To make Comments write directly to Jim at jimt@quixotic.ca
21
Jan
2018
Tim Hortons is in hot water – and I don’t mean coffee.
When the Ontario government bumped the minimum wage up from $11.60 an hour to $14.00 an hour, some Tim Hortons outlets slashed hours and benefits for their staff, who ended up getting a pay cut instead of an increase.
A deluge of criticism followed, in newspapers, and in online petitions.
Disclosure: I do not own shares in Tim Hortons or its parent companies, Restaurant Brands International and 3G Capital, a Brazilian investment giant. But I am a Tim Hortons customer. And my daughter worked for Tim’s for a few years.
The policies that earned scathing editorial comments happened at a minority of Tim’s franchises – perhaps a couple of dozen, all in Ontario.
Categories: Sharp Edges
Tags: Tim Horton, franchises, RBI, 3G, coffee
17
don’t expect much more snow. Not around here, anyway. Because I just bought a snowblower.
In a sense, my snowblower symbolizes our social obsession with independence.
It starts young. We encourage our children to do things for themselves, instead of depending on their parents. We expect young adults to earn their own way, to plot their own course. We expect older adults to keep on looking after themselves, despite disabilities.
A group of us guys get together, occasionally, to talk about growing older. We don’t have any choice about growing older, short of expiring. But we agree that we don’t want to grow “old.”
“Old” implies weak. Helpless. Unable to cope with credit cards or iPhones. Forgetful. Needing someone to supply the word we knew perfectly well when we started that sentence. Needing help to carry bags of groceries out to the car. If we have a car at all. Tripping. Falling.
“Old” means losing our precious independence.
Categories: Soft Edges
Tags: snowblower, independence, aging
14
Here’s a challenge. What do these five objects have in common -- kryptonite; Sauron’s ring; canned spinach; Thor’s hammer; the sword Excalibur?
Answer: they were all once associated with super-powers. Sauron’s ring made Bilbo and Frodo Baggins invisible, in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series of novels. Thor’s hammer and the sword Excalibur made their owners invincible in battle. And spinach gave the cartoon character Popeye super-strength.
Kryptonite also deals with super-powers, but negatively. It robbed power from Superman. It rendered him helpless.
Those five things also have one other common characteristic. Only an older generation finds them familiar.
In a word, they’re outdated.
Tags: kryptonite, Sauron, rings, Popeye, spinach, Archives, floppy disks, eight-track tapes
10
I have no sentimental feelings about California quail. But in my experience, they make chickens look like candidates for Mensa.
We joke about chickens crossing the road. Around here, quail move in flocks. Sometimes so many they give an impression of the earth itself rippling in waves.
There is no such thing as a single quail. So if I see a solitary quail at the side of the road when I’m driving, I slow down. That quail will certainly try to cross the road in front of me. At the last possible second. And it will equally certainly be followed by the rest of the flock. They could fly, but they won’t. They’ll erupt from the grass and underbrush like nerf balls, and scuttle on Roadrunner legs across the blacktop.
Except that when they’re almost across, they will decide they didn’t want to go there after all; they will turn, en masse, and head back — sometimes actually underneath my car.
No, I do not have a high opinion of quail intelligence.
Tags: Quail, Mensa, intelligence
7
“It ain’t over till it’s over,” New York Yankee’s famed catcher Yogi Berra once said. Berra may be right about baseball; he was wrong about wars. Wars don’t end when someone wins. They end only when the last generation of victims dies.
That’s what makes the recent UNICEF report on child victims so disturbing. Child victims will live longer than adult victims.
UNICEF’s statistics are staggering.
The deaths are bad enough: 700 children killed by conflicts in Afghanistan; 135 children forced to act as suicide bombers in sub-Saharan West Africa. But – pardon me for even saying this – at least they’re now dead. They won’t carry their experiences with them for the rest of their lives.
Not so the survivors. In Ukraine, 220,000 still play amid landmines and unexploded ordnances. In Yemen, 5,000 children have been injured by war against terrorist factions. In Myanmar, almost half of the 650,000 Rohinga refugees forced from their homes into Bangladesh are children. In the (grossly misnamed) Democratic Republic of Congo, 850,000 children have been driven from their homes.
Tags: rape, UNICEF, Somalia, Yemen, Congo, abuse, PTSD