The Canadian International Development Agency was just caught in a bit of a fib. It claimed to know that, by distributing vitamin A in the Third World, it had saved 1.5 million lives. But auditors say the agency didn't count, it just ran a computer model. Bow your heads, O people: You stand in the presence of social science. It bestrides the modern world like a clay-footed colossus. When we were in Cleveland recently, an AFL-CIO agency bombarded us with statistics on manufacturing job losses by quarter and county. The per-cent bone's connected to the graph bone, the graph bone's connected to the decimal bone, now hear the word of the Lord: "45,734 Ohio jobs lost between 1995 and October 2003 can be directly traced to international trade." Not 45,733 or 45,735; 45,734. The Pope should be so infallible.

Look, if you like playing SimCity, go ahead. But in those terrible middle ages no one thought real knights jumped over things in an L or castles zoomed about in straight lines, the way they did in chess (many a king may privately have felt his queen was more powerful, but never mind). And no peasant could be so superstitious as to believe all human experience could be reduced to a series of linear equations, then solved to yield orderly, scientific happiness. Especially not after watching Robert McNamara run the Vietnam War that way. But like Ptolemaic circles, if you're committed to the concept, you patch the model here and fudge a variable there and get so focused on it you forget the original point lay outside your study.

Remember the headlines in late 2000 that man-made global warming was even worse than the alarmists had thought? Well, maybe it is and maybe it's not. But all that happened then is programmers punched even more pessimistic assumptions into their models and got even more pessimistic projections.

It's like increasing the hypothetical interest rate on your mortgage-payment spreadsheet, seeing your "payments" rise and thinking you're poorer, when all you really just learned is 12 times six is more than 12 times five. If that; increasing one variable and having the result rise doesn't give any reason to think you got the other variables or the formulas right.

Or take government job creation ... please. When something like Canada's infamous Infrastructure Program is projected to create so many jobs and then later hailed for doing it, did you ever wonder how they knew? Going out and counting would be useless because they had to know what was going to have happened in order to compare it with what did happen and take credit for the difference.

So they create a computer model of the economy and tweak it until it "works," that is, converts 10 things they think were measured right in 1995 into six things they think matter in 2003. But the model says nothing about reality because lots of different sets of equations can turn 10 numbers into six other numbers and they can't do test runs of the economy to see which really applies. Despite which, they run their model before implementing the program and call the output a projection. Then they do it again afterwards and call it a result, when all it really proves is that unless you spill coffee into a computer, it always thinks two plus two is four.

So fling econometrics out the window, including any notion of "spin-off" (or "multiplier") effects. Sure, if a government program pays a construction worker a dollar, he spends it on lunch, the waiter then spends it on braces for his kid and so on. But since that dollar came from a taxpayer who now doesn't spend it at the cafe, it's all a giant wash, leaving only the boring question of whether the government is likely to spend the dollar more efficiently than the private sector.

No, it's not a loaded question. It obviously won't in many areas. But government must provide real infrastructure (though pouring the asphalt can be contracted out). It all comes down to a common-sense judgment: Do we really need a road, canal or airport here?

Of course, you need to count your sheep to know if wolves are eating them. I was horrified to learn that during the First World War the British admiralty didn't keep track of whether U-boats were sinking ships faster than they were being built. But you should collect numbers to give common sense something to work with, not to replace it. So forget social science and study hard sciences or humanities.

If vitamin A observably improves immune system responses in individuals (it does), and CIDA distributes lots of it in poor countries (it does), it clearly helps many people live longer. Maybe about 1.5 million. I don't know. Or need to. Doing good is not a branch of mathematics.

So what are these computers doing in our temples?

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

As the ad says, you never get a second chance to make a first impression. Thus two American academics gave college freshpersons a few minutes to meet each other on the first day of class, and found nine weeks later that people who had initially liked or disliked each other mostly still did. I took one look at that story in the Citizen and said "Yeah, it figures.'' It still does. It certainly fits with other studies, as it does with the cliche that most job interviews are essentially over in the first 30 seconds. And that professor who seemed dull in the first lecture had you comatose by Christmas, right?

Mind you, there are two very different possible explanations. Either we mortals are shallow fools who make hasty judgments, then refuse to revise them, or else the human intellect is geared primarily toward social interaction, because we don't have to be good at calculus if we can sense whether the engineer before us is honest and intelligent or a sneaky blowhard. I'm going with the latter.

So take my cup of coffee, please. I've long known not to accept when they offer it in a job interview. But I only recently found out why. "Any fool can drink coffee,'' explained a lawyer who conducts such interviews, "but it takes a real fool to spill it.'' Of course, not every fool does spill it. But running the risk reveals your folly. If you need caffeine to function well, or at all, you have my sympathy. But if you didn't have a cup before the interview you lack foresight or organization, and if you can't resist another during it you lack self-control. And it shows.

Fine. It's obvious why we would want to be able to judge people quickly and accurately. What's not so clear is why we can. Why hasn't an evolutionary or social arms race made us such good liars as to produce a stalemate? Lying can work; just ask Bill Clinton. But also, I suggest, ask economist Robert Frank.

His Passions Within Reason: The Strategic Role of the Emotions starts with the tale of a dog piddling on a stoned kid at a political rally. It is, you'll agree, more colourful than dull chatter about "commitment problems.'' But Mr. Frank goes on to point out that chasing a dog if it pees on you takes time and effort, if you catch it you might get bitten, and even if you whale the tar out of it you won't get the urine off you. It's clearly irrational. Except for one vital consideration. If the dog knows you'd chase and whack it, it won't pee on you. If. The kid's big mistake was being obviously too wasted to move.

If you're dealing with the same person or dog repeatedly, he can learn from experience that you'll eventually seize a chance to stuff his face into the village fire if he steals your corn, messes with your wife or pees on your leg.

It's a lot harder with strangers, which makes xenophobia common and trips to the market risky. An irrational willingness to avenge injury is actually rational if it deters injury. But to do so it must be evident beforehand. Especially if your position is weak. My Scots ancestors fended off the English not by feuding tenaciously, but by being notorious for it. Rudeness is a weapon of the weak. (The drawback is, it signals weakness. But hey, economists expect tradeoffs). So humans are good at giving strangers a look that says wrong me and I'll chase you round perdition's flames before I give you up.

The same thing, oddly, is true of honesty. It too is a big advantage, if you're an open book. Dogs that wag their tails only when happy can be trusted by other dogs. Whereas, if people even suspect you can lie without blushing, your eggs will go unsold in the market and you'll freeze in the dark while the tribe shares food and jokes round the fire. If they don't suspect, it can be even worse.

Lying may appeal to the short-sighted and the fleet of foot. And the occasional bandit makes out like a bandit. But it is at least as dangerous to be overestimated as underestimated. You really don't want to be a major disappointment to your spouse, your boss or the guy next to you in the foxhole. Especially if they have the typical human predisposition to think revenge is a dish best served cold. Far better to have your limitations as well as your qualities on open display.

We are told not to judge a book by its cover but by golly the first sentence tells you a lot. For instance, "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.'' (Nineteen Eighty-four.) Whereas, if the author lacked the talent or willingness to start well, it could improve later but what are the odds? So wear a nice shirt to a job interview and don't spill coffee on it.

Otherwise, they'll realize you're a bum right away. And be right.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

How can TV be so moronic? I said HOW CAN TV ... Look, would you please turn that thing off? Thank you. I'm serious. And no, I'm not seeking suggestions for new reality shows. Television has been subject to colourful abuse from almost its earliest appearance. In Rex Stout's 1953 The Golden Spiders, Archie Goodwin tells us the genius detective Nero Wolfe "was in the office looking at television, which gives him a lot of pleasure. I have seen him turn it on as many as eight times in one evening, glance at it from one to three minutes, turn it off, and go back to his book." By now, TV's mind-numbing properties are so familiar it can be a bit difficult to see the mystery. (Other than why we stare for hours at what we openly call the "boob tube.") I hope the government will let us watch Fox News because I believe in freedom. But I can hardly suppose that adding one more channel will transform the experience from vegetative to energizing. Such a belief is no longer credible.

It once was. Whatever they think of individual programs, no one ever called radio the "idiot box.'' Why should TV be so qualitatively different? The other day I was reading one of those book things, Neil Postman's Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century, and, as he often is, he was most thought-provoking when most wrong. For instance, noting that by age 20 the average American has seen 600,000 TV commercials, he asks, "Would it not have been possible to foresee in 1947 the negative consequences of television for our politics and our children? And ... through social policy, political action, or education, to prepare for them and to reduce their severity?" No. No it would not.

At least, I don't think anyone did foresee it. I give a "so close and yet" award to the New York Times reporter who, after seeing a prototype in 1939, wrote: "The problem with television is that the people must sit and keep their eyes glued on a screen; the average American family hasn't time for it." He beat the guy who in 1926 said "While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially I consider it an impossibility..." But imagine it's June 13, 1948. We're enjoying a gripping radio broadcast of the pseudo-Sherlock Holmes mystery The Case of the Bleeding Chandelier and I mention that I've just seen one of those new-fangled "televisors" that receive pictures as well as sound. Do you reply, "Good Lord, we'll all turn into zombies"? Or "How marvellous; you could have a performance of Shakespeare right in your home, or a conversation between scholars, or a presentation of the day's events by an informed journalist, should it prove possible to find such a person?" If I claimed Orson Wells's notorious 1938 radio broadcast of H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds would, if seen as well as heard, have induced not panic but virtual narcolepsy, would you have hailed me as a prophet or written me off as a loss?

Well, I invite you to stake your reputation on another prediction. Fairly soon, holographic home entertainment will displace the flatscreen visualizations characteristic of primitive 20th-century technology. Mankind will have "theatre in the round" on their living room carpets; NFL touchdowns thrown from beside the couch to a receiver near the stereo, driving the dog insane; adult films in which ... well, you get the idea. So tell me: Will three-dimensional entertainment also tend to produce single-digit IQs among its audience? Will it be stimulating like Dickens, riveting like The Shadow or banal like Gilligan's Island?

One day it will be obvious. But it isn't now, is it? So when researchers tell us television suppresses melatonin, or social commentators from Marshall McLuhan to Neil Postman claim the way we absorb information tells us more about what the world is fundamentally like than the specific information we absorb, I do not doubt that there is truth, and value, in their observations. But they have a bit of a post facto quality: Saying radio and print are "hot" media and television is "cool" seems to me to restate, not solve, the puzzle. Sometimes, in history and in life, we need to explain why something surprising really happened, not why whatever happened isn't really surprising.

Like why television is so dang moronic. Guess I'll sit me down to channel-surf for some program to explain it. After all, adding pictures to sound puts amazing information resources at the disposal of the average person. How could it not? Right, Friends?

- - -

A reader informs me the half-Latin poem about buses mentioned in my last column was in fact written "early in the last century ... by Alfred Godley, an Oxford don" and kindly sent me its full text.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

That wacky pope. Iucundus est, nonne? Over at the Vatican, where they speak Latin for fun and official business, an institute Paul VI founded in 1976 has produced a new lexicon of terms for things like hot pants, punks and computers that weren't around back when Caesar was crushing the Parthians or people were faking their own deaths to escape Nero's ghastly poetry recitals. Regrettably, the actual terms they've invented sound as though they were produced by a committee. Which they were. I am, unsurprisingly, in favour of Latin. I wish it were still taught in schools and some day I really will read Asterix et Normanii and Quomodo Indiviosulus Nomine Grinchus. At the moment I have a bit of an Ars longa, vita brevis problem (don't we all?). But Latin, as any readers fortunate enough to have studied it will know, is exceptionally elegant, supple and powerful. It is inflected; that is, it is the endings of words rather than their position in the sentence that tell you what they're up to, whether they're performing the action, having it performed on them, or even having it performed by them. Latin even has a special case, the "ablative," for all sorts of handy peripheral meanings like where something is happening or how it's being done. Thus, as vis means force, to indicate that something is being done by force you need only toss it in its ablative form vi, naked, wherever in the sentence you think it would sound best. Two letters speak volumes. Is this a great language or what? Unless, unfortunately, it falls into the hands of a pontificating ... sorry, pontifical, institute.

For instance, these guys turned "playboy" into "iuvenis voluptarius" and "hot pants" into "brevissimae bracae femineae." Literally they're accurate. But who wants literal? Latin was, like those who spoke it, ruthlessly practical and to the point. For instance, the proper Latin for head is caput (plural capita, as in per capita) but it was the legionnaires' slang term "testa," for "cooking pot," that produced the French "tête." Roman soldiers, administrators and citizens wouldn't call a punk a "punkianae catervae assecla" (though I do like "tromocrates" for "terrorist"), or a cigarette a "fistula nicotiana." And they certainly wouldn't call a computer an "instrumentum computatorium." (Memo to the Vatican: Since "er" is a perfectly reputable 3rd declension masculine ending with a complete declension available off the rack, the proper, indeed obvious, term for computer would be "computer" (with, pedants will immediately grasp, the genitive singular computeris).

In my high school yearbook someone composed a poem treating "motor bus" as a Latin phrase and working through, for instance, the nominative plural motores bi and the accusative singular motorem bum (yes, I went to an odd school). No offence ad pontificem maximum but your people could and should have drawn a lesson therefrom instead of turning basketball into "follis canistrique ludus."

Some folks may, at this point, be wondering what Latin is doing on my agenda (from "ago, agere" to act, meaning "that which is to be acted upon" just as "propaganda" means "that which is to be propagated" et caetera). They may suggest that fussing over the details of scholarly matters is a distraction from our ongoing attempts to solve pressing, festering problems with solutions both ill-conceived and sloppily implemented. And some young people may feel too rebellious to interest themselves in something the cool herd isn't grazing on. To which I reply O tempora O mores.

Latin could have some distinctly practical uses. For instance the usual suspects within the European Union are frantically trying to stop English from becoming its de facto official language, an increasingly expensive, time-consuming and futile struggle now that expansion has brought the EU 25 languages into which every last memo and bus transfer ought to be translated. The obvious solution: Adopt Latin. It would be convenient, serviceable and avoid outbursts of chauvinism.

More broadly, a revival of Latin would help people appreciate the languages they speak in much of the world, including Canada, by showing them the derivation and subtle meaning of many splendid words such as "egregious." And if taught in schools it would impart an unmistakable, powerful rhythm to students' written and spoken prose. If only someone would produce neologisms a Cato or a Cicero would have deigned to speak, and legionnaires would have been willing to carry to the distant corners of the world, not dump from their kit at the first rest stop.

As to the Vatican's new words, I appreciate the effort, but in view of the results I'm afraid I can only say "Veni, vidi, risi."

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

PORTLAND, OREGON - Would you like weeds with that roof? Or perhaps a parking lot bioswale? If so, Portland, Oregon, is the place for you. And me. It was my last stop on a tour of swing states, run by the U.S. State Department's Foreign Press Center to help Canadian journalists understand American politics. It's a good idea, given how many Canadian journalists vacillate between figurative and literal inability to believe George W. Bush might be re-elected. But at first I didn't understand why the tour included Oregon, which I thought so liberal its Republicans deserve endangered-species protection. Portland is liberal (but for a coin toss it would be named Boston). But rural Oregon is Republican, the suburbs swing, and Al Gore won the state by only half a percentage point in 2000. That should worry all Democrats to the right of Dennis Kucinich, especially as Oregon has set trends from directly electing U.S. Senators to the first Nike shoe (made in Eugene on a waffle iron) to New Age spiritualism to rejecting universal health care by a four-to-one margin when shown the price tag.

Portland itself is delightful, partly due to "progressive'' policies including an early 1970s state law severely restricting urban sprawl. Originally to protect farmland, it ended up protecting wilderness outside the boundaries and livable cities within. For instance, with downtown space at a premium, Portland residents soon ripped out their hideous riverside freeway in favour of a park (where a plaque offers a stirring denunciation of the wartime internment of Japanese Americans ... by Ronald Reagan).

I especially liked visiting the Portland offices of EcoTrust. My regular reader would not expect an organization devoted to building "Salmon Nation'' to be my cup of herbal tea. But it's in an 1895 warehouse that got the first U.S. Green Building Council gold-level certification for historical building renovation, with lovely salvaged timber beams, soaring open spaces (atop which sat a very non-PC stuffed elk head). And splendid plants on the roof. Not algae. Not potted geraniums. A large, mostly hydroponic garden.

No, they're not eating roof carrots. Soil is too heavy. And besides, the point isn't what grows there, it's making a livable building in a livable city. Especially in Portland, heavy rain can wash air pollution right into the rivers. But at EcoTrust, at least, it's filtered through rooftop plants, then runs down through gutters into "bioswales,'' which look much like the plants in big concrete boxes you see in better parking lots everywhere except they don't have bottoms; it's soil all the way down, and the plants are chosen for their tolerance of soaking and parching. Meanwhile, much of the roof that doesn't have plants has planks rather than asphalt, keeping the building cooler and making Portland a bit less of a "heat-island.'' Every little bit helps. And as good greens they prefer native plants. But rooftops, even in Oregon, turn out to be harsh environments. So as practical greens they seek local plants that thrive like traditional imported ones. (For more see www.ecotrust.org/ncc.)

Portland more generally is a showpiece of sensible urban design. They even brought back streetcars, nicer than buses if less convenient. And when a street becomes a hive of commerce and cafés (Oregon's main industrial product, so far as I can tell, is latte), they put a new track down the next street to expand the buzz.

So why's it a swing state? Well, the practical progressives we met there were strikingly uninterested in the Democrats' national agenda. (And one regular Oregonian, a pro-choice, pro-gay-marriage registered Democrat, said she was definitely for Kerry until she heard him speak, but he was so "vapid'' she's now painfully undecided.)

The green roof guys are not my kind of Republicans. But they're into practical, small-scale, business-on-side results. John Kerry could learn a lesson here. So could our politicians, national and local, with their gridlocked posturing and lack of useful specifics.

Doubtless it's partly the civic culture transplanted from New England. But it's also partly the institutions that came with it. Like vigorous public participation in politics (including referendums this fall on matters from the definition of marriage to compensation for regulatory takings to making medicinal marijuana practically available). It encourages schemes that create as many winners and as few losers as possible, rather than a maximum of partisan rhetoric and self-satisfaction. Oh, and Portland has one downtown and 24 suburban municipal governments, to facilitate local experimentation rather than... say, what was municipal amalgamation for anyway?

So when do you think Ottawa will tear out a neighbourhood-destroying, soulless freeway? Right. About the same time roofs sprout plants and politicians let us decide if we favour same-sex marriage.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

CLEVELAND, Ohio 'Hello Cleveland." Perhaps not everyone recognizes that line from the classic rock mockumentary This is Spinal Tap, though people often shout it when they enter Cleveland's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But as they point out at the Hall, virtually everyone on Earth knows rock music. And not just here: NASA's 1977 Explorer carried a Chuck Berry song. It may be only raucous roll. But as our museum guide rightly noted, it's the one universal art form, and you can't write a history of 20th-century culture without it. Including the transformation of race relations in America. One day it may even reach the beer industry.

Incredibly, a major brewery, which has since apologized, just released eight "legends of rock'' beer cans each featuring a white person. Were they in a purple haze and hadn't heard of Hendrix? Didn't they know the first picture in the Hall is of the same Chuck Berry currently shouting "Hello Alpha Centauri" courtesy of NASA? That six of the first 10 inductees into the Hall were black, like so many of rock's precursors it also honours?

Rock 'n' roll may mostly conjure up bobby-soxers rockin' round the clock, hippies tripping to Joplin, or aimless rebellion, staged excess and slack-jawed morons interviewed about their mind-blowing wealth. Well, that and your first love. But there's much, much more. The American military and professional sports are rightly credited with helping break down segregation, because solidarity with buddies under fire or heroes on the field is incompatible with despising them. But I think the less obvious role of rock and roll was ultimately more important.

Rock had no formal launch date any more than, say, jazz. But it didn't exist in the mid-1940s and was widespread by the mid-1950s; legendary Cleveland DJ Alan Freed had popularized the term and the soundtrack of The Blackboard Jungle had sent Rock Around the Clock rocking around the world. As various Hall of Fame exhibits note, "Rock and Roll is city music," inconceivable without post-Second World War urbanization. But one aspect of it in particular: Hall of Fame curator Howard Kramer defined rock as "black music played by black people for a mostly white audience, or black music played by white people in the style of black musicians." And on the beer controversy, William McKeen, editor of Rock and Roll is Here to Stay, said "Rock 'n' roll is black America meeting white America. It's about the merger of white people's music -- country -- with black people's music -- rural blues." They met in the city. And knew one another.

Music is universal. As the Citizen observed a few years back, "You simply can't find people who don't sing, chant or beat on drums." And it's primal; other than people who can't hear, or can't hear pitch, almost everyone is stirred to the depths of their soul by some kind of music. To the point that sometimes you wish they weren't, if their preference differs from yours; a remarkable variety of music, from bouzouki to bagpipes to rap, makes non-enthusiasts long for the dulcet tones of Led Zeppelin. Lots of people never quote a sonnet, but almost no one doesn't sometimes hum a tune or feel a powerful wave of nostalgia the minute a certain song starts. Right, Peggy Sue? Thus a white bigot could enjoy the same bad 1950s coffee as his black neighbour but feel basic kinship with a white guy sipping tea 10,000 miles away. But not when they're both rocking to Blue Suede Shoes while some distant aristocrat is waltzing.

It's more a matter of changing ideas than behaviour, though what is agreed, at least in Cleveland, to be the first rock concert in March 1952 featured an audience desegregated in a way then miraculous. As radical 1960s journalist George Leonard, in his retrospective Walking on the Edge of the World, observes, "when the miraculous happens it quickly begins to seem commonplace. Today we complain that the plight of black Americans is in some ways as bad as or even worse than it was in the '60s. But not to credit the enormous, breathtaking victories of the civil rights movement is to dishonour the sacrifices of those who made them possible and to discourage people to work to make further gains." Indeed. And rock was there all the way.

Skin colour is not yet as trivial as hair colour in America. If it were the brewing company error could hardly happen, let alone be troubling rather than funny. But 30 years ago, race was on the verge of burning America down. Now it's a problem that is fast succumbing to America's optimistic, can-do attitude.

"Hello integration." I'll drink to that. Along with Ziggy Stardust, if the Explorer has reached him yet.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

CLEVELAND, Ohio It all comes down to Ohio. Whoever wins the Buckeye State will win the presidency. At least, no Democrat has reached the White House without it since 1960, and no Republican ever. Unfortunately it's too close to call.

Ohio leads here by following. It doesn't set trends; rather it is a microcosm of America, except in being only 2.1-per-cent Hispanic. It was settled by northerners and southerners. It has Appalachian counties. Yet the Midwest begins at the state capital, Columbus, a spread-out city with streets wide enough to turn a wagon around. Ohio's economy suffered from the decline of manufacturing, but is being revitalized by services and higher-tech industry. And it is riddled with institutes of higher learning, from small elite schools to self-made Columbus State Community College (born humble Columbus Area Technician's School in 1963, it now grants degrees and boasts 24,000 students from 125 countries), to vast public Ohio State University, home of the Buckeyes.

As the university website admits, "It is rare for an athletic team to be named after a tree..." But it is also very American in its exuberance. The buckeye, the site explains, is aesculus glabra, a relative of the horse chestnut. But while "Before the days of plastic, buckeye wood was often used to fashion artificial limbs" and the nuts are sometimes carried for good luck or to fight rheumatism (good luck), "the trees and their nuts are of little practical use: the wood does not burn well, the bark has an unpleasant odor, and the bitter nut meat is mildly toxic. Still, the tree has grit. It grows where others cannot, is difficult to kill, and adapts to its circumstances."

Which virtues the university quickly claims for its students and staff. Quickly and typically. "Buckeye" was first used for a resident of the area that later became Ohio in 1788 when the six-foot-four Col. Ebenezer Sproat was greeted at the first Northwest Territory court session by local Indians shouting "Hetuck, Hetuck," their name for the tree. We're told they were impressed by his stature; if they thought him largely useless, that tale has not reached posterity. He and his neighbours proudly adopted the term.

Then in 1840, partisans of presidential candidate and war hero William Henry Harrison, a Virginia patrician posing as a rough-hewn, simple Westerner, showed up at the Whig Party convention with buckeye canes and strings of buckeye beads. This imaginative forerunner of the campaign button became inextricably linked with Ohio, which has produced more presidents (seven) than any other state. And today entrepreneurs market "buckeyes" of peanut butter dipped in chocolate. Very American. Like Ohio politics.

Its cities are Democrat, rural areas Republican, and the suburbs waver. It is trending Republican; 10 years ago it had two Democratic senators while today, every statewide officeholder is Republican. But all the major-city mayors are Democrats.

Columbus, birthplace of the archetypally American golfer Jack Nicklaus and so typical it was long a favoured test site for new products, is run by officials who think "progressive" is a compliment and boast of the second-highest gay population per capita in the U.S. while explicitly trying to reverse the egregious damage done to its downtown, as to so many American inner cities, by Lyndon Johnson's Great Society urban-renewal program. But the Democratic mayor of depressed steel city Youngstown just endorsed George Bush.

Folks in Ohio are patriotic and a surprising number have relatives in the military, including National Guardspersons in Iraq. They are not neoconservative nation-builders, but nor would they cut and run.

The presidential race is so close a small thing could tip it. Eric Fingerhut is currently walking the state from Cincinnati to Cleveland to demonstrate that his opponent, former governor and incumbent Republican senator George Voinovich, is out of touch. We caught up with him in a roadside ditch (hey, lots of campaigns end in one) and he conceded that, while many voters were prepared to turn against President Bush, John Kerry still had to get in there, offer visible alternatives, and "close the deal."

If November's ballot includes a citizen-initiated referendum to define marriage as one man and one woman in the state constitution, it could boost Republican turnout decisively. A Democratic voter-registration drive in the cities could do the same for them.

There's always the possibility of a telling gaffe; something dumb by President Bush, an egregious waffle by John Kerry or a self-indulgent spontaneous combustion by Teresa Heinz Kerry.

Otherwise, and barring a foreign policy surprise, it will depend on whether the sun is shining on the buckeye trees, bringing out a lot of weakly motivated but anti-incumbent voters this Nov. 2.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Let's see. What's in my personal digital assistant (PDA, in case you live in an unwired cave) for today? Oh, right: "15:13 to 15:18:30: Go mad, in belated effort to keep up with world." I put it in after reading in Wednesday's National Post that PDAs are de rigueur for elementary school children. Oh, the sweet memories. Also on my schedule: Try to figure out how a young child can even use, let alone need, such a thing. In my salad days (homemade dressing, real fat) starting school at 9:00 was, in some sense, on my schedule. But really it was on my parents': "Morning. Drive kid to school by 9:00 or boot him out front door in time to walk there by 9:00." I didn't have any say in the matter, I didn't have to keep track of it because they would remind me and anyway it wasn't all that hard to remember. "What shall I do today? Oh yeah, go to school. Repeat until at least 18."

Once there I went in a big door that didn't change in ways I needed to keep track of on-line, entered my classroom, and did what the teacher told me to (or faked it) until he or she said it was time for recess at "half past ten" (10:30:00). Then we raced around outside until the teachers rang actual bells with wooden handles, metal bodies and clappers (not by clicking a mouse but with a vigorous shaking motion of that long thing that holds your thumb in place while you enter stuff in your PDA). Then we lined up, went back inside and did what the teacher told us until noon, went "home," ate lunch cooked on a "stove," went back to school when a parent said to, and stayed until the teacher said "Go home... please."

How did we manage it without PDAs? And how did the neighbourhood kids often successfully gather after dinner to play some sort of game chosen on the spot, without referees, schedules or leagues? To be fair, we did employ one scheduling device, Mr. Sun: When he went away it was time to go in.

What's so different today? It seems the modern child is desperately overscheduled like (and by) the modern parent. But surely their schedule is basically do what harried parent (HP) says or, if in back seat of vehicle, go wherever HP drives, do whatever activity they are propelled into until expelled from it into car of waiting HP. If they get outside and HP hasn't arrived, what's the point of PDA Jr. saying "21:13: Get in car go home with dad eat microwaved food?" Who are you going to believe, PDA or your own eyes? "HP l8 must w8." It's so simple even an adult can understand it.

Besides, isn't the real answer for adults to stop overscheduling kids this way? Let's block out some time to consider whether an eight-year-old who can't keep track of his or her activities without some new electronic device might actually be in need of a new schedule instead or, heresy of modern heresies, a new lack of schedule. Does anyone remember fun? Fun does not compute fun is not logical fun will not happen. When do today's kids have time to do an activity because they feel like it, until their internal rhythm, the rhythm of nature or the rhythm of the activity itself tells them to stop? To smell the roses or skip stones?

In one country song, Boxcar Willie reminisces about unscheduled childhood activities like hanging out at the old swimming hole, fishing with a cane pole, hearing his mama singing across the fields and how once a week, "that old preacher man once more set my heart at ease." Where's that in your kid's PDA? Will they one day reminisce about rushing from practice to practice while harried adults shout into electronic devices? Or is reminiscing not on their schedule?

I grant that modern kids are highly efficient. But when did efficiency become a desirable attribute of childhood? I also grant that they are mastering technology and it will be useful. Especially if we are all assimilated by the Borg. But kids will master technology they're immersed in without force-feeding. And what about my favourite invention, fire?

I confess that I just got a cellphone and it's pretty cool. But will today's kids treasure their first blunder onto a porn site the way I treasure my first camping trip without adults where I successfully turned a heap of damp wood into a source of heat, light and beauty? (Or the time we tried to open a tin of spaghetti with an axe?)

I say we tie the straitjackets together, download ourselves from the window and make a break for the deep woods where food is cooked with heat, time comes in dollops not tiny identical digitized chunks and kids aren't just unhappy little clones of our own harried selves. An unscheduled break.

Hey, when they're old the kids might even look back fondly on such an adventure.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]