It is posts like these that really somedays make me wonder why I even bother with this website. I mean, it costs me money, it saps my time, it gains me a lot of headache and wakes me up at night calling to be fixed or restarted, and then it attracts totally asinine drivel like this.

Really Walt, pardon my French, but ...

• Exactly what skin off your backside does this policy cost you?
• How exactly do your rights suffer to allow someone to wear what they wear every day when they vote?
• What possible blasted business of yours is it?

Please. Do tell. Do enlighten us so we may be informed.

This isn't being Right Wing, so don't hand me that Bullshit. This is neither big-C nor little-c 'conservativism'. This is just being a narrow minded petty and arrogant xenophobic idiot. (I originally had a shorter word in that spot)

More to the point, please, do tell us all

1. What does this rant of yours possibly have to do with South Bruce Peninsula?
2. What possible interest could it be to the thousands of tourists and residents who frequent this site?
3. Indeed, pray do tell what possible connection allowing or dis-allowing ethnic dress in the poll booths could have to anything but your own sad and twisted self-righteous sense of what you and you alone think should be declared proper for everyone else ... which, if I remember correctly, is not any declared precept of any free democracy, appears nowhere in our national constitution, and is nowhere enshrined in our Bill of Rights.

Do you mean to say you would wish to be the one to stand there at the North Toronto polls to rip the bourkas off the young daughters of Islamic Canadians who had come there to exercise their democratic rights?

As to your Zorro mask, maybe you're more kinky than I imagine, but I have trouble imagining that you wear that mask every time you appear in public, and I have real trouble believing that your priest has asked you to wear it so as not to excite the women folk, but benefit of the doubt if you do choose to do so, then please, sir, do so. Wear it to the polls if that is your way, and do let us know when you do, because I'd love to float front page a picture of it.

In the meantime, excuse me while I recontemplate precisely why I should bother to spend my time keeping afloat the public vehicle for stupidity like this, especially when CFOS would likely give you a weekly-poll for just such junk, I feel our once-upon-a-time SBPeninsular is today far from relevent.

It has, instead, it seems, instead sunk just as low a base common denominator as the all rest, and is, hence, quite redundant.

Thanks for the nudge Bub, and certainly it was you and Sabrinus and Dodge and VinylGirl and others who did take a run at my ideal, and I have to thank you all and be thankful for all of that. For those who wouldn't make the leap to the click, what Bub refers to is probably this:

The Peninsular is a guide to our home for our visitors, a living documentary for those who call this place home. The Peninsular collects our memories, tracks the issues, the concerns, the dreams and the stories that come together to tell us who we are.
[ South Bruce Peninsular: The New Voice ]

But now I have lived 4 and a half years into that future, and far from bringing the community together, we have a magnet for blowing them apart. Not just Sabrinus, even KeeMay has found other, better venues for building communities online, and they don't involve the town or the lake or the skies, they are worlds away from anything here and maybe that's the way things should be. Folks in the community don't need an online channel, they already have their ways of connecting, their network of friends and their ways of keeping in touch, keeping connected. Most everybody has Facebook now, and as KeeMay put it, "Nothin' ever happens around here" -- nothing worthy of a journaling, anyway.

So while I do welcome you back and while I still do harbour that secret and probably selfish desire to have this community journaling idea leave the Story of the SBP'ers indelibly online, I really have to question if it is either doable by this route, and if it is even desirable. Maybe the days of "Tell us a story from 'ome" are gone, replaced by HBO specials the way big-screen TV has replaced family conversations at our MacDonalds, anachronisms that just don't belong ... or maybe they do belong, but just not in this format, not on this site, with this software, not under this name.

So I'm undecided right now. I can't fault Walt for being who he is any more than I could fault the rest for keeping their stories private, that's just the way everyone is. Maybe the whole public journal thing was just too far out there -- I was thinking of something like those fabulous folk-art displays from the town fairs, the pictures, quilts, children's poems and drawings, only I wanted to scrap-book them for the whole world to see, but maybe other folk don't want their stories told. Maybe that whole model isn't a valid assumption. Maybe Town Fairs are meant to be fleeting things, stuff you only maybe remember seeing sort of kind a faintly and would forget if not for the crumpled photo you found in a drawer.

So I dunno. I have to think about it. Something went horribly wrong somewhere along the line, took a wrong turn at Alberquerque maybe, I dunno, somethin' -- gotta do some rethinking about it all anyway and decide whether to turn back, press on, or just pack it in and call it a day.

Clarification: I did not say, "Nothin' ever happens around here". My almost exact wording is, "I do not feel a sense of community." Besides, I do not like politics. So, I stay away.