Tim Horton's Tasteless Commercial

There is a new Tim Horton's commercial to promote the lasagna dish they have just added to their menu.  Three people gather for lunch. Two men and a women.  Now, look at it from the new politically correct standards.  There's a woman, a person with an obvious ethnic background, and a white guy. It used to be that we would say there was a token woman, and a token ethnic person, but by now we are so used to seeing this sort of gathering that it doesn't immediately sink in. What does sink in rather quickly is that the white guy is made to look somewhat idiotic in this commercial.

For years I've been hearing that it is becoming harder and harder to get a job is you are a Canadian white male.  Apparently that's because various businesses and services now feel the need to hire a certain number of woman and people from various ethnic groups so that they cannot be accused of discrimination.  In a way, this is reverse discrimination against an otherwise fully qualified white male as it makes that many jobs less available to him.

I do hope this Tim Horton's commercial is not a sign of things to come. It will make it even more difficult for the Canadian white male population to secure a job, if they all become type cast as the least intelligent creature in the population.

What's up with that Timmy???

The Non Subscription

Sometimes magazines offer a free issue to get you interested in their publication.  I often accept these offers and even if I can't handle a new subscription at that point in time, I do make note of the magazines I might like to have later on.  I'm a magazine junkie, and always have at least four subscriptions at any given time.  I also really like free reading material, so if something is offered for free, I'm likely to take it.

The thing is, in recent years, the publishers have taken to sending the invoice before the free issue has even arrived.  This bugs me to the point where I have been known to send them a note telling them that while offering a free issue is a great way to advertise, sending a bill before I've even seen their publication kind of counteracts their good will intentions. 

Last July I decided I would accept the offer for a free trial issue to a magazine I have never seen before.  It only comes out 4 times a year, so I knew I likely had to wait a while before the next issue would arrive in my mail box.  As I've now come to expect, the invoice arrived.  I put it aside to wait for the magazine.  When it came I would decide whether to pay it or cancel the possible subscription.  The magazine didn't come but a second invoice eventually did.  That's when I let them know that I was still waiting for the TRIAL issue. 

I got an e-mail with an apology, telling me "A trial issue does take about 6 to 8 weeks so it should be arriving by the end of this month. Please hold on to the notice and disregard any due dates on there until you receive the first issue."

Another month went by and yesterday along came another invoice. This one said that if I have not sent my payment within the past 30 days they will suspend my subscription.  Well, of course I had not sent the payment, as I still had not seen the trial issue.  By this time I'm sure they have no intention of sending me anything until I pay for it.   If I'm not getting the issue they promised, perhaps I'd never get the ones I pay for either.

I sent them another message, once again explaining that I still had not received the trial issue yet, though I ordered it in July.  No matter how you look at it, that's definitely more than 6 to 8 weeks.

I suggested they cancel the order as even if I like the magazine, I don't think I like the service.

 

And they did.

 

Apparently they don't understand that a trial issue is a good selling point and now they have lost a customer.

Unusual Halloween

I got on Facebook last night and asked the question, "Where are all the kids?"  They were more than half an hour later getting started, and few and far between.  By the end of the night, I'd had only 56 total. And come to think of it, there were no cars on the street either.  That's a good thing, safety wise, but also means the parents in the outlying countryside didn't bring their kids into the village either.

News reports apparently stated that it was expected that there would be fewer kids this Halloween than there ever has been in the past 40 years.  I had noticed that there didn't seem to be as many children around as when I was raising mine, but thought that was because the population of my village was aging.  I guess there was an age group that didn't bother to reproduce for a while there.  Thankfully, I see lots of babies these days, so I guess I can expect more kids at Halloween in a couple more years.

In the meantime, I had a bit of fun anyway.  My Red Hat chapter gathered at a local restaurant yesterday morning to have a Witch's Breakfast.  We let our Red Hatter's protocol slide for the day, and came dressed as witches instead.  Being Halloween, most of the people in the restaurant never even batted an eye, but we did manage to amuse a few people, including ourselves.  We might have to try this again sometime in the middle of the year, just for the shock value alone.  That could be fun.

Tortilla Soup

In July we went to Herbfest.  Among other interesting things we saw there I found someone selling packaged soup mixes that appealed to me.  I do make soup from scratch but there were some interesting ideas among her products. Determined not to buy more than one, I finally settled on the Tortilla Soup mix.  It contains nothing but good stuff:  dried black beans, dried corn, red and green bell peppers, spices, salt, garlic and green onion.  All you do is add some canned tomatoes and water and within half an hour you have a very tasty soup.  We put some broken tortilla chips and grated cheese on top and enjoyed it very much as our supper last night.  This package, by the way, comes from Victoria Epicure Inc.

I'm now searching for a recipe to make my own.  If I don't find one I like as much, I'll be ordering in a supply of their packaged stuff. I like it that much!

Meanwhile stand by for Chatelaine's issue with the great Christmas cookies I tested a couple of months ago.  It should be out anytime now, as they just contacted me to see if I still wanted to test recipies for them.  I'm looking forward to the next culinary adventure.

Hats and Hosta updates

You may remember that during the summer I got invited to sit and paint in a  beautiful hosta garden as part of a fund raiser. People who would also be going for a lovely tea in a local church basement toured the garden throughout the afternoon.  I had never tried to paint in public before, and decided, since acrylics dry much too fast for me outdoors, that I'd work in watercolour.  Well, I didn't think it would be very interesting to have others watching paint dry, so I got three different hosta paintings started before I arrived, and then worked on which ever ones were dry enough to proceed.  It was an interesting day for me, and I hope those wandering through enjoyed it too. 

I never would have had the courage though, if it had not been for the fact that we were supposed to wear hats, since the event was called Hats and Hostas.  I have a hat that I thought would get more attention than anything I was painting, so that gave me courage. 

Summer is over, but I thought I should share those paintings, now that they are finished.  Tell me, do you like one better than the rest? 

Creative Spirits

Halloween is coming, and that means lots of different kinds of spirits are floating about. The artistic spirits in Merrickville just held their 27th annual Artists' Guild Studio Tour and I had to go check out a couple of my favourites.

Claudette Hart, also known as the Gourd Lady, used to be a potter, but now she has turned her hand to gourds instead. Before that she was a teacher, and in this segment of the CTV Ottawa Morning Show, she proves that she still knows how to get even the biggest kids to do as she tells them.











Claudette had guest artist Heather Snow at her house during the tour again this year.  Heather is a highly imaginative artist and you never know what she will come up with next.  Last year there was a tower of teapots that totally fascinated me. This year she was working on a gauntlet made entirely out of old silver spoons and forks.  What is she going to come up with next?  You could keep an eye on her webpage to find out.











In keeping with all this creative spirit, I decided to try my hand at a multimedia piece myself.  While I'm not known to be one of "the artists" in these parts, I had a lot of fun and it didn't turn out badly for a first attempt.

Trend Micro Update

I have been using Trend Micro Titanium Maximum Security for a month now It has generated a monthly report, to let me know what it has been able to prevent.  In the past month it has apparently blocked 9 Web Threats and terminated 1 Unauthorized Change.  It has also eliminated well over a hundred cookies I didn't set up.  It left the good ones though, and I was still able to be recognized by all my favorite sites.  This report can easily be expanded to see exactly what has been eliminated.

This morning I decided to finally do the System Tune up. I had been putting that off as I wasn't sure just what it would change.  But I see it created a Restore Point, so if I find things don't work as they should, I can always put the computer back into the state it was before it got tuned up. 

Well, the tune up freed up 4.07GB of space.  That's a lot, and I'm impressed.  But it also got rid of what I consider to be my good cookies.  I find I now have to log in to the many sites I go to that require a password, as the system no longer automatically recognizes me. I hope I can remember all my passwords, or I'll have to have those sites e-mail them to me.  Once I'm in, of course, their system will remember me again....until the next tune up anyway.  Trend Micro lets you schedule that for once a month, but I'm not sure I'll allow that yet. 

Another thing I notice is that I now have to type in the URL's I go to on a regular basis.  I have not had to do that in a long time, as Internet Explorer 8 remembers those for you, and auto finishes the web address. Well, I'll have those all reestablished soon too, as I do tend to go to many of the same sites day after day. 

One wonders though, since I now see the green highlighted go ahead and click links quite clearly, how I managed to hit so many possible web threats.  Well, okay, so I get a lot of newsletters with links and yes, I enter a fair number of contests, and.....okay so I admit I did hit a few of those grey links as well as the green ones. I did see some links highlighted in red, and avoided those though.  One has to wonder how much trouble I got into before I had Trend Micro to protect me!

I am a BzzAgent and this has been an update on my original blog posting on this product.  If you should happen to want to try Trend Micro Titanium yourself, use the discount code "BZZ30"