No cellphone

I have no cell phone. Yes I can just imagine your face right now. It will probably be about similar to the ones I have gotten fact-to-face when I tell them that I have no phone. It's just like declaring yourself a vegetarian.  The expression is something between shock and being dumbfounded. As if this mortal willingly decided to abstain from one of the great pleasures in life - whether either eating meat (Fleisch as the Germans and Dutch like to call it - which you know sounds more appropriate but gruesome) or having a cellphone.

But the cellphone is much more now as it used to be in the golden olden ages (ahem 5 years ago? not so long). Now, its as if we had always been born and raised with a cellphone to our ear. And then again, who wouldn't want it not to be - with the new models that are out you can do everything EVERYTHING on the cellphone: tell time, internet, calculation, fb, twitter, maps etc. etc.  I once asked a guy if he had the time. He had a watch but ofcourse he went instinctively for his cellphone!

Which then leads me to ponder can live really exist before cellphones? Well if our parents lived most their lives without this handy dandy instrument then why not? When I came back from abroad, my phone wasn't at the same frequency as in North America - and since then have never found a good reason to get a new cell phone.  And why not? Surely, this women would now attest to my predicament.  A godsend but also major distraction in the form of a pocket sized trouble making device. Like a fb on demand. I've gone roughly a month without a cell and counting. No harm yet. Time will tell. But atleast I won't be crashing into any water fountains.

Mourning a fallen soldier

It was early morning on Wednesday January 12 and the daily 9 to 5 routine was just beginning anew. It was also the day that a ''shoeless'' (why newsbits caught this name I don't know - but it could have justified such a dangerous man as homeless or ''unstable'' therefore also making the story that much more glamorous) man stole a snow plow and then continued to drive it erratically from Dundas and Parliament. The large vehicle, along with the ''shoeless'' man, eventually crashed into a garbage truck and ended its plow through the streets at Humberside Avenue and Keele Street.

Det. Constable William Hancox

Sgt. Ryan Russell succumbed to injuries the day after in the same hospital that the suspect was taken to (after police shot him down).  A ceremony was offered on Tuesday January 18 for the officer. The march was a sight to see. A procession of Toronto police officers, and as news reports ''officers from America'', walking down the main roads and ending up downtown at the Toronto Metro Convention Centre.

And all this public show was necessary? What I fail to see is the necessity of having such a public ceremony. How many other officers have fallen in Toronto - yet never honoured with the same? Constable Todd was killed in gunfire during a walk-through for illegal drugs.  In 1998, Detective Constable Bill Hancox was stabbed while grabbing something to eat. Yet, I have no recollection of any ceremony for their honourable deaths as big as this one. Hancox served 9 years while Russell had served 11. Was there a significance to this funeral procession that I fail to grasp or is Toronto turning another ''bread and circuses'' on us?

Sgt. Ryan Russells and wife.

It serves to highlight how we can celebrate or mourn some things and really just ignore the rest.  Of how many officers that died on duty have we mourned; of how many men and women who had fought our wars been appreciated (not saying war of any kind is alright); of how many firefighters, doctors, etc have done the same...but have never had a public ceremony? We should wake up and realise that Russels is not the first and will not be the last. It is a pity that we only cry for those who have a show put up for them.