Random Access

Stupefaction. “A feeling of stupified astonishment,” says the dictionary.
If there were an illustration that went with the word, which many dictionaries provide as a helpful visual clue for particularly difficult-to-describe words, there are some very obvious candidates.
For instance, a drawing of my son, my daughter, or my wife, reading the latest edition of the Harry Potter saga.
You know the marathon mesmerization has begun when you walk into the house after a three-week vacation and are greeted — not with a report on the happenings in your absence— but a curt explanation from Poet-Boy that, “I’ve been reading Harry Potter all day and I’m almost finished.”
Translation: don’t expect human conversation until my fantasy fix is complete.
There follows silence, but not just any silence — frenzied speed-reading silence that fairly enshrouds the reader. It is as if a sign blinks above the head of the Hogwarts devotee: Do Not Disturb, Potter in Progress.
The next day, my daughter settles into the book with the same steely-eyed, grim determination. It is pointless to try to explain this utter concentration — which clearly should be reserved only for a truly great professional football game or a vintage wine.
Many explanations have been offered for the unbelievable sales of J.K.’s spellbinders, but the obvious has escaped many: every Potter fan must have a personal copy of each and every book.
Apparently it is impossible for any Potter fan to share. The young adults in my household each bought a book after its midnight release Friday and, had my wife not been isolated at the cottage, we would undoubtedly be the collective owners of three copies. Thank goodness the cat is dyslexic.
One other aspect of Pottermania to note: the release of any new book prompts the physical/psychological necessity to return to the first of the seven volumes and work one’s way chronologically through the entire canon.
Bring out those lazy, hazy, glazed-eyed days of summer, to misquote Nat King Cole.
• • •

Former Mississaugan Glenn Wells — whom we met while waiting for the Lakeview powerhouse kaboom — reports that his hitch back to the west coast was filled with great rides. Took him just 73.5 hours from Lakeview to home in Abbotsford.
And he added a new “kind stranger” anecdote to his arsenal. After staying in a motel in St. Anne, Man., he asked a man pumping gas where the highway was. The man offered to give him a lift but they ended up on the wrong side of the highway so the driver offered to give Glenn breakfast and take him to Winnipeg because he was going there later that day anyway.
“We pulled into his driveway and I noticed a cut and curl sign,” Wells said in an e-mail. “It turned out his wife was the hairstlyist for the whole town. Well, as you can guess, she offered me a free cut. So away went the ’60s throwback style and I’m sporting a new ‘office’ look. So this is the first time I ever received a free meal and a cut in my life while hitchiking.”

If you keep writing about your vacation long enough, will it feel like it’s still going on?
It’s a theory worth testing.
Most people probably mark their vacations by weather and trips, but the birds are the yardstick by which we tend to remember the long, lovely summer stays at the cottage.
As in – remember the year that the American Redstarts nested in the caragana hedge?
We watched in amazement, and so did our then-young children, as Mr. and Mrs. Redstart shopped for real estate just inches away from our screened porch. The mister had picked out several prospective nesting spots in the hedge and gave his spouse the full tour. She would wiggle her rear into the triangle formed by the branches and, after trying out several spots, finally chose a site where he went to work on full construction.
Early that summer each of our many meals on the porch began with a scolding from the birds, until they finally figured out that we were the Windows Restaurant to their SkyDome centre stage.
The little village in the Kawarthas where our cottage is located is marked at its entrance by two giant white pines, one of which has a messy penthouse unit which is occupied every year by osprey. This year, the male decided to make a tree near the dock his main staging area for fish strikes. We were lucky enough to see him catch a big fish right off our dock.
Great Blue Herons are another fixture on the lake. One early morning, an adult was poised on the end of a dock at a weird angle, as if he was about to take off in slow motion as I approached. But instead of taking off he leapt from the dock and came up with a wriggling green fish. He flew over to a nearby sandbar and devoured it, then walked into the water to wash himself off by whipping his beak back and forth under water. The heron equivalent of a bowl of water with a slice of lemon.
Every year there are birds that seem much more numerous than normal. This year the Redstarts seemed to be nesting every 100 yards or so and there were copious quantities of Gray Catbirds and song sparrows. But there were fewer Orioles, Flickers and warblers. Aside from the redstarts, the only other warblers spotted were a black and white and something unidentifiable to my inexpert eyes that went into that huge and frustrating category called “confusing fall warblers.” Except it’s not fall yet.
The woods were once filled with warblers, especially the Myrtle Yellow-Rumped. Did not see a single one on this trip and only saw a single one in the spring migration.
More numerous than ever were the Pileated Woodpeckers, such as the young fellow shown here whom I snapped along the lakefront road. There have been summers when one or two actual Pileated sightings were celebrated. This time, they were as numerous as the goldfinches and Blue Jays. It was actually hard to go for a stroll without spotting one.
On my way back from Bobcaygeon Saturday, the osprey family who occupy the low-rent district on top of a telephone pole beside the golf course, were having a family meeting on the edge of the nest. The parents were clearly cajoling junior into taking his new wheels ... or wings, for a test flight.
Could not resist pulling over to the side of the road to watch the young raptor take what was likely his first flight, judging by the big, precarious dip he took toward the ground before he got his feathers coordinated. He made one big turn and then headed back to the nest in a run that couldn’t have lasted more than 20 seconds.
But what a thrilling 20 seconds of uncertainty it was.
Can’t help but envy the young fellow. His life’s work will be fishing in paradise and vacation will never end.

When the Mississauga South Liberals got together in 2003 to select a candidate to challenge the 18-year reign of MPP Margaret Marland, they had three contenders from which to choose.
Here we are four years after the fact, and two of those three would-be nominees will be running in this fall’s provincial election — but neither of them for the ruling Grits.
Tim Peterson, of course, won the nomination and went on to take the seat from Marland by a scant margin. Now he’s a Conservative.
On July 16, the man who finished second in the race, former Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board Chair Peter Ferreira was nominated to run as a candidate in the Toronto riding of Davenport — for the New Democratic Party.
(The third South candidate in 2003, for the record, was Stephen Wahl.)
“I fit their profile,” Ferreira the immigration paralegal said this morning in a call from his long-time offices which are located in Davenport, where he grew up and went to school in little Italy.
The long-time activist in the Portuguese community is running in a riding where more than 35 per cent of the constituency, which he describes as generally working class, share his ethnic heritage.
The NDP has held the riding before under former Cabinet Minister Tony Silipo. It’s strictly a two-party race in Davenport, where the Tory candidate only managed 7.46 per cent of the vote in ’03.
The seat is held by former Toronto Councillor Tony Ruprecht, who has been an MPP since 1981. He represented Parkdale from 1981-99. Then he moved to Davenport to accommodate the ambitions of star candidate Gerard Kennedy.
Ruprecht is one of those backbench MPPs who is never going to be a star, but is always going to be tough to beat.
“It’s not going to be easy,” admits Ferreira, a long-time Liberal who spent much of the past four years bashing his head against the Queen’s Park funding formula and publicly battling Education Ministers Kennedy and Kathleen Wynne. “It was difficult, to say the least, dealing with the Province and the press in Mississauga,” he laughs.
Ferreira became the defiant face, and voice, of the board as it refused to cut services to balance its budget and was ultimately had its finances taken over by a provincial supervisor. The former Catholic trustee notes gleefully that the supervisor has so far made relatively few cuts.
“I think part of my appeal will be that I stood up to the Liberals” when they didn’t revise the funding formula as they’d promised.
The riding is very winnable for the NDP because voters who want to send a message about their concern about downloading and school funding can hurt the government without directly electing a Tory.
Ferreira hopes John Tory runs a strong third in the riding though, because those votes will largely be drained from Ruprecht’s support.
“I don’t see myself as a parachute,” the Mississaugan says, because he is back in his old stomping grounds in a riding where he works and pays property taxes. The issue is largely moot, as Ruprecht doesn’t live there either.
Ferreira already feels a lot better about his chances than he did last November in Mississauga, when he challenged incumbent Ward 3 Councillor Maja Prentice for the second time.
“At least I won’t have the mayor campaigning against me – hint, hint, nudge, nudge,” says Ferreira, referring to Hazel McCallion’s obvious but unstated preference for Prentice.
In fact Toronto Mayor David Miller, a long-time NDPer, might even put a good word in for him.
Ironically, Ferreira’s chances of being elected an MPP are a lot better than his chances were of unseating a City councillor.

When you live in the provincial riding of Mississauga West, you don’t expect to hear too often from the Member of Provincial Parliament from Mississauga Centre.
Yet oddly enough, as a resident of Erin Mills, I have received three newsletters in the past couple of months from Harinder Takhar, who represents the Centre riding.
Takhar, of course, is going to be running in the Oct. 10 provincial election in Mississauga-Erindale which – surprise, surprise — happens to include Erin Mills.
It seems the four Liberal MPPs in Mississauga got together a while ago to talk about public communication and redistribution.
They realize, of course, that there will be a lot of confusion about the change in riding boundaries which become effective with the new election. About half of Takhar’s current Centre riding will be lost to the surrounding seats.
Takhar says that, after some discussion among the MPPs about putting out a joint brochure explaining the new boundaries, they decided to opt for individual pieces.
And where are those “communication” pieces being distributed? Why, the incumbents just happen to be distributing them in the areas that will be part of their new ridings if they get re-elected.
And, while they are explaining the boundary changes, the incumbent MPPs are also enumerating all of the Liberal government’s accomplishments over the past four years because.... there was some space left over after the biographies and the riding maps.
In other words, the distribution has a lot more to do with introducing themselves at taxpayers’ expense to potential voters than it does with clearing up public confusion.
We have grown accustomed to publicly-funded communications arriving on our doorsteps just before elections at all levels of government, but this really takes things to a new level.
One of Takhar’s brochures had to be redistributed because it was not printed in the right colour (it was brownish instead of red) and it failed to include a sub-headline on the front stating: Your Voice for Mississauga-Erindale. That’s the reason that piece was received twice.
Its purpose was, “to give people because the ridings have changed,” Takhar explained today. “The new people need to know what is going on.” His last piece, called Four Years of Positive Change, outlines accomplishments in health care, education, infrastructure etc., something he has put out annually. “I’ve always done it.”
Mississauga West’s Bob Delaney explained that there is no party logo on the brochures the MPPs are distributing in the areas they do not represent. “We made sure it is within the letter of the law of Elections Ontario.”
David Brown, the Conservative candidate and local planning consultant whom Takhar will face in Mississauga-Erindale along with Shaila Kibria of the NDP, says, “Mr. Takhar is representing Mississauga Centre and he is simply using this as a vehicle to raise his profile. The reality is that they are campaigning. If they are going to be distributing material in any form outside of their ridings, they should be doing it in a campaign context,” says Brown.
That would lead to campaign expenses, however, which is exactly what this little exercise is obviously designed to avoid.
It may be within the letter of the law and it may be small potatoes in the how-low-can-we-go limbo sweepstakes to get re-elected but it’s still — what’s that word?
Oh, yes — wrong.

“The fact that you don’t know you are writing satire doesn’t mean you aren’t writing satire.”
So stated Professor Dennis Duffy in his expert testimony at the May trial of Pothole Poet Antonio Batista, as he has come to be known.
Too bad for Batista that Mr. Justice James J. Keaney didn’t agree with the expert.
In fact, he said the opposite Friday in his verbal judgment that convicted the 75-year-old Batista of uttering a death threat against Ward 9 Councillor Pat Saito.
First of all, Justice Keaney ruled that Duffy’s testimony in the trial was inadmissible. Then he flatly contradicted his argument about unintentional satire. He said Batista couldn’t argue that his comments were in jest because he didn’t know what satire was. (Batista told court that he only heard the word after the trial procedure began.)
Throughout the trial, defence lawyer Clayton Ruby desperately tried to find a witness (other than Duffy) to speak to satire. He couldn’t find any takers, not Detective-Sergeant John Mans, not resident Neil Lawrence who first spotted the poetic flyer on a mail box and not Saito herself.
So his whole case rested on Duffy’s outline of the history of political satire, which has roots as far back as Greece and Rome, roots that Prof. Duffy expertly outlined. Ruby also relied heavily on his own fine closing argument, which exhorted the judge to protect the core right of political free expression. “Do not be quick to draw criminality into political expression. Your job is to protect that kind of speech,” said Ruby. “We have to be careful to protect a citizen’s right to criticize in public.”
There were a couple of problems with pleading not guilty by reason of satire. The first one was that his client, who testified on his own behalf, is obviously not given to light humour when it comes to the subject of Councillor Saito.
As Batista demonstrated once again when given a chance to speak to his conviction Friday, he has a one-track mind when it comes to political concerns, with all roads leading back to his belief that Councillor Saito failed to act appropriately when residents were sent tax notices for their new Green Park homes and then were forced to seek rebates from the developer (as the Municipal Act dictates.)
Although Ruby said there was no evidence of personal animosity between Batista and his then-councillor, his client’s demeanour and comments stated the opposite. Outside the court Batista even said that Saito is the one who should be in jail because she isn’t doing her job.
But the main problem Ruby and his client had throughout the trial, and one they never really addressed, were the actual words that were used in the poem.
He wrote, “We are going to dig a pothole about six feet and 3 feet wide and 5 feet deep to hide her body and God will take care of Her Soul, but we cannot forgive her for doing nothing. She can keep running at a good pace but We will make sure that She is in HEAVEN and out of the race. So please GOD take care of this SOUL for ever and EVER.”
Batista said he did not intend that those words be taken so seriously. But they are what they are. It is hard to construe them as anything other than a threat of death. Mr. Lawrence, whom crown attorney Jennifer Goulin argued was a stand-in for the “reasonable person” the Criminal Code speaks to, certainly took them as a threat. He warned Saito’s office immediately.
It’s very easy to ridicule this prosecution as political over-reaction. Clearly, politicians have to accept a higher level of criticism.
It all comes back, however, to the actual words that were used. If that letter were written about my wife or daughter or son, I would have gone to the police too. The words simply “crossed the line,” as Justice Keaney said.

One of those seriously unimpressed with the conviction of Pothole Poet Antonio Batista is that veteran of multiple death threats, Ward 6 Councillor and Mayor-in-Training-Wheels Carolyn Parrish.
When she was an MP and practising her Texas two-step on that doll who lives in the White House, Parrish was inundated with nasty missives in response to her famous aside about “those American bastards.”
Parrish says she certainly would not have referred the issue to police had someone penned a free verse about her, rather than Pat Saito, which fantasized about her next home being in a comfortable councillor-sized hole in the ground.
The first Mississauga-Erindale MP says the Liberals made her refer a number of the nastier threats she received to the RCMP for investigation. One particularly upsetting email said that the writer had seen photos of Parrish’s two daughters on her web site and mused about what pain he would inflict on them.
“When the police traced it down and went and knocked on the door they found that some kid had been down in the basement sending out emails under his Dad’s name,” says Parrish. “Boy, were his parents ever upset and did he ever get in trouble!”
Parrish agrees with defence lawyer Clayton Ruby that the most appropriate response to the pothole poem would have been a motherly phone call, not a reference to the police.
As for the issue that infuriated Batista — being charged for taxes that rightfully were the responsibility of Green Park Homes because the law only allows the City to bill the first assessed owner of new homes, the councillor said she has solved similar situations already — by threatening the developer into co-operation. Someone has obviously been paying attention to the modus operandi of Her Warship.
• • •
Everybody knows about the power of one, which refers to the ability of an indomitable individual to make real change. But how about the power of two? That term may well come to refer to an amazing pair of Mississauga women who have just managed to reverse, with a few months’ work, a long-standing grievance that hampered the delivery of decent meals in senior citizens’ home across Ontario.
Julie Curitti and Angela Shaw are old friends who went to nursing school together and were asked to co-chair the family advisory council at the Cawthra
Gardens Long-Term Care facility.
When they started asking questions, and discovered that the “raw food allowance” paid by Ontario was $5.46 per senior per day they were shocked and outraged. They put together a little campaign that started with their family council and their local church and ignited a firestorm of public interest. It reinvigorated campaigns by the Dietitians of Canada and by their own Registered Nurses of Ontario, found a leader in MPP Peter Fonseca and coincided nicely with the timing of the provincial election.
The result is that Ontario yesterday came through with the increase to $7 a day that the their petition targeted.
Moral of the story: If you want to doctor up a big problem in Ontario, send a couple of nurses to do the job.
• • •
Are either of the two leading political parties in Ontario at all interested in winning the open seat in Mississauga- Brampton South?
You have to wonder when neither the Liberals or the Tories have a candidate in place 10 weeks before we go to the polls.
There’s no incumbent in the riding, which you’d think would make it a magnet for would-be MPPs. Of course a lot of Liberals were interested before the party decreed that a hand-picked female candidate would be appointed. But where is she?
Masood Khan, realtor/actor/publisher/politician is still waiting anxiously for his nomination date but the delay in setting one by the Conservatives speaks volumes.
All of which begs the question: What if they called an election and nobody ran?