Easy Does It

It would appear that some of my previous posts have raised the hackles of some Lt. Colonel in the Ford Nation armed forces. Well, tough. I think the second you run for public office, you open yourself to all manner of criticism, lampooning, etc. So I don't ever feel bad for criticising a politician.

You might say his weight has nothing to do with his official position and is therefore not fair game. Au contraire, I retort. I think Ford's weight problem has everything to do with the political woes of this city. Because first of all, he is not simply a bit chubby. We're not talking about someone who could stand to get a bit more exercise but is otherwise healthy. We're talking about someone who is probably morbidly obese or super obese* (worst. superpower. ever.). The health problems that come with that are a serious concern in a civic leader. For example, what if he dies in office? That would be chaos for the city.

But that is really just the obvious problem. The bigger problem is what his weight problem represents -- that is, his lack of self control. While it's possible that there are some genetic factors here, his machiavellian brother has half the same genes and isn't morbidly obese. What is more likely is that diet and exercise are the culprits here. But controlling his diet and exercise is not really his style. And that kind of behaviour spills over into council, for example, when a vote doesn't go his way. And of course this lack of maturity is why so many people love him so much.

Self control is hard, but the new mayor peddles easy answers, such as "Toronto has a spending problem, not a revenue problem." This sounds really good because the problem is easy to fix and falls on someone else – someone else is wasting my money. And then, lo and behold, when it turns out Toronto does have a revenue problem, it's someone else's problem again. And when that someone gives him the same hard line he's been running all around the city, he throws a temper tantrum and threatens to begin a war by inventing a sovereign nation.

Because that's the easy answer. But it's an easy answer that is unlikely to accomplish anything but short-term self satisfaction. This city needs a leader who is interested in more than instant gratification. Great things require hard work.

The mayor's weight problem is just symptom of the mayor's lack of self control. And the mayor is a symptom of voters'.

* According to this extremely unscientific source, Don Cherry is 5'11" tall and Rob Ford is a bit taller than Don Cherry in the photos from the infamous inauguration, so if we give him 6'1" and take a wild guess at his weight being 300lbs, we get a body mass index of 39.6.

Fast Ford Nation

Inspired by top user comment on this Toronto Star article. Thanks to everyone in the lab who helped, especially Andrew.

Ford Nation Passport Cover by CJ Lee is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Worship This

According to Wikipedia, most municipal leaders in Canada are called "mayor". Some small areas villages and rural areas still use the term "reeve". There is one exception to this. Niagara-on-the-Lake gets a "lord mayor" instead or a mayor or reeve. This is apparently in recognition of the fact that Niagara-on-the-Lake was once the capital of Upper Canada.

Mayors in Canada are styled "Worship", as in when talking directly to a mayor you say "Your Worship" and when talking about a mayor you say "Her Worship" or "His Worship". What I would like is for Toronto to get an exception to this rule, the way Niagara-on-the-Lake gets an exception to the "mayor" thing. I think that present and future mayors of Toronto should be henceforth styled "Corpulence". As in "Your Corpulence, Mayor of Toronto, I am writing you to ask that you use the considerable weight of your office..." and so on.

I can't find out where these stylings come from, so if you have any information about that, please leave it in the comments. I asked a librarian friend and she didn't know either but she said she suspected that it's a matter of tradition and that the way to "officially" change it would be to simply get people using the term. So, I beseech you to use the considerable weight of your conversation to make my (admittedly petty) dream come true.

Curious

I'm a little surprised that nobody has yet tried to combine this with this.

Mmm.. Pie...

Locations of PIES in the Gulf of Mexico. Scanned from this week's EOS, Transactions of the American Geophysical Union (Vol. 92, No. 3, 18 January 2011).

Newsflash: Toronto gets cold in winter!

Toronto has issued an "extreme cold weather alert" for this weekend. Because the temperature is supposed to get down to -18ºC. Seriously? There are cities in Canada that would kill for -18ºC right now (all below -18ºC at time of posting).

I think what's really going on here is this: "Alerts are issued to step up support services for homeless people..." Which I think is important. Minus 18º streets are not a place for anyone to sleep.

But can't we find a way to provide extra services for the homeless without sounding like a city of giant pussies?

Remember Acid Rain?

A facebox friend of mine, an old coworker, asked today "remember acid rain?" As an air quality researcher, I do, in fact, remember acid rain. It comes up fairly regularly in my work and in discussions with other people at the university. But the point he was trying to make was that acid rain was a big, big deal for a long time. I remember the news and the people talking at my grade school. But now, the news never (hardly ever) talks about it anymore. My friend then asked if there was any other thing which seems to be following the same pattern. I assume he meant climate change.

Acid rain occurrence in the developed world has been greatly reduced through regulation. I think a lot of that was because people are inherently afraid of acid. It sounds dangerous. Another part is that people didn't really have to do anything. Regulations were made and cars, gas and industrial processes changed, but most people didn't have their daily routine changed.

CO2, on the other hand, is not something that most people would think of as bad. It's plant food, right? Everyone makes it, therefore it can't be bad. And global warming, well, I mean, who wouldn't want things a bit warmer? And the solutions require major, major changes in the way the developed world runs. Instead of saying you have to improve the catalytic converter on your car, you need an electric car, or a hydrogen car, or no car at all. Instead of scrubbing the effluent from industrial processes, it's an end to industrial farming. On top of that, it's a very slow process. It's basically a recipe for people to avoid dealing with it:



So, while acid went away in the media, it was in large part because regulations have helped decrease it to a point where other stuff is more important / interesting. We can only hope that climate change goes away from the media for the same reasons.