Dropping the Ball Lange

I have a new certificate to add to my ever-growing collection of certificates of accomplishment. Yesterday, I completed a three-week job finding and self-marketing seminar with a human resources consulting firm called Ball Lange & Associates.

The program is funded by the Ontario government (so far), and I've found it to be invaluable. All aspects of job finding are covered including evaluating my goals and my personal work profile, résumé writing, interview skills as well as what resources are available and how best to use them.

The program's biggest focus is on tapping into the "hidden" job market; that is job openings that are never advertised. To that end, it focuses heavily on networking as well as researching and cold calling (sorry, "gold" calling) organizations. It is estimated that 80 to 90 percent of all job vacancies are never advertised. That means that those who limit themselves to the classified ads and the internet job sites are limiting themselves to only 10 to 20 percent of the market.

So, for the past three weeks, I've spent seven hours a day, five days a week at the Ball Lange offices with a group of eleven other people, learning how to mine the job market more effectively, market myself more successfully, and basically working full time at looking for full time work. I had full use of their facilities (business directories, computers, internet, photocopiers, fax machines and phones) with the right to continue using the Ball Lange offices and facilities even after completing the program, and I even got 250 personal calling cards printed and a genuine Ball Lange coffee mug, all at no charge to me. Such a deal!

I estimate that this program has probably at least doubled my effectivity in looking for a new job to replace my previous, non-functioning one. That concurs with Ball Lange's statistics, which estimate that 75 percent of those who completed the program found work relative to their skills and experience (i.e. not asking "Would you like fries with that?") within three to six months of completing the program.

Okay, pop quiz, hot shot! You're the Ontario government. Your province is in a recession, so unemployment is high. You're funding a program that teaches invaluable job search skills and gets three out of four people who take the course off unemployment and back to work, happily paying taxes again. What do you do? Why, you cut the program's funding of course! That way, you not only put an end to a proven effective job search program, but you also shut down the organization that ran the program, thus putting all their people out of work as well, all in one fell swoop! On the bright side, at least those people know how to effectively look for new jobs.

That's right, as incredible as it may seem, the Ontario government has "changed their funding formula" for programs aimed at getting the unemployed back to work and, apparently, the new formula involves not giving any further funds to Ball Lange & Associates. Why? Because Ball Lange specializes in job search skills, but they don't do re-education or re-training, and the provincial government, in its wis-dumb, has decided they only want to fund organizations that do everything - you know, jacks of all trades, masters of none.

I have just two things to say about that. One, it's a bloody shame and, two, I'm sure glad I got in before Ball Lange & Associates close their doors in July. Three, (Three things! I have three things to say about that!), see you at the polls, Mr. McGuinty.

Free Software for Doctoring Photos

One web site which I check regularly (in fact, pretty much daily) is giveawayoftheday.com. They give away free software! The premise is pretty cool. Each day, a new title is offered. The titles offered aren't shareware, nor are they time-limited or feature-limited versions that you have to buy in order to fully enable. They are one hundred percent, fully functional programs that you can have for free and use for as long as you want.

The catch? You only have twenty-four hours to download and install them while they're being offered. After that, they won't install anymore. Once installed, they work just fine but, if you ever uninstall them for any reason, or upgrade to a new computer, you can't reinstall them. Still, I think this is an excellent way to evaluate software.

Unfortunately, the software offered is something of a mixed bag. Giveaway Of The Day has offered a few gems in their day, such as The Glary Utilities (a suite of system cleanup and optimization tools something like the better-known Norton Utilities, but cheaper) by Glarysoft, or AnVir Task Manager (a much more robust task manager than the one that comes standard with Windows that gives you much greater control over tasks, processes and services, flags suspicious or possibly malicious programs and even provides some rudimentary virus and spyware protection) by AnVir Software. I got both of these very useful programs from Giveaway Of The Day. However, the site has also offered a lot of software that adds very little to Windows' standard functionality or for which much better freeware alternatives already exist.

Sometimes, the software offered seems way too specialized. Take, for example, NoWires; an Adobe PhotoShop plugin for removing power lines from digital photographs. I kid you not. "Imagine you have photographed a beautiful sight. And there is only one ugly thing — electric wire crossing the picture," trumpets the web page that offers this plugin, "Get rid of this annoying wire using NoWires!" Boy, am I ever glad I found this thing! If I had a nickel for every time my photos were spoiled by unsightly power lines...

Okay, okay, I'll sop up the dripping sarcasm. Look, I'll grant that NoWires might prove useful if you have a lot of photographs that are marred by power lines but doesn't it seem just a little, well, overly-specialized? For one thing, it's a PhotoShop plugin so, if you happen to use a photo editor other than the very expensive PhotoShop, you're S.O.L. as they say. Besides that, PhotoShop is pricey for a reason. If you do happen to own it, I'm just sure it has its own tools for getting rid of unsightly power lines, not to mention any number of other unwanted items in your pictures. The individual who markets NoWires (and it does appear to be just some Russian guy by the name of Pavel Dovgalyuk) wants $29.95 for his plugin. Seems a bit steep for such a one-trick-pony bit of software.

A much better alternative is Inpaint, by Teorex, also previously offered by Giveaway Of The Day. Inpaint removes any kind of object from photographs; airplanes, cars, buildings, people, scratches, watermarks and, yes, even power lines. What's more, it's a stand-alone program, so you don't need PhotoShop or any other photo editor in order to use it. I've used it several times, so I can attest to the fact that it works nicely in most situations although, obviously, there are limitations. It works by extrapolating the background behind the object that you want removed so, obviously, you can't take out a building that fills 80 per cent of the picture. Also, the simpler the background, the better the results that you'll achieve.

A personal license for Inpaint (if you missed it on Giveaway Of The Day) is about ten bucks more than NoWires, at $39.99, but it's also much more flexible and, therefore, much more useful. If it sounds good, but you can't justify ponying up the cash, all is not lost. Giveaway Of The Day frequently does reruns, meaning that they may well offer Inpaint again at some future date.

The Canonization of Brother André

This will be one of those posts that would stir up all kinds of controversy and probably get me excommunicated from the Catholic church if more than three people were to actually read this blog.

I read in a news article last week that Pope Benedict (you know, the new one; the one who looks frighteningly like Darth Sidious) has approved the canonization of Montreal's Brother André Bessette. No, this does not mean that the Pope intends to fire Brother André's remains from a cannon. It means that Brother André has officially been declared a saint by the Vatican.

Actually, it means that the Vatican intends to officially declare Brother André a Saint. The canonization won't actually happen until October 17. Until then, I guess Brother André remains a heavenly intern.

Brother André Bessette was born Alfred Bessette in Saint-Grégoire d'Iberville, Quebec back in 1845. Even as a young boy, Bessette showed an intense spirituality. By the time he reached his twenties, his parish priest, having noticed his generosity and devotion, presented him to the Congregation of the Holy Cross in Montreal.

He had a particular devotion to St. Joseph and would recommend the sick to him in prayers when visiting them in their homes. Some of those people were cured and many proclaimed that they had St. Joseph and Brother André's intervention to thank, although Brother André himself always refused to take any credit for the healings.

In 1904, Brother André started a campaign to erect an Oratory to honor St. Joseph. It took twenty more years before construction on the Oratory actually began in 1924. In the meantime, his reputation as a healer continued to grow as more and more people, and even some doctors, proclaimed cures resulting from Brother André's intervention which defied medical explanation.

When Brother André died in 1937 at the age of 91, millions of devoted admirers filed past his coffin. He was like a Canadian Mahatma Gandhi. His remains were, fittingly, placed in a tomb at the foot of the Oratory which he had championed, except for his heart, which lies in a separate shrine in the same oratory after having been stolen and eventually retrieved. You know, for most of us, "You stole my heart" is just an expression.

Because of Brother André's reputed powers as a faith healer, millions petitioned the Vatican to canonize him. He was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1982. For you non-Catholics, that means that we Catholics were formally allowed to pray to Brother André to intercede with God on our behalves, but it didn't yet make him an actual saint.

In order to qualify for sainthood, a person must be credited with at least two miracles by the Vatican. Until last week, although Brother André reputedly helped to heal thousands during his lifetime, the Vatican officially recognized only one as a bona fide miracle. Last week, the referees at the Vatican apparently watched the replay tape for a second miraculous healing one more time, and decided to allow it.

Here's my problem with all this. Who gave the Vatican the authority to promote a man to sainthood? Since nobody ever becomes a saint until after they've died and the afterlife is supposedly under God's jurisdiction, wouldn't it be up to God to decide whether or not Brother André gets his halo?

Understand that I don't mean to denigrate Brother André's selfless devotion nor the man himself in any way. All I'm saying is that, if he deserved to become a saint, I doubt that God waited all these years since Brother André's death for the Vatican's permission to make him one.

The Most Unusual Mail Order Catalog

Quick! What's that thing to the left? Yes, I know it's a Hammacher Schlemmer catalog cover, smarty-pants. I mean what's that thing pictured on the cover?

Don't feel bad if you didn't know that it's a Superplexus. Actually, it's "The Superplexus". Hammacher Schlemmer catalogs often feature items on their cover whose identity and purpose could challenge Einstein.

In case you didn't know, Hammacher Schlemmer (H.S.) is a New York based retailer established in 1848. Aside from their New York store, they also sell via mail order and, of course, the internet. So how did one of their catalogs come to land in my mailbox?

Simple. I mail ordered something from somebody else's catalog. I couldn't tell you what I ordered or from whom, but a lot of these vendors love to share their mailing lists. "Hey Alfred! I've got another chump who has too much money on his hands and loves to spend it on stuff that he's only seen pictures of!" Next thing I know, Alfred Hammacher and William Schlemmer's catalog adorns my mailbox, sporting some inscrutable object on its cover. It was probably the inscrutable object on the cover of the first H.S. catalog that I received which coaxed me into opening it (the catalog) in the first place, rather than just throwing it out. "I've just gotta find out what that thing is!" I probably muttered to myself.

Then it happened. Somewhere among the pages of that fateful catalog I saw that Hammacher Schlemmer's inventory included Hasbro's interactive R2-D2; the very same interactive R2-D2 that I described in such detail in last week's post. I had already heard about Hasbro's R2-D2 earlier and, as I explained in my previous post, had already developed a serious case of the "I Wants" for one. Part of what kept me from rushing right out and buying one was the fact that there were none to be found in any of the stores in my immediate locale. I checked everywhere; Toys 'R Us, Sears, Zellers, even various obscure hobby and novelty shops. Nada. But there it was, in full color, among the rest of the H.S. merchandise, right next to the words "In Stock".

I think I began excitedly whistling "I've found it! It's here!" (that was an obscure Star Wars reference for you non-geeks out there) until my wife came over to find out what the commotion was all about. After settling me down with the help of several tranquilizer darts, she managed to convince me to hold off ordering one long enough so that she was able to get me one as a Father's Day gift, because every father should own a toy R2-D2.

There's only one better way of getting on a catalog store's mailing list than by ordering from some other catalog store, and that's by ordering from them directly. Hammacher Schlemmer has been faithfully sending me catalogs on a quarterly basis ever since they received my wife's order for R2-D2.

For those unfamiliar with Hammacher Schlemmer, they are distinguished, in my mind, as being a merchant of unusual and/or hard to find items. If you're looking for a gift for that hard-to-buy-for person who seems to have everything, consult with Hammacher Schlemmer. It also helps to have a whole lot of disposable cash.

Take the Superplexus, for example. You're probably wondering what, exactly, a Superplexus is, even though you've seen a picture of one at the start of this post. I was getting to that. Ever see those wooden labyrinth games where you roll a marble through a maze by twisting the board around using two knobs? The Superplexus is something like that, except that it's three-dimensional, it's enclosed in a glass sphere, it stands just over four feet high and three feet wide, it weighs 65 lbs. and it retails for $30,000. Yes, that's right, I said thirty thousand ... with four zeroes. It's the ideal Christmas gift for Bill Gates' son, who probably already has all the video games he can possibly play; just a tip for anyone who happens to work for Microsoft and is looking for a good brown-nose opportunity.

Hammacher Schlemmer's catalog and web sites are full of this kind of stuff! If the Superplexus seems a bit "frugal", how about a genuine seven foot tall Robbie the Robot (the one that looks like a walking jukebox, remember?) for fifty thousand dollars (actually $49,999.95). Or, if you're a bit more budget-minded and the Lost In Space robot is more to your liking, H.S. will gladly sell you a life-sized one of those for only twenty-four and a half thousand dollars.

It's not just all toys, either. Are you environmentally conscious and in the market for an electric car? H.S. has three to choose from; a 4,000-watt roadster for $13,000, a one-person electric car for $36,000 or an electric two-seater that goes from zero to sixty in four seconds, with a top speed of 120 mph; a steal at $108,000. And, for the kiddies, how about a kid-sized electric SUV for just under $500? May as well start building that spoiled sense of entitlement during their formative years, right?

Not everything in H.S.'s inventory is priced for the Rockefeller set, but even their less expensive items tend to be unique. How about digital copies of every National Geographic magazine ever published on a DVD-ROM boxed set, for $69.95? Or a wallet that can withstand being put through a full dishwasher cycle for $49.95? Let me tell you, if I had a nickel for every wallet I've wrecked by dropping it into the dishwasher... well, let's just say I'd need H.S.'s Balance Keeping Coin Bank to keep them all in.

Another peculiarity about Hammacher Schlemmer's catalog (and web site) is that practically every item's description begins with the definite article, "The". It's not just "Gyroscopic Golf Trainer", it's "The Gyroscopic Golf Trainer". It's not just "A Bucket Seat Bicycle", it's "The Bucket Seat Bicycle". This probably makes sense, since the use of the definite article implies uniqueness, as in "there is only one", and I daresay much of H.S.'s inventory is definitely unique. I mean, how many different Upside Down Tomato Gardens can there possibly be out there?

For their less unusual or unique offerings, H.S. tends to add words such as "best", "most" or "genuine" to their product descriptions, implying top of class or best of breed, such as "The Best Electric Knife Sharpener" or "The Slimmest Bluetooth Speakerphone". While I can't vouch for such claims, as doing so would mean comparing every possible brand and make of a given product in order to determine if H.S.'s is truly the best one, I will say that I've been very satisfied with "The VHS To DVD Converter", which I purchased from H.S. two Christmases ago (yes, I was actually able to afford two items from the H.S. catalog back when I used to have a job).

The VHS to DVD recorder that I received from H.S. turned out to be a Sony model RDR-VXD655. This unit is by no means exclusive to Hammacher Schlemmer and I can't say whether there are better VHS to DVD recorders available elsewhere, but it's interesting to note that nowhere in H.S.'s catalog or on their web site do they mention that the machine is a Sony, let alone its model number. Considering that Sony is a fairly well-respected electronics manufacturer, most retailers would trumpet the brand name as a feature. Not Hammacher Schlemmer. They seem content to let their reputation speak for itself. "If we're selling it, you can rest assured that it's a top quality item." I find that unusual, and refreshing.

Artoo Detoo It Is You! It Is You!

I was thinking of calling this post "Toy Story 3" as it's about a particularly cool toy, and two earlier posts about another of my favorite toys were imaginatively entitled Toy Story and Toy Story 2. Of course, the other two titles doubled as references to the two animated Disney movies whose respective names they stole (I mean "borrowed") but there never was a Toy Story 3, which would make that title inconsistent. On the other hand, I suppose I could have gone with that title and, should Disney ever actually release a Toy Story 3, I could have sued them for copyright or trademark infringement or some such thing and been set for life. Keep your banner ads. That's how to make money blogging!

But, no. One of the prime directives of this blog is to keep things fresh and innovative (which is why I'm writing about a toy for the third time now) so I decided to break with precedent and come up with a new, fresh, clever title for this post. For those of you who are not quite so nerdy as myself, I should explain that the title of today's post is, in fact, a reference to the very first Star Wars movie (appropriately known as "Episode IV"). It's the line spoken by See Threepio when he and Artoo Detoo are reunited in the bowels of the Jawa sandcrawler, after having been separated in the Tatooine desert.

Artoo Detoo (or R2-D2 for the more technically inclined) is one of my top three favorite robots of all time, right up there with Forbidden Planet's Robbie and the generically named "Robot" from Lost In Space. For one thing, I prefer robots that are designed not to look like mechanical people. Of my three favorite robots, Robbie is most guilty of this faux-pas. He's a biped with arms, kind of looks like an astronaut in some kind of weird space suit, but at least he doesn't have anything resembling a human face. In fact, above the arms, he looks a bit like an old Wurlitzer jukebox. I've always been a sucker for colorful blinking lights.

The Robinson family's Robot is a little better. He still has sort of a bipedal form, but at least he doesn't have articulated legs and instead rolls around on what I presume are treads. That to me seems far more likely. His "head" looks even less human than Robbie's, and also features those seductive blinking lights, and you have to laugh at the comical way in which he waves his accordion arms around, crying "Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!"

Then there's R2-D2, who looks nothing at all like we humanoids. If anything, he looks like some sort of electronic trash can or fire hydrant, and he doesn't even talk - well, okay, he does, but not in any manner that movie-goers can decipher. He beeps, he whistles, he hoots and sometimes emits what sounds suspiciously like electronic farts and, surprisingly, he manages to do so with expression. You may not understand exactly what he's saying, but you can definitely tell whether he's pleased, excited, annoyed or scared dischargeless.

Imagine my joy when I learned, one day, that the Hasbro toy company had created a toy R2-D2. "Big deal" you say, "there are lots of toy Artoos out there". Very true, but this is the toy Artoo. Hasbro officially calls it the "Star Wars R2-D2 Interactive Astromech Droid" and the key word here is "Interactive". This thing is almost a miniature clone of the beloved droid from the movies. He understands and obeys voice commands. He answers back. He can see and navigate around obstacles. He plays games. He guards your room. Heck, he can even bring you a cold one!

The moment I learned about this toy, I got a serious case of the "I Wants". Trouble is, I was approximately 42 years old at the time and, as neat as Hasbro's toy is, it's still a toy - as in "designed for kids". Of course, there are adult collectors of toys, but I'm not really a collector. I just have a weakness for certain things that push my inner "cool" button. This is one of those. As toys go, it's also kind of expensive. It retailed for $US 120 when I first learned of it, and the price has climbed since then - mostly, I suspect, because Hasbro no longer makes them. As usual, practicality beat my inner geek into submission and I contented myself with simply drooling over magazine and internet ads.

Fortunately, I also happen to be married to a woman who knows me all too well (and stays married to me anyway) and it was this same woman who decided to get me Hasbro's interactive R2-D2 for Father's Day that year (and, no, the irony is not lost on me).

My interactive Artoo stands about 18 inches tall; a pretty good size for a toy. The electronic "eye" on his dome lights up and blinks red and blue. His dome projector also lights up. The dome rotates almost all the way around. He beeps, chirps, hoots, whistles (and farts) just like his movie counterpart, and he rolls along on the floor with the ability to turn left or right and even back up. All this takes power, and no miserly amount at that. Artoo uses two sets of batteries; four D cells for motor control and movement, and four AA batteries to control the lights and the logic boards. At least the batteries do last a good long time before needing replacement. With all the batteries installed, he's a fairly hefty little dude, weighing in at about five pounds.

Artoo comes equipped with navigational sensors that allow him to see where he's going, and an infrared sensor for distinguishing people and pets (i.e. warm bodies) from inanimate objects. He has a microphone (the better to hear you with, my dear) and pressure or resistance sensors that allow him to detect if something is impeding his movement.

Artoo's voice recognition software is truly impressive. He recognizes speech right out of the box without any need of training, regardless of whether the speaker is a five-year-old girl, a forty-two-year-old man, or a five-year-old girl in a forty-two-year-old man's body ... but perhaps I've said too much. He recognizes over fifty spoken commands, names and phrases. You can tell him to move or to stay put. When he's moving, you can tell him to go in specific directions or just have him "patrol" the room. You can tell him to talk or to be quiet. Tell him to play the message (the one that he's carrying in his rusty innards) and he'll light up his projector and play Princess Leia's message to Obi-Wan Kenobi (sound only - no holographics). You can ask him if he remembers various Star Wars characters and he will indicate that he does, indeed, remember them as well as what he thinks of them, by his reactions. Ask him about See Threepio and he'll chirp happily. Ask him about Darth Vader and he'll scream and shudder.

Speaking of emotional responses, Artoo's software emulates his sometimes stubborn and rebellious personality as seen in the movies. He can get temperamental and sometimes intentionally ignores you. You can tell when he's sulking because his sensor eye goes from blue to red. Once I let him roll off a small ledge, only about 3 inches high but enough that he fell over onto his side, and he let out a plaintiff electronic whine. If he gets too uncooperative, you can tell him to behave himself.

Watching Artoo explore a room is truly fascinating. He won't run into walls or large obstacles, stopping as he nears them and then turning and heading off in a new direction. He can't see low objects like the edges of carpets and he sometimes misses narrow objects like chair legs. If he does miss something and bumps into it, he senses the obstruction and backs away, again heading off in some other direction.

His inability to see ground-level objects also makes him susceptible to rolling down stairways or off table edges, a practice which shortens his useful life considerably and definitely voids his warranty, so he comes with a button that prevents him from rolling when you want him to stay put. This is not a mechanical inhibitor. It's a software inhibitor. Artoo's programming tells him not to move under any circumstances when his movement inhibitor button is set to "engaged", not unlike the restraining bolt used in the movies, and this is one command he always obeys. In fact, if you tell him to go somewhere or to patrol the room with the movement inhibitor engaged, he'll simply shake his head at you, as if to say "I can't, stupid!"

Artoo's sensors, motors and software also give him the ability to perform certain semi-useful functions. For example, he can act as a room sentry, standing soundless and motionless, looking for all the world as though he were powered off. The moment he detects any sound or movement, however, he comes alive, shines his projector light on the intruder and sounds a shrill alarm.

He can also play games such as "Light Tag" or "Spin the Droid". When playing Light Tag, Artoo will count to ten, giving all the people in the room time to go and stand somewhere. He will then patrol the room, specifically looking for warm bodies with his I/R sensor. When he finds someone, he stops and shines his projector light on them as if to say, "Hah! Gotcha!" He can also sing and dance, chirping out well-known Star Wars music, such as the Cantina Band theme, and shuffling back and forth to the beat.

I'm amazed at the technology that's gone into Hasbro's "plaything". I've read several anecdotes about the many problems that George Lucas and crew had with the R2-D2 prop whilst filming the original Star Wars trilogy. The thing was constantly falling over, banging into walls and just plain malfunctioning. Lucas probably would have given his eye teeth for a prop that was capable of just a fraction of the things that Hasbro's toy can do.

For my fellow techno-geeks that want to know more about the firmware that powers this little guy and just what it can do, you can find out much more at this link: http://rebornspirit.com/R2D2.html

If you'd like to see one disassembled in order to find out what makes it tick, try this link: http://content.techrepublic.com.com/2346-13636_11-177912-1.html?tag=content;leftCol

As for the rest of you, if you'd just like to see the little guy in action, try the video below. If you're impressed and want to see more, YouTube has many more like it.

So you see, coming back full-circle to the title of this post, I think it more than appropriate. From the moment you switch on Hasbro's Interactive R2-D2 and watch it come to life, you almost forget that it's a toy and might just find yourself exclaiming "Artoo Detoo, it is you! It is you!"

Playing With Numbers

The problem with big numbers is that, once they get big enough, they lose their meaning. People need a frame of reference, something with which to compare, in order to have any understanding of scale. One common trick is to express numbers which measure size, volume or distance in terms of time. People seem better able to relate to the passage of time than they are to size. That's how the concept of the light year arose. Tell someone that the nearest star (excluding the sun, of course), Proxima Centauri, is 39,900,000,000,000 kilometers away, and you generally get a blank stare, even if you express that number as "39.9 trillion". The human mind can't comprehend that big a distance. Say that Proxima Centauri is 4.22 light years away, and it becomes clearer. Ah! So even light, which we know travels very, very fast, would still take a little over 4 years to get from here to there. Now we have a frame of reference.

Someone sent me an interesting spreadsheet this week. You enter your birthday, and it tells you exactly how long you've been alive, in years, months, days, weeks, minutes and even seconds. According to this spreadsheet, at the moment that I typed my birthday and pressed Enter, I had been alive for exactly 1,492,450,707 seconds. That's just under one and a half billion seconds. That got me thinking; if someone had been handing me one dollar bills at the rate of one per second from the moment I was born up until the present, I'd have about one and a half billion dollars to my name. Can I think of anybody who has that kind of money? Of course I can.

Everybody loves to pick on Bill Gates, so why should I be an exception? At the time of this writing, he's worth about 40 billion dollars. A person would have to live to the age of 1,269 years and earn a dollar per second during that entire time to come up with that kind of money. Question: Does any one person need or deserve that kind of money? I don't mean to trivialize Mr. Gates' contributions to society and I acknowledge his philanthropic endeavours. It just seems absurd to me that any one person should be rewarded that richly, regardless of what they've done. Nobody needs that kind of money. It's gross over-compensation. Of course, Mr. Gates is not the sole member of the world's Billionaire's Club.

As I write this, Canada's national debt stands at about 512 billion dollars. If the country paid down its debt at the rate of a dollar per second, it would take a little over 16,235 years to eliminate it. Does that much money exist in the world? If not, how did Canada manage to borrow it?

Of course, Canada's national debt pales in comparison to the United States' debt of about 12.3 trillion dollars at time of this writing. You see what I mean? You get to the point where it just seems surreal, doesn't it?

A Woman Scorned

One of the best ways to make a blogger's day, especially one whose blog is based on entertainment or amusement, is to hand him a real life story that's funnier than anything he (or she) could possibly have made up. Yesterday, The Waterloo Region Record handed me just such a story.

Seems one Dr. Vincent Leering, a local chiropractor, had been treating his girlfriend. Unfortunately, the relationship eventually soured, as relationships sometimes will, and the two broke up, upon which Dr. Leering referred her outstanding bills to a collection agency. I can't help but suspect that this was probably done more out of anger and spite than out of financial need.

Bad mistake.

Women are almost always smarter then men. That goes double for men who are in any way emotionally agitated and not quite reasoning at full capacity. I can almost hear Leering's ex muttering "So that's how you want to play, is it?" after getting the first call from the collection agency. She filed a complaint with the Ontario College of Chiropractors, telling them that her chiropractor had been sleeping with her. They, in turn, charged him with sexual abuse and revoked his license to practice for at least five years. Game. Set. Match. The poor guy probably understands now exactly how the Coyote felt after setting up that Burmese tiger trap kit, only to catch a Burmese tiger and then fall into the trap with it.

I have to feel a twinge of pity for Leering. The article makes it clear that he was already involved with the woman before she became his patient. To my mind, that's a very different situation compared to a doctor who makes advances on a patient with whom he'd had no prior relationship. Unfortunately, the optics are still bad, especially when you're cursed with a name like Vincent Leering. It couldn't have been worse unless his name had been Sacha Purvort or Dar T. Oldman. In any case, Leering's ex-girlfriend seemingly realized that the Ontario College of Chiropractors has a zero-tolerance policy about these things, and apparently used that knowledge to her full advantage.

This is one lady that Leering should definitely not have screwed with ... literally.