It’s mid-summer, it’s warm, and it’s raining every three days, which is the perfect trifecta of conditions for turbo-speed grass-growing. I don’t actually mind cutting the grass. In fact, I look forward to it for the same reason I look forward to a round of golf: because it gives me a few blessed hours of peace where my wife and toddler can't bug me.
And just in case my wife actually reads this week’s column, or for any readers who think I’m some kinda deadbeat dad, I love spending time with my family, I was only joking about them bugging me. Sometimes I joke. But not about bees—I was dead serious last week when I said the world would be better off without bees. Screw those little bumblebastards. [Editor’s note: No he wasn’t. Save your letters.]
Anyhoo, back to grass. I was talking with my good friend, Councillor George McDermott this week, and he was telling me that Fort Erie’s bylaw department is being overwhelmed with complaints from residents about uncut grass. An absolute onslaught of people tattling on their neighbours for leaving their grass a bit unkempt. When I questioned how many complaints there could really be, he said bylaw calls about uncut grass outnumber every other complaint combined, by a wide margin.
I hate to say it, but I get it. On one hand, don’t be a whiner. Sometimes people get busy. Life gets in the way and a weekend of two rolls past and you just didn’t find time to mow the lawn. It happens.
But on the other hand, it makes your neighbourhood look so janky. You go through all that work to make your own lawn look nice, but it’s all for naught because your neighbour doesn’t cut his grass and now the whole street looks bummy.
Be a good neighbour, especially when your property shares a border, I guess is what I’m getting at here. This applies to international borders too.
It’s pretty safe to say that America has a gun problem. You can buy assault rifles in the kid’s section at Target down in America. And because we share such an enormous border with America, their gun problem becomes our gun problem. An investigation from Reuters found that when a crime is committed in Ontario with a handgun, 85 percent of the time the gun was smuggled in from America.
America’s gun problem is our problem because they can’t secure the border and stop guns from pouring into Canada.
Thankfully, America recently announced they had a whole new plan to significantly tighten up border rules and security… for dogs.
Guns, not so much, but fear not because American border officials are ready to clamp down on dogs. Back in May, border officials from America unveiled a bizarre new set of stringent rules that required dog owners to carry reams of paperwork with them, get their dog microchipped, and even provide border guards with photographs of their dog’s teeth, if they wanted to cross into Canada.
As someone who spends a disproportionately large amount of his summer organizing wiener dog races (don’t miss our corgi and basset hound races at Fort Erie Race Track on Aug. 18) the new rules were causing a lot of headaches for people from Buffalo who just wanna go to the beach or the cottage (or the dog races, Aug. 18 at beautiful Fort Erie Race Track) in Niagara for a day and bring their dog.
Thankfully, on Monday everyone came to their senses and realized how silly this was, and the whole thing has been put on the back burner. Good idea guys, maybe instead of spending time, money, and resources hassling dog owners bringing their harmless corgis over the border, try focusing on the extremely harmful handguns that cross the border and are used to murder people.
Oh, and America, maybe mow your lawn while you’re at it, you’re making us look bummy by association.
James Culic is aware that he did a rare triple tangent this week, from grass to guns to dogs. Find out how to yell at him to stay on topic at the bottom of this page, or send in your own meandering tangential screed in a wandering letter to the editor.
