Sadly, this is hilarious:

"Spotty weather, soaring fuel prices and an uncertain economy have combined to keep people home when they otherwise would have been travelling."

Egad will you look at that? I suppose they blame their parents for bad potty training too? C'mon folks, get up offa that thang and grow up, to put it bluntly. The world was not made for your convenience, the world does not serve the tourism industry, there is no basic human right that says other people have to pay the way for you.

That's my psychologist training showing through :)

But really, really truly really its time to stop wining about dat big ol' meanie wat did dis to po' widdle me and take the bloody bull by the horns and slay it. We can't go on blaming outside influences for our failures, that is a recipe for disaster, it is a resignation, it is, in the parlance of the psychologist "Victim Syndrome" and in a teenager we'd treat it, probably with Ritalin or Valium, or both.

As Billie Holiday sang it, "Take a look at yourself, you will laugh to beat the band!" -- let's say I have $50 to spend in Sauble, where do I go? What are my options? Say, for dinner. Let's say I'm 60, which means I am of the Woodstock Generation and I have oodles of cash and a nice car and I want to go for dinner in Sauble Beach because I'm on vacation. Where? Um ... ah ... well ... um ...

Ok, forget dinner, we'll BBQ. Where can I buy healthy eating foodstuffs? Don't forget, I'm not the grease-burger bopper from post-war life-be-damned James Dean 50's, I'm an ex-hippie who only wears cotton shirts and worries bout my prostrate. Were do I shop? Um ... ah ... well ... ok, forget the BBQ, let's rent a movie? ah ... ok, we'll just go sit and watch the beach ...

FWIW, I pay $7.50 to park all day in downtown Toronto where there are thousands of options for shopping and eateries for all tastes, all styles, all budgets. I forget what I pay in Owen Sound, but it's so small I usually use change I've dropped in the car. But that's not important right now :)

Here is a true story from the legends of psychology: Richard Bandler tells of an experiment to see how smart rats were compared to people and they set up two mazes, one big one for people, one little one for rats. For rats, they used cheese, for people they used $5 bills. They found the rats learned the maze only slightly slower than the people, but then they did the Part Two and they removed the reward.

The rats soon gave up, uninterested in the experimental maze, they went home. The people are still there, they break in at night to look for those bills.

Ok, its not a true story, but nevermind, that's not important now. What is important is the plan for what we can do, for the actions that we can take to turn this beach ship around and put all this whining and broken-promises stuff behind us (like we expect Saugeen Nation to do?) and pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and say, "Where do we want to go, and how are we going to get there?" and then just go do it. Adversity is a call to invention, a challenge to be met. Just dig this guy and then come back and tell me life is too difficult for the poor businessman. of course its difficult! otherwise we would just hire grad students!

I don't know why I even bother saying that, y'know. It's just going to cause an argument. Maybe I need some lessons in how to politely slap people in the face and nicely ask them to WAKE UP because the fox is in the henhouse and their house is on fire.

"If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you." (Oscar Wilde)