Sunday, September 21, 2014

A Weekend of Defiance

This was the weekend of the greatest march in history that will surely save Mother Earth from her murder by evil mankind. I expect like most of these events that the march will be full of sound and fury and ultimately signify nothing.
Meanwhile, I was defying age and gravity by playing in a Masters basketball tournament, in a small city an hour from Toronto on the shores of one of the world's largest fresh water lakes. Now my age is a state secret and to be honest my defiance of gravity would be measured in inches not feet. But these defiances pale when compared to the defiance against science and reality when I arrived at the new and shiny field-house in which the tournament was staged.
It is truly a marvelous facility, bright and new with hardwood slats never before suffering the pounding of the big feet of large males.
Then I went to fill up my water bottle.
Now in a modern world, where decisions were based on theory and proof, not political considerations, this activity would take about 15 seconds. But nooooo. Not now, not here. It took about 5 minutes to capture enough water to prevent my dehydration and death. I have seen a stronger trickle from a faucet with a leaky washer.
And the showers? I had to move around and do a shimmy dance to make my hair just a little bit wet.
Did I mention that my drive to the place was conducted in rain so strong that it pooled on the highway and caused at least one accident? And that it is raining similarly as I write this?
The facility is perhaps one mile from one of the largest fresh water lakes in the world. It probably increased in volume by a foot or so from the rain today.
But the politicians who would have had to sign off on this project needed to have insisted that the facility be 100% earth friendly. Which means, it doesn't matter if people can get enough water to drink or in which to wash their sweaty bodies.
This is not Arizona. Nor is it California, although clearly the stupidities from there have made it up here.
This is Ontario. We have LOTS of water. And we don't need to conserve it. Especially since any water we drink and piss away makes it back into the eco-system.
As a smart guy once said, the biggest different between stupidity and genius, is that there is a limit to genius.

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