Up in Ontario

On America Recycles Day

Today is America Recycles Day down south in the USA: the land of unsold Hummers. Who knew?

If I didn't recently subscribe to the Gristmill blog RSS feed, I would have been clueless. I haven't heard anything about it. Has anyone? Perhaps we're inundated with theme days now - Earth Day, Secretaries Day, Buy Nothing Day - and can't suffer another. Or perhaps it's moreso that the adoption of recycling is such a sad story that we avoid it.

Driving home from fishing on Sunday I had a bit of a rant about using recycled products, especially paper products - tissue, toilet paper, paper towels, napkins - that are so easy to substitute for those made from virgin fibers, which largely come from clearcut Canadian forests. If you want to have forests and the animals that rely on them for their habitat, it's the only decent thing to do. The actions of each and every one of us matters. I believe that, even though the sleepwalkers at Zellers have never responded to my inquiry.

And while we're on the topic of deliberate underwhelm, The Walrus has never sent me a single soggy issue of their magazine, as they offered to do in exchange for the logo and link on the left-hand side of the Up in Ontario blog homepage. I moan about this even though their latest issue looks like a real stinker. I saw it on the newsstand today and nothing on their cover encouraged me to pick it up. Their foundation hasn't received its precious charitable status yet, which enables many Canadian mags to continue to make a go of it and which was a key part of their business plan.

Oi! What's that? Off in the distance, I think I see them lining Ken Alexander up against the wall. He's alone. Well, I guess he's got no one else to fire, so I guess this is what the end looks like. And the old joke goes:

Q: How do you make a small fortune in Canadian publishing?

A: Start with a large one.

Alright, I think I'm done now.