BOCA INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHING COMPANY

Sunday, February 12th, 2012, 9:55 p.m.

Years ago, as a youngster, I became hooked on awards. It was a way of showing others that I was good at something. Never satisfied with just one award, I went on to earn others, cub badges, scout badges, racing ribbons, school sweater badges, just about anything that proved I had some skills. I then went on to the Kin organization and while there from 1966 to 1969 and 1974 until 1986, I got too involved with everything. Today I have a wall of thirty year old brass plaques, probably about 14 or 15 of them. They will likely be around long after I die. They do not mean much to people outside of the organization but to me each one was an accomplishment. Winning a national public relations award was probably among my favourites and the Life Membership was a fitting end to my years in Kin. They are all symbols of achievement, something that my paintings and ebooks have become in later years. While I did not make a million dollars and in fact went the other way as the years rode onward, I still gained a great deal of satisfaction in what little I did achieve. Four university degrees allowed me to make up for a lifetime of learning disabilities and as I look back, I can see that history will not speak well of my financial successes but it will remember me in the family history I have researched over 38 years and the fact that after 62 years I was able to reunite my mother with her older sister and give them ten years together towards the end of their lives. There are things in my past life I wish I could forget but they travel with me every waking moment and I know they are there. I live with the baggage of a lot of years but I have learned to let it go and not let it rule my life. There is no such thing as a perfect life, it begins and it ends, like that of my friend Harry who died while in university or Jeff and his brother Brian, childhood friends who did not live beyond 60 or so. Life is a journey and we all go down the same road. I watch a great many movies and TV shows because it is the generation I grew up with and it is an important part of my life. I am constantly attracted to the actresses of my daughter's age because it is the age I best remember and the youthfulness I carry inside this deteriorating old body. I do not expect to finish my life in someone else's arms so I am resigned to accept what comes and live the remaining years to the fullest. There are no promises in life, just the journey. I will leave this world eventually with the hope of a better life for those who follow. I hope to stick around long enough to see my grandchild and perhaps other grandchildren grew and prosper. Only time can take care of that. Give me another twenty years and maybe that will happen. If not, so be it, I have had my turn and now it is their's. As time goes by, all I can hope for is to be remembered by those who really care. That will be my last award in this life, long after I am gone. But don't count me out just yet!!!!!

Wednesday, February 8th, 2012, 10:55 p.m.

Friendships are an interesting thing. My parents had a close friendship with their neighbours at the lake before 2005. The neighbours were more like my age than that of my parents. In fact, there is a closer relationship between my younger sister by three years than my parents had with them as neighbours. I think they looked at my parents as replacements for their own parents as it was the feeling I got at times when I was down there. When my parents first moved to the lake back in 1974, it was my older brother and I who poured the concrete bases for the deck that surrounded the west end of the house. Along the way, I did repairs to the old decks between efforts by my father but in time the whole deck needed replacement. Thirty years later it was the neighbour who replaced the deck for my father. It was something he was particularly good at and there was nothing further he could do to his own property to make it better. Because my parents lived to be 88 and 85 they had a number of different groups of friends. There were the business associates from the general office where my father spent a lot of years before his promotion to one of the top three in the company, the other two being family members who owned the company. Then there were the son and his wife who had trained together in medical school and live in Saudi Arabia for a dozen years or more. They in turn were the son and daughter-in-law of a couple who my parents had known since the 1950s. He had worked for my father's firm for his entire life in the high end retail jewellery business having gone from Halifax to Calgary in his employment journey across Canada. Times were different back then and the way people celebrated friendships was also very different. Those who had gone to war in the 1940s had learned how to party with friends in a military situation. They quickly learned how short life could be for some and how important it was to get out and have a good time. My parents had regular parties at the house after the war right into the early 70s when they started to see their own friend begin to pass on like I have done in the past thirty years. Their parties were either for business associates or for just friends that gathered each week to celebrate in their own way....a few bottles of booze, beer and food. Most of it was talk or a bit of dancing but always fun. For one reason or another, my parents latched on to a group known as the Somerset bowling league. It met once a week throughout the winter for an evening of exercise and fun. I also filled in at time when spares were needed. That same group living on Somerset Road, home to my dad's older brother and family who introduced the family to it, consisted of a number of my uncle's neighbours who had been gathering for as long as I could remember while they lived on that street. Time would take care of that group as it slowly moved away, died off or finally left because of the deteriorating political situation in the Province of Quebec. Montreal had been the financial center of Canada for something like a hundred and fifty years until the French element drove it away with idealist thoughts of sovereignty for the large Quebec French element within the borders Canada. While I never thought of it that way, I was always aware that the family friends were always the same groups of friends that my parents had known all their lives. From time to time, a gathering of the clan brought out old friends and family but as time passed they were fewer and farther between. In time, it was the offspirngs of those families that came to those gatherings and the locals whose lives had been influenced or totally changed for knowing my parents. It did not dawn on my how the changes had come about until my father said one day that they had outlived all of their wartime friends, all of their early friends and had not expected to live beyond their mid-sixties because their own natural parents had all died by the age of 65. My mother lost her natural  parents at ages 54 and 30 and my father lost his natural parents at ages 65 and 56. Both their fathers had remarried and my mother was close to her stepmother who had raised her as a teen but my father resented his stepmother and never spoke to her since she ended up with the family wealth after my grandfather died. She was seen by him as an opportunist and nothing more than his father's secretary from work until he married her a year after his wife died. My father had been away at war for 4-1/2 years and came home to find a dying mother and a father who was seldom there.

Even I, my older brother and younger sister have already outlived all of our grandparents. This was a surprise to my parents who found their own longevity a unexpected happening. They took to the road and travelled for months after my father's early retirement at age 54 and travelled a great deal in North America and Europe. Dad live another 34 years after retirement, something he was not really prepared for with the effects of inflation and the added costs of living in the country but he had prepared his financial situation as best as he could to ensure they would survive in reasonable comfort. Fortunately, his skills as a businessman took care of a number of services for which neighbours would regularly have to pay like snowremoval, dock launching, mechanical repairs and so on. His skill as an accountant, negotiator, manager, corporate executive and willingness to take on any task placed him in high local esteem.

Among the people I have known in my life, I can count only two at the moment who are presently in my life. The rest were just acquaintences who at the time were close but who because of my own inability to keep up relationships, disappeared over time. One of my present friends and I see each other anywhere from one to three months apart because of our different states of health. He still skis while I had to give it up thirteen years ago. He still plays tennis while I have had to deal with two hip replacements and other medical problems. Still, we have been good friends since first meeting some 29 years ago and now live some three streets from each other. My other friend is younger by some 15 years our having met during rehab at the hosptal in 2010 shortly after having my first hip replacement. He has gone through a variety of physical problems, emotional problems and is headed for great financial trouble unless he is able to pick things up shortly and do something to earn a living. Unfortunately, he has a knee replacement to go through next so it is not over for him and a back operation is in the works for the future. LIfe is never easy for some. Nevertheless, he and I get together every month or so for an afternoon that consists of coffee and often lunch or an early evening meal, usually at a fancy coffee shop somewhere followed by a trip to a mall, Chinese restaurant, or perhaps a  Thai or simple Vietnamese restaurant somewhere. It is usually a good outing. Well, time to go now that I am thinking about food again....tough thing when you are on a diet, and yes, I have been losing weight, how much and for how long I cannot tell you but something is working in my favour.

Bye until next time.

Friday, February 4th, 2012

Every day the year is going by faster. It is hard to believe that this week was full from Monday to Friday with a trip somewhere to do something each day, mostly to see doctors, have my ears tested, have my toenails cut at the hospital, and then back to the hospital drugstore again today to pick up a three month supply of pills which seem to be doing wonders with my body. For whatever reason, I have lost something like 20 pounds in the past month because of my change in diet. That may only be because I am dehydrated but I also think it has a lot to do with the fact that I have made some severe diet changes. If you are wondering about the title of today's blog it is because I wanted to tell you about my exciting weight loss but not seem like a braggert at the same time. This is what I came up with. The other nice thing about the pill combination I am on right now is that my body is not going into the contortions I was going through before I started to take them and drink a lot more water. Now I can go each day and do my thing almost like a normal person, given that I also still use two canes to get around after being largely bedridden for the past four years and had two hip replacements. At least these days, I am able to get out of bed each day, get up, get dressed and go do something. This weekend I promised myself I would begin to tackle the spring cleaning I started in January and did not get very far with. The only problem with that is that it interferes with things like this blog and my book editing time which I have not done for a number of weeks now and which I  have to get back to shortly. Why don't kitchen fairies or dust monsters really exist to help people like me out?

Well, I do not have a lot to say today so I will say no more.....besides there is the gremlin pulling at my pantleg looking for some attention....see you later!

FEBRUARY 1ST, 2012, 2:42 P.M.

I suppose you are wondering about the title of today's blog. Well it is SMTWTFS otherwise pronounced with a silent F as SMITWITS. It is the name given to pill takers who spend their lives filling the little boxes full of a variety of pills hoping to solve one thing or another in the process. Well, I have to admit, at age 67 I too have become a SMITWITS character. Failthfully each week I fill the little boxes with a whole variety of some dozen pills and faithfully try to take them each evening before I go to bed. However, that number has now grown to a figure of fifteen pills with all of the vitamins and other things I am taking so I have now upgraded to a larger container and I am now one of the bigger SMTWTFS users. That makes me a real SMITWITS character of some considerable note. My new container is just over 10 inches long and about 1-1/2 inches wide and an inch deep. Now that I am the top SMITWITS around here I will get to use this unit for the rest of my life.....the other one I had was my mother's early pill container. She died in 2005 at the age of 85 and had outgrown her tiny SMTWTFS container too. So if you see me pull out this gigantic thing one day, you will recognize me as the top SMITWITS and not challenge me. If you did, I would probably hit you with one of my two canes so beware.....or maybe I will just throw a bunch of pills at you.....on second thoughts, maybe not, you might swallow something that only works for me and that would be a real waste.  

January 31st, 2012, 7:05 a.m.

I am a real movie buff. I even have a B.A. degree in film studies, one of my many interests in life. In fact, I have been a movie extra in films like Searching for Bobby Fischer and five other movies for the screen or TV. I was the gas station jockey in Strange Invaders although most of the shots ended up on the cutting room floor. When I saw the launch of the film in Toronto, I was most surprised to learn that the opening scenes that took a look at a beautiful house from all the surrounding streets in the area, happened to be the one my wife at the time and I owned. The idea of the film was great in the beginning but I have to admit, not well finished rbrn though it had a number of well known actors, including one with an academy award. Nevertheless, the experience taught me how films were made and the roles of the various people. In addition it spurred me on to take classes in various forms of film out of genuine interest, Hollywood Cinema, Japanese film, African film, documentary film, plus a course in film making and screenwriting. Of course, I filled out the other credits I needed with Fine Arts studio courses. I lived and loved the whole creation process even though I could not finish my documentary so that it was properly done.

Well, you probably wonder why I titled this blog entry as Bollywood Film. Simple, after finding Netflix I found modern day Bollywood films. Because I was accustomed to foreign films from my days at school, and did not mind reading the English subtitles, I found a new and exciting form of film that far outstrips the efforts of Hollywood which I am getting tired of because the keep recycling the same old lines and themes time and again. Now that videos are on the way out, there is a much better chance of change and Netflix is a good step in that direction. The extraordinary efforts put into Bollywood films, even if some of them are 3 hours long, still outweighs the efforts of Hollywood and yet, copies it from the nineteen thirties and forties with dancing and singing, things long lost in the modern Hollywood films. Sure, the nasal high-pitched Indian singing done by the women takes a bit of getting used to but the skills with which the films are put together, other than the locations, unusual dress, cultural backwardness in some areas and other negative things, still has caught my attention. I cannot remember when I hated a horrible father as much as I found myself doing in one of the films. Normally, it did not phase me but for once, i wanted to go out and hit him myself. Some of the story lines are great too and to a guy the women in these films understand that sex is a big part of their being and they use their bodies to attract men everywhere. There is this constant use of rain to make them look more sexy in their wet clothing and I quite doubt that this is normal for the number of times it happens in such a warm country.  In any case, I highly recommend that you watch a few Bollywood films and get to know what other cultures are all about, it will allow you to better understand the people and the life they came from to get here. Then again, I am writing this in Toronto and I have to admit I have been exposed to the multi-cultural world of this city for more than forty years now....unfortunately, I can only speak two of the languages and a smattering of the rest. So I will close by saming, Gung Hai, Fat Choy.....however it's spelt..... that's one of the smatters <smile> What do you mean New years is over and I cannot say that...it is still January, isn't it? Eleven more months to go and then I will wish you Happy New Year again in Chinese!

Sunday, January 22nd, 2012,  10:30 p.m.

Well, today's topic is pills. You know, sometimes we refuse taking pills for one reason or another. After my mother was almost over medicated on too many different drugs by a country doctor and began to lose her hearing,she only then realized that some things in the country did not keep up to what was going on in the rest of the world. I am sure the old doctor was doing his best and meant well but it was not helping her. Once her medications were reviewed down in Kingston, Ontario, 25 miels from where she lived, it became apparent that she needed to find a new doctor. That problem solved, she regained her health and lasted another twenty years, even having her arthritic hands unbuckled by an operation which allowed her to use a pen again so she could sign her name. Well, I am at the age now when all this happened to her and I am on the same road. I seemed to hesitate with all the medication I was prescribed over the past few decades and I have tended to ween myself off of pills until now. Today, I take about thirteen pills per day. A multivitamin, a Vitamin C, 2 Vitamin D pills and a Calcium pill. The other eight pills are prescription pills and have very different purposes; one is to reduce my blood pressure to make sure that the blood going though my kidney is cleaned properly because I only have had one in my body for the past fifty years.  Then there is the pill I take to reduce my prostate gland, something us guys have to deal with as we age. The next two pills are to help me get the sugar in the food I eat into my system so that they do not cause my body to suddenly go through the roof since I am now a diabetic. Then there is a pill to help me to regulate my metabolism rate, that sounds like a good one and then my favourite, the one that sounds exactly like the fake kingdom in Europe where the grandmother of an american teenager, growing up in an old firehall with her widowed mum in the USA, became the queen after being trained to take over. You know the one, with Anne Hathaway and Julie Christie. I think it was called Princess Diaries. Well, all of these pills including the one called Janeuvea or something like that, have begun to make me begin to feel human again for the first time in five years. Then again, maybe it is the additional water I am drinking, the new eating resume or perhaps a combine effort to make changes. Grant you, it has only been about two weeks and I occasionally slide back to old habits but at least I am making an effort with the idea that in the long run there will be a long run. I used to always say, as my brother reminded me recently, that I was here for a good time not a long time....well, that good time has become a long time and I would like to keep it going as long as possible now that it is really getting good again. Talk about going to hell in an applecart, that was the last 25 years for the most part. Regaining my health is sure sending me in the right direction. Tennis anyone? Maybe next year.  

Saturday, January 28th, 2012 10:50 a.m.

I often get a really good kick out of political humour and there are certain cartoonist that have turned it into a real art. I also get a laugh out of some of what I call, "backlash" type of humour where the value of elected individuals is rated down to the lowest level, often because of the actions of a few along the way. You cannot cover up, lie about or expect to get away with everything all your life, whether you are an individual or a politician. You are bound to eventually get caught and although you may come out of it smiliing, the thought will always be there that maybe, just maybe, you should not have got away with it. Nevertheless, political humour has been around from the early drawings of the first newspapers continue until this very day, a matter of a hundred and fifty years, if not more. The cartoons express what was thought at the time, even though the content's meanings may have been lost along the way. Today, a lot of that humour and I give you one example that I particularly got a laugh out of, true or not. Enjoy! It is titled:

It just dawned on me -

My dog sleeps about 20 hours a day. He has his food prepared for him. He can eat whenever he wants. His meals are provided at no cost to him. He visits the Dr. once a year for his checkup, and again during the year if any medical needs arise. For this he pays nothing, and nothing is required of him. He lives in a nice neighborhood in a house that is much larger than he needs, but he is not required to do any upkeep. If he makes a mess, someone else cleans it up. He has his choice of luxurious places to sleep. He receives these accommodations absolutely free. He is living like a King, and has absolutely no expenses whatsoever. All of his costs are picked up by others who go out and earn a living every day. I was just thinking about all this, and suddenly it hit me like a brick ....... I think my dog is a Member of Parliament!

Thursday, January 26th, 2012

Well, believe it or not, I just found parsnips for the first time. It is interesting how one's body reacts to certain things. I thought they were delicious when boiled and mashed with margarine. I did not realize thogh that my daughter had such a big hate for the veggies which I enjoy. While brussel sprouts are not my favourite, I will eat them. Along with those go lima beans or as the British called them, Broad Beans (and that is a story in itself which I will tell you one day.) It was the only vegetable I hated as a child. Frozen peas and carrots together do nothing for me but I like them as separate vegetables and they are among my favourites, boiled carrots especially when prepared in a certain way. Zuccinis never excite me as vegetables but as part of a medley of vegetables they are fine. I will eat them with broccoli heads for example, boiled up together. They are great as raw table veggies served with a dip because their flavour is lost in the dip and only the texture remains. I have a giant pepper squash waiting here to go in the oven at some point. I hope it is not going bad inside as I have not refrigerated it. I guess my concentration on vegetables at this point in time comes from the fact that I am a Type 2 diabetic. As a result of changes I am making in my diet, I am trying out new vegetables and they have become a bit more interesting to me as time goes by and I find new ways to prepare them. As kids, all our parents knew was to boil vegetables forever until they were cooked so it is something I still do. We ate carrot sticks and cucumbers raw but that was about it. Then the fad of raw vegetables came along and we discovered a whole new set of rules for vegetables. Then we discovered Thai food, Japanese food and a whole variety of other types of food where vegetables were only sauteed lightly or served as wraps. Food in Canada has gone through an interesting evolution in the past sixty years from the days of traditional foods we grew up with like, the occasional French Canadian cooking in Quebec and British cooking which my mother gave us. That along with Canadian Chinese food which has been around for more than a century and evolved to include a lot of sweet food to meet the Canadian taste was all that we really knew as children growing up in Montreal. Occasionally we would add a few things as we got older but our training was conditioned by those days. At age 21 I lived with a German family for a year in Calgary and with other German people I knew, came to experience that kind of cooking. Then I got to know Polish food in Toronto, Swiss German food from my sister-in-law and Indian food from lunch with my customers in the days when I worked as a spice broker. Then there were the Italian friends I got to know over the years and my taste for pasta products other than the spagetti which I had as a child expanded in many different ways. In the early 1950s frozen foods were making their mark in the world with food companies that gave you a large freezer and filled it with new products every month. We lived a lot of our childhood days out of that old Amana freezer from 1951 and it was still running out in the side porch for another 20 years or so. To us as youngsters, I was a six year old, it was a gigantic thing which just fitted into the side shed and sat there like a heavy monster waiting for us to come home from school. Mother would ask us to go hunt something down and as we would pull the heavy door open, this bright light would come forth as if it was full of shiney gold and we would find a world of frozen meats, steaks, chicken and a variety of vegetables along with cans of frozen stawberries and raspberries, ice cream and all the wonderful things we loved as children. It was a treat in itself. Then as the shelves emptied, the next shipment would arrive and we would be given the job of sorting it out and seeing that all of the things went in the right place. That was my early introduction to the frozen section at the new Dominion style grocery store in Cartierville right next to the new Dairy Queen that they built next door. I will have to look at the road map photography on Google on the computer and see if it is still there. Don't let me start talking about my favourite banana split which was my traditional birthday gift back then. Mum always took me out on my birthday for one. Today if I had one, first, I could not eat that much sweet stuff and secondly it is too sweet to begin with but as a child, there was no end to them, even on my own at the Dairy Queen. Looking back, I often wonder how I would have survived those years without ice cream, those small fruit pies that cost a dime and the cakes like Joe Louis and Mae West by name. Interesting enough, you can see the racism of an earlier time in the Joe Louis cakes most likely named because of the chocolate brown colour. Aunt Jemima pancakes and syrups fell in that same category......and ohhhhhh, such good things they all were to a kid with a sweet tooth.

Wednesday, January 25, 2012 9:55 p.m.

Peanut butter.....I just love peanut butter. In fact, I love salted peanuts, chocolate coated peanuts, split peanuts, raw peanuts, peanuts in the shell and especially peanut butter cookies. They have been a favourite since childhood and no other cookie could meet the taste of the exquisite peanut butter cookie, except maybe the peanut cookies made by Voortman, the Canadian manufacturers. They have actual peanuts on top...yummmmmmm! But those things are things of a bygone era that I seldom eat anymore. The weight says no, the diabetes says no and the arthritis says no. I guess I will just have to settle with an occasional cracker with peanut butter or perhaps a piece of toast with some on it. It is funny how you connect to peanut butter.....my connection is Kraft Foods as my nextdoor neighbour was a Vice President of Production there back in the 1950s and he often turned up with peanut butter. Then there was the time I arranged to have the President of Kraft Foods Canada bring the President of Kraft International to speak to a thousand students at the Mount Royal Hotel in Mountreal when I was President of the Georgian Marketing Society at Sir George Williams University in 1971. It is now called Concordia University after the amalgmation with Loyola College. That event with Kraft was a real taste of Peanut Butter, and a whole lot of other things too. The one thing I regret about peanuts occurred about ten years ago and was quite a lesson for me. I arranged a big night at the ski club for the volunteers and as an added touch, I brought a gigantic bowl of peanuts for everyone to munch on at the bar. When I went to get a drink, they had disappeared. Upon asking I was told that one of the girls had an allergy to peanuts and could not be around them. Well, everyone in my family had allergies of one type or another so I got upset thinking that she had no right to complain and could just put up with the peanuts. Well, she and her friend, a girl from the club who I did not like to begin with went off the handle on the subject. Obstinate as I can get occasionally because of past experience with this friend, I blew up and turned my own personal friendship with the sufferer into a hate on her part because of my ignorance. Little did I know then that peanuts sitting in a bowl could kill someone by a slight bit of contact. When I found that out some time later, I felt really bad about the situation but by then, I was no longer around the club because I could not go to meetings as I had trouble with my hearing there. I also moved, had a few bad years and never recovered. All I can do today is hope that someday, she will forgive me and my lack of knowledge about peanut allergies, one of the many things I missed learning in my earlier years. We all have these long held regrets. The nice thing about it is that now, every time I think about it, I can eat a few peanuts and not worry about being allergic to peanuts myself. President Carter of the USA, the man who peanuts made, would be proud!    

Monday, January 23rd, 2012

I wanted to write about monuments and other related things today. It is something that seems to identify people down through history. Some like those of the kings of shame in this world, like the dictators known as Edie Amin, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Saddam Hussein, and a whole bunch more were largely statutes raised in toast by the leaders to themselves. When deposed or when their reign ended by death, the statutes became the targets of those who hated them enough to destroy the monumnet in place of the person who they could not reach. I say that is great and it should happen that way. At the same time, we tend to forget that the monuments that were raised by our grandfathers to people of their era had a much similar meaning but the adoration came from the people and not the individuals themselves in most instances. Those statues still remain  where they were once placed where everyone could see them as they passed and to remember the person and what he did for the world, the country, the province or state, the city and in some cases, just for a cause that caught the eye of the world. The statue to Terry Fox was such a statue. I am speaking in partucular about the statute that stands along the Trans Canada highway near Thunder Bay, Ontario in a beautiful spot on a slow rise hill with the expanse of Lake Superior behind it. I could not think of a more fittiing memorial to a man who has done more for the world in raising awareness and funds for cancer research than any other individual or organization. Even today, some 30 years after his death, he is still spoken of with heart. In some 60 countries in the world his name is connected to cancer research and fundraising events to support it. Schools, parks, playgrounds and a whole variety of other buildings bare his name. There are also many other monuments to him across Canada and he will not soon be forgotten. It is one name that no one will ever be able to disgrace for even the memory of him will live on in other forms. Until her death, his values live on in his family and their control of the foundation set up to distribute the funds as he would have wanted. Sure, they probably lived well because of it but there is little that could ever match the legacy he left the world in the way of support for cancer research. It takes money to make money but it also takes money to give it away.

Now I will talk to you about "the other things." There are those creatures of the wing whose security in the big  city is only guaranteed by the presence of a statue. Yes, I am taking about the pigeon, *&#$%[email protected] They are leftovers from who knows where, birds that have no fear of the average human and tolerate their presence in parks, on the street and wherever they can settle and poop. I know all about poop and the pigeon. I had one build a nest on my air conditioner in 1988 before I knew it. I did not find it out until I went looking for the chirping sound I kept hearing and found two little fellows had hatched in the nest. At that point, I did not have the heart to push the nest away. Instead, they continued to poop until I eventually had to get rid of the air conditioner. Oh well, it was an old one anyway. Now, talking about poop, what about all of those statues around the city that no one cleans up on a regular basis. Should we have the city do it or the people who support the idea of monuments? Poop is a never ending problem and the only successful thing that keeps it away is the presence of hawks trained to go after the pigeons. I have seen them at work and they do a great job. If they don't scare the pigeons away, they catch them and eat them. Now I also know there are people who love feeding the pigeons...well I do too but I don't because it just encourages them to stick around. The humane thing to do would be to catch them and take them to......eh?........to......eh?.......to ANOTHER BIG CITY. That way the streets would be clean for at least a few days until someone caught on at the other end and brought them back. So what, it would give us a break.....let's see, which other city do we hate the most?........... hmmmmm. Besides,. it would soo tell us which were city pigeons and which were homing pigeons, wouldn't it?

As I leave your with this to think about all I can say is that there is another bird in Canada that is part of our history. I am talking about the Canada Goose. It is much like the creation of the pigeon, another bird, but it is God's monument to the Canadian people and what ever other  country they frequent. I say that because they land before they poop. Thank God for thinking that one out! I wonder if Dr. Oz could explain that one?....hmmmmm