Lame duck Mayor does disservice to investment

Lame duck Mayor Miller has added a third job to his portfolio as interim chief executive officer of Invest Toronto. He is already Chairman of this organisation. I'm not sure how this allows him to spend more time with his family. In the gobbledegook of management speak: "The mission of Invest Toronto is to promote Toronto as a destination for businesses to invest, grow and prosper."
He is fatally compromised in such a role. What if an entrepreneur wants to meet him on arrival at Toronto City Centre Airport? "Oh, no, I can't possibly go there!" he will cry. What if said entrepreneur wants to invest in Toronto City Centre Airport? "Oh, no, I advise against it!" Surely Invest Toronto deserves better than a quacking lame duck with an impeccable anti-business record. No doubt his appointment and the sudden announcement of his departure from the mayoralty were intimately connected. A sinecure was needed in a hurry.
Mayor Miller's legacy is printed on Page 5 of the Globe and Mail today - a full-page advertisement for Porter Airlines!

Farming notes

On our recent trip to Spain I commented on the fields of scorched sunflowers thinking they were crop failures. Lo and behold there were the same fields in the Charente in France. Seems it is normal procedure to let the sunflowers dry and shrivel before harvesting and processing. You live and learn.

Take me out to the ball game

I received a last-minute invite to the end-of-season baseball game at the Rogers Centre in Toronto. The Blue Jays came from behind to beat the Seattle Mariners 5-4. This is sport with a showbiz flavour.

Brompto in the Charente

The tour party to Angoulême relaxes at the Bar le Donjon at Montignac. Here Chef de Mission Jack Kellett, right, and Nigel Lewis pose with four Brompton bicycles. The bikes were a blue six-speed titanium from 2007, a red 3-spd L3 from 1997 and red and green 5-spd L5 models. We covered approximately 15 miles in a circular route from Camping de Marco at Bignac crossing the Charente river. The party travelled to France in a red Honda FRV.

Circuit des Rempart 2009

There have been a lot of anniversaries in the car world - 100 years of Morgan and Bugatti - plus fifty years of the mini. Here at Angoulême the Circuit des Remparts celebrates the seventieth edition, hosting a mini. This is the 1071cc mini of Denis Derex from 1963. I took this picture on the short chute approaching the Virage du théâtre by holding the camera through the fence and hoping for the best.
Pic by RLT.

Tin snail at Angouleme

I'm at Angoulême for the Circuit des Remparts. Stopped by a 2CV rally in town. Feeling no pain. Pic by RLT.

Frank Gardner, Aussie original, is gone

Frank Gardner, racing driver and stranger to political correctness. See The Indy.

I met him in Wellington, N.Z., at the Nissan-Mobil 500 in 1992. I also remember him racing in the sixties.

Hogtown City Limits XIII

Councillor and former hack, Adam Vaughan (Trinity Spadina), one of the men who brought you the recent Toronto garbage strike, seeks to lecture others on the fine points of management. See this well-argued response from the Toronto Port Authority. You'd think that with his recent track-record that a little humility was called for - the sheer brass neck of some people knows no bounds.
If Vaughan wants something constructive to occupy his time why doesn't he sort out the eyesore of the Canadian Maltings site at Bathurst, city-owned and the first thing that arrivals at the Billy Bishop Toronto City Centre Airport see. This derelict building is an international advertisement for the incompetence of the sinecurists down at City Hall.

Hogtown City Limits XII

To the Royal York Hotel for the Annual Meeting of the Toronto Port Authority who manage, among other things, Toronto Island Airport, this year celebrating its seventieth anniversary. The suits on the platform were attempting the impossible - that is to satisfy the congenitally dissatisfied. One hour was set aside for questions and answers - it seemed like three.
Prematurely-aged Councillor and former hack, Adam Vaughan (Trinity Spadina) was soon on his feet with an obscure technical point. He lapsed into saying "we" - that is not the Royal "we" but as in me and my claque. Assembled were Toronto's finest rentamob intent on sneering, heckling, barracking, interrupting and generally tormenting the TPA directors. All the tired old tactics of these clapped-out lefties were on display. The debate veered schizophrenically between points of detail about current operations and a more general wish to return to the days of the horse and cart. The lady moderator struggled, without much success, to contain the ersatz indignation from the floor.
The announcement was made that the TPA had reported a profit for year 2008, with promises of more to come. This was greeted as a serious setback as only abject failure would do. The proposed tunnel to the airport, shovels in the ground, was viewed with suspicion. Surely vehicles would travel through it sooner or later, jets would be flying, armageddon was just around the corner.
Further the name of the airport was to be changed to the Billy Bishop Toronto City Centre Airport. We were assured that this was welcomed by the surviving relatives of this famous military aviator - whether the new name will stick or not only time will tell.
Adam Vaughan was later seen spouting to the gentlemen of the press to satisfy his narrow constituency. I pointed out that it ill-became him attacking the TPA, as his stewardship of the city-owned Canadian Maltings site, rotting and derelict, spoke to his management capabilities. See: PunchBuggy passim. Billy Bishop must be turning in his grave.
Enjoy the Toronto Airshow this weekend!

Surviving in the sun

This Renault 4 was one of many that we saw in Portugal. The picture was taken on our recent tour at Monchique in the Algarve.

Detroit Tried to Squash the Beetle

The idea that Detroit did nothing when faced with competition from Volkswagen in the fifties is nonsense - see previous post. In all the weeping and wailing over the collapse of Detroit this myth is taking hold. Nothing could be further from the truth.
By chance I have been reading Morgan: Performance plus Tradition by Jonathan Wood, about the British sports car. Writing about the alloy Buick V8 from General Motors, later the Rover V8 fitted to the Morgan, he says:
At 215cu in (3.5 litres), the new GM
engine had a small capacity by
American standards, and had been
conceived to power a trio of GM's so-
called compacts, produced in
response to European imports such as
- in particular - the Volkswagen
Beetle. American Motors had quickly
come up with its Rambler and this
had been followed in 1959 by the
Chevrolet Corvair, Ford Falcon and
Plymouth Valiant. It was now the turn
of GM's Buick, Oldsmobile and
Pontiac marques to produce their
compacts, and the Buick Special,
Oldsmobile F-85 and Pontiac Tempest
were duly introduced in the autumn of
1960 for the following season,
complete with the new V8.
The Chevrolet II of 1961 came with four and six cylinder engines aimed squarely at the Volkswagen. Later import-fighters were the AMC Gremlin (1970) and Pacer (1975). The Dodge Omni and the Plymouth Horizon were imported by Chrysler from 1978 (sold as the Chrysler Horizon in the UK). The root cause of the failure of all these efforts was the quality issue which opened the door to Japanese imports. When Volkswagen stumbled over quality with their U.S.-built Rabbit cars, the Datsun (later Nissan), Honda and Toyota marques moved in and cleaned up.