Fellas, it's too rough to feed you

Currently at Toronto Pearson: 4. High today: 4. There has been snow on the ground, uninterrupted, in K-W for eight days now. K-W got a bit more sloppy snow today; Toronto's five days' growth of snow is just about finished going down the drain.

Last week I heard someone on the bus say that someone had won the $39 million in the Lotto 6/49 or whatever, and maybe someone asked "what would you do with all that money?" and I thought "what would I do with all that money?" and thought, well, first I'd give away $38 million ... only $38 million? No, maybe $38.5 million. And I thought, of course, this is why I would never play the lottery--but then I realized, maybe this is why I should play the lottery! When other people win, they usually spend the money on stupid stuff. (I guess.) But I would, I don't know, give it to Doctors Without Borders and whatever the hell. (I really don't know.) So, maybe I am actually morally required to play the lottery, in order to do my part to try to divert lottery money to something worthwhile.

Turns out I was wrong about the idea of deflation taking a long time to sink in. It was the lead headline in the Star today. Gas is below $0.80 a litre around here these days. Again I remember the Globe poll, some time after Katrina, asking whether gas would ever be less than $1/litre again. Most people said "no", of course. Most people would have said "no way in hell" a few months ago.

The price of a can of beans is up 40-60% since the summer in the local grocery store, though. For some reason the grocery price war is over; Loblaw's has been steadily jacking up its prices and just reported a large profit. This is going to be some jagged disinflation/deflation; I would guess that relatively poor people are going to continue to see steep inflation for some time, since they spend proportionally a lot on food and not much directly on energy. It has occurred to me to wonder as house prices fall whether the conditions that produce falling house prices put upward or downward pressure on rental prices. House prices are falling because people's ability to pay for houses is decreasing. If people's ability to pay for houses is decreasing, does that mean that people who would otherwise have been at the low end of the home-ownership market are forced into the rental market, increasing demand for, and thus creating upward pressure on the price of, rental units? And: does it result in a flattening of price differentials between the high end and low end of the rental market, as people are forced downward in the market, creating more demand and higher prices at the bottom of the market?

And I am still on strike. The deep, dark stupidity of it all is upsetting, but also amusing in its way. Somehow I have begun to love my enemies. Soon I'll find myself in love with the world, and the only thing left to do will be to ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long.