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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2003-06-04, Page 5THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, JUNE 4, 2003. PAGE 5. Other Views Cars. Too smart for their own good Bonnie Had your car been recalled yet? If not, don’t feel left out. At the rate things are going - and providing you’re behind the wheel of a vehicle of more recent vintage than a 1983 Westfalia - you should be getting a letter from your dealer sometime soon. Consider: DaimlerChrysler is recalling 135,000 sedans to replace faulty seat bolts. GM wants to have another look at a few thousand specimens of a dozen car and van models built since 1999 to fix the air bags, steering linkages and trunk releases. Volkswagen is asking owners of Passats built between 1990 and ‘97 to bring in their buggies for some work on defective front seat heaters. There are also recall orders for Dodge Dakotas (headlights); Kawasakis (oil leaks); Honda minivans (leaky gas tanks); Mitsubishis (accelerator pedal problems); Chevrolet Silverados (unsealed windshields); and Toyotas (slippery floor mats). And those, friends, are merely the recall notices that went out to the public in ONE WEEK recently. What’s the problem here? Are carmakers building lousier cars these days? No, they’re just building cars that are ‘way more complicated. At the risk of sounding like a dinosaur, I have to say that I remember riding in the rumble seat (look it up, kiddies) of my brother- in-law Roy’s Model T Ford. It had hand- operated windshield wipers, skinny rubber wheels with wooden spokes, and a brass horn mounted on the door frame that went AY- OOOOOOOO-GAH when you squeezed the rubber bulb. And no worries about the electric starter malfunctioning. There wasn’t one. Tories seek votes from 1 Got a call a few days ago asking me to vote for Ernie Eves - all the way from New Brunswick. The caller was not an excited Maritimer informing that the east coast is buzzing over the Ontario Progressive Conservative premier’s accomplishments, nor an expatriate Ontarian letting it be known who he would vote for if he could. The caller, obviously youthful, introduced herself by her first name and said she was phoning “on behalf of Ernie Eves and your local candidate, Charis Kelso,” the Tory running in the Toronto riding of St. Paul’s. She said Eves’s policies include allowing homeowners to deduct part of their mortgage interest payments from taxes and “no more teachers’ strikes” and asked if I would vote for him when the election is called. When told there are concerns whether Eves will keep promises, because he has backed off several, including one to sell the province’s electricity transmission network, she said she knew nothing about that. Asked what other policies Eves has, she started to read from his platform, The Road Ahead. To other questions, she said she was phoning from Miramichi and was a student employed by an organization she identified, after turning to someone to confirm, as “Responsive Marketing Group.” This raises embarrassing questions for the Tories. Parties normally use volunteers, often party members, to phone voters seeking support, and the Tories over the years have been able to count on more than Arthur Black You started the car by jamming a steel hand crank into a slot below the radiator, giving it a reef, then running back to the driver’s seat before the car took off on its own. Roy’s Model T wasn’t fast or smooth riding, but it was reliable. Most cars were back then. After all, there wasn’t that much that could go wrong. And when something did go wrong, you didn’t have to be a diagnostic technician or a mechanical wizard to fix it. I also recall a ‘52 Pontiac my Dad drove that had a tendency to jam in first gear. My Dad’s solution? He’d get out, open the hood, smack the gear linkage with a ball peen hammer, close the hood, get back in the driver’s seat and drive on. I try not to even open the hood of my car nowadays. What’s the point? It looks like the command centre for the Pickering nuclear plant in there, with sleek, gray, anonymous modules ticking and humming away, all carrying stem admonitions. WARNING: NEVER OPEN WHEN HOT. POISON! CAUSES SEVERE BURNS. DANGER! EXHAUST GASES PRESENT. CAUTION! SEE MANUAL. And the mystifying REMINDER: USE ATF DEXRON AS FLUID FILL. Can you remember when Volkswagen Beetles came with a wooden yardstick you dipped into the gas tank to measure how much Eric Dowd From Queen’s Park their share of them. Voters called at their homes and asked to support a candidate envisage they are being called from a bustling campaign office not far away, packed with public-spirited volunteers, working enthusiastically to elect the person of their choice. Voters picture them, young and old, giving up leisure time, tirelessly thumbing through phone books and repeating information out of the goodness of their hearts. The mere fact so many go to so much trouble is some testimony their candidate has merit. But the Tories now have people calling voters from a thousand miles away who have never set eyes on the candidate or riding and know nothing about his or her record and policies except for a few brief notes handed them on a sheet of paper. And they are paid for doing it. The Tories under Eves and his predecessor, Mike Harris, have fallen far behind the Liberals in polls over the past three years and now seem also to have fallen so far behind in attracting volunteers they have to pay people in another province to do their calling. fuel you had left? I can. Seems impossibly Neolithic when I read about the latest ‘automotive breakthrough’ - something called iDrive. iDrive is a knob that you’ll find in the centre of the dashboard on the latest models of BMWs. It can be moved in eight differ­ ent directions and that gives you access to - get this - SEVEN HUNDRED different functions. What kind of functions? Everything short of a moon landing. iDrive puts you in charge of Communications (telephone). Navigation (guidance, scroll-down road maps, GPS etc.), Entertainment (radio, CD, DVD) and Climate (heat, AC, air distribution). But that’s just the major groupings. Secondary menus include options like OB Data (On board computer and maintenance operation, don’t you know) and Settings (activation and deactivation of vehicle settings such as traction control). All I can say is: Earth to BMW: I don’t give a flying lug-nut about all that crap - and it does not improve my highway confidence to think that the guy at the wheel of the oncoming BMW is bent over fiddling with his iDrive to check his latitude and longitude. I don’t want a dashboard console with 700 functions not counting the DVD/audioCD- R/mp3 player - I want a car that conforms to the philosophy of those early Model A and Model T Fords. Somebody once asked the man who created them, Henry Ford, what colours his cars came in. Ford fixed the inquirer with a flinty glare and grumped “You can have any colour you want. As long as it’s black.” That’s all a car driver really needs. That, and ,000 miles The Tories constantly say they’re better at creating jobs in Ontario. If they have to hire people to canvass for votes, surely they should hire them so it provides jobs in Ontario, not a thousand miles away. Or are they hiring far away hoping the news will never get out? The Tories, who receive huge donations from business, have ample funds to pay outsiders to keep the phones busy day and night. They tend to deride demonstrations that quickly come together for left-wing causes as rent-a-crowd, although there is no evidence anyone is paid, but now the Tories are resorting to rent-a-canvasser. This is not the only Tory tactic that seems contrived. Their caller made it clear they will campaign particularly on promises to make mortgage interest payments tax­ deductible and ban teachers’ strikes. But making mortgage interest tax­ deductible was never discussed by Eves until it suddenly burst forth in his election platform. Banning teachers from striking also was not contemplated by Eves and in recent comments he opposed a ban. This suggests these two policies and some others he is premising were dreamed up solely because his surveys have shown they can win votes in an election and are just as contrived and artificial as rent-a-canvasser. The Tories also presumably have people canvassing us from New Brunswick because costs there are? lower - soon they may be seeking our votes from Taiwan. The short of it So much hope There are so many things I could be writing about. We got SARS out of our system, we thought, just in time for West Nile to take centre stage. Then a cow in Alberta brought the scare of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy or mad cow disease (Boy that sounds scary no matter how you say it). And then SARS came back. It kind of makes you wonder if somebody up there is licked off at Canada. We can panic over all of this. We can over­ react. We can even find the humour as one fellow recently did, joking that it has never been so unsafe to barbecue beef in cottage country, particularly if that cottage is near Toronto. Or we can warily ignore it, exercising a level of caution, but taking a deep breath and doing our best to put it all into perspective. There are after all, many scarier things out there than one sick cow in Alberta. It was with this thought in mind recently, that I took a stroll in the rather rare sunshine. The news had, 1 admit, overwhelmed me just a little and 1 decided to focus my attention on the beauty around me. And it was, and is, bountiful. The positive in the deluge of rain has been the vibrant greening of lawns and trees. Flowers are slowly starting to emerge from winter sleep bringing an energizing burst of colour to yards and landscapes. The vividness of life is not simply visual, however. There is the sense of touch as we are kissed by warming breezes and soothed by the sun. We can taste the vitality as we enjoy the early offerings from the earth, asparagus and hubarb. Beauiy can be heard too. Bees and hummingbirds buzz as they begin their dance, flitting from place to place, bud to bud. The drone of lawn mowers give special effect to the scene of springtime awakening. And the music. I had not realized how much I had mused the music of spring and summer, my windchimes and the birds. It was the awareness of the latter that reminded me of another springtime sight. Mounting the stairs of our garage I moved slowly to the window. Perched on the ledge is a robin’s nest. Where just a week before had lain a wriggling mass more reminiscent of the worms they would eventually consume, were now four slightly transparent babies. Eyes still closed, they snuggle their sparsely-downed bodies together waiting for mom to return, to nurture and protect. I try not to stay too long. Mama robin is reluctant to sit when invading eyes are present. But for a brief time I watch this new life, fascinated by the growth, marvelling just a little at their survival and protectively praying it continues. I have become a surrogate mother hen. I check their progress regularly now, always happy to see the same number. While they are safe from feline predators in their penthouse dwelling, I am concerned about other enemies. Their home makes them vulnerable to larger birds looking for easy prey. The height that has protected them from so much in the early stage of their life, also worries me as I think of their first flight, over my concrete patio. So many obstacles in an already precarious world. But oh so much hope too.