The Circus Outside My Window...Day 6

AllTheBlueCoatsThatFit
SittingInTheSunVille


It's crazy out here on Circus' far western edge today.

Becaause it's Canada v. Sweden in Women's Hockey.

All set to start in about 45 minutes.

And for the first time since they closed the roads 13 days ago there is actually action, excitement and adventure afoot.

Not that there is much for the 7 blue coats manning the empty parking lot outside my window to do.

OK, OK, OK.....the parking lot is not entirely empty.....there are two tiny shuttle-buses and one tour bus, contracted from.....wait for it..... Scranton Pennsylvania.

So, while we will never get Stephen Cobert out here, we are, at the very least, only 37 degrees separated from Michael Scott.

Ha!

****

I actually have to go out into the throngs to pick up littler e. from school now

Will report back on the mayhem later.....

(maybe)


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Update, 5:30pm.....Absolutely no mayhem whatsoever.....Not even the faintest whiff of it....There was, however, a very well-behaved and entertaining (they sang songs!) group of young anti-poverty protestors, about 70-80 of them, whom the crowd streaming by on their way into the game had no problem with...Meanwhile, afterwards there were only 7 squad cars with lights-a-blazing (vs. 10 yesterday) piled-up along the 500 meters of boulevard between the Arena and main gate to campus, although there was more police/security presence today as I counted 21 of them (more bikes, a motorcycle, a sinister-looking black SUV that sat idling directly in front of a fire-hydrant for much of the duration, and even a few campus cowboys)....Having said all that, and taking all snarkolepsy out of the equation in its entirety, here's the real thing....Again, nothing I have seen at the Circus gets even a tenth-of-the-way to being as rambunctious as it gets on a typical mid-summer night 'round here when a big concert sucks in every surburban rowdy for miles and miles....So, given all that, let's be extremely conservative for a moment and pretend that the 'security' budget for this division of the Circus is 0.1% (ie. 1/1,000th) of the total.....That would be $1 million.....Now, there used to be a social services group out here that helped literally hundreds of families deal with all kinds of things, including sports and recreation for the kids (ie. many of the families where one or more of the parents is going to school out on this, the Greyest of Lotusland's Western Points, are NOT rich and they do NOT live in the local mansions, or even manse-like townhouses)....The annual cost of this social service agency to the provincial government was about $30K per year....That social service group is no more because the government of Mr. Gordon Campbell, as he has done for so many other de-centralized, community-driven groups around the province of British Columbia, cut the funding....So.....How many times does $30,000 go into $1,000,000 again?

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