Category Archives: DISPATCHES & RAMBLINGS

RULES IN THE GAME OF LIFE

POSTED: February 1, 2025

I went to a funeral last week. Now when I say “went”, what I actually did was live stream to my little laptop on my boat sitting in warm waters off Malta, a funeral that was occurring in Toronto where it was cold and in the middle of a multi-day snow storm. And when I say a “funeral”, it was in fact a true celebration of life.

It was a celebration of life not only because the lad was in his mid nineties when he died but that he had lived a life to celebrate. It is one of the three things that really stood out for me with him.

But I am getting a bit ahead of myself here. The background is that I only met him a few times but knew him through one of his sons – a very close friend.

The event was a Baptist Church service and while some good music would be assured because of it, all four of his children were musical and three of them worked with music as part of their daily lives. Is was very heavily music focused session and as funerals go, one of the best I have been to.

One of the things that characterized this man was that he was a “gentle” man. He was not prone to anger, nor being reactionary, instead being able to, if not empathize with the person who was behaving inappropriately, at least not escalate the conflict further. He was the one who would try to talk someone down off the ledge instead of passively watching or worse getting their camera out and challenging the person to jump.

The second big characteristic of this fellow was that he had lived a “complete” life. Now I have buried a number of people in their eighties and nineties who by any measure have lived a long life, but only some of them having lived a complete life. He immigrated to Canada from Jamaica. He and his wife were together for all of their adult lives until she passed a few years ago. They raised four good children to be proud of with an additional number of grandchildren and even great grandchildren. Right up to his passing he was involved every week with one of his kids or grandkids activities as a very active Poppi. He had a long career and was well respected in his field. And through it all, he had his spirituality. From first arriving in Canada, he joined the same church that funeral was held in, and throughout his long life was a very active force in its evolution, eventually becoming a Deacon. But more than the title, he was a model for many based on how he lived his life. As various people spoke of his role in their lives a little twist on the word kept entering my mind and really said it all in his case – Deacon as beacon.

And it is this part – following religious teachings to live a life, that has been creeping into my consciousness all week.

I grew up in a Christian family who went to church on Sunday, on special occasions like Christmas and Easter, baptisms, funerals and weddings. Occasionally, at family dinners grace would be said. Church was compartmentalized into those slots. When growing up I gobbled up the parables and would try to understand the homilies, but my relationship was with the church and not with God. So, when the church did what I thought were fairly nasty things like helping people in Africa and South America but with the religious strings attached, I was out of there. I did not realize at the time that the really nasty things the church I belonged to was doing were occurring right in Canada with the Residential Schools.

But I have always envied those who have a direct one-on-one relationship with a superior being. I am a simple fellow and am awestruck by how vegetation starts again in the spring after a harsh winter, or how blood knows to coagulate when exposed to air. Something designed this. Something infinitely more capable than humans today. I guess I am an agnostic.

I have also been intrigued by the common elements of most of the great religions. I have big issues with some of the major religions who cling to dated elements of differences in the genders, or perpetuate an element of “Us and Them”. But otherwise most of the major religions have codes or lists of DO THIS, DON’T DO THAT, which I find hard to argue against. These are simple rules to live by.

In my seventy-two years however, I keep seeing that it is the application of those codes or lists that is the issue. If everyone lived by them the world would be a much better place – something of a heaven on earth. But we live in a time of selectivity, carefully curating which rules work for us and which ones we find too restrictive. There is an American President today who sees all of the rules as “general policy guidelines” and totally optional when it comes to their use. Even taking out such an extreme example most people will be very adherent to most of the rules but a bit sloppy or interpretive when it comes to some others.

The man who passed last week did not select which rules worked for him. He didn’t reinterpret for his own purpose the rules. He did not take a statistical average of his performance on them where he got five out of five for some and 2 out of five for one, but kept a pretty good average. Instead saw them as binary – you only live by doing the right thing all the time on all fronts. I did not have a conversation with him in his last days, but have little doubt that he passed without regrets, without guilt and with satisfaction that he made peoples lives better and enjoyed his to the full as well.

I am not about to run out and go to church at this point. I am going to reflect on the example this man was however, and try to emulate that in my own life. All the rules all the time. The game starts now.

Django

BORDER WOES

POSTED: JAN 1, 2026

I was coming out of a fresh market recently and ran into an old friend of one of my buddies. I did not know him well and he did not recognize me but I took a lucky shot at his name and he was startled. I don’t often run into people from Canada here in Malta so it is a common quick bond between people who otherwise would be complete strangers.

It turns out he was in Malta as part of a cruise he and his wife and a few other family members were on that stemmed from a fast last-minute booking to cheer up his wife. They had just experienced a terrible event when trying to cross the border going from Canada to Florida.

While they did not have much time to talk as they only had a day in Malta and much to see it was clear he wanted to share this story as it had been so upsetting for them.

They had left Toronto on a relaxing driving trip to Florida and had planned on meeting some of their family members there. In fact, their granddaughter was going to join them for the drive until the last minute when she was invited to a birthday party and decided to come a few days later with her parents, my friend’s son and his wife. At the Windsor -Detroit border they assumed the process would be straightforward as they had their Nexus cards and passports ready and had filled out some additional forms that are now a requirement of U.S. Customs.

But the process was not at all straightforward and turned into a nightmare. After asking him a few questions the U.S. Customs person asked the fellows wife her name and she gave it. He looked at her somewhat askew and asked the question again. And again, she gave her full name including her two middle names. His response was to ask if she was drunk, at which point her husband jumped back into the dialogue and with a stern look told the customs person she had recently suffered from a stroke. But the customs officer responded with “no, I am pretty sure she is drunk” and told her to step out of the car. My friends response was what triggered the next series of events. He asked if the customs officer had gone to the Trump School For Sensitivity Training? They were both removed from the car and despite the requests of a junior Customs official to reconsider what was happening as he believed her and was not comfortable with his superior calling her a drunk and telling him to put her in a more specialized holding facility, they were both taken off to different holding areas to be interviewed while their car was stripped down.

As it turns out, during the early questions when asked what electronic devices they had with them they had said two cell phones and two laptops, but had not realized that when their granddaughter had changed plans at the last minute, she had left her electronic tablet in a little pink knapsack in the back seat.

It was clear to me that he was wrapping up his story as his wife had just finished her shopping, and as she approached he had to tell me the conclusion. She was released, but he was not only detained but actually charged, held overnight and had to go back to Canada the next day and will not be allowed to return to the United States. He also learned there is no obvious way to do a conventional legal appeal of this decision, only through complex diplomatic routes.

They headed off to enjoy more of their one day in Malta, and I sat down with my groceries to digest what I had just learned.

I have crossed a lot of borders. From West Germany through East Germany to Berlin, into the former Soviet Union in Yugoslavia and several times into Russia when moving dissidents by boat. Regular readers will know from my early posts my role as cook on what later became my boat, when working for others who were moving dissidents, journalists and others in the not too distant past.

Our expectations at borders flow from the nature of what the border is. Often in Europe a border is called a Frontier. It is because it is the edge of where all known things end, and beyond is uncharted wilderness. At least that’s the way I have thought of borders that are called frontiers. In these semi hostile contexts at times passports must be given up, and often customs officers are all powerful authorities who can detain you simply because of their response to how you look.

But most borders are friendly places where yes, a passport or perhaps even a visa is needed, some questions answered, and goods declared, but is more akin to a process like presenting a boarding pass on an airplane or offering up a ticket on a train.

We have been sliding into dangerous times in the world, and instead of having a steady hand at the tiller in the U.S. we are faced with additional layers that are indicative of a right wing authoritarian regime. At that border there were a few in authority who knew what was happening to this older couple was an abuse of power and while they did sympathize, they did not take action. I think its time for more people to step up to the little acts of the abuse of power and the breakdown of the rule of law before it is too late. I fear we may have already have passed that point.

Django

SCAMMED

POSTED: DEC 1, 2025

I was talking to a friend over a month ago who was wondering if he had been scammed. I was chatting with him again this week and the confirmation that he had been scammed was all he could talk about.

Scamming has become an ever-present component of daily life today. Now I am not talking about the big security breaches that occur from time to time that result in our information being shared and potentially then turning into some big problems later. While these can be devastating at the time for the most part the organization that was the victim of the breach is the one who will correct it or provide compensation for the problems that ensue.

No, I am talking about the scams that we may as individuals unwittingly entered into. In some cases, it is those times when we have incorrectly clicked “download” or “scan” or any other click trick that is presented and we are now into a world where we have let someone into our digital financial world. Most of these online scams are “pure” scams – there really is no service or product that will ever be delivered, but we are paying for.

But long before the cyber scams out there and what still dwarfs that industry in scale is the conventional unfulfilled or over priced contract scam. Whether it’s the old time door to door sales where a slick sales guy convinces the 1950’s homeowner they need a new vacuum or the similarly slick sales guy in 2025 who convinces the homeowner to get their furnace ducts cleaned, carpet cleaned, eavestroughs blown out or water heater replaced and either the service never occurs or the water heater that is replaced is very overpriced for the model it is.

Recently a friend who was concerned about her water quality was looking at a water softener and a reverse osmosis system and solicited a few quotes. One of them was from a very nice young guy representing what looked like a very legitimate business. After doing some water testing in her home and demonstrating his extensive knowledge of the topic offered her a package that would cost just short of $10,000 CDN but would include a ten-year supply of cleaning products! The same system she put in with another installer for less than $3,000 CDN and is happy to buy her own cleaning products.

There is also a category of this that is the classic renovation scam. In this one the sums are large and the scammer wants lots of funds up front, and actually shows up and starts to do some work but at the point where most of the materials should be showing up on site the contractor is making excuses about the supply chains or the weather or his bad back. These operators will keep making up excuses for not coming back until they stop making excuses and are just not available. The amounts are usually just under the amount that is beyond the tipping point of the recovery costs as all legal fees, court costs etc. are expensive and these operators have usually shielded themselves legally as well. So do you spend $10,000 on legal fees to get a judgement against the contractor for $15,000 that he will probably never pay? Most people will not pursue it given that math. And the scamming contractor continues on with his program scamming others the same way.

It is exactly this kind of scam my friend was caught in. A contractor who was recommended by a acquaintance, was “able to fit the project into his busy schedule” on the basis of a really short build time where the materials would all have to be ordered immediately, and he could pull in some trades for a quick job if they were paid a portion ahead and the whole job would be done over a couple of weeks. So my friend paid out a lot of money for the materials and the prepayment to get the trades during a busy season.

And then…. almost nothing happened. My friend was livid and hounding the contractor to get the project going as all the dates for various components were now being missed.

And then…. almost nothing happened. But finally after a lot of conflict, the contractor showed up and got a bin on site and started to dig the excavation. But almost as soon as he did this he also requested another tranche of funds as the contractor was in a financial bind and did not have enough cash available to pay the final bill on the materials ordered and their delivery was imminent. My friend foolishly complied, and also paid more money toward some other exterior painting services partially because the contractor also was talking up a medical ailment that had held him up from completing another job and my compassionate friend fell for this lie.

A month after the whole project was to be completed based on the original schedule but had hardly been started…..again, nothing happened. After another big fight with the contractor my friend was able to get back $2,000 from the contractor as the deposit on the painting as it was now late October and the exterior painting season in Canada had passed. My friend hoped this would be a reset on the relationship and the project would now progress but after three months of these delays from the original start date, began to gear up to start the legal process against the contractor.

The roller coaster ride of wondering if he had been scammed, but hopeful that something would occur, was heightened as small bits of the excavation were being completed each day and it was clear the contractor was just trying to stretch it out. So he prepared a Demand Letter for the contractor and the day he was ready to present the letter…. a big ready mix concrete truck showed up and the floor was poured. My friend was shocked but very pleased and keen to have a meeting with the contractor to talk about the next stage. But the meeting for looking forward to the next stage did not happen. The contractor showed up for the meeting looking for more money for the work that had just been done, even though it had already been paid for. The contractor chattered on about cost overruns and premiums charged for concrete in the cold weather and because my friend had been so compassionate about the contractor’s health previously it was shared that he had stage four cancer. My friend did not need to review the medical records to know this was more nonsense from a person who had set out to scam him from the beginning, and threw him off the property and changed the locks on the house and began the legal process.

You might think to yourself that my friend is a bit of an idiot and not familiar with contracts, with human nature or with construction. But while he certainly did exercise bad judgement with this person, he is quite seasoned in renovations, construction, contracts and dealing with contractors. If it could happen to him it could happen to all of us.

Since starting the process of chasing the contractor for the funds provided other victims have come out of the woodwork. The person who had recommended him originally, and had been pleased with the initial work the contractor had done for her was also later scammed. Fifteen product suppliers are all owed money, and a group of property owners in one new housing project who were also all scammed at the same time have now surfaced.

To my knowledge I have never been scammed. That relates partially to rarely having much cash or credit available, and also partially because I live a very modest life. But to hear my friend who has now been down this road, I understand how it can change a persons perspective. Some people will never recover from a scam – financially or psychologically. And often there are other scammers who will sweep in when it is learned that a person has been victimized and offer to help for a fee – another scam.

As so many things challenge my notion that the world is a wonderful place and is getting better, more of these disappointing trends appear. But it’s a beautiful day, we have consistent winds today and I am going to round up a few friends and take En Plein Air out for a sail.

Django

THE WORLD SERIES

Posted, October 31, 2025

As I write this the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Toronto Blue Jays are gearing up for game six of this years World Series. As a person with one foot in Europe and one in Canada and having grown up in Canada of course I am rooting for the home team. The truth is, it is our only professional baseball team in Canada at this point. And that is a bit of comment on the whole nature of this being a “world” final sporting event. Outside of the United States and central America the sport only exists in pockets around the world and has had a long legacy of being challenged as an Olympic sport as a result. Not dissimilar to basketball in that regard. So the name World Series is somewhat aspirational in nature but as it is a business they get to call it whatever they want. It’s not that different to some places in the world with replicas of the Eiffel Tower claiming to be the largest Eiffel Tower in world. Sorry kids, there is only one Eiffel Tower.

Like other Canadians I am totally enthralled in the fight and hoping “our” team, which usually consists largely of Americans, Cubans, and many from central America will defeat their team of similar national heritages, with a couple of Japanese players as well. Not a lot of Canadian Content in what many are dubbing our “national” team.

For some it also has a political layer. Canada is under siege from Mr. Trump and his tariffs and threats to take over Canada and make it the fifty- first state. It has hurt us a lot, and to have a Canadian team be potentially winning this very American of games is a sweet irony.

We also ignore that as a professional team, these players may at times be a “team” but ultimately their agents will remind them that at contract time they only negotiate one on one.

But these points aside, I do love to watch any sport that is played at a high level. And this is certainly an example of that. I don’t know much about baseball but watching what some of those pitchers can make a ball do, is only a bit short of the cartoon pitches where the ball goes around the batter a few times before finding the catcher’s glove.

I was sitting watching the game and found myself having to google various terms of course. I started with slider and the references were all to hamburgers, another American thing.

Like everyone else who is enthralled by this competition right now, we know in our hearts and minds that the horrific treatment of Gaza continues, that Putin has not let up in Ukraine and that most economies are struggling. But that gets turned off for a moment while we focus on this. It is like the few times I have been sitting in procession of cars travelling from the funeral home to the graveyard and watching kids playing, birds singing and people seemingly not realizing I have lost a loved one. We all live in many worlds and for our own mental health need to have some things that give us pleasure, even when we know the bigger picture may not be as rosy. My parents told me stories from some happy times from their youth as kids and when when I looked at the dates involved realized it was in the Depression.

As the underdog, the Blue Jays are similar to that championship Toronto Raptors team from a few years ago. A few veterans, some rookies who had been cleverly acquired and more than a few overlooked seasoned players on a comeback. This is the team fighting the all- powerful team with the funds to buy the best players in the world. Sounds like a movie script to me. Probably a Hollywood production but shot in Canada.

Go Jays go, and Happy Halloween!

Django

SIMPLE & COMPLEX

POSTED: OCT 1, 2025

I like simple…. I like complex….

But my relationship has changed with these two concepts as I have aged.

The two terms are not as binary or mutually exclusive as I once thought. Most things exist in both realms but sometimes the significance of something is whether you choose to evaluate the complex elements or ignore them for the simple impact or big picture. All about the forest and the trees at times and at other times very much about the trees.

Part of what looking at the complex gives us is depth as we dive in the various layers of almost anything – whether it’s the detail of a design or the hidden reasons for behaviour. And another key component of complexity is context. Yes, our old friend context is always critical and in any equation with many factors, it is that context that matters.

As I age, I see this distinction in simple and complex in almost everything.

Electric cars are better than gasoline powered cars when it comes to carbon emissions. But dig deeper and depending on the source of the electricity to go into the car battery (eg generating electricity from coal vs generating it from solar or wind power) plus the loss of power in the transmission of the electricity from source to the location of the charger and associated environmental damage from that transmission, plus the issue of the extraction of minerals to create the batteries, plus there is no current way to deal with the batteries once they come to the end of their life, and we realize the real environmental equation is not so simple.

Or you can respect a person for one set of skills and in simple terms consider them a friend but dig a bit deeper and you may not respect them for their life choices.

During an election a few years ago, I asked a friend why he had a particular politicians sign on his lawn. He explained that he had followed the politician stand on many key pieces of legislation and did not agree with all the policies of the party that the politician represented, disliked the politicians ambition and a variety of his personal traits. But on balance – it was simple – the other candidates were worse.

My head spins today when I watch the news. I once believed I understood the world, with its simple truths, and complex issues but today realize it was probably my ignorance that led me to the conclusion that I understood it. The wisdom to come to that conclusion I think like most things is both simple and complex. As I bury friends and watch the world decay, the complexity of it is right before us and we have access to dig deep into almost any topic very easily, but I find myself valuing more of the simple things. A nice day, homemade jam on a fresh baquette, a nice chat with a friend or a refreshing swim. I can choose complex on my time and on my terms.

Django

LOVE

POSTED: SEPT 1, 2025

I am quite intrigued by language, and as I am really only proficient in English that is where I spend most of my adventures in exploring words and wordcraft. One that is a perennial favourite for me is the word LOVE.

Now I know that many other languages tackle the broad notions that the English word Love covers by breaking it down into other words or variations on a word, so that would be a more sophisticated way to go. But English – no way, we use it as a positive emotional catch-all. It relies on the context to put things in perspective. So you might love your grandpa and love a cheeseburger but it is the context that we have to apply to know that you don’t love them in the same way or on the same scale.

It is also interesting how putting a word before or after it gives it a new set of meanings – making love, for example is not necessarily really about making or love.

As a result of this broadness of application, the significance of the word is often diluted as it is so overused, whether in the sale of consumer products or as a general term for affection of some kind.

But that same broadness of application and dilution in some contexts makes it more special in some contexts. In the dating world (yes, I am dating myself for using such a term) the word is not used lightly as it has profound implications. So all of the throwaway references to loving the new soap you are washing your clothes in or loving the new improved garbage bags, may be liberally used in all contexts other than the person who you might actually be in a relationship with, but not want to add that layer of seriousness or commitment to. So, the word gets tucked away for such purposes only to come out when triggered.

And why am I riffing off on such a subject today? Well, an old friend I ran into on the internet and we got to chatting. Some backstory might help to understand her relationship with the word love. I knew her as we were both working in the kitchens of cruise ships fifty years ago. Yeah, fifty years – a while back. And in the mid 1970’s relationships were quite fluid, where the level of commitment was a very wide spectrum. But within that love the one you’re with world, people still would find themselves in committed wonderful deep relationships. So my friend, on a few occasions in her life had encountered men who chose to share with her that they loved her. And on each occasion once her partners opened that can of worms they could not handle her response. As soon that as soon as one of those lads would reference that he loved her she would be out of the relationship. She would also be in a mess, in that she had valued the person and saw a future with them but the word had a real stigma for her. I never knew why and one of the guys who was a fallout of this phobia I knew quite well and he was so messed up by the rejection, left the cruise ships and joined a cult. Yes, another strange characteristic of the times.

I was never really close to her and have not kept in touch very well over the decades so it was strange for her to relate to me why she had a problem with someone expressing their love for her. I had made up in my imagination that it might relate to a bad experience with a stepfather or weird uncle and learned that yes, it was in fact a family relationship not the kind my imagination had conjured up. No, her problem stemmed from being a real monster as a kid, much like myself, and hearing from her mother throughout her life that she was loved. From an early age she realized the statement had an unsaid back-half of the sentence like “I love you, …..despite being a mean-spirited little bitch that has caused nothing but pain and hardship for your father and I and your siblings”. When she dropped rocks off an overpass onto the windshields of the cars below at twelve and trashed a corner store at fourteen and stole a car and then crashed it in her later teens, was all before she really ramped up the bad behaviour further in her late teens, each time her mother would start the conversation at the Principals office, Police station, or hospital with I love you or You are loved.

But I realized that after all this time, her sharing this with me, a person who she had not chatted with in about a decade, was an indication that she was moving forward, understanding her emotions better and putting it all in context. We are all just trying to figure ourselves out, and some issues take longer than others. She was also happy to chat to find out if I had an email for that mutual friend from decades ago. It was not to reconnect in some romantic way but to explain to him why she had treated him the way she did and to apologize. Good for her. I did not have an email but sent her the contact for someone who I expected would have it.

Django

ETHICS & THE KISS CAM

Posted: August 1, 2025

A couple weeks ago at a Coldplay concert outside of Boston, a couple were seen on the Jumbotron (kiss cam) in a warm embrace. It was heartwarming to see two people enjoying themselves at the concert and in their enjoyment of each other. Then the fellow ran off when he realized they were onscreen. Chris Martin “called it” of course… either very shy or in an affair, and before long this was all that was on the internet. Apparently, it was more important than the slaughter and starvation by Israel of the people in Gaza, or the relentless bombing of the Ukraine by that regions war criminal, or the dismantling of the last shreds of equality in the United States with One Big Shitty Bill.

The world was seemingly mesmerized by what turned out to be a tech executive with his company’s head of HR. It was quickly revealed that he was a married person so beyond the obvious inappropriate unethical corporate behavior this was also a personal moral failure.

But what intrigued me was the coverage that followed over the next several days with many commentators suggesting that what someone does in one aspect of their life is not relevant to their corporate life. There is a term for people with such ideas – stupid.

If a person is prepared to cheat on their most significant partner, and ignore the honesty needed in the most important of relationships, we can only expect that they will also be prepared to cheat on items with similar gravitas – business partners, their taxes, their finances etc. Now I am not trying to put ignoring a parking meter as the same as murder, but the decision making that goes into an immoral or unethical decision, particularly an ongoing set of immoral or unethical decisions and the deceit that is required to maintain the coverup, is a decision maker you don’t want on your team, or managing anything, let alone investors money, or the security of your personal identity.

I certainly have made mistakes in how I have dealt with others at times as well. And I don’t know this fellow’s situation and the nature of the relationship he has with his wife. What I do know is that when I see the level of discourse on whether it should affect how we think about him as a decision maker, it is another piece of evidence our society is falling apart, and that there is a growing percentage of the people we share the planet with who are very confused about how to conduct themselves and interact with others. Perhaps this is how we ended up with Trump.

Django

CANADA DAY

POSTED: JUNE 30, 2025

Canada Day, JULY 1, has always been a big thing to me. Like many Canadians I have had grandparents who were from somewhere else, and at least one parent who had chosen the country to call their new home.

We have gone in phases of course with many who will hyphenate their heritage and loyalties, Italian-Canadians, Irish-Canadians etc. but today with the threats to the country so real, and the challenges so great, it is exciting to see most of us just dropping that hyphenated portion and be proud of the country we have chosen.

Like the rest of the world, we have a lot of problems, some of our own making. Top of that list is our conflicted history with the Indigenous Peoples. But I think we are on the right path to reconciliation, even if it is early going.

I will be celebrating the day with a lot of Canadians and Canadian supporters on En Plein Air, here in Malta. I will be doing some cooking of course. There will be maple syrup, and various Canadian products. Its hard to source many of them in Malta but there will be a lot of Canadian Wines and Beer and some Alberta steak and some seafood from the Maritimes. The only thing I wont be serving is Poutine. I have always just found the combination of fries, gravy and cheese, gross. The soundtrack will range from the old stuff – Rush, Joni, Guess Who, Mr. Young of course, through the years of The Hip, Rough Trade, Sarah Mclachlan and then into the current crop but all in a mix, much like our country.

The attire will include various shirts involving the Maple Leaf, with several hockey shirts in the crowd.

We will end the evening with some Canadian Ice Wine, butter tarts, Nanaimo bars. The weather in Malta will be a great day and we will probably spend part of it out anchored off Gozo.

I have hosted this party before and with some certainty can set out clearly how the day ahead will go. I can’t however predict the future for Canada, but like all Canadians will have my elbows up, ready for what comes next.

Happy Canada Day!

Django

COINCIDENCE

POSTED: JUNE 1, 2025

Any regular visitors to this website know that I don’t understand exactly how everything works in the world. There is some stuff that escapes me – almost everything in the world of science for example! But the other things that often have me baffled, just when I think I have a good handle on them, are the things that occur in life. Coincidence is just such a notion. Sometimes its serendipity, sometimes neutral and sometimes bad, but regardless of the context I always find it more than a bit spooky.

Ian Fleming wrote (and I am paraphrasing) “something occurring once is happenstance, twice is coincidence and three times is enemy action”. Well, this week I was talking to my buddy Jim and he told me about just such a situation. Actually enemy action is not exactly accurate but some serious overlaps in events.

End of The Road Ukulele Group, Gardens Hotel, Key West

It started with his partner Janice playing with her Ukulele group in Key West about six weeks ago before Janice and Jim made the tough decision to head back to Canada early. The ukulele players range from professional to recreational musicians who play in various parks, pubs, and at events just for the fun of it. The ukuleles when played en masse are quite a formidable sound. So, a couple of weeks ago after playing in a pub one night for about sixty people and then playing a few days later at an outdoor garden party that was a fundraiser for local worthy cause they found themselves at an evening event to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the HINDU, a fine old wooden hull schooner that had recently been rebuilt and this was the relaunch. Various nautical and sea focused songs were performed and it was a good time. The day had seen all sorts of musical acts, and various tributes and stories about the fine old boat and this was one of the last of the acts to perform.

Now Key West is a small community so it was not really a coincidence that they were playing there as one of the ukulele players was related to the owners.

End Of The Road Ukulele Group Paying Dockside At HINDU Relaunch

What was a coincidence however is that the HINDU was the boat that my buddy Jim and Janice went on in Provincetown, Massachusetts in 1978 as part of their honeymoon. I don’t have any pictures of them on the boat at the time but Jim had a couple of shots from their honeymoon trip camping through New England.

1978 Janice & Jim Honeymoon Camping Trip

I had heard about this fine old wooden schooner.

The reason is that more than one person had mentioned it too me as it was one of the few schooners left that had been designed by William Hand, a naval architect in the United States. The reason it had been referenced to me more than once is that my boat, En Plein Air is a William Hand designed powersailer with a pilot house design. There are only a handful of these boats left on the planet. This Naval Architect William Hand was much like the architect Charles Rennie MacIntosh in Glasgow who when designing a building, would also design the crown molding, baseboards, casing and backband, windows and lots of little details like little nooks for books or space for a vase of flowers and the furniture for the place.

She is a 1925 gaff rigged schooner, but looks like she was just built. And that’s because of the magnitude of the refit she just went through. Her owners offer sailing charters in the winter in Key West and in the summer in Provincetown. On her way north during the pandemic at about 3:30 in the morning she hit a submerged keel boat and did significant damage. During the pandemic a lot of owners of large keel boats that were financed were sunk to collect the insurance. The owner of this one had created the holes in the hull and air chambers to make her sink but had neglected to put holes in the water tanks and sewage tanks, that were partially filled with air, so when the keel boat “sank” it was only to just below the surface and when the Hindu hit it might have well been running aground for all the damage done.

So after a long time, and considerable cost the Hindu is better than ever and has a new lease on life.

I love the fact that in this crazy complex and huge world, there are some things that just continue to have ties to other places, times and experiences and it is those connections that make them all the more significant to us.

Django

P.S. Just as I was posting this, I got an email from my buddy Jim who is now back in Canada from Key west but wanted to tell me that he and Janice went out for a sunset cruise on the HINDU, just a few days before they left the island, for the drive home.

I think it was particularly poignant for them because with Trumps declaration of economic war with Canada they will be challenged by the question of whether to return to Key West, a place they love and have friends who are important to them.

ONE HUNDRED DAYS

POSTED: MAY 1, 2025

A lot can happen in one hundred days. Apparently if you are an American President you can:

continue to support a war criminal in the middle east;
continue to support a war criminal in Russia;
round up a variety of people you think don’t belong in the country and send them to prisons in other countries;
propose taking over with force a sovereign country in Central America;
rename an international body of water;
threaten to invade a remote island in the North Atlantic because it is strategic to your plans;
terminate large swaths of Federal civil servants with no regard to employment contracts, tenure, or equity, and even eliminate entire departments of government including one department that has had so much positive outreach in the world in softening the hard edge of so powerful a country;
threaten former allies and major trading partners around the world;
impose unrealistic tariffs on both democratic and non- democratic states without regard for the impact on world stability or the very livelihood of many of your own citizens;
execute many of these plans with the assistance of a private citizen who benefits financially from much of the decisions made;
ignore the rule of law and the institutions created to enforce it.

And what is even more amazing is you can do these things with virtually no opposition from the elected representatives who are actually charged with making most of these decisions. It is one thing for domestic political opponents to not be able to stop these actions but inconceivable that these actions can be taken without at least some of the members of the majority party stepping up to do the right thing.

One hundred days is a very short time to do such damage. The decades of positive work done on so many fronts can be eliminated with the stroke of a sharpie.

Being on this planet gives me a stake in this war he is waging, but being a Canadian also makes me an active combatant. The trade war waged on Canada is already devastating for both economies, but longer term it will be worse for Canada.

The rhetoric surrounding the taking over of Canada by economic force however has rallied the country like never before. I am seventy-one, and it’s the first time I have seen supporters of all political stripes uniting to this extent.

In that same one hundred days, in Canada we have seen the Prime Minister step down, a leadership convention, leading to a new Prime Minister, and a federal election occur over just several weeks. We also witnessed the early front-runner in that election who patterned himself partially off the American President, go from twenty percent ahead in the polls to his party not winning the election and not even winning his own seat in the House of Commons.

Mark Carney is the adult in the room. He is the adult in any room he is in and a very smart, disciplined, ethical person, who has the support to take on this battle. It is an unfortunate truth however that he can not solve the problems created by Trump, but he can work to rethink the Canadian economy to catch up with the Canadian psyche. That psyche is very much elbows up. We are scared, feel betrayed, but like the Ukrainians are gearing up for the fight.

Let the games begin.

Django