JohnF

Or perhaps a disgruntled employee leaving their mark before they departed the company portals for the last time. JF

They're just reacting to all that patented Boxer drool on the feathers. JF

Interesting marketing technique. Perhaps a form of reverse psychology? JF

For Christmas 1993 we bought the boys a Strat and a Precision bass with amps. What they did with 'em was up to them. Steve never got to use his Strat but Matt did okay. Never had any formal lessons, just worked it out by himself. My brother, who's a strong enough rock musician (back in the day) to be critical, says he's impressed with what Matt accomplished. This link has a few cuts of Matt playing the bass in his old band. When the NYC label signed 'em to a contract they said they'd they would market them as Cosmic Country genre. The boys had never heard of that one and hadn't thought of themselves as a country band but figgered what the hey. http://www.myspace.com/frontierindexband I thought you might get a kick out of hearing what can evolve from nothing but encouragement. JF

Oh ye of little faith. JF

Just encourage him to try a variety of things. Soon he'll be making friends and wanting to share their interests, and he'll start to sort out whether he likes team or solo sports, or music, or fishing, or any of the myriad pursuits there are for kids today. At some point he's going to want to try everything so you'll have to make a few decisions that he won't like. The biggest challenge most of us face as parents is to try to save our kids from having no positive experiences and interests while making sure that they don't miss out on those wonderful years of just being a kid. The biggest mistake I see parents make is trying to relive their own lives through their kids, trying to fit them into the holes we didn't quite fill. I think the best thing we can do is encourage them generally and grease the wheels (as in buy the gear they need, or the lessons). If they find something they really love they won't need to be pushed. If they need to be pushed they probably don't really love it. That's not to say there won't be days when they'd rather go out and play instead of going to practice. Kids will be kids. Your job is to figure out if they're begging off cuz they really hate it, or just because they're having a little kid moment. As they get older you'll start to see the pattern emerge. You do a good job of teaching values and he'll do a good job of evaluating. I envy you having this road to travel. I don't begrudge one second of the time or one cent of the money that we poured into encouraging our kids to discover what they loved and were capable of. I wouldn't change a minute of it. Have fun. And make sure the kid has as much fun. JF

This may sound inane but until I came here (OFC) I had no idea there was a difference between a Walleye Boat and a Bassboat for example. I think it might be interesting for viewers to see an overview/comparison of the different boat styles and configurations popular in Ontario. You could show examples of the high and low ends of those various types cost and equipment wise, and demonstrate what in partivcular makes them better suited to certain types of fish and fishing. Another thing might be some good U/W video of our favourite gamefish in their natural habitat, something more than fast cuts from fish to fish as fill between show segments. I've seen a lot of them in my diving adventurers - huge catfish, carp, pike, all flavours of bass, muskies, trout, perch and walleye in our local waters - and I've rubbed shoulders, literally, with big Tarpon in Grand Cayman, touched sharks in Mexico, been lovingly embraced by a big Green Moray off the Florida Keys, etc etc. It's really interesting to watch them and to see how they interact or ignore when not being stuck with hooks etc. For whatever reason they usually just ignore a slow moving diver. I guess they think it's just a seriously ugly fish. What it means to me now as an angler is that I have a good idea of how the fish acts while grazing, hanging out or just cruisin' and that helps me to envision him responding to my lure, bait, whatever. There are some who might justifiably argue that it doesn't seem to have helped my own fishing skills but to them I can only say "Think how bad I could have been without this insight." Perhaps a short video on the relative merits of the different styles of minnow buckets in human waste composting?? JF

Jeez. Now I'm worried about the genesis of your nom de plume. JF

It's what one does when one no longer has a lawn to cut, gardens to weed or a pool to clean. This new condo life style is very .... small. Sure hope I get used to it soon. JF

You're gettin' closer, I think. JF

I'll keep reminding myself of that when I'm trying to roll out of bed in the morning. JF

Weren't those shows all made as reruns? JF

I never lost Dad’s old battered green tackle box, and it still holds some rusty snelled hooks, a tin of assorted lead, a white folding knife with a scaler blade inside, a dirty red and white bobber and a few of those scarred wooden ersatz pike lures that I tried to use as a kid. With it is a telescoping rod with a dirty red rubber grip and a level winder reel that holds black woven line of some kind. The whole rig weighs a ton. There’s also a Genesis split bamboo fly rod with a missing tip and a square steel short rod with a trigger that snaps out to lock the reel in the seat. Dunno what ever happened to his creel and net, oh, and there was a green worm can and a minnow bucket as well. Remember your dads having that stuff? When our boys were little they both wanted to fish but I had no interest myself. It was some sort of ethical aversion to killing, even hurting, fish. But I didn’t want to stifle the boys by imposing my own biases so I went to the local CTC store and bought them cheap Berkley rods with spinning reels, and turned them loose. I still have those setups and am slightly embarrassed at how little I must have known about angling when I bought them. They were about the longest, heaviest, clumsiest rods I could find and the reels were better suited to hauling in record muskies than rock bass. These days Matt (our youngest) is getting even with me for my apathy by ignoring my pathetic pleas to join me for some fishing. Eternal optimist I, I remain ever hopeful he’ll come around one day. With any kind of luck it will be while I’m still hale and hearty, or at least alive and able to share the fun with him, even a little bit. And if he doesn’t get the bug, then perhaps I’ll be able to have my way with his kids, my future grandchildren, though he shows little inclination for procreativity yet. He seems disgustingly comfortable with the string of beautiful girls that glide through his life, and there’s been no sign of any marriages on the horizon, let alone babies, dammit. For now I’ll just keep my fingers crossed. For my own part I had been an avid if unskilled fisherman up until my mid teens but then girls, sports, school, and girls lured me away. Two summers working in a meat packing plant sealed the deal, and I turned my back on hunting and fishing for the next forty-five years. Then something happened to me a few years ago to reawaken the urge to angle. A good friend dragged me down to the river, put me on a smallmouth, and with that first little dinky fish I was as hooked as that wee bass was. Apparently I had used up my quotient of blood and gore experiences stored away during the slaughterhouse years. So, my hunter/gatherer urges back in full swing, I’m back in the fishing game, buying and upgrading tackle and gear, reading and asking questions, suffering the trials and tribulations of once again being a fisherperson. There’s something primal, visceral, about angling. Perhaps it appeals to those aforementioned hunter-gatherer instincts - some inherent atavism that lurks in every man and woman. Not everyone hears the siren call, but those who do rediscover the simple pleasure we felt as a child, communing with nature and the fish. We didn’t know what it was then, and we’re hard-pressed to explain it today, but it draws us in and ensnares us in those slimy smelly velvet chains we welcome. I can’t help wondering if all my carefully chosen fishing tackle will one day be mere curiosities like Dad’s stuff. In the meantime , I’ll just continue to buy and try, discard and replace, relegating the surplus gear to the judgment of future fishermen as to it’s efficacy and value. It’s hard to imagine some of my latest acquisitions ever being deemed mere curiosities though. Will Dad’s stuff from the 50’s, the boys’ stuff from the 80’s and my shiny new 21st millennium stuff all be dumped into the same pile one day labelled “Old Junk”? Why not? We do it with our old people, so why not our fishing gear, right? JF

No idea. I can only think it was left atop the car or on the shoulder of the road when we drove away. I'm generally careful about that but I guess I screwed up that time. Didn't realize it was gone until almost 10 days later. JF

A few years back I was into curling. So one night the four of us were driving to a neighbouring club for the Mutual (for any who curl around here) and our second sticks a tape (or cd) in the dashboard. It was the Champ. We howled the whole way there and once we hit the ice we couldn't stop reciting the lines. Of course we cracked ourselves up - and demolished our game. The other rink must have thought we were nuts. The year before we were nearly unbeatable and that year we were gone immediately. Damn the Champ! JF

Like I said - if they'd been able to trade goalies the score would have been more like 5-1 Leafs. But Toskala will have some good games, or he'll be riding the pines and the Monster will get a chance to prove he can sustain his preseason, albeit brief,even promise. If neither can deliver Burke better go shopping again. In the meantime it's fun to watch, way better than last year. And until our bubble gets burst, if in fact that happens, we've got nothing to lose but games. The real pressure is on the top teams to maintain their spot. Leafs got nowhere to go but up. Some other teams nowhere but down. JF

Poor Michael is only $200,000,000 behind him. JF

And Tiger just topped one BILLION dollars. And that's with no body contact at all. JF

I guess I have a soft spot for Gill. He reminds me of me when I played, not that I got anywhere near the NHL. I can sympathize with big guys who just have to stand there and watch the little buzzers scoot hither and yon. Gill would have been a star back in the day when defencemen were expected to stay at home and clear the front of the net and most of them were less than 6' tall. Thank Heaven I played back in those days. Today my pylon imitation and blistering shot (that often made it over the goal line, but not between the pipes) wouldn't make me a hero among heroes. JF

No kidding. I've got my Dad's old rods still. One is a hex steel 6'(?) with a black string line level winder and it weighs a ton compared to these nice new featherweight thingies. And I don't care how old or young you are. If you spend 6 or 8 hours casting frogs or plugs from a platform yer gonna hurt. If the gear is user friendly you won't hurt as much. If it's cheap (i.e. heavy & poorly matched) yer gonna hurt. Age only dictates the degree of hurt. That being said I'm not a happy camper tonite. I just realized that I've lost my favourite rig (Quantum Energy spinning reel on a really nice 5'6 Quantum one-piece rod). It had enough oomph to handle good-sized bass and to throw fairly heavy lures but was light enuf to lug around for hours of wading. I'm gonna miss that one. JF

They were the big deal for air cooled 2 strokes back in the early seventies. And yes, they tended to foul easily. We often ended up running different heat ranges on the hot and cool sides to try to balance the burn. Not sure we ever got it right though. JF

Just before the implosion I was thinking that if only they could have swapped goaltenders (Price for Toskala) the score would have been something like 5-1. Price was very solid. Toskala was Toskala. He had some good moments, but not enuf of them. Hopefully K. will stifle his enthusiasm for games against other teams. If it had started after the Habs started running Toskala I might have assumed it was a message being sent, albeit rather clumsily, but it just seemed to be the way he was gonna play that game. Hopefully it was because he felt he had something extra to prove to his old buddies, and not a sign of how it's gonna be all year. JF

I thought he was, but the way technology is moving who really knows any more. Whoda thunk a few decades back everybody would be using satellites to clock boat speed. JF

Please tell me she was referring to yer car. JF

Jeez. Don't tell my wife that. JF