Here’s opportunity
for the Occupiers
    The Occupy movement’s weakness so far has been its failure to focus. It’s right to damn an obscene gap between rich and poor, but instead of just tenting in parks it needs to denounce specific offences. Ostentatious excess is a place to start: Make conspicuous over-consumption politically incorrect.
    Super-cars are an obvious target. Vehicles capable of speeds more than twice the legal limit should be banned except on the track. Owning them without special permits should be a crime. Anyone walking the street with lock-picks in his pocket and a jimmy up his sleeve is presumed by law to be planning burglary: Anyone on the road in a car that can do 250 kilometres an hour should be presumed to be contemplating driving it at that speed.
    Last week’s multi-million-dollar pileup above (in Japan) involved eight Ferraris, three Mercedes and a Lamborghini, but more often when these luxury speedsters go off the rails they take out some poor devils in a modest family sedan — or a pedestrian or two.
    Decry these things. Urge politicians to outlaw them. Occupy car lots.    

Are all our politicians
heartless racist liars?
    Federal officials are visiting Attawapiskat to assess the need for help in the isolated Cree community on the shore of James Bay. Assess the need? They’ve known the need for decades.
    Three years in a row Attawapiskat has declared a state of emergency and pleaded for outside help. It has people living in uninsulated tents, without heat, hydro or plumbing. Ontario and the feds do as little as possible and haggle over jurisdiction.
    Federal Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Minister John Duncan says he’s taking the crisis seriously but is waiting to be sure that funds already provided are being used effectively. Ontario Aboriginal Affairs Minister Kathleen Wynne says Ontario’s waiting for Ottawa, but “there haven’t been specific requests or proposals, and that’s why it’s taken some time to get clear as to what needs to happen.”
     Meanwhile there are people have become permanent residents of overcrowded emergency shelters, people using buckets for toilets and oil drums for wood stoves, children still lacking a proper school since theirs was bulldozed 11 years ago as a health hazard.
    And politicians are waiting to find out what needs to happen?
    We airlift vast relief supplies almost immediately to earthquake victims in Haiti and Afghanistan. When Winnipeg has a flood threat — or even when a snowfall spooks Toronto  — we call out the army. But for the neediest among us — the aboriginal people our governments have oppressed, cheated, lied to since Confederation and before — we have only red tape and doublespeak.

Here's a boondoggle blatant enough to drive you to drink

    The Liquor Control Board of Ontario spends a fortune on advertising, despite being a monopoly with a product so popular it really doesn’t need promotion. The contracts are worth millions. Hands up, all those who believe this isn’t a means of shovelling money into the pockets of people who’d look better behind bars than in boardrooms.
    Year after year, government after government, the LCBO puts out one of the glossiest food and drink magazines around, gives them away free though other magazines on the same subject command substantial prices. Week after week, no matter the party in power, the board stuffs your newspaper with expensive, multi-page ad inserts — beautiful photos on thick, glossy paper — extolling wines and spirits with much the same reverence that Tiffany reserves for diamonds. Is any of it necessary? Not a bit. Drinkers will drink without encouragement.
    The LCBO is one of the few government endeavours that actually turns Ontario a profit. It’s a cash cow. But you can bet the taxpayers who own it aren’t the first in line at the teat.

Cycle of stupidity
never seems to stop
    Any large parking lot anywhere is sure to be full of examples of How Not to Do It — louts using spots meant for the handicapped, dolts straddling two spaces at once, boors blocking the fire lanes, and what-have-you. Stupidity isn’t confined to those on four wheels, however. Bicyclists too account for a certain share of the socially retarded.
    Here’s an example of how not to use a bike rack. Rather than being secured at right angles to the rack and taking up one space, as it’s meant to, the machine at left is locked sideways across two. There are cyclists who do this invariably; whether it represents active  malevolence or out of mere ignorance is debatable.
    One argument favouring the second explanation in this instance is that only the frame of the sideways bike is secured to the rack; any passing mischief-maker could have the front wheel off with one twist of the quick-release lever.

Concerts aren’t about where you sit, but what you hear

    By general consensus the music at Wednesday night's viola-piano concert in Aeolian Hall was wonderful, but some in the audience were indignant that the hall was set up cabaret-style, with chairs grouped around tables, rather than in rows. That just wasn't done for classical music, they said; it was disrespectful. Some were quite vehement about it.

    They were wrong.

    Mainly they were wrong on practical grounds. Management had a pretty accurate estimate of how many people were going to show up, and by experience they've established an attendance threshold below which they know that row seating is a bad idea. The number of concertgoers Wednesday night would have been just about sufficient to fill three rows, leaving the rest of the hall embarrassingly empty, but they were enough for a respectable showing when dispersed through the room at attractively clothed and candle-lit tables, where they could stretch their legs as they pleased and sip a glass of something if they liked. A concert that would have been discouraging to performers and audience alike with row seating proved to be comfortable and enjoyable with the alternative.

    Those complaining were wrong too in principle. No rule says classical music must be played only to audiences sitting in rows of fixed seats. Even most of the traditional concert halls in which these are found are also ringed with loges in which patrons can arrange the chairs as they please. Much of the concert-hall repertoire was written to be heard in private salons, in aristocratic dining rooms, even in royal barges floating down the river. The Siegfried Idyll was written to be heard first by a woman asleep in bed. 

    The classics have been performed worthily on piers and promenades, in parks, factories, shopping malls and town squares. To feel that any of those settings constitute an indignity is to forget momentarily the purpose of music.

Back-to-work bill? 

How about for MPs?

     The Harper government is threatening to impose back-to-work legislation if Air Canada and its flight attendants don’t cut a deal before a strike disrupts what the government deems an essential service.  But the legislation won’t come before next week when MPs return to Ottawa after their Thanksgiving break.

     It would seem MPs aren’t an essential service.

     If an Air Canada shutdown or slowdown is an emergency sufficient to justify denying employees the right not to work for unsatisfactory wages and working conditions, why isn’t it an emergency sufficient to justify MPs cutting short their cushy long holiday to deal with it right away?  How many days off did you get for Thanksgiving?

Sealed-up trash bins leave trash littering the streets. 

A good idea trashed
     This bus stop furniture was a great idea. All over the city local real estate agents smile out at us from the signboards on these nicely designed, well constructed units. Supplied by Creative Outdoor Advertising, of Gormley, Ont. (head office Jupiter Fla.) each offers four reasonably comfortable seats, designed so rain and snow will wash them but won't pool on them, and a high ‘counter’ on which you can rest a heavy bag of groceries or lean an elbow. Then there's the big signboard — the raison d'être for the whole thing — and finally a discreet swing-top trash disposal bin.
     But the trouble with trash disposal bins is that eventually you have to go around to them and collect the trash. Somebody had the bright idea that there'd be more profit in keeping the ad revenue and disposing of the trash-collecting duty. So they sealed the swing-tops shut and drove screws into them to make sure they stayed sealed.
     Now the real estate agents still smile at us, and the trash collects on the ground.
     You look good on this thing, George. But it doesn't look good on you.

Nicholson Baker

Pleasures of poetry

     This comes under the heading of “other stuff.” One of the most enjoyable books I’ve seen in a long time is The Anthologist, a novel by Nicholson Baker (Simon and Schuster, 2009). Its narrator is a second-rank poet whose wife has decamped, tired of supporting them while he dawdles and daydreams instead of writing the overdue introduction to a poetry anthology he’s produced, and 
earning a fat cheque.
     He’s a lovable idler, well intentioned but easily distracted. Anything — a falling leaf, an ant in his driveway, some bit of historical trivia — is sure to sideline his latest effort to settle down and produce the few remaining pages his publisher is demanding. Perversely, what distracts him most frequently is the impulse to tell us about poetry.
     Unmistakably, Baker loves poetry. His protagonist knows many of our leading poets personally and has a scholar’s intimacy with their predecessors all the way back to Horace. He quotes Coleridge and Kipling as readily as Alan Ginsberg and Theodore Roethke (whose surname I never knew until now rhymes with “set key”). Above all, he talks about poetry’s origins, its meanings, its usefulness as mnemonic, its role as the foundation of language and a compiler of vocabulary. He teaches us new ways to think about verse, new reasons to embrace it, and new places to look for it.
     Too few people in 2011 have more than a hearsay awareness of poetry. But those lucky children raised on rhyme — Dr. Seuss, A. A. Milne, Shel Silverstein, Dennis Lee, who you will — tend to reach adulthood with an appreciation of words’ weight, flavour, value and versatility that will enrich them for life. Baker’s delightful exposition of that should inspire you to run out and pick up a poetry anthology or two for yourself.  
         

She knows parking signs aren't meant for the likes of her.

How sweet

to be elite

     She parked her snazzy little convertible right in front of the No Parking sign, and strolled into the Masonville Loblaw, swinging her snazzy little skirt as if she hadn't a care in the world. And she probably hadn't.

     No parking? Fire route? How perfectly ridiculous, my dear. Do you see anything on fire here? Yes, of course there are plenty of parking spaces just over there. They're for ordinary people, dear, who aren't in a hurry. Well, they may be only a few steps away, but if I felt like walking I wouldn't have brought the car, would I?

Have a nice trip
     Ever noticed how many London sidewalks have become obstacle courses lately? One slab higher than the next? Some slabs canted sideways? Others cracked and sinking inward? Year after year, freezes, thaws and downpours render our urban footways more uneven. It craves wary walking.
     The problem is substandard installation: insufficient soil compaction, insufficient gravel underlay, stingy concrete pours. The solution is certainly not what the city's providing: grinding bevels on upraised edges, and packing black asphalt into low spots. The grinding doesn't correct the unevenness, and the asphalt is as unsightly as patches on a business suit. Both makeshifts leave the impression of a hick town that can't do the basics properly in the first place and can't be bothered properly fixing the inevitable damage. Once upon a time we'd have replaced these sections, and done it right.

     A quarter-inch height difference in adjoining slabs is enough to stub the toe of an incautious pedestrian. In today's London, variations can be as much as two inches.

     Does no one at City Hall walk? It's time they had to. Bureaucrats there who think ground-off edges and black-top patching are the answer to that are clearly not thinking of users who might have impaired vision or mobility issues. Or people of any age who expect to be able to walk down a sidewalk confidently without having to worry about each footstep. Or visitors who look at our streets and think, “My God, when did this city start turning into a slum?”

Too much in your face
   The latest ‘improvement’ to Facebook’s interface ‘invites’ you to tag people who appear with you in photographs but doesn’t offer you any provision for declining the invitation. You're presented with only one choice: OK.
    Well, you do have one other choice: you can quit Facebook altogether, then reopen the program to get a new page. But the next time you click on the name of a ‘friend’ — or even a ‘friend’ of a ‘friend’ — you'll get the same razzmatazz.
    Nosy? These people make the Homeland Security snoops look like recluses.
    Facebook would have you believe that this is all aimed at promoting ‘connectedness’ among people the world over, broadening global friendship and understanding. Yup, that's what the KGB and the Stasi were into, too. They just wanted to get to know you better. And so do their present-day counterparts in our own beloved governments, not to mention a million enterprising ad men.

Bunch of clucks
    Government taxes you to pay for enforcement of rules that make your food taste worse and cost more. Rules punishing small-business enterprise that politicians profess to encourage, hurting the farmers they profess to defend, and promoting the very cruelty to creatures that they profess to deplore.
    Say you want to sell apple pies at a church basement fund-raiser, hot pasta dishes from a market stall or home-made desserts from an ice cream cart. For finest quality you want the freshest ingredients, right? For instance, the freshest fresh eggs you can get. So you find a reliable farmer and get your supplies daily direct from the hens.
    Nope, says a food inspector. You have to use government-inspected eggs. That means you have to deal with a third-party supplier who can afford to pay for the time-consuming inspection process (and will of course pass the cost on to you).
    But, you say, that will put my own prices up, and the eggs won't be as fresh by the time they get to me and into the food. My farmer can sell eggs at the farm gate to anyone who drives up. Why not to me?
    Sure, people can buy farm eggs to take home and eat themselves, the inspector says, but you can't put those eggs in food you're selling to others. You have to use inspected eggs.
    But, you say, most of your inspected eggs come from places where the hens spend their whole lives locked into nesting boxes, being fed chemicals to make them lay more. It's barbaric. Who knows whether anything from those Frankenfowl is even safe to eat?
     Trust me, the inspector says. I'm with the government.

Don't be a lout - Part III
    The boob at left may be socially retarded, but that impairment doesn't qualify him for the seats Pearson International Airport sets aside for the physically handicapped. Able-bodied, ambulatory and an airport employee, he might be expected to heed house rules. Instead, he sets the contrary example. Taking a coffee break, he parked himself in this nearest seat rather than in any of several dozen non-reserved ones nearby. Not because he wasn't up to walking the extra few steps but because he saw no reason to.
    We may imagine that if someone genuinely handicapped had come along, he might have moved. No such person did, so we'll never know, but we do know that a handicapped person might well hesitate to challenge a trespasser so obviously inconsiderate.
    The lout, alas, is not alone in his attitude that provisions made to lessen the difficulties of the disabled have no relevance to him except as an inconvenience to be ignored. His like are everywhere, from public transport to public toilets, from priority lanes to parking lots, usurping spaces set aside for the less lucky in life.  Do not imitate him. We're meant to think not only of ourselves. It's called civilization.

Artists and vandals
    People with paint can make a big difference downtown. Most graffiti — simple-minded scrawls defacing countless surfaces throughout the city centre —declares disrespect for property, whether public or private. Each bit adds to an impression that the area has become lawless, derelict and unsafe. Bylaws trying to avoid this by saddling property-owners with the cleanup costs merely victimize them twice.
   But paint used intelligently can also beautify, as in the huge mural behind The Honest Lawer on Queens Avenue or in the instance at left, where it perked up the dull stucco front of this building at Dundas and Richmond. For years now, Londoners have looked up and smiled at the couple and their child leaning out of a trompe l'oeil balcony on some patriotic occasion and waving to folk below. It's no masterpiece, but it's honourable work and the artist, V. Harrison, was proud to sign  it.
   Not so the fool who leaned down from the roof one night and painted "DUBBLE!" above it — and a lucky thing for him. That contemptible vandalism has been there for years too, and one hopes the fool has grown old enough to realize that his folly has made the city's core's just a little bit uglier and thus its economy (and indirectly his own) just a little bit weaker.
    The stucco is badly weathered these days and one hopes Harrison's art will be kept in any eventual restoration. But we'll be glad when we're no longer affronted daily by the eyesore above it.
    As for the one below it, that's an affront of a different order, but not entirely unrelated.

Chew on this, 
Rubbermaid
    Coons and squirrels just love our garbage. Plastic garbage cans won't keep them away from it. Racoons can unlatch them and lift the lid, but squirrels will chew at the top night after night till they've got a hole big enough to climb through.
   Both kinds of critters leave a disgusting mess, but squirrels are worse because once that hole's chewed, the garbage can is open house every night.
    Metal cans thwart the squirrels and challenge even the coons, but they're no match for the garbage collectors, who dent and crush them in a matter of weeks till the lids won't fit.
    We finally settled on storing our garbage in a metal can and then emptying that into a plastic one with an as-yet-unchewed cover to put out at the curb on garbage night. Streetlights and the passing traffic seem to keep critters at bay for the few hours till dawn.
    But I want to know why you can't just replace a plastic can's lid, instead of also having to buy a new can each time too, and ending up with a bunch of unwanted lidless cans that garbage collectors won't take away unless you cut them in pieces. How smart is that?  
 

Who edits editors?
   The text at left is me, in a letter to the editor of the Free Press, replying to an editorial-page column by reporter Joe Belanger in which he blasted an earlier article by freelancer Herman Goodden. Herman lives just across the river from Harris Park and the noise from festivals there, like Rock the Park, nearly rock him out of bed. (They rocked me too, in a condo overlooking the park; soon after its bandshell went in, I got out.) Herman also has to suffer the sonic assaults from Victoria Park.
   Joe seemed mostly angry at Herman's distaste for the kind of music being blared, but he was also incensed that downtown residents should see their need to sleep as a priority over festival revellers' desire to keep rockin' far into the night. There were only a few of these spoil-sports, Joe said, and it wasn't very often. The implication was that they ought to be glad to go sleepless a few weeks every year for the sake of the tourist trade.
   I fired off a tiny squib citing what I felt to be Joe's errors. It was only six sentences, but some editor felt the need to shorten it (the line greyed out here; presumably it was none of my business where Joe lives) and in doing so managed to reassign Joe's quoted words to quite another Joe: our mayor, whose dippy proposal for louder and longer noise-fests started all this in the first place. Way to go, guys.
   

A shade too private
   It's become all too common for drivers to have all their windows so darkened that they can't be seen. Some may think of it as privacy. More, I believe, think of it as armour. Unseen, they can doff their seat belts, phone, text, gesture obscenely, pick their noses, drink their beer — who's to stop them? They're invisible.
   The civic simpleton at left felt free to park right beside a fire-route no-parking sign. It was a hot day and she had her windows down, but the moment a camera turned her way, the touch of a button rolled up the glass and, voila! instant anonymity.
   Because police so steadily ignore the trend, it might surprise a lot of people to learn that it's illegal. Ontario law forbids the tinting of vehicles' front-seat windows on either side. Windows abaft that can be as dark as desired — although there ought to be limits on the degree of tinting there too, because a cyclist coming up alongside a parked car with darkened glass can't see whether there's a driver about to open a door into his path.
   Assume that people who go in for this wrap-around concealment are up to no good. Otherwise, why are they hiding?

Canada's best theatre company, at Niagara-on-the-Lake

   Consider this as “other stuff” — definitely not complaint. We've just come back from a couple of days at Niagara-on-the-Lake and rediscovered yet again why the Shaw Festival is our favourite summer self-indulgence.
   So far we've seen only four of this year's 11 plays and I'll mention only two since this blog is meant to be brief, but take my word for it: If you come away from any production at the Shaw without having seen something wonderful — well, as someone else once wrote, we won't refund your money, but we will give you advice.
   The threadbare fellow taking tea here is Steven Sutcliffe, who stars in The Admirable Crichton, a sort of cross between Upstairs/Downstairs and Gilligan's Island. It's a lightweight piece but after director Morris Panych, musical director Ryan deSouza and designers Ken MacDonald and Charlotte Dean get through with it you'll leave the theatre wanting to dance. The performances are delightful.
   Drama at Inish is a mixed bag, but the best bits are as good as theatre gets. A classical repertory troupe arrives in an Irish seaside town, stimulating culture and stirring catastrophe. Thom Marriott and Corrine Koslo as the leading thespians sum up in their final exit all the reasons why I adore actors.
   The Shaw has so many great ones. David Schurmann plays a lord in one of the pieces, and a different lord in another. He's perfect  in both, as always. It would take far too long to explain why I adore David Schurmann. So I won't.

Clip it, clueless
   Hedges beside sidewalks are fine; hedges hanging over them aren't. If you've got one of these, keep it trimmed, not sticking out so far that people have to step off the pavement to get around it or else risk their clothes being marked or mutilated.
  The example here is bad enough; at least the day is fine and both the overgrown greenery and the boulevard are dry. But it could just as easily be raining, the hedge dripping wet and the boulevard a quagmire. And of course the obstruction will still be there in the winter, each branch loaded with snow or sheathed in ice and the boulevard barred by the piled-up frozen wake of the sidewalk plow.
   Have you noticed, too, how often property-owners who let their shaggy shrubbery grow this intrusive seem to prefer the kind with thorns?  Not only inconsiderate but passive-agressive. Walk with a machete.

What's with you, bozo? You lame or just lame-brained?
   Yeah, you over at the cash machine. There were 73 vacant spaces in the parking lot just behind you on the other side of the fire lane you're blocking. I counted them.
   You didn't look lame walking up to the ATM. So I guess that would make you either a simple ignoramus or just a lout too lazy to park where you're meant to and walk an extra 20 paces to get where you're going. Or maybe I failed to see that you had a badge on your chest saying you're such an important character that the red-lettered sign at the curb saying
                                                                        NO PARKING
                                                                          FIRE LANE
doesn't apply to the likes of you. Or, let's see , , , maybe you were in a hurry. Awww.
   Fire lanes aren't a frivolity, fool. When fire trucks need to get somewhere, they need to get there in a hurry. You're in the way.
   I hope you were overdrawn at the cash machine. And I hope your fire insurance lapses.

Social sins
and fashion lapses
   I know, I know, we just did the keep-your-damned-feet -off-the-seats thing, but here's the same pig-ignorant bus behaviour paired with a sartorial eyesore too egregious to go uncensored.
   First of all, guys, sandals are fine for the beach, the back yard, or the pilgrim's road to Santiago de Compostela. Worn elsewhere, they suggest that you are not now, nor have you ever been, a member of the serious grownups. If you just can't resist them, at least keep ’em discreetly on the floor. Parking them where other people will soon be sitting is not only uncouth and inconsiderate but unsightly as well.
   Further, if you must wear this particular style of sandals, don't wear them with socks. It makes your foot look like a cow's hoof. And you, sir — you in particular, you with your feet on the furniture — you're not really a cow, are you? You're an ass.

Which way to the liquor aisle?
   I often want a glass of wine in the evening. Occasionally I'll have one at supper. Once in a blue moon I feel like a gin and tonic. (How does a gin and tonic feel, you ask? Don't be a wise guy.)
   The nearest liquor store is inconveniently far. But there's a very well-run Valu-mart just four blocks away. I want it to have wines and spirits along with all the coffee, corn flakes and cake mixes.
  The store owner would like nothing better, and says all his customers want it too. Everyone I know wants it. A poll done this month for the Ontario Convenience Store Association found 61 per cent of Ontarians want it. What's the hold-up?
   It's not as though it's hard. In any European country it's normal. The English shopper in Sainsbury's thinks nothing of picking up a bottle of Beaune or Bergerac with his groceries. In Quebec, any backwoods dépanneur offers a modest selection of good French wines.
   Here in the land of drag-your-feet, our politicians have only got around to letting some of the biggest  supermarkets pair with some of the biggest Ontario wineries to set up in-store wine outlets separate from the grocery side — each store selling only one winery's plonk.
   It can be done better, though. In small centres where demand is sufficient for profitability but not for a stand-alone liquor store, the LCBO does sometimes set up separate little operations in — are you ready? — convenience stores. A good example is just down the road in Thamesford, where you can pick up a Pinot or a Piesporter in the 7-Eleven.
   At last report, Thamesford had not fallen into anarchy.

OK, Carrie, drop the mask
   I’m mad at MADD. The organization of justifiably angry moms that began as Mothers Against Drunk Driving has morphed into a mob of Mrs Grundys denouncing all alcohol consumption. By anyone. Ever.
   I’ve always accused the Women’s Christian Temperance Union of sailing under false colours by not calling itself the Women’s Christian Abstinence Union when what it really wants is a return to Prohibition. In the same way, I argue that MADD should admit its full agenda and simply call itself Militants Against Demon Drink.
   I’m all for combatting drunk driving, and for that matter drunkenness itself, but the sale of alcohol doesn’t automatically promote inebriation any more than the sale of food promotes obesity.
   It’s true there are people physically unable to tolerate alcohol. There are people physically unable to tolerate peanut butter. For some, Skreech can be as deadly as Skippy. But for most people peanuts are a highly nutritional food source just as alcohol, in moderation, is a useful social lubricant with modest health benefits — red wine’s good for your heart, etc.
   So while I’m happy to go along for the RIDE, I’m agin MADD turning into a League of Carrie Nations.
   I’m mad at it at the moment because its powerful publicity machine is opposing calls to allow the sale of beer and wine in Ontario grocery stores, calls which I heartily endorse — and which, having taken a vow of brevity in these rants, I’ll have to take up another time.

Stop being a lout (Part II)
      Lots of us want what we want when we want it (the ones too impatient to wait their turns are a topic for another time), but many of us, our wants once met, feel no impulse to tidy up any leftovers. The drift of detritus at left, which includes discarded clothing, empty food wrappers and a torn-up Bible, is a puzzle for an urban archaeologist, and maybe for a psychiatrist as well.
   The bench is on the northeast corner of Dundas and Clarence streets. On the northwest and southeast corners are litter boxes, on the southwest a recycling station. Some social defective could not be bothered crossing the road to reach any of them.
   He is at one with the dolts who drop their drink cans or fast-food cartons wherever they happen to empty them — or, to be even more obnoxious, set them up ostentatiously in the exact centre of a flight of steps somewhere, or in the exact middle of an intersection (‘making a statement’). Someone else, they know, will clean up after them eventually. The rest of us will pay to have it done — the rest of us who object to having our city made a sty, and who object to the few behaving like pigs.

Stop being a lout (Part 1)
   There will no doubt be many parts to this series; the forms loutishness can take appears to be boundless. Today's example is the tendency of the relatively young to park their feet on unsuitable surfaces. The ill-bred boor on the left, for example, is sprawled on a London Transit Commission bus, his none-too-clean footwear fouling a fabric-covered seat on which someone else will shortly be sitting, undoubtedly wearing a dress or a suit that will show every mark and stain. The boor has no thought that he may be causing the next person expense or embarrassment; he has no thought at all of anyone else whosoever.
   There must still be families in which children are raised to know that putting their shod feet up on bus seats, park benches, restaurant chairs, café stools and the like is rude, unsanitary and inconsiderate. But clearly there are not enough.