Back from a pseudo holiday

Just a quick note to say that I was away last week helping run the Ottawa Sun Scramble City Championships and caddying at the Candian Mid-Amateur Golf Championships in London.

I have 3-4 entries that I'm working on at the moment and should be publishing them throughout the week. I might have been out of town last week, but I didn't lose my sense of amazement at what went on while I was away!

Stay tuned!!

Ben Mulroney: tell it like it is - there's nothing wrong with it!

I can't believe a column in today's Ottawa Citizen. On page D6 Eric Kohanik blasts Canadian Idol host Ben Mulroney for "whining on camera" last week when he disagreed with that week's results. The judges were flabbergasted and expressed their shock at "Canada's vote" and followed up on Ben's comments before the program faded to black.

The column goes on to explain how viewer participation has yielded questionable results on a number of occasions on American Idol in the past and that producers and hosts of such programs should strive to remain impartial. In other words, Mulroney was out of line when he expressed his thoughts on live television without censoring himself.

Kohanik must have missed the moment where the Canadian Idol host was going to "do what he was supposed to do" and utter one platitude or another regarding the results before moving on to delivering the teaser about the coming week. Mulroney, who according to the column's author is a host who lacks "seasoned broadcasting professionalism", stopped short and took back words to the effect that he did not know what to say. He continued, said he did know what to say and then said it. Good on him.

To Eric Kohanik I say: it takes a "seasoned broadcasting professional" to have the intestinal fortitude to buck the politically correct "never speak your mind or say anything that anything but mainstream" trend and actually tell it like it is for once. It takes someone with balls to stand up and speak from the heart... something we've been conditioned in recent years to squelch.

Ben Mulroney may have his detractors, and I can't say I've seen much of the work he has done... and I have only been sucked into watching Canadian Idol (or any Idol for that matter) this summer, but as far as I can see, he's a solid host and does not deserve being slagged for speaking his mind. There are more people out there who should take his lead.

Have you ever heard of the Rideau Canal Scum Patrol?!

OK, ladies and gentlemen... who out there has heard of the "Rideau Canal Scum Patrol" before? Anyone? A quick Google search yields nothing of consequence and putting the search terms in quotation marks gets you the following result: "Your search - "Rideau Canal Scum Patrol" - did not match any documents."

Why am I asking what seems to be such an inane question?

It's a bit of a long story, one that began on Friday, July 27th. Barbara Lajeunesse was walking her furry friend Molly along through the Arboretum in the Central Experimental Farm. As she does every day, she wandered over to the path looking out to the Rideau Canal. A strange smell overtook her and upon closer inspection, she found a dead animal floating ten feet off the shoreline. It appeared to be a small dog.

Not exactly impressed with the fact that someone's pet met with such a fate, Barbara wanted to have something done about it - largely having it removed from the water and having it dealt with appropriately. How it got there nobody will ever know, but it should certainly not stay there.

When she arrived at her office, she immediately reached for the phone and called the City of Ottawa. The kind operator pointed out to her that the Experimental Farm was National Capital Commission (NCC) property and that they would be the right people to call. Barbara reached a pleasant individual who said that the NCC "had people for that" and that the problem would soon be rectified. Satisfied knowing that she had completed a job well done, of she went to tackle the rest of the day.

To her horror, the dog was still in the water early on a weekend morning. While it was possible that "the people for that" were busy on Friday and didn't work weekends, she hoped it would be gone come Monday. Not wanting to see it again, Barbara and Molly went to another part of the Farm for their morning walk. Surely it would be gone by Tuesday.

Wrong.

It was still there.

In what seemed to be as close to a fit of rage as I had ever seem Barbara display, she flew up to her office to call the NCC one more time. The person who answered this time had no idea what she was talking about and was quite adamant that there was nothing that she could do. Her advice was to call Parks Canada. The NCC is responsible for the grounds of the Experimental Farm, but because the dog was in the water, in the Rideau Canal, the problem was not "in their jurisdiction".

Not to be discouraged by this setback, Barb called Parks Canada. One might remember that the Rideau Canal was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site on June 27th, a mere month before this story began. Well, the Parks Canada staff person who Barb spoke with had no idea where the Rideau Canal was!!!

Calls to the Ottawa Humane Society went nowhere (to be fair, we didn't expect much from them because clearly this wasn't their domain) and so Barbara was back at square one.

When the dog was still there on Wednesday morning - we're now looking at day six since this situation was first discovered - a call was made to the Ottawa Citizen who eventually dispatched a photographer. Barbara made a few more calls and this time managed to get someone from Parks Canada who was helpful. This person did know where the Rideau Canal was and was able to note where the dog was located.

Shortly before time came to head out to meet the photographer, a call came from a guy who identified himself as being with the "Rideau Canal Scum Patrol". Barbara thought he was joking, but he was quite serious. It turned out that these patrollers are employees of Parks Canada and their job is to remove algae and debris from the Canal. Their headquarters are at the Chartwell Locks and, evidently, they go up and down the Canal, cleaning it as well as they can.

The story was that they would shortly be on their way to pick up the dog and do whatever was necessary. Unfortunately, as of 12:10pm, nobody had shown up. Perhaps they were still paddling over from their home base when we had to leave.

Why nobody knows about the "Rideau Canal Scum Patrol" is a mystery. I am writing about it today so that someone searching for it on Google will actually get a useful hit. To go one step further, the telephone number to reach them is at 613-235-2644. If you see something that needs to be tended to, the "Scum Busters" will spring into action. I am assured that they do indeed refer to themselves by that name.

UPDATE: While this cannot be confirmed at this time, a message was waiting for Barbara at 12:30pm. It said that they had "taken care of her problem". The timing of the message was odd, for nobody was there at 12:10pm... it's possible that we just missed the Scum Busters, but we'll wait until our hero Barbara Lajeunesse walks by again tomorrow morning to see if the deed has been done. In the meantime, let there be online documentation about the Scum Patrol from here on in!!!!