Winnipeg Free Press > Opinion > Columnists

Tom Oleson

About Tom Oleson:

Tom Oleson is a Free Press columnist.

  • Picking names is more than Tom foolery

    Despite the fact that we take them so much for granted, names actually do matter. For example, they help us sort the phone calls we don't want to take from those we cannot bear.

    A sharply shrieked "Tom!" coming from the kitchen is a definite sounding of the tocsin, a warning to head out the back door as quietly as possible because you are obviously in serious trouble and the only safe sanctuary is the most obscure bar you can find.

    View Full Column | 6/02/2010 1:00 AM | 0

  • End of the world as you know it

    IF you think the Doomsday Clock is that watch on your wrist, ticking down to midnight as relentlessly as the metre on your taxi is ticking up towards $20 while your wife, who has had supper ready since six, when you said you'd be home, is still waiting but you stopped for a quick beer with the boys and one drink turned into another and then there was that flirty-flirty from advertising who, you thought, kind of fancied you but eventually left with that creep from accounting -- if you think any of that, you are simply wrong.

    The Doomsday Clock is about nothing nearly so serious. It is not just about the end of the world as you know it, which is really all that matters. It is about the fanciful end of the world as all of us, including you and the faithless flirty-flirties, know it.

    View Full Column | 16/01/2010 1:00 AM | 0

  • Where the buck, and loonie, stop

    United States President Barack Obama this week -- since Christmas Day, in fact, when an Islamist extremist tried to blow up an American passenger plane in the air above Detroit -- has fixated on problems with American homeland security that the bombing attempt revealed.

    Serious, sweeping surveys, furious reviews of policy were conducted, before Obama came to the conclusion, almost two weeks after the event, that there had been a "systemic failure" in American security that allowed this to happen. There had been a "failure to connect the dots" by the various American intelligence and security agencies involved. The president found this intolerable.

    View Full Column | 9/01/2010 1:00 AM | 0

  • The digit-al age is always with us

    To start with, we should get everything out in the open. I have a Blackberry, so I am, almost by definition, not one of those techno-illiterates who don't even know what digital means. I have ten fingers and ten toes -- always have, always hope to. Digits and I, you might say, are so closely bound that we are flesh and blood. My colleagues fondly call me High-Tech Tommy.

    That being said, I have to confess that the most important part of my Blackberry is the heavy elastic band that runs around it just above the top of the keyboard, if that is what you call it, and over the very bottom of the screen. This holds the Blackberry together and allows it to function as a cellphone -- its previous owner, who clearly did not appreciate the wonders of electronic communication nearly as much as I do, carelessly dropped it and without the elastic band, it now tends to fall apart and become dysfunctional.

    View Full Column | 2/01/2010 1:00 AM | 0

  • Tiger great, not good, so what?

    THE world was shocked this week -- at least those little puritanical parts of the world that still enjoy being shocked were -- to learn that the sexually profligate Tiger Woods had been voted The Associated Press Athlete of the Decade (and, no, it was not for his prowess in that department.)

    Rather, it was for golf -- you remember that he does play that game, too, and is quite good at it. In fact, some people say that he is the best there ever was (at golf; none of his 14 mistresses has yet said he is the best at the other).

    View Full Column | 19/12/2009 1:00 AM | 5

  • Push the yellow strip, Tiger

    Tiger Woods probably never rides the bus, although apparently he's been riding just about everything else lately, and it may be time that the greatest golfer that the world has ever known -- or so we're told; my money is still on Jack Nicklaus -- took a lesson from some of the dumbest riders in the history of public transit.

    Most Winnipeg Transit buses have yellow strips on their rear exit doors. There are a few buses that must be leftover from when I was in junior high, I think, where one has to push a little gate to open the big doors and no one had yet thought that in Winnipeg in winter, heated buses make good ideas. And there are a few new buses, which somehow seldom show up on the routes that I ride, where, if you want out, you just have to push something on the pole and the door miraculously slides open like something out of a science fiction movie -- another futuristic quality of these buses is that they actually have heaters and even air conditioning.

    View Full Column | 12/12/2009 1:00 AM | 2

  • FYI: Tombits... Iggy's no Tiger but that's Canada for you

    TIGER WOODS may or not have been, as the American tabloids claim, unfaithful to his wife with one or even more women. The greatest golfer who ever lived, or so we are told, may or may not have been wonked in the face with a golf club -- some say it was a nine-iron -- by an angry wife who was feeling betrayed. We may never know, and in truth, it isn't really any of our business. The affair, if you'll pardon the expression, of Tiger's untimely departure from his home at 2:30 a.m. (Florida time) and the crashing of his car into both a tree and fire hydrant may never be resolved. What we have been told is that Mrs. Woods only used the golf club to smash the back window, enabling her husband to escape from the wreck. A $164 US fine and four demerit points on his driver's licence is all that it took to get Tiger out of the woods.

    View Full Column | 5/12/2009 1:00 AM | 0

  • Marriage baggage lost in transport

    Sometimes I think that the only thing that keeps me and my wife of the moment together is our mutual poverty. I work for the Free Press, which usually pays me in bus tickets, and she is unable to work if you don't count keeping house and looking after kids as work. Bus tickets only go so far, and then there is the problem of the dozens of children that she has -- well it seems like dozens, anyway. Once you get past three, there is no keeping track, they're just all over the place.

    I am quite fond of her. She is less fond of me, which is hardly surprising, given that I am notoriously hard to get along with. If I could afford to pay her alimony, she might well jump at the chance, although, after 29 years of marriage, I am starting to think that she is just a bear for punishment.

    View Full Column | 5/12/2009 1:00 AM | 1

  • Phil Anwyl -- 'friend' to the end

    This is not something that I usually admit to, but I once, many years ago, owned (and wore) a green corduroy suit.

    It's not something I've thought about for a long time -- you can imagine why -- but I thought about it on Thursday when I heard the news that my friend Phil Anwyl had died. I thought about it because I was wearing that suit during a pivotal moment in my friendship with Phil. If I had worn something different that day, something different might have happened. You might say green corduroy changed my life.

    View Full Column | 21/11/2009 1:00 AM | 1

  • Acts of Orwellian feminism

    My elder daughter spent Thanksgiving weekend with her boyfriend visiting his parents at their farm northwest of Winnipeg. For a young woman who had never had any previous taste of life in rural Manitoba -- aside from a walk in the woods at Clear Lake one year -- it was eye-opening. For her, at the time, the emphasis was first on taste. At home on Thanksgiving she gets turkey, mashed potatoes, a vegetable, and, if she's been good, which is not often, a piece of pie with, perhaps, some ice cream.

    View Full Column | 7/11/2009 1:00 AM | 1

  • Some bridges need burning

    The federal government has spent $1,335, 342.37 on legal fees trying to block the repatriation of one of its citizens imprisoned in a foreign land. That was the total bill, as of July this year, but the tab is rising as Ottawa prepares to go to court once again to appeal an Ontario judge's ruling that the government has to do everything in its power to bring Omar Khadr, accused of being an al-Qaida terrorist who killed an American soldier in Afghanistan, back to Canada.

    View Full Column | 31/10/2009 1:00 AM | 1

  • No business in polygamists' bedrooms

    It is not hard to understand why a woman might want more than one husband, perhaps even two, three or four husbands. Aside from the obvious reason -- even the sturdiest of men get weary, as I will freely attest -- there are the financial considerations.

    Four incomes are better than one, and if you are the one who is in charge of all four, well, go to town, girl. And then there is the inevitable aging or, as Browning put it, "Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be, the last of life for which the first was made." Four dead husbands -- guys seem to always die first -- could make the last of life a lot easier for a widow than one.

    View Full Column | 26/09/2009 1:00 AM | 1

  • The twice damned

    The family of Stefanie Rengel was in a Toronto courtroom Thursday. They heard the boy who murdered her -- he is a 19-year-old man now, but he was only 17 when he killed the 14-year-old girl -- express remorse and say that he deserves whatever sentence he gets.

    That matters, because the court hearing was about what sentence the boy, known as D.B., will get, and Stefanie Rengel's family was there to tell the court the grief and suffering her murder has put them through and how their pain continues.

    View Full Column | 19/09/2009 1:00 AM | 0

  • The blend of things to come

    You can see just about anything, just about everything, the past, the present and the future, on the bus if you ride it often enough.

    For example, in the words of the familiar children's chant, I saw England, I saw France, I saw a lady's underpants on the Mountain bus one morning this week on the way to work.

    View Full Column | 25/07/2009 1:00 AM | 0

  • A three-legged dog walks into a saloon

    My colleague Doug Speirs, the best-selling author of Bite-Sized Doug (available at good bookstores everywhere for the scandalously low price of $9.95), likes to tell stories about dogs. He is the only grown man I know who will publicly admit to owning a wiener dog, so you know that when he talks about dogs, it has to be true, at least as the truth runs through the peculiar canyons of his mind.

    He likes to tell the story of the three-legged dog who walked into a saloon. "Three-legged dog, what are you doing in my saloon?" the bartender asks? The three-legged dog replies: "I'm lookin' for the man who shot my paw."

    View Full Column | 18/07/2009 1:00 AM | 0

  • The King of Pop is dead

    There was perhaps only one brief moment of genuine grace, dignity and emotion in the sordid pandemonium that surrounded and still clouds the death of singer Michael Jackson.

    It was at his memorial service on Tuesday when his three children, whom the "King of Pop," as he was known, had taken great pains to shield from prying eyes, were paraded out in public by his family.

    View Full Column | 11/07/2009 1:00 AM | 3

  • Natural or not, smiles give you a rise

    22222What will be is that if you try using a smile as your umbrella at the bus stop at the corner of Mountain and Fife in the middle of a Winnipeg summer thunderstorm, you will get very wet as water pours alang alang alang down on your ba-doo ba-doodle-ay. Although a smile won't keep you dry, it can, apparently preserve your marriage. A recent report published in the journal Motivation and Emotion claims that the more people smile as children, the more likely they are to have a happy marriage later in life. Kids who grin like idiots, it seems, are more likely to be better and more long-lasting husbands and wives.

    View Full Column | 4/07/2009 1:00 AM | 0

  • Dictionary! Look it up

    One of the great virtues of Google, which, in case you have had your nose inextricably stuck in a book for the last few years, is an Internet search engine that enables you to read about almost anything with a few key strokes, is that if you make a spelling mistake in typing -- pardon me; keyboarding -- in a search command, it will ask "Did you mean...?"

    When you click on that, you will get about 11 million answers to your question, a lot of which will be wrong but all of which will be interesting and Google is at least always polite, even when you can't have any real confidence in its answers.

    View Full Column | 13/06/2009 1:00 AM | 0

  • We dare not forget the blood at Juno Beach

    Prime Minister Stephen Harper flew off to France yesterday, storming, in a way, if you will, the beaches of Normandy once again.

    Mr. Harper is there to take part in the commemoration of the 65th anniversary of D-Day, June 6, 1944, when Canadian, British, American and Free French forces invaded France in an ultimately successful effort to defeat Nazi Germany and liberate Europe from that tyranny.

    View Full Column | 6/06/2009 1:00 AM | 5

  • The Charter protects all of us, right?

    How dare these neo-Nazi, child-abusing skinheads use our sacred Charter of Rights and Freedoms in a pathetic attempt to defend their despicable beliefs and to justify teaching them to their children?

    That seems to be the general reaction -- it has certainly been the reaction of the media's resident hysterics -- to a case before the Manitoba courts right now. It involves Child and Family Services' (CFS) seeking custody of two children who were raised in an atmosphere apparently filled with hate against other races. "If you have a friend who is not white, I won't be your mom," the mother is alleged to have said to her seven-year-old daughter.

    View Full Column | 30/05/2009 1:00 AM | 5

  • Neither lucky nor smart at gambling

    The wind that was blowing so briskly through Winnipeg on Friday was not the normal spring breeze. It was more likely the result of a collective sigh of relief emitted by millions of Canadians when they learned that Wednesday's Lotto 6/49 jackpot of almost $50 million, which had been won by one ticket, had not been won by one person.

    Somehow, the fact that the jackpot was shared by 13 women who work in an Edmonton office -- each of whom will get a mere $3,834,759.30 as her share -- makes it easier for the rest of us, especially those among us who didn't even win a free play, to bear the pain of losing. If there were going to be only one winner, it should have been me (we all think).

    View Full Column | 23/05/2009 1:00 AM | 1

  • Cash cow's milk goes sour

    Cash cows and governments go together like love and marriage, except they work a lot better and last a lot longer than romance, as the continuing existence of a federal income tax, introduced as a temporary emergency measure during the First World War, and the ubiquity, some might call it the enormity, of photo radar in Winnipeg attest.

    Since the concept of photo radar sprang ill-grown from the brow of former mayor Glen Murray, this newspaper has argued in editorials, written by people far wiser than I, that it is wrong, wrong, wrong. It was wrong in its conception and became increasingly wrong in its implementation by succeeding city and provincial governments under the direction of Mayor Sam Katz and Premier Gary Doer as the money it sucked up increased in a weird geometric progression.

    View Full Column | 16/05/2009 1:00 AM | 6

  • The fun police are watching you

    The British writer G.K. Chesterton thought that to enjoy the indulgences of the flesh, the simple pleasures of life, "We give thanks for beer and burgundy by not abusing them." That's probably how it should be, and how it is in most parts of the world with the cruel exception of Canada.

    In other places, governments sort of assume that people will behave responsibly. Here we tend to assume that if we don't regulate people's behaviour down to the last detail, down to how many government-monopolized drinks they may have on the table at a time, in what dark, cold, wind-swept alleys they can smoke their tobacco, how much money they may stuff into government-run slot machines and VLTs in an evening and -- this is coming soon -- how much and what kind of food they can eat, they will all completely lose control and become obese, alcoholic, cancer-ridden gambling addicts.

    View Full Column | 25/04/2009 1:00 AM | 1

  • When apologies aren't right

    We all have things we are sorry about, or at least things we should be sorry for. That is not the same thing, however, as saying that we should apologize. I'm sorry, for example, that when I was courting my wife I hounded her into marrying me -- she deserved better than that. But I won't apologize for it, because my intentions were good.

    Things don't always work out as we intend them to. Sometimes they go horribly awry. When that happens, they may require regret, but they don't always require an apology. In our personal lives, we can sort this out ourselves, but in our public lives we increasingly find governments and other institutions apologizing on our behalf. No one really has the right to do that.

    View Full Column | 18/04/2009 1:00 AM | 5

  • A tragedy no one should face

    Generally, I think, I present a bit of a shabby image in public. When I stop pedestrians on the street to ask for directions, before I can get the words "excuse me" out of my mouth, they shoo me off by loudly exclaiming, "I have no change to spare!" or "Get a job!" Actually, I have a job, at least for the moment, a job that I really enjoy and that almost pays me a living wage and which resulted from one of those extraordinary strokes of luck that sometimes bless our lives.

    View Full Column | 11/04/2009 1:00 AM | 0

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