may come away feeling the Kent uses the approach of a manipulative child feigning to take the high road while carefully hurling insults. In the end, many folk would give Trudeau the nod as the better mannered MP. Trudeau's language was coarse but Kent's words were slimy.

And The Free Press/Sun Media team knows a thing or two about feigning a reaction. In keeping with the we-are-not-amused tone of their story, Trudeau's words were printed by the paper with red-faced, embarrassment. The paper reported than Trudeau called Ken "a piece of s---".

The use of a row of hyphens is out of character for both The London Free Press and the Sun Media chain. A bit of googling shows Sun Media owned papers use the full word, shit, in print and online with regularity. The (Welland) Tribune reported the words of rocker Kim Mitchell without feeling the need to resort to hyphens. They quoted Mitchell: " I don't really give a shit about sales and I don't really give a shit about money . . ."

I even quickly uncovered the offending word in an online post by Free Press columnist James Reaney. Granted Reaney, a class act, ran "language alert" at the top of his post: Raw Power Thought for the Month. He quotes Iggy Pop: "This shit really sizzles . . . "

But I thought that the really interesting story coming out of the house Wednesday was the following.

New Westminster MP Fin Donnelly fed the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans a baited hook and the hon. Keith Ashfield bit. Donnelly asked Ashfield, "Why is the minister bullying DFO employees?"

Ashfield replied, asking rhetorically, "Do I look like a bully?"

Newfoundland MP Ryan Cleary stepped up, set the hook and landed the fish. Mr. Speaker, the answer to the minister's question is, "Yes sir, your department and you, sir, are a bully".

Cleary was smooth, but not smooth enough for the Speaker of the House. He had to apologize. On the other hand, Donnelly had carefully skirted calling Ashfield a bully directly. I do not believe he was required by the Speaker to apologize.

Mr. Ryan Cleary (St. John's South—Mount Pearl, NDP): Mr. Speaker, I wish to apologize for using a word that I have been told is unparliamentary. The Minister of Fisheries and Oceans asked a question. He asked this House whether he looked like a bully. I merely answered his question. I would answer the question the same way if he asked it again.

The Speaker: I am afraid that is not an acceptable retraction, so the hon. member may have some difficulty getting recognized until he decides that he may want to respect the House.

The question that started this brouhaha was attempting to examine reckless cuts being made by the minister's department. It was claimed that these cuts were putting fish stocks in jeopardy. Ministry scientists, their jobs on the chopping block, were being bullied in to silence.

These two stories demanded better treatment by The London Free Press and Sun Media. Oh, fuddle-duddle.

If you've got the time, and you haven't already seen the clip, watch the old Peter Kent discussing global warming back in his CBC days. There are reasons the new Peter Kent is losing the respect that the old Peter Kent earned over his years in the public eye.

"Let's make music, Ga-ga."

The electronic drum kit was clearly superior to the metal cookie tin for music making.

Fiona is now a full 27-months-old. She has discovered drumming. Yesterday she flipped one of her grandmother's cookie tins over and happily pounded the shiny metal. "Let's make music, Ga-ga," she cried. (I'm Ga-ga.)

I recalled I had a small, electronic drum kit in the basement. I set off to find it, telling her I'd be right back. "O.K.," she said with a slight note of disappointment in that tiny little-girl-voice of hers.

Disappointment turned to excited interest when I returned with the kit. I plugged it in at the phone table and Fiona dragged a chair over. She climbed up onto the chair and was ready to "make music." She seemed to instinctively understand that the round tips on the drumsticks were for striking the drums.

Was she good? Let's say Fiona makes music like she draws. She shows the same enthusiasm for drumming that she shows for scribbling with one, big exception. She doesn't seem to realize that her scribbles are just that: scribbles. But with the drums, she immediately noted that her drumming was "noise." Nice call.

All this made me curious; How do toddlers approach music?

According to KidsHealth:

"Music contributes to what experts call "a rich sensory environment." This simply means exposing kids to a wide variety of tastes, smells, textures, colors, and sounds — experiences that can forge more pathways between the cells in their brains.

"These neural connections will help kids in almost every area of school, including reading and math. Just listening to music can make these connections, but the biggest impact on comes if kids actively participate in musical activities.

"Between the ages of 1 and 3, kids respond best to music when they actively experience it. Passive listening (like in the car) is fine, but look for opportunities to get your child rocking, marching, rolling, tapping, clapping, and moving to the beat."

The article notes toddlers won't pick up individual notes but they will experiment with different pitches. I've noted that! Fiona loves to sing songs that she makes up with her voice sliding from high to low and back. At this point, Fiona does not have a clear understanding of rhythm. Thankfully, she does have a clear understanding of noise and tries to keep it down.

Giving an older toddler something to bang — a drum or a xylophone — is a good idea. This encourages the young child to discover and experiment with rhythm. By two or three, simple wind instruments — a recorder, pipe whistle, or kazoo — may be appropriate. The only caveat is ensure the instruments are appropriately sized and shaped for little hands and, most importantly, safe for toddlers. No little parts that can be inhaled and choke a kid.

Fiona's mom is quite musically talented. She won an award at a piano competition as a child. Maybe it's time to start thinking of music classes for Fiona, something simple, short and fun. When I worked at the local paper, The London Free Press, I covered a number of recitals by young musicians being instructed using the Suzuki method.

The Suzuki method has a rich and long history in London, Ontario. According to The Canadian Encyclopedia , in 1969, Herman Dilmore began a Suzuki program at the University of Western Ontario.

"The Suzuki method is a teaching system developed by the Japanese violinist and educator Shinichi Suzuki . . . The essentials of the Suzuki method are an early beginning, parental participation, and rote learning. The children look, listen, and imitate. There are regular private lessons and periodic group lessons. Children as young as two-and-a-half or three years old are accepted without any preselection, and introduced to music one step at a time. It is a highly individualistic method in that no child proceeds to the next step until the previous one has been fully mastered, no matter how long it takes."

Come Monday, I'm contacting the London Suzuki Music Centre. No more noise!

A Morgan Adventure

My Morgan Plus 4 with a bed roped to its back.

My Morgan has it easy these days. I'm in my 60s and retired; It's in its 40s and is also taking it easy. But things were different when we were young. Back then both of us were up for anything.

In the spring of 1971 my Morgan and I took our annual spring trip south. Starting when I was 16, I had welcomed spring with a long prowl down the back roads of Kentucky, Tennessee, the Carolinas, Georgia, Arkansas and Alabama. Every year it was the same states, somewhat different roads and completely different adventures.

In 1971 the adventure centred around an iron bed. It was old and a little bent but it had all its parts. It had both the head board and foot board, and the bed spring side supports were still intact. With cast iron ends, these bars could be brittle and often broke in use --- and an old bed has seen a lot of use.

I was in northern Georgia, checking out an antique store in an old wood clad home, when I found the bed. It was thick with green paint but that was good. No rust. It was a simple design but I liked it. I asked the owner of the store what he was asking.

"I reckon about ten dollars," he said.

I bought the bed on the spot. He carried my purchase outside, spotted my car, and thought no way this young man is carrying this bed all the way back to Canada with that little car. But, I found a long plank, had the store owner drill a large hole in the middle and I attached the plank to the back of the Morgan. I then rested the bed on the bumper overriders and tied the bed firmly in place.

I duct taped two short metal plates to the bottom of the legs to protect them from being damaged when the Morgan went over bumps. As it was, each time we hit a bump, sparks shot from the sacrificial metal plates. It was rather spectacular at night.

I made sure I got a receipt for the bed. I didn't want to have to pay duty. The owner of the shop took a slip of paper and had me write that this was a receipt for a ten dollar bed. The fellow took the paper from me and put a large "X" at the bottom. He had made his mark. He didn't know how to write his own name! I wasn't all that surprised. This was the south and I was used to stuff like this.

I had been planning to drive to northern Florida but with a bed tied to the back of my Morgan I decided to change my plans and head north. I would head in a direction vaguely towards home. On April 30th I was in Washington, D.C.

I parked the Morgan and went to the Washington monument, taking the elevator to the top. When I got off the elevator I heard loud beeping and noticed a couple of uniformed policemen checking me out. I must admit that my hair was a bit long; Yes, I once had hair. They politely took me aside and asked to check my bag. They were looking for bombs and their instruments indicated that I had an incredible amount of metal in my canvas bag.

The found camera gear: camera bodies, camera lens, a small tripod. But what they really took an interest in was my 300mm lens which I paired with a 2X converter. The police officers took turns looking at the distant city through my "friggin' telescope."

When I got back to the Morgan I found more police were taking an interest in me. It was the bed this time that caught their eye. I had more than a dozen police cars surrounding my little Plus 4. "What's with the bed, young man?" I was asked.

Soon they were satisfied that I wasn't planning on taking up residence in the park and they turned their interest to the Morgan. A steady stream of officers slid behind the giant Bluemel steering wheel. Some toggled the toggle switches. Some asked to see the engine. All, in the end, smiled. Morgans are like that. They make people smile.

"Boy, do you know what tomorrow is?" "May 1st," I replied.

I soon learned that tomorrow was to be a very special May 1st. Large scale civil disobedience protesting the war in Vietnam was planned for Washington, D.C. There would be mass arrests and maybe a few bashed heads. The police officers told me I'd be wise to get in my little roadster and put a few miles between Washington and me.

My long hair, tattered army jacket and weird car with a bed tied to the back would draw attention and tomorrow would not be a day for friendly chatting. They made it very clear that I might get hurt. I started up my Morgan and waved good-bye to Washington. Dozens of boys in blue waved back.

I motored out of Washington and kept going until I crossed into Pennsylvania.

I still have that bed today. It is now beige and sits in Judy and my guest bedroom in London, Ontario. I think it may need a new mattress. Guests have suggested to me the mattress is beginning to feel as old as the iron bed itself.

hashtag #heblowsalot

I caught a CNN report on Kansas student, Emma Sullivan, 18, who tweeted: "“Just made mean comments at gov brownback and told him he sucked, in person #heblowsalot.” Sullivan tapped out her tweet while she and her high school group, Youth in Government, were listening to Brownback speak on stage.

CNN refused to show the complete tweet on air. The wimps, nasty minded wimps, I might add, blocked out the word "blow" from their report. I'm surprised they left the word "sucked" uncensored. They saw "blows" as having a nasty sexual meaning not fit for broadcast. I may be naive, really, I might be, but the first thing that I thought was that the hashtag meant "he's a blow hard." I translated what followed the comma as "in person he's full of hot air" and not that he's enthusiastic at delivering felatio.

Later I heard the young woman explaining that she had not made her mean comments directly to the governor --- nor did she say that she did. Note the comma. It's important. The comments were made about the governor but "at" saves keystrokes, which is so important in the 140 character Twitter world.

One bit of advice I found on the Internet for dealing with teens and their words was: If something a teen says upsets you, ask them to elaborate further before blowing up. This means before you explode, uh, explode in anger. One's gotta be careful with the word explode. Some may think it has sexual overtones. Can't have that.

Sullivan's tweet was noted by the governor's staff and the staff contacted the young girl's principal --- a principal who was definitely not the young girl's pal. Her principal turned out to be a principal without principles. Instead of tossing the letter of complaint he confronted the teen and demanded she sit down and write some letters of apology. One must go to the governor, she was told.

Emma Sullivan refused to apo

Sullivan dug in her heels, blowing off the principal's demands. That mean ignoring his demands for those jumping to sordid conclusions.

Sullivan refused to apologize. The governor wisely decided that it was he who would issue the apology in the hope the Twitter fiasco would blow over.

My Klondike property deed is not worthless to me

My deed is worth a lot in memories. Held together by Scotch Tape, I doubt it has any other value.

My wife wants the basement clean and she's blaming me for the mess. Mess? It's filled with valuable stuff, like this deed for one square inch of land in the Klondike. I found my 56-year-old deed as I was rearranging the basement. I'm operating under the theory that if it's tidy, she'll let me keep my stuff.

If you're wondering about the deed, you are not an early born baby-boomer. It was the winter of 1955 when the Quaker company began one of the most successful advertising campaigns ever. As a tie-in to the Sergeant Preston of the Yukon program which ran on both radio and television, the cereal maker gave away 21 million one-inch square plots in Canada's Yukon Territory.

To get a piece of the land claim action, all a child had to do was coax mom into buying a box of Quaker cereal containing a land deed. 21 million deeds resulted in a lot of action and not just for young buyers of the cereal. The oh-so-legal looking deeds kept Quaker busy for year.

Some people took the campaign a little too seriously. The gathered up thousands of deeds with the goal of creating a large, useful plot of land in the Canadian North. If you're curious about the story, I found the following posted on Yukon Info.

___________________________________________________________________________

DAWSON, Yukon Territory – Once upon a time there was an advertising executive in a city called Chicago. His job was to make children yell, “Mommy, I want Quaker Puffed Rice!”

For many years, this man told the children his cereal was shot from guns. This helped his sales. But other cereals had talking tigers and gave away prizes in every box. This hurt his sales. What could the poor businessman do?

He needed a new idea. Or else he would need a new job. He had to think of something catchy and simple and it had to do with the cereal’s radio show about a Mountie in the Yukon. Suddenly, the man knew!

In each box of Puffed Rice and Puffed Wheat he would give away a square inch of land in the romantic Yukon right here in Dawson where Sergeant Preston and his trusty dog King had their adventures every week. And so began the Great Klondike Big Inch land Caper, one of the most successful sales promotions in North American business history.

For long after all the rocket rings and plastic submarines arid other cereal-box prizes were lost, millions of those official-looking, legal-sounding, gold-embossed deeds to a square inch of Yukon land remained in drawers, albums, safe deposit boxes, scrapbooks, vaults and, more importantly, in the memory of a generation of men and women not so young anymore.

And given the ravages of the years and the current uncertain economic times, a steadily mounting stream of these former children, their attorneys, their widows and their executors are writing to inquire after their “property,” which they assume has increased in value over all these years.

But, alas, the replies carry sad news. Not only do these people not own the land now. They never did, because each individual deed was never formally registered. The Klondike Big Inch Land Co., an Illinois subsidiary established to handle the cereal’s land affairs, has gone out of business. And anyway, the Canadian government repossessed all the land back in 1965 for nonpayment of $37.20 in property taxes.

But still, the cereal saga won’t die. Thousands of “owners” have written to officials in the Yukon. A vast, sparsely populated area that is one of two of Canada’s northern territories. “Please tell them to stop.” pleaded Cheryl Lefevre. a land-office clerk who stores the Yukon’s files on the matter, files now more than 18 inches thick.

The land of course, is still here – Group 2 in lot 243. It is a 19.11-acre plot on the west bank of the Yukon River about three miles upstream from town where, according to crumbling old records in Dawson’s land office, Malcolm McLaren first homesteaded back in 1911.

It is a long way from a suburban Chicago home in 1954, the night before Bruce Baker, the adman was to make his promotional presentation. Before he died three years ago, Baker recounted to a friend his side of the Klondike epic.

Baker was nearly panicked for a new idea, any new idea. When the inspiration came to him, he could almost see the ads: “You’ll actually own one square inch of Yukon land in the famous gold country!”

Quaker Oats hated the idea.

Too many potential legal problems, the lawyers said. It would cost far too much to register every deed to every little cereal-eater out there. Baker suggested, then, that they not register the deeds.
And he found a Yukon lawyer who thought it was legal. Baker flew to the Yukon and, after a harrowing midwinter boat journey, saw the land and bought it for $1,000.

Twenty-one million numbered deeds were printed up. And on Jan. 27, 1955, the promotion was begun on the Sergeant Preston radio show. The response was far beyond Baker’s wildest hopes. Quaker’s puffed cereal plant in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, could hardly stuff the deeds in fast enough. Within weeks, every box was sold.

As time went on, Quaker redirected its cereal sales. “We do zero promotion now,” said Kathy Rand, Quaker’s public relations manager. “because we’re not positioned for kids. The cereals are no sugar, salt or additives, so they’re aimed at babies or the diet conscious.”

In 1965, the 19.11 acres were seized. In 1966, the Klondike Big Inch Land Co. was dissolved. There were always some “owners” writing for information. But it built to a flood more recently, involving Canadian consuls general in the United States, the Yukon and even the prime minister’s office in Ottawa. Steven Spoerl wrote Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau to announce he was declaring the formal independence of his four square inches.

Officials in Ottawa, only slightly amused, send each writer a polite reply telling all correspondents to contact the Quaker Oats Co. in Chicago for details relating to the decades old 'promotional gimmick.' Quaker has the unhappy - and the time consuming - task of telling them that the deeds are worthless, that the Klondike Big Inch Co. no longer exists, and that the Canadian government has taken back the land.

Quaker has been threatened with lawsuits over the matter, and is tired of the time and expense required to answer letters. Quaker executives cringe at the mention of the promotion. John Rourke, the company’s public relations director, claims that they "probably wouldn’t get into such a campaign today because of the legal ramifications."

It’s unlikely, however, that a lawsuit would proceed very far, as the Klondike Big Inch Land Co. has been dissolved and there’s nobody left to sue. In effect, it would be like suing a dead person who has left no assets. That’s the bad news. The good news is that, thanks to the nostalgia boom, a number of memorabilia experts claim the old deeds are now worth as much as $90 each to collectors.

Bruce Baker, the man who started it, takes special delight in pointing out that that makes the deeds worth about twice as much as a share of stock in the Quaker Oats Co. So there you have it. No Klondike property but a nice bit of memorabilia, but occasionally it gets worse.

One American gentleman travelled all over the United States collecting these deeds until he had 10,880. He figured that amounted to about 75 square feet of land and wrote to the Quaker Oats legal department wondering if he could consolidate the different inches into one big chunk. He said he would prefer a piece of land "near the water" and "as quiet an area as possible." Needless to say he was quite perturbed when he learned the story behind the deeds.

“The deeds were not meant to have any intrinsic value,” Quaker says, “but rather to give the consumer the romantic appeal of being the owner of a square inch of land in the Yukon.”

Fuel sipping technology is here

Peugeot 3008 HYbrid4: world's first diesel-electric hybid gets up to 74 mpg.

I have never personally owned a car with anything other than a four cylinder engine. I never saw the need. The reason for the awkward phrasing is that my wife owned a used, six cylinder Chevrolet Lumina once.

An early gas sipper from the '60s.

I have always been offended by gas guzzlers. In the '60s my brother-in-law and I used to compete in fuel economy runs. One year the winning entry was a Renault 4. The driver inflated the tires until they were rock hard to lower rolling resistance, he trimmed the carburetor to burn a leaner fuel mix and when approaching a red light he turned the car off, letting it coast. If the light changed while still coasting, he popped the clutch to restart. With all these gas-saving contortions, his little car came close to hitting the magic 100 miles per gallon number.

When I worked at The London Free Press, I drove a lot for work. I experimented for a time with a compressed natural gas (CNG) powered car. I bought an American-made, compact and converted it to a bi-fuel car burning both natural gas and, at the flick of a switch, unleaded gasoline. When I drove outside of London I found I burned far more gasoline than CNG as there were almost no stations offering natural gas.

The CNG conversion was a disaster. It was the most expensive car I have ever owned. It cost a fortune to keep on the road. Whether or not the conversion caused a lot of the engine problems, I will never know. But GM would not cover the costs as the conversion put the car outside of the warranty. The CNG conversion folk said my problems were not their concern. The problem, they said, was with the GM engineering.

But, I do know the engineering of my early compressed natural gas system was poor. The engine burned through fuel at a phenomenal rate. I could fill the CNG tank in my trunk up to three times a day. And it took forever to fill, well five minutes, but it seemed like forever. And the car always reeked of natural gas.

I wish I had had an emission test done on that engine. My guess is it was emitting a lot of unburnt hydro carbons. I'm convinced it a fuel sucking, world polluting pig.

Today, Honda sells a fine CNG powered Civic but not in Ontario, Canada, where I live. It's no wonder they don't sell them here, almost all the stations that once sold CNG are closed. Here, in London, there is only one station left. There aren't a dozen public refueling stations in the whole province. As the technology has improved, the availability of the fuel has dried up.

Now, I'm retired and suffering from a serious heart condition. My car purchase in late summer may be my last kick at the green-car can. I wanted a Prius but my wife hated, absolutely hated, its look. Oh well, I had some nagging doubts about how green all those batteries would prove to be in the end. I bowed to her wishes and scratched the Prius off my list.

In the end, I settled on the latest Volkswagen Jetta TDI (turbo direct injection diesel). All I can say is, "Wow!" In the almost three months I have been driving the Jetta, my overall fuel consumption has averaged 41.3 mpg. (Those are imperial gallons; That's 34.4 mpg in U.S. gallons.) My most impressive number is 55.1 mpg achieved on a round-trip to Sarnia. It was mostly freeway driving but there was a fair amount of city driving in Sarnia on account of construction closing the freeway.

There was one car on my dream list that I had to drop from consideration early on: The Volvo V60 plug-in hybrid diesel. The car will not be released in Europe until late in 2012, and Volvo has announced that it will never be released in North American. Volvo believes the diesel component of this hybrid would kill United States sales. Pity.

I honestly believe that there are technological answers to North America's propensity to guzzle gas. The NA vehicle fleet gets better mpg today compared to historical numbers, but still, we could do much better.

Unfortunately, technology today costs money and with the economy only sputtering along, missing on a number of cylinders, buying a smooth running, technologically advanced car is not an affordable option for many. My TDI was not cheap. It is thousands more than a plain vanilla Jetta with a small gasoline engine.

The newest Mazda 3, when equipped with an optional Skyactiv-g engine, gets up to 55 mpg in Canada. And to get that great mileage, you will be asked to pay a great price. Like my Jetta, the top-of-the-line Mazda 3 Skyactiv-g is paired with a new transmission. According to Road and Track, "the 2012 Mazda 3 with the new automatic is 21 percent more efficient that the car it replaces."

The 'g' tacked onto Skyactiv with a hyphen stands for gasoline. I understand that in Europe and in Japan Mazda offers a Skyactiv-d engine with the 'd' standing for diesel. R & T reports: ". . . withing 15 to 18 months, Mazda will have a diesel passenger vehicle on sale here in America. We're betting it's the CX-5 with Skyactiv-D."

If you are curious about my TDI and how it is performing, I'm writing a long term blog about owning a TDI. For more info on diesel vehicles, and hybrids, too, check out the HybridCars site. The U.S. government has a page devoted to diesel-powered cars.

3008 HYbrid4 from Pascal BUSOLIN on Vimeo.

In Europe, Peugeot recently released the 3008 HYbrid4, the world’s first diesel-fueled hybrid, returns up to 74 mpg according to some car reviewers. This car is economical – and four-wheel drive. In winter conditions, it can selectively apply the brake to the wheel with the least amount of grip for better control.

Why is this technology only seen on European roads?

For me, when it comes to delivering high fuel mileage wrapped in an incredibly stylish package, the Volvo V60 plug-in hybrid diesel promises to be the car to drool over. (I've posted a video.) Volvo claims 50 km of in-city-driving in the electric powered mode. I could do most of my driving without burning a drop of fuel! In Europe, although not in North America, hybrid diesels are somewhat common in large, public transit buses.

Doctors discover some patients believed vegetative may be unresponsive but not unaware

These patients are trapped in the limbo of the permanent vegetative state (PVS). Unresponsive to everything around them, they appear totally oblivious to the world. But are they?

A new study, led by researchers from The University of Western Ontario, suggests possibly one in five of these seemingly comatose patients may be, in fact, still conscious of the world around them. A report has been released detailing how doctors in three countries, on two continents, worked together to gain admittance into the isolated world of brain-damaged patients trapped in a faux vegetative state.

To read the whole story, please read my report in the Digital Journal.

Adrian Owen, left, Dir. Melvyn Goodale, Centre for Brain and Mind, Univ. of Western Ont.

Filing cabinets for people

I find many apartment buildings in London are simply large filing cabinets for the orderly storing of people. Don't get me wrong; Lots of these buildings are fine places to live. I especially like the ones with large, indoor pools. Still, viewed from outside, there is little to see.

I did a post on the apartment complex across from The London Free Press on York Street. I recalled how our Homes section fawned over the concrete, balcony studded, apartment towers. And I recall how one reader took us to task for not recognizing East Leningrad architecture when we saw it.

In my post I ran a picture of an apartment complex from Leningrad that showed the reader was wrong; Leningrad
architecture trumps those towers.

Since those York Street towers were built, quite a number of apartment towers have been built in London. Although many look better than those concrete lumps, they still have a cookie cutter look affirmed by the fact that their look is repeated in various locations around the city.

One does not often feel that apartment buildings are constructed to take unique advantage of the positive qualities of the site. One exception that comes to mind is the apartment complex overlooking the Thames River on Riverside Drive at Wonderland Road.

Now, one of the most dramatic locations for an apartment building in London, Reservoir Hill, may soon be built on. City staff are presently preparing the geological reports and the slope stability reports in order to properly evaluate the site plan.

If the past is any indication of what can be expected, do not expect to be wowed. I live in southwest London and when The Free Press wrote about the welcoming Wonderland Road gateway to London presently under construction, I groaned.

I drive that stretch of road frequently and it is neat and tidy with lots of box stores. It is reminiscent of suburban developments common right across North America.

I believe, the paper talked of gateway apartment buildings for the area. This rang bells in my memory banks. Mississauga held a competition for a gateway apartment tower. I found a picture of the winner. I also took a picture of the London buildings, with a design repeated in various locations around the city.

So, what will be built on Reservoir Hill? What beautiful structure will grace that historic location, offering the apartment dwellers an amazing view of downtown and delighting passersby with its sculptural creativity?

Check the following apartments from around the world.

Living Foz

Sunway Palazzio

Turning Torso

VM Apartments

Perspective on a world of 7 Billion

The graphics were designed for a world of only 6.9 billion, not the 7 billion we have now, but I think the point is still valid.

North American urban sprawl is a criminal way to use Space Ship Earth.

For more interesting stuff on cities, population densities, etc., check Per Square Mile.

Links to ghost towns for Halloween

Today is Halloween and a fine time for checking out ghost towns around the world. One my favorites is the San-Zhi pod resort in Taiwan. Check it out.

If you find this interesting check out my other link. It will take you to an article on the 10 most amazing ghost towns on earth.

Art, craft and serendipity

I've discussed this in the past: art. When I was attending art school, I came to believe that art was the creative aspect of a work and craft was the skill that it took to produce the work.

I've know painters who worked for a month or more on a piece only to paint it over. The creativity and skill just didn't gel. This might not have been obvious to the observer; An onlooker doesn't know what the artist intended but failed to create — but, the artist knows. The flawed piece might look awfully good and still be a big disappointment to the artist.

Photography is no different. The photographer sees a scene, like the one featured today, and sees light and dark, highlight and shadow, the push-pull of colour on the picture plane and the contrasting juxtapositon of texture, form and direction and even mood. Like painters, photographers do their best to get all the elements in the image working together to make the desired statement. And, like painters they sometimes fail.

The first thing that attracted my eye to this image was not the colour but the soft, falling branches of the weeping willow in the background. Those branches were the perfect foil for the bright fall foliage in the foreground. The bits of blue sky were an added bonus. The strong shadows and sweeping slopes of the small rises gave the image a strong base on which to build.

I wandered about hunting for the right angle and I had to wait for the sun return from behind some clouds to get the strong, directional lighting that attracted me originally. Pictures, even simple pictures, often just don't happen. They are created.

There's a lot to think about when shooting a picture. This image pulled together nicely. It took only a little cropping to arrive at the final result shown at the top of this post. Having a clear idea of what was wanted helped. Having a number of different interpretations of the vision (a number of pictures from different angles) also helped. And in the end, having a little serendipity on my side also helped.

Do you really think that painters, or sculptures, and other traditional artists don't also benefit from a little serendipity?

Thank you Brian Lilley

I've been following the battle between Quebecor/Sun Media and the CBC for some time but I hadn't formed an opinion on the positions of either media combatant until today. Today I read Brian Lilley's piece, "CBC starting to feel heat at its feet."

Lilley made me aware that the CBC was now aggressively fighting back against the angry claims of Quebecor/Sun Media, which feel that the Canadian broadcaster, with its government backing, has an unfair advantage when competing in the world of network television.

My curiosity piqued, I began googling about the Web. I found lots of posted pages claiming that Quebecor/Sun Media is a media hog slopping back funds from the taxpayer trough. Allow me to quote just one, this one from Macleans:

"In 2010, Quebecor President Pierre-Karl Péladeau threatened to sue the Canadian Media Fund when it refused to pony up money for TVA’s Star Académie, our very own version of American Idol that is, in Péladeau’s words, “the biggest success in the history of Canadian broadcasting."

"Now why would the biggest success in Canadian broadcasting history need even one cent of taxpayer money? Sounds like the kind of hard biting question for Sun News, doesn’t it?"

Thanks Brian Lilley. Without your encouragement, I never would have read the stuff I stumbled upon. If just a fraction of the stuff I read was accurate, man, is Quebecor/Sun Media ever living up to its nickname of Faux News North.

Thanks again, Brian.