Open Letter to Unsuspecting Simpletons

Dear Confounded Morons:

I wish, hope and even pray that this:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/vacationing-family-hit-with-10-000-movie-bill-1.1229301

is the last story I will ever read respecting an wholely, good, kind and unsuspecting citizen who has, to great horror and surprise, received a whopping bill from his cellular carrier as a result of data charges while out-of-country. If history carries any weight, however, I fear that in another four to six months, we'll be hit, again, with another story of the same ilk. Although initial stories of this sort were about consumer victimization when they surfaced six or seven years ago during the initial explosion of smartphone availability, it seems to me that in the intervening period, the victim ship has sailed. To me, John Gibson of Weyburn, Saskatchewan, this is a story about your shocking level of ignorance. Where have you been for the last half-decade?

First of all, your charges were not a "movie bill". Granted, that was probably a headline generated by CBC, but none-the-less, it implies that somehow the use of shocking sums of data were rather innocent and should be compared, in value, to the cost of "a few movies" in some other context, like a movie rental or a theatre ticket, which you were apparently too lazy or cheap to actually buy. Why the hell were your kids sitting inside in front of the computer anyway when they had the benefit of the Arizona heat, which clearly cost a pretty sum in airfare to provide to them? Couldn't you at least make vacation a little bit exciting - take in a theatrical experience, or maybe go to the damn zoo, even. Make no mistake, the product you purchased was not "movies" but "data". Had you downloaded music, tv shows or porn, it's all ones and zeros to the network - it's all just data. These oversize roaming bills are almost always foisted upon children, as if the predatory phone companies are praying on the innocence of infants and crushing the soles of children. I guess it would be more difficult to run the media play if the headline was "vacationing family hit with $10,000.00 pornography bill".

I just hopped off a plane in Arizona last night and, despite that my cellular data was turned-off, SaskTel - the same carrier that cold-heartedly bilked Mr. Gibson of his children's happiness - sent me no fewer than THREE text messages warning of the various rates for data roaming and advising what to do about it - they even provided a link to call for the addition of a US data plan.

Mr. Gibson - welcome to 2014. Please hop off the ignorance train. If I have to read another story of this nature in the Saskatchewan news, I'm sending a personal letter to the complainant on behalf of phone carriers, which is really saying something, because at the end of it all, I too, believe that most carriers are jerks.

Open Letter to National Media: Stop Reporting Toronto's Weather

Dear Canadian Media:

Toronto's daily weather is not national news. Please stop reporting it as such. This is getting ridiculous.

As my family and I bathed in the dark enveloping coolness of a four hour power outage at -30 degrees (not "feels like", but actually -30 as the true air temperature), we awoke to national headlines advising that Toronto was slushy, and that as a result of a coming "cold snap", the slush might freeze. I checked the temperature in Toronto: it's -5 degrees. Of course, it's getting as cold as -12 this evening and the overnight low tonight is... wait for it.... -19. The horror. Torontonians might have some ice, because that happens in freezing temperatures.

Last week, I recall hearing on CBC Radio One's morning national news accounts of people hearing cracking noises in Toronto when it dipped to a bone chilling -20 overnight. The fact that some cracking noises seemed unusual to some lake-front dwellers at that temperature informs us of just how infrequently it really reaches seriously cold temperatures in Canada's media darling, which also gives you some idea of how out-of-touch ol' Hogtown is with the climate in a large swath of this country. Lakes freeze at -20 - shifting ice and water make noises.

It's trite and a smidge self-righteous for me to point-out that we of the prairies have been living with daytime highs below -20 for several consecutive stretches in the last few months. Consider the people in the vast stretches of our territories north of 60: our prairie coldsnap probably seems quite tolerable to them. I do realize that the national media is reporting the Toronto weather as a function of relativity - perhaps it's currently colder than normal. I suppose that's news in some minor fashion - a sidebar to the local weather report. But it's not not national news - that's where this whole thing went off the rails. It's hard to solicit pity for the downtrodden residents of the Golden Horseshoe when their reported climatic suffering would constitute a thermal relief for a wide swath of the country. In Canada, overnight lows of -50 should attract some national consideration. Overnight lows of -20 are just "winter".

So seriously, Canadian Media, stop towing the line. Winter often sucks in this country, wherever you are. If you're in Vancouver, it's raining, if you're in the prairies or the north, it's bloody freezing, if you're on the east coast, it's storming, and if you're in Toronto.... well.... it's a damp cold, I guess (which, if you understood weather, indicates it's really not that cold). Let's just accept it, leave the complaints for the coffee shops and elevators, and get on with getting by until March. Stop reporting the woes of Toronto as national f*cking news. Couldn't you just dig-up a story on Rob Ford or something?