Right on, Weather Guy Phillips!

Dave Phillips, Environment Canada's hugely popular weather publicist and creator of the The Canadian Weather Trivia Calendar was guest speaker this past fall at a meeting of the Canadian Geographical Society in Edmonton.
Following his talk, his calendars were offered for sale and Dave agreed to sign them.
I asked him to sign the January page of my calendar with a guess about how cold and snowy the winter would be. As a cross country skier, I love cold and snow -- the more, the better. Dave obliged by signing the page with a declaration that he was "Looking forward to a La Nina Year". I understand that lots of cold and snow are characteristic of such years.
As I write this on a Monday afternoon, following a wonderful, old-fashioned blizzard yesterday, it's minus 31 and forecast to dip to minus 34 tonight. It's the coldest I have seen it in at least a couple of years and there is
a deep snowpack on our streets. The included photos show the front of my house and my signed calendar.
Way ta go, Dave!!
P.S. After I curled this morning, Joan and I spent an hour shoveling off our sidewalks and driveway.
Then we loaded the shovels in the car and spent two hours shoveling out the driveway and sidewalks of an old couple who can't do that any more. The heavy, wind-blown snow was almost a meter deep in places and we had to duck into their heated garage three or four times to warm up before we finished the job.

Bostonian To Blaze New Trail at Edmonton Journal?

The Edmonton Journal finally has a new publisher 14 months after Linda Hughes resigned when she realized that her new bosses at CanWest Global value healthy profits over first-rate journalism.
Considering his academic and business background, her successor, John J. McDonald (the Third, no less), seems like a very odd duck...
Raised in Boston, Mass., where he attended a private boys' school, he got a BA in history and Russian language at Boston College. He apparently developed an interest in things Canadian while getting an MA in Russian and East European Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa.
Then it was back to Boston for his MBA in 1986 at the prestigious Babson School of Business. For the next 20 years, he worked in the U.S. advertising business for Yellow Pages and then Verizon.
Ya gotta wonder what inspires a guy like that to suddenly jump into the Canadian newspaper business -- and here, of all places. Did he get on the wrong plane, thinking he was going to the power centre of Alberta?
It must have been a hell of a shock when he got here and realized that Calgary is 320 kilometres further south...
When McDonald's appointment was announced Jan. 14, he was quoted as saying that he wants The Journal to gain broad recognition for its journalistic excellence. Besides being the voice of Edmonton, "I want The Journal to be one of the most innovative papers in Canada and beyond".
It's hard to imagine how that will happen.
I was one of more than 20 senior reporters and editors who took advantage of a CanWest buy-out four years ago. Forty years after getting my journalism degree at Carleton University, it was a good time for me to quit.
CanWest slashed The Journal's newsroom budget and drastically shrank its staff. The few new reporters hired are on contract with no benefits. Requests for basic tools such as phones with call display are denied. Those who remain are expected to do more without added compensation.
For example, all those staff blogs in the online Journal are done for free.
It was everything we feared Conrad Black would do (but didn't) when he bought the former Southam newspaper chain, including The Journal.
McDonald's arrival coincides with a second major buy-out of newsroom staff which will see 28 senior editors, reporters and columnists gone by Feb. 1.
This buy-out was triggered by a basic change involving the news selection and lay-out of pages for world and Canadian news at all CanWest dailies.
Instead of having local editors select content from various sources, that work and the page make-up will all be done in Hamilton, Ont. Generic pages will then be emailed out to The Journal, the Calgary Herald and all the other dailies.
CanWest already provides generic, cookie cutter content for movie and television reviews. Remember the great movie reviews Mark Horton used to do? That kind of local content is gonzo.
Wonder why you no longer see the CP logo in The Journal?
CanWest saved about $5 million a year by pulling out of the Canadian Press news sharing cooperative that was created to let Canadians know what was happening all across the country.
Content from papers such as the Toronto Star, the Globe, the Halifax Daily News, the
Calgary Sun -- and a raft of smaller dailies-- is no longer available to Edmontonians. And with no CanWest dailies in the Maritimes, that part of Canada is like a big geographic black hole for us.
The news flow from Edmonton and Calgary to the rest of Canada is similarly restricted.
It's probably the worst thing CanWest has done since it got into the newspaper business and it has happened with barely a nod or a whimper from our provincial and federal politicians.
If you believe that healthy democracies best thrive on an abundance of information and viewpoints, you'd have to agree that Canwest is going in the absolutely worst direction.
I'm afraid that what's going to happen in John J. McDonald (the Third)'s brave new world is a chain of very profitable CanWest newspapers that will look and read almost the same from city to city.
__________________
* See The Journal story regarding the McDonald's appointment at:
www.canada.com/edmontonjournal/news/story.html?id=42e88d11-eb5e-4780-8faf-7147a37ec6a8&k=89893
* Exerpt from CanWest MediaWorks (Canada) Inc. Nov 30/07 financial statement:
14. RESTRUCTURING
In November 2007, management made a decision to move the production functions of certain sections of the newspaper to one central location. Due to the move of these functions a workforce reduction plan was announced for the affected newspapers. The workforce reduction is expected to be complete by the end of May 2008. During November 2007, an accrual of $7.8 million was recorded in accounts payable and accrued liabilities and expensed in restructuring expenses. This accrual has been reduced by payments of $0.1 million as at November 30, 2007 resulting in an accrual of $7.7 million as at November 30,2007. Management expects that further costs relating to this workforce reduction plan will be incurred; however, as at November 30, 2007 those costs were not determinable.

Well, I DID Have My Day in Court...

There's a saying that goes something like this : "He who represents himself in court, has a fool for a lawyer."
Well, to that you can add: "If you have a fool for a lawyer, don't go to court on a Friday the 13th!"
I thought my trial on Friday, Jan. 13, 2006, on a charge of careless driving, would be a piece of cake. Not only would I win but the judge would compliment me on my brilliant defense.
Boy, was I wrong! The judge was not impressed.
After stating that anything my chief witness might testify would be irrelevant, he found me guilty and fined me $405.
(An even worse hit came later when my insurance company cancelled my policy and I had to renew with an insurer who more than doubled the premium... )
Last September, I had been helping my brother on his sheep farm west of Edmonton. On the way home, I was driving south on 149th Street, following a Jeep station wagon.
As we approached 111th Avenue, the Jeep driver braked suddenly. I couldn't stop in time and rear-ended her vehicle.
The Jeep was basically undamaged because the spare tire on its back door cushioned most of the blow. But the front of my old Mazda MPV van was caved in, the radiator was broken and its fluid spilled on the road.
(My insurance company later wrote off the van and I ended up having to buy a new car -- our fabulous 2006 Honda Civic.)
When a cop arrived 80 minutes after my first call, he said he had no choice but to charge me with careless driving. But he said he didn't believe it was an appropriate charge and that I should contest it.
He said the police have been instructed by Alberta Justice that in all such accidents, careless driving is the only charge they can lay.
In a later interview, his superior, a sergeant, told me that since it's rarely possible to prove a charge of 'following too close', Alberta Justice has directed police to lay the more serious careless driving charge.
Those charged usually end up doing a deal with the crown prosecutor, agreeing to plead guilty to a lesser charge of following too close, thereby avoding a trial and the need for police time in court.
The traffic sergeant told me he was writing a report to the Solicitor General, recommending that the Alberta Safety Act should be amended to include a new charge midway in seriousness between careless driving and following too close.
I did subpoena him and the traffic court judge grudgingly allowed me to call him to the stand.
But he cautioned that the only matter before him was my careless driving charge. Whether the police disagree with laying that charge is irrelevant, he said.
When I put myself on the stand, I made what I later realized was a crucial tactical error.
When asked how much distance there was between our vehicles as we approached the intersection, I got flustered and quickly guessed about 60 feet. It was probably closer to 30 feet. But the crown prosecutor leaped and said if I couldn't stop with a 60-foot separation, then I was following too close. And he said the Alberta courts have ruled that following too close is evidence of careless driving.
The judge agreed with him and found me guilty.
Before going into court, I knew I could likely make a deal with the crown prosecutor and plead guilty to following too close. The fine would have been $175.
But I airily told the crown prosecutor that I preferred to go to trial. He shrugged and as much as said, 'have fun'.
Had I consulted a lawyer and had he not been a money-grubber, I would likely have been advised to go for a deal with the crown prosecutor.
It was an expensive lesson, all around...
But I'm convinced that Alberta Justice has devised a devious way of getting drivers to plead guilty to a charge that basically cannot be proved in court.
Instead of having to prove a charge of following too close, they charge drivers with a more serious offence, knowing that most will agree to plead guilty to the lesser charge.
It's a perversion of justice, in my opinion. But who am I, anyway --- just a fool!

That ("special dog") ...Maligne

If you phone my daughter in Vancouver and no one is home, the answering machine will kick in with a message from Toby that goes something like this:
"You have reached the NEW home of Sarah, Toby and Maligne (special dog) ... ."
When Toby www.seetobylive.com and Sarah www.tobyandsarah.com began their relationship a few years ago, she made it very clear that it was a package deal that included Maligne, who is now a huge part of their life.
I guess Sarah inherited a love of pets from me. We had a succession of dogs ("Lady" in particular) and cats that met various untimely ends when I was a boy.
Sarah's first dog was a lively little Heinz 57 mutt that I acquired about 1981 while on assignment for the Edmonton Journal.
It involved a story about a Canadian Coastguard tug making its annual spring trip down the Athabasca River from Fort McMurray to Lake Athabasca and then down the Slave River to Fort Fitzgerald on the Northwest Territories border.
Large barges were then being operated out of Fort McMurray to supply the uranium mine and townsite at Uranium City, Sask. on the east end of Lake Athabasca.
The Coastguard tug Miskew would open the shipping season by going down the two rivers and marking problem sandbars with buoys. The crew would also stop at every bend to set out a navigation marker on the river bank.
When the trip ended at the Fort Fitzgerald Coastguard base, I saw a little black and white pup scampering around. The tug captain said to take him because he would only get caught in someone's trap, anyway.
Fitz (seen in the above picture taken in the Porcupine Hills, west of my parents' Claresholm home) was a much-loved part of our household while I was a single Dad. He and Sarah came as a package when Joan and I got married in 1986.
At the ripe old doggy age of about twelve, Fitz went to that place in the sky where delicious, stinky bones are buried everywhere.
When Sarah began living on her own, she went looking for a dog at the Edmonton pound and found Maligne, a sort of husky cross.
Sarah was then heavily-involved in whitewater kayaking and named her dog after the river that drains Maligne Lake in Jasper park.
Maligne has a kid's personality, curiosity and a lively intelligence . She always has a happy, tongue-lolling grin and turns heads and triggers smiles wherever she goes for a walk.
Sarah lavished affection on her, giving her obedience lessons, the best veterinary care and only high quality, pelletized dog food.
She takes Maligne everywhere, even kayaking and hiking.
I love to go for walks with Maligne who adores chasing cloth frisbees, tennis balls, squirrels etc.
When I took her with me on a couple of canoe trips last year, she would sit regally at the bow, calmly watching the scenery.
It's hilarious seeing her plunge into the water after a stick, coming out looking like a drowned rat before vigorously shaking herself off.
She knows some fine tricks, including "high five", shake-a-paw and roll over. But her specialty is chasing cloth frisbees. She goes racing after them, leaping and catching them in mid-air 90 per cent of the time.
I like to take her to the Crestwood School playground near our home. It's surrounded by a chain link fence which has three or four small openings for kids to use without having to go to the main entrance.
When I toss the frisbee into the playground, Maligne scoots along the fence until she finds an opening, leaps through and then goes looking and sniffing for the frisbee.
Sarah and Toby moved to Vancouver in July where they managed to find a dog-friendly rental house owned by a couple who are now out of the country.
Anyone who knows Sarah well knows she doesn't do anything by halves. To counter landlords wary of pets, she had prepared a " doggy resume" that listed all Maligne's good and bad points (very few of those).
Maligne, Toby and Sarah and they have fitted in very well in Vancouver. But there was one nasty surprise.
One of Maligne's bad points is that when she sees a cat, no amount of yelling will stop her from chasing after it.
A couple of months after the move, Sarah let Maligne out for a pee just before bed time. Maligne spotted a black and white 'cat' in the shadows and went for it.
You got it. It was no cat. The skunk gave Maligne both barrels right in the face and the household was soon in an uproar. There was a rush trip to an all-night vet centre where they got some enzyme product to deodorize her.
But apparently she still exudes a whiff of 'eau de skunk' if her fur gets wet. As the old Swede said, "too soon vee get old; too late vee get schmart!"

What Good is A Golf Course In Winter?

Well, for one thing, there are no golfers cluttering up the place.
And those carefully-mowed fairways are great for skiing with a covering of as little as two or three inches of snow.
I've skiied on Edmonton's golf courses -- Victoria, Riverside, Rundle, Mill Woods and the Edmonton Golf and Country Club for more than 30 years.
Of course, I'd rather be out in the mountains. But when they're a five-hour drive away, you have to find alternatives.
The photo above shows my daughter, Sarah, and her "special dog" Maligne at the Golf and Country Club last January when snow conditions were great.
Riverside and Victoria are used by a lot of skiers but Victoria is by far the busiest with tracks set by Edmonton Parks and Recreation staff. Racers from the university are there every day when snow conditions are good.
I prefer to set my own track.
Machine-set tracks are too wide and too uniform for my liking. And the track setters generally show little imagination as far as choosing a route that maximizes the terrain to make the views and 'climbs' and glides interesting.
My routes go past and through clumps of trees, especially evergreens, to give a kind of 'wilderness' illusion. They take in any sidehills, bumps, berms or depressions I can find. And they're never straight, always tracing long, sensuous curves so that the view always changes.
I was one of the founding members of the Edmonton Nordic Ski Club back around 1971 when we promoted moonlight ski trips at Victoria to pique people's curiosity.
With all the city lights reflecting off clouds, there's no problem seeing where to go. And when there's a full moon, it's fantastic.
The cold is no problem when you have a good, wind-resistant anorak over a pile jacket. Cross country skiers generate a lot of heat. The faster you go, the warmer you get.
Victoria has a couple of side hills where you can crank out half a dozen telemark turns. Mill Woods has a great tele slope facing north toward Whitemud Drive.
But my favorite course is the Edmonton Golf and Country Club which borders a high bank of the North Saskatchewan River with wonderful views out over the river and Terwillegar Park.
Oddly enough, it has very little use, although in my opinion it provides the best skiing within a 50 km radius of the city. That includes the Blackfoot Grazing Reserve and Elk Island National Park.
It's bisected by a deep ravine with a suspension bridge for golf carts.
The eastern half has some wonderful terrain extending out from the club house between the access road and the river valley. If you're really energetic, you can ski down to a big, flat flood plain below the golf course and opposite Terwillegar Park.
The west half has a fantastic overlook to Terwillegar Park and some very good up and down terrain that includes another deep ravine.
There are a lot of deer, rabbits and birds. Occasionally, I see coyotes. One day I saw what I'm convinced was a wolf.
Unfortunately, as I write this on New Year's Day, 2006, we're in the clutches of a mild, snow-less winter with no end in sight. I haven't been able to go out once so far this winter.
The organizers of the big "Birkiebeiner" cross country competition in mid-February at the Blackfoot must be tearing their hair out...

Winning Big Bucks at Jasper Place Curling Rink

Well, I guess I'll have to turn pro...
Look carefully at my left hand and you'll see the loot I won at the December/'05 Senior Men's Bonspiel at Jasper Place Curling Rink.
Twelve teams were assembled from the senior men's leagues at the Jasper Place and Crestwood Curling Clubs.
Over three days from Dec. 28 to 30 we played eight games and only lost one. (Actually, that's a bit of a lie because we tied in five of our six round robin games which involved four ends each with no tie-breaker...)
We moved from the round robin into the main semi-final game which we lost and then won the main consolation game.
The team from left is Ian Inglis, 63, who I've known since I was in university; Andy Anderson, 82, skip; Art Platten, 83, lead (he was the contractor when the rink was built in 1959) and yours truly, 64, second.
While both Andy and Art have to use "extenders" to deliver their rocks and Art is unable to sweep because of his arthritis, together they have about 100 years experience and are very good tacticians.
Curling is obviously a life-long sport.
If you can no longer bend down to deliver your rocks, you can use an extender -- a stick with a plastic sleeve on one end which fits over the handle of the rock. A lot of these guys are just deadly with extenders.
Several belong to an Edmonton club of senior curlers with a minimum age of 80 years!
Two of the guys on the team we played against in our final game have limited vision and use binoculars to scope out the house at the other end of the sheet before delivering their rocks.
It's only my second year of curling but I'm doing pretty well (usually as second). I couldn't play except as a spare in most the fall season because of my surgery in mid-October.
But starting this month, I'll play every Tuesday and Friday morning at the Crestwood rink near where we live. And I'll curl some Mondays as a spare at with the City Church Curling League at the Shamrock rink.
In mid-January, my older brother, Garnet, and I will join our younger brother David at a bonspiel at the tiny Seba Beach rink. It's near where David and his partner, Jane, have a menagerie of livestock and dogs on their farm overlooking Wabamun Lake.

Can't bank on Edmonton Journal's "Money Game"

It seemed like fun contest -- at first...
In late September of 2005, the Edmonton Journal invited its readers to join in the "Money Game" which involved collecting 'money' printed in the paper for use in bidding for 24 prizes.
Available were cars, holiday trips and merchandise ranging from a $1,200 computer to a $30,000 Mini Cooper car and a $50,000 BMW. Bank notes for $25,000, $50,000, $75,000, $100,000 and $1 million appeared in the paper over about 10 days with a total of $2.5 million available to each subscriber.
No limits were set on how much more could be collected by various means.
Bidding opened on groups of four prizes per day for six days. While you could bid any amount on any prize, no one could win more than one. Bidding was to remain open for each group for three days, after which the names of the highest bidders were to be published.
I strategized how and when to bid, figuring the odds would be best for the lowest value prizes. But, obviously, I'd have to scrounge money from wherever -- from friends and relatives, by looking in papers left in coffee shops etc.
When the first of two $1 million notes were printed, things began getting crazy.
I decided to buy some papers, reasoning that buying 10 papers for their $1 million coupons
was no more foolish than buying some Lotto 649 tickets.
Trouble was, all the stores seemed to be sold out! And when I began to look for papers in the Journal street boxes, they were empty!
Someone wrote in The Journal's "Venting" section that they saw people methodically stealing armloads from Journal street boxes.
A United Way of Edmonton official said some of their agencies had members and supporters collecting Journal money in hope of winning a prizes for the agency.
With this kind of stuff going on, I figured I had to step up the ante or drop out.
I had no shame. I got more friends to collect for me. I did the rounds of several coffee shops, looking for discarded Journals. I climbed into newspaper recycling bins at several locations.
When the second $ 1 million note was printed, I was up before dark, looking for Journals at dozens of gas bars and convenience stores. They were all sold out except for one with a sign saying "limit of 2". I bought two.
My local Safeway store opened its doors at 8 a.m. and I was the first one in. There must have been 60 Journals for sale. I figured that in good conscience, I couldn't take more than 20. As I
left the check-out, I looked back and saw that a young couple had scooped all the rest...
By now I had amassed about $103 million, clipped from more than 240 papers. But I knew that I didn't have a hope in hell against thieves. Their bids would probably be in the BILLIONS of dollars.
When the names of the first four top bidders were published, I was dismayed to see that bid amounts were not shown. That would have set some kind of bench mark.
Still, I figured my wad might be worth something to other bidders and I tried to sell it in a Journal want ad. They refused to accept it. Nor would its competitor, the Edmonton Sun.
A few days later, a Journal ad said they had changed the rules.
Names of the top bidders would no longer be published because "unsportsmanlike" people hassled the top bidders. None of those named had been declared winners, it added.
Names and photos of all 24 winners will be published on or after October 23, it said.
It will be VERY interesting if The Journal is fair to its readers and publishes the bid amounts. Just as interesting would be to hear the winners explain how they amassed their dollars...

Addendum: After a two-week extension of the date for announcing the winners (because of the schmozzle created by the stupid rules), the names and pictures of the winners, together with their bid amounts, were published. They ranged from $301 million for the least desireable prize to $1,206 billion for the BMW and $4,851 billion for the Mini Cooper.
Considering how many papers I had to find to amass my bid, I figure the winner of the Mini Cooper had to collect at least 12,000 papers.
How was that possible? It would have made for a fascinating newspaper story. Curiously, not a word about it appeared in The Journal...

A new North Sask River pedestrian bridge to nowhere?

A bicycle/pedestrian bridge over the North Saskatchewan River is nearing completion in Edmonton's booming southwest corner, attached to new Anthony Henday Drive bridge.
The link -- as shown in the attached photo -- will be the only pedestrian river crossing between the Quesnell bridge and Devon.
But it may be a bridge to nowhere if off-leash dog walkers and dirt track mountain bikers who use Terwillegar Park have their way.
Last spring, they persuaded City Hall to halt the extension of a multi-use trail through the park to the bridge site.
They claimed that providing a wide, smooth trail would eventually see Terwillegar become another Hawrelak Park. They want to preserve it as a huge off-leash park with only rough dirt trails for cyclists.
Terwillegar has been held in reserve for park use for several decades and the off-leash dog walkers and mountain bikers gravitated to it. Fair enough.
But must the status quo be preserved indefinitely? Who speaks for citizens at large, for cyclists who may wish to commute through the park to the city centre?
Terwillegar is supposed to be an integral part of the "ribbon of green" involving valley parks and an 88-km multi-use trail from Fort Saskatchewan to Devon. Who will champion the ribbon of green?
The River Valley Alliance, a private corporation involving Edmonton, Devon, Fort Saskatchewan and four area counties, claims that its main goal is to "facilitate" the ribbon of green.
But this group which meets in private and produces no annual reports takes a "hands-off" approach to trail development in the park.
Sol Rolingher, an Edmonton lawyer who chairs the Alliance, says while a trail through the park is part of the ribbon of green, they will not take a public stand on it.

Update, 21 Jan '08
Nothing has changed in three years. The dirt track between the bridge and Terwillegar Park is still fit only for mountain bikers and hikers. When it's wet and muddy, it's almost unusable.
The City continues taking baby steps in extending the Ribbon of Green public spaces and trail in southwest Edmonton. It recently bought the large flood plain opposite Terwillegar and below the Edmonton Country Club and will hold it in reserve for park use.
Construction will start later this year on a pedestrian bridge linking the upstream end of Fort Edmonton with this new park reserve which is a key element of the RoG. Another pedestrian bridge is needed to link the upstream end of this land with Terwillegar Park.
The River Valley Alliance is still dead on arrival as far as becoming a public advocate for the RoG and reviving the Parks Department's plan for a multi-use trail linking Terwillegar and the Henday bridge...