Cobourg....for sale or rent....

 

 Life in a small town.There are rewards but then there are difficulties as well. Cobourg is probably as nice a place as you will find if it's retirement or a slower lifestyle by the lake is what you are looking for. Employment opportunities are at best miserable or limited. The town itself is a bit behind the times as far as rebuilding and keeping up the downtown area. Many of the old buildings, homes and stores in or near downtown are old and dilapidated looking.Quite a few of the main street ( King Street) retail stores are for sale or for rent and have been vacant for the past two years or more.

A purpose to my blogwork?

Friends and family are not much  interested in my blog,too negative and depressing they tell me. So be it.
If we do not think or talk about hunger,misery,neglect,starvation, violence,war,conflict, poverty...how can we effect any change. We must face it and even in minute and small ways attempt to try and change things.

 If you feel called upon to alleviate suffering in the world, this is a noble thing to do, but remember not to focus exclusively on it. Otherwise, you will encounter a great deal of frustration and despair yourself.
Without a profound change in human consciousness, the world's suffering  is a bottomless pit.

So do not let your compassion become one-sided. Empathy with someone else's pain or lack and want to help must be balanced with a deeper realization of the eternal nature of all life and the ultimate illusion of life.

December 2012...this town

This, Cobourg...is a nice and relatively clean town of about 16,000 and it is easy to live here for me. Most of what I need to buy is available here and for other stuff I take the occasional trip to Peterborough, Oshawa or the big city, Toronto.

One of the strange  taxes here is the so called garbage bag tag. Obviously a form of downloaded somewhat invisible form of stupidly applied taxation. A bit  of a problem if you happen to live at the end of a quiet street or as in my case  at the bottom end of Darcy Street next door to the Water-works.

Some idiot will occasionally stop at the end of the street( the lake is next and no parking signs are posted but ignored)  and dump garbage bags and then quickly disappear. That is aside from the daily visitors who throw stuff out of the cars after a short stop coffee break. Or the dog poop left behind,one screwball appears here daily to let his two big dogs do their thing but has never cleaned up any of it.

But, back to the garbage bags...

I now have a choice, buy tags for $2.75 each and fasten them to the bags so the will get picked up, or just leave the junk for animals to rip the stuff apart and scatter the contents all over the place.

Latino america coin

video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lp1XpdAkXng&feature=player_embedded

Bush...the shrub

Top 10 Reasons Bush Should Apologize!

10. He was the first president in more that 200 years to have his vice president shoot someone (while still in office). It happened one time before in 1804 when Vice President Aaron Burr, serving under Thomas Jefferson, shot Alexander Hamilton.
9. He set back the cause of reading 300 years. He read My Pet Goat and had trouble with the big words. Bush reportedly said in 2000: “One of the great things about books is sometimes there are some fantastic pictures.”
8. He set back the cause of science 200 years when he proclaimed to a crowd in 2005, “The jury is still out on evolution.”
7. He appointed John Ashcroft as attorney general. One of Ashcroft’s first tasks was to cover up the exposed breast of the Spirit of Justice statue at the Department of Justice.
6. Kim Kardashian first came to prominence during his administration.
5. He was responsible for hanging chads, swinging chads and the Florida election count, and ultimately for the lame Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore.
4. He spent more than 400 vacation days at his ranch in Crawford, Texas.
3. He said in all seriousness: “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.”
2. He unfurled the “Mission Accomplished” banner seven years too soon.
1. He couldn’t find Osama Bin Laden

Writing...writer J.Grisham

I am really not all that talented when it comes to writing stuff..I read a lot and occasionally I like to comment on some of what I manage to take in. I can be quite critical if the writing does not make much sense or is hastily put together or inaccurate.
Recently I have enjoyed reading most of the books by John Grisham, an American novel writer. Generally I do not read much fiction, but J.Grisham's Lawyer stories are to a large extend based on true happenings and contain a lot of social and cultural facts.
Pollution, racial tensions, exploitation of certain regions,tort lawyers and their dirty tricks, big tobacco, the chemical industry, drug cartels,  international oil companies are some of his subject matter.
They all become targets of finely spun yarn by this great writer.