Odie:

Odie is our little black Abyssinian with a white bow tie under his chin.

He's Cat #2 at our house. 13-year old Garfield, Bianca's cat, is Cat #1. Both are spoiled rotten, mostly because we allow them extra slack due to the fact they are persecuted.

We live in Oakville, probably the only town in the world where cats are held captive. They're not allowed outdoors to control the town's rodents because they might be a danger to songbirds. When given the choice, our councillors here are strictly for the birds.

Never mind that the Egyptian Pharaohs valued their cats enough to mummify them and take them into the next world with them when they expired.

Never mind that following the San Francisco earthquake when the rodents threatened to take over the ruins, cats went as high as US $200 each. That's in 1906 dollars. The town councillors in Oakville took the time off from their busy schedules to appease the rodents among us.

Anyhow, back to Odie. A true Abyssinian, he's impossible to contain. Most of the neighbors appreciate him because he cleans up the rodents around the neighborhood. When he's tired of playing with them, he bites their heads off and leaves the little corpses on the back lawn. I use the long-handled picker-uppers from Dollarama to pick them up and put them in the garbage.

That ice storm made outside excursions uncomfortable for him and Garf and we finally had to put him in the garage. We checked at half-hour intervals to see if he was ready to come back in. This went on until bedtime with no sign of Odie. Finally, Eleanor got him in around 10pm.

"He's in!" she hollered, and I continued surfing the Web. Some time later, there was a clunk somewhere and I assumed it was one of our neighbors fidgeting outside with a snow shovel.

Then there were more clunks and it dawned on me that the sounds came from the bathroom. Sure enough, there was Odie in the contoured tub playing ping-pong with a mouse.

It was about the third or fourth time he did that this season. Very sneakily, he'd bring a mouse in with him from the garage and take it straight upstairs into the big tub where he would play with it to his heart's content until someone put a paper coffee cup over it and carried it outside. 

People who think cats are not too bright should give their heads a shake. It takes some imagination for a cat to figure out that the slick sides of a tub are about the only thing in a household to be impossible for a mouse to climb. Those little suckers could go straight up the sides of a brick wall outside when a cat's chasing them.

Anyhow, I scooped the mouse and took that paper coffee cup outside. It was cold and the poor mouse was all curled up shivering in the bottom and I felt sorry for him, so I put the cup down horizontally near a big pile of leaves that the wind had swirled into a heap outside the front door. 

I checked the next morning and there was no sign of either the mouse or the cup following a cold and windy night.

The Trump Card:

After a year of Donald Trump, most Americans should be able to see how much he was needed.

It's not about how much voters admire Donald Trump.

It's about how much America needs a course correction only someone outside the existing political loop is likely to deliver.

Children's Crusade:

You have to wonder what the most mouthy agitators at the head of all those kids goofing off from classes probably said to whoever was appointed to listen to them when they reached Washington.

Was it "Mr. President, how are you going to prevent the criminally homicidal rejects amongst us from finding a gun the moment they're severely p'd off over something and blowing away as many of us as they can?" 

That's a question that no American adult can answer with any degree of certainty, not even Donald Trump.

Did each kid think of him/her/itself as a thumbs up for gun control?

Did they think of their numbers as having gone viral? Is that how the effectiveness of any protest is measured these days?

Wynne Economics 101:

Just in case she has failed to cover some part of the Ontario electorate while buying votes, Wynne, that brilliant economist, is now promising every woman wages equal to what those dreaded males beside her are making.

This is another artificial spin on market economics like the one that put the late Soviet Union out of business back in 1990.

When I did a tour of the Soviet Union in the mid-80s the working folk there liked to describe their work environment as "They pretend they are paying us and we pretend we are working".

That's the kind of thinking that sets in when people with a good work ethic realize that the slackers among them are making the same wage with no effort at all.

Wynn is unwilling to allow the market to decide which employee is worth what. She alone will dictate the terms after introducing sexual distinctions.

Trump's Silence:

The Brits' expulsion of a bunch of Russian diplomats following the assassination attempt of a double agent has failed to prompt Trump to immediately join the international community in condemning Russia.

Naturally, everybody, especially the left-wing US media, is whining that Trump should have been quick to join in.

Really? How come suddenly Trump's participation in this international pile-on is so important?

Since his election to the US presidency, the Brits have been reported to be debating whether or not they should allow this brash new president into their precious country or anywhere near their queen. Their left-leaning media was reported to have painted Trump as downright unworthy of British acceptance and recognition.

So why should they be surprised at Trump's seeming reluctance to immediately jump in and endorse their theory that the Russians are responsible?

If I were in Donald Trump's boots, I'd do exactly what he's doing before jumping into the fray, at least until there is solid proof that the Russkis are to blame.

Ford's win:

Doug Ford should make a good premier for Ontario.

Unlike the majority of today's political types, he appears to know when it's time to stop talking and start doing.

That is one of the characteristics of a successful businessman, and that's what he is.

We shouldn't expect to see any dumb business moves like buying votes while recklessly setting artificial values on wages.

Vulnerable Farms:

At the time I grew up on a farm, there was a farmyard on practically every quarter-section of land. As time went on, farms grew larger as the economics of scale kicked in. The farm implements grew accordingly.

Today, there is one farm and one farmyard where there used to be a dozen or more. That one big farm now contains buildings for the farm families and animals, plus well over a million dollars worth of machinery. That includes giant tractors with tilling machines to match, large harvesting equipment, trucks, loaders, graders, grain bins, and all-terrain vehicles. 

There is machinery to do everything that needs to be done--all on a giant scale.

So what we have there is a small island of value perched in the midst of a large tract of land mostly well isolated from any municipal source of administration such as fire protection, law enforcement or any other services paid for by taxation.

Too often, this presents an irresistible temptation to the kind of people who would benefit from anything they can steal or gain simply be walking in and taking it. By the time the farmer can get any response from the RCMP or the local police force, the freeloaders are long gone.

Some administrations, like those in Australia, where sheep and cattle ranches are vast, have decided to cope with this problem by making it legal for ranchers and farmers to shoot thieves and trespassers where unavoidable without the risk of being charged and dragged endlessly through the law courts.

But not in Canada. Here, our Prime Minister and his ministry of justice have indicated that they intend to make it easier for drunks, thieves and trespassers to pillage farms by reducing the chances of successful legal retribution for the farmers.

Like his father before him, young Trudeau obviously does not appreciate the importance of farming to Canada's economy. 

Hey, Justin, that is where they grow things you eat, you know, like food. That's where your local supermarket gets the stuff they load into their shelves. That is where the stuff they make doughnuts from at the doughnut shops comes from.

It's not just a rural Canada problem. Eventually it may even have an effect on urban electorates, including Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa. When the time comes that the coffee drinkers can no longer buy doughnuts, they may reconsider how they mark their ballots.