Cheers & Jeers

Cheers: to enforcement and extrapolation. So, another traffic crackdown goes by, and there are another slew of tickets issued. The RCMP and the RNC just finished up Operation Impact, putting police officers on the roads for the Thanksgiving weekend to crack down on speeding, dangerous driving and a whole host of violations. For the RCMP alone, it meant over 1,000 charges laid — in other words, something like 340 charges per day. So think about it this way: on an average day for you on the highway, that’s the number of dangerous drivers you could potentially have problems with. Another thought? Word spreads pretty quickly about the occasional RNC and RCMP traffic crackdowns, so on an average day, there are probably even more offenders on the road. The writing on the wall’s pretty clear: traffic enforcement has to be more than an occasional effort on our roads. If there’s the potential for more than 124,000 violators to be on the road during a single year, the lack of regular highway oversight is clearly leaving a mark. And that mark looks like a long skid, smashed glass and broken lives. Jeers: With one toilet paper company exhorting us to “Enjoy the go” and another trumpeting everything from asking us to join the “let’s talk about your bum” discussion on Facebook and offering website tips on exactly how to use the bathroom (https://www.cottonelle.com, boasting the headline “Health Alert: You’re Taking a Crap Wrong! This Is How You Poop Properly”), don’t you sometimes miss the day when using the bathroom was, well, a little more still behind closed doors? And those blue, endlessly cheerful toilet-paper-using bears? Saints preserve us. And ever notice? They’ve always got their underwear in the dryer, and they don’t even wear clothes … Cheers: to science. There’s this headline from Virginia tech: “Virginia Tech researchers publish study on jellyfish energy consumption that will improve bio-inspired robotic designs for Navy.” Wondering how? Turns out jellies are energyefficient because they essentially make a vacuum behind themselves when they pulse, letting them use 30 per cent less energy to move ahead. They make a hole in water, and then slip their way into it. The U.S. Navy connection? “Virginia Tech also has unveiled a life-like, prototype autonomous robotic jellyfish nicknamed Cyro that is 5 foot 7 inches in length and weighs 170 pounds, as part of the larger Office of Naval Research project.” Now, wouldn’t that be something to run into when you’re out for a leisurely snorkel? Cheers: to the most consistent season. So, the Newfoundland fall is unrolling the way it so often does: warm sometimes, growing cooler, with the wind and rain we’ve come to expect. It’s probably the best time for people from away to come here. So often in the fall, you get exactly what you think you’ll experience, instead of the endless heartache and crushed hopes of May and the downright despair of June.