Still down in Toronto helping my mother and father-in-law clean out Rose’s apartment. Rose was Ethel’s last remaining sister, and I couldn’t see letting her face that trial without some help. It is very strange cleaning out the apartment where a 94 year old woman lived for the last forty years. I’m finding jars of antiseptic and cleaning products from the 1950’s as well as a lot of interesting memorabilia. Ninety-four years is a long time to collect stuff. For Shauna and Ethel, every picture and scrap of paper is a priceless memento, and so cleaning the place out is a very slow process. As expected, there is a dispute over the estate, and the greedy nephew by whom Rose felt so betrayed is scrambling around now trying to figure out how he can abscond with more than he is entitled. He isn’t interested in mementos; he’s got his eye on “the prize”. That is the furthest thing from my mother-in-law’s mind right now. The ironic part about all of this is that, near the end, Rose wanted to cut the guy out of her will entirely, and she simply didn’t have enough strength to see it through. It was Ethel and Shauna who felt that the strain of a competency dispute would be too hard on her and their focus near the end was to make her as comfortable and worry-free as possible. If they had been as interested in her money as he is, they could probably have made sure he got nothing, at Rose’s ultimate expense. Now he’s running around telling the one or two people left in the family who don’t completely despise him that my mother-in-law “poisoned” Rose and the rest of the family against him. There is a special place in hell for people like that. Be careful whom you trust.
In the news … obnoxious Yankees owner George Steinbrenner finally struck out at the ripe old age of eighty. I thought the guy was a certified lunatic, (I always loved that Seinfeld impression of him), repeatedly hiring and firing managers as he sometimes did. Still, I guess his obsession with winning and his “money talks” mentality worked, because under his reign the Yankees did pretty well. Paging through the International Herald Tribune, looking for anything amusing this week, I noticed an article on scientists in Australia who are tackling the growing problem of bovine emissions. Forget about the greenhouse gas assaults from rusty old Ford V-8’s, the real culprit in global climate change is cow burps (and farts). Anyhow, somebody has figured out a way to tweak the bovine diet in such a way as to reduce the methane emissions, and this is a great day for mankind. Thank goodness, now I don’t have to buy one of them Priuses, and I can resume my gluttonous overuse of fossil fuels. Speaking of which, rumour has it that BP is close to capping that oil spew, just in time to watch the last of the Gulf marine wildlife disappear. Congratulations you schmucks.
I knew it was the cows all along. Take that Al Gore, you tree-hugging, Tipper-divorcing, hippo. Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c 2010 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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