I’ve put these three C’s together because alliteration wasn’t
foreign to any of these three. My biggest miss for cancelling cable has been the
celebration of athletic feats through language. There was Bob Costas’
deployment of vocabulary atypical of the arena but succulent to the scholastic.
Mary Carillo triumphed with unrehearsed back seat colour laden with one- liners.
Howard Cosell’s deliberately slurred maligned characterizations injected fodder
for the fortunate fans of Wide World of Sports.
Costas is in the news because of an opinion in the face of
the sports machine. He’ll retire after a good run and his legacy will be
steeped in his affinity for the formidable phrase fitting to the forum (okay, I
can do alliteration too).
I have no idea what happened to Mary but her charisma simply
shone through the TV.
Although young as an admirer during the Cosell years, I remember Cosell as an obvious stalwart in and industry critical to extracting entertainment value from sport. There were the Muhammad Ali interviews and the Monday Night Football mantras such as “he could go all the way”. As a boy, it became evident that there was eloquence in sport beyond finesse on the field. In spite of having snipped the cable, my sense is that the market and mystique of midfield monologue has now left the broadcast booth. Was Cosell’s opinion that ex-athletes were not best equipped for the microphone correct? I suspect yes with exceptions. ���F�z�Q4 �h
What I like about Browns Social House: It’s friendly and has high padded bar stools with foot rests. It has properly controlled climate. Décor not overly imposed by big screens. Happy hour. Four dollar draught. Quick service. Reasonable prices. Did I say that? Square bar accommodating for socializing. You’re not there just for the booze, right?
While much focus has been on the driver of the Humboldt bus
crash, it’s become evident that an insidious behavioural pattern of distraction
while at the wheel is underlying the cause. Although it was a flapping tarp and
not a cell phone, every single driver who owns a smart phone and is compelled
to jump to its chime indicating the latest facebook notification should take
heed. Speaking to passengers is distracting, changing CDs is distracting, and
soothing crying babies is distracting. Some minds may be better equipped to
deal with distractions than others but should you really be assigning yourself
the confidence to multi-task while at the wheel when one misstep can lead to a
life-long occupation of guilt.
It’s certainly easy to judge this man responsible for the
deaths of these Humboldt teens but hypocrisy given one’s own behaviour is
peculiar.
In addition to the driver, Jaskirat Singh Sidhu, law
enforcement and the regulatory framework of the transportation industry must
also answer to this event. We put doctors in this country through seven years
of training and a driver of a transport truck through three weeks, if that. Mr.
Sidhu may have lacked training in how to
properly secure a load. Our justice system is structured in such a way that
police tend not to put resources where they believe that the probability of
conviction is low. I postulate that in the minds of law enforcement, the
process of obtaining the necessary evidence to charge a suspected distracted
driver is not worth the application of resources and hence this matter is at
large with you and I witnessing distracted drivers in metropolitan centres
daily.
If the financial penalties were materially strong and the
justice system had the practical powers to enforce, we could actually make
headway toward significantly reducing this problem.
He was one
of the very nicest people that I’ve ever come to know and he was my boss for a
brief period of time around 2003. He practiced public accounting and the dynamic
between the two of us was mutual respect. Upon helping him through one tax
season, I pursued another opportunity which helped paved the way to establishing
my own practice.
Al should
have been winding up his practice right around the time I had come on board.
However; it’s clear that his clients and the game of golf were preeminent
interests which weren’t going to go away. We had lost touch between my tenure
and his passing but I can only imagine that he had a tremendous home life with
loving people around him. Evidence of his high intellect is referenced from his
obituary listing his university graduation at the age of 19 from our common
alma mater, the U of A.
Upon
reflecting this morning of one particular collaborative effort on a file with
Al, I just had to draft a blog post in remembrance of him. He was one of many
fine folk instrumental in assisting me with the street level application of tax
accounting. Al was one of those people
who knew exactly how to treat people respectfully. He was a soft spoken big man
who carried clout through his unspoken word.
