Part four on suing #MrLube for #BotchedOilChange. While #JoeFontana awaits verdict, victory is mine! #LdnOnt

While London mayor Joe Fontana waits for a judge to render a verdict June 13 in his case, I got great news today about my equally weighty, but lower profile, legal battle with the elusive Matt Rowswell, owner of two London Mr. Lube franchises.

The mayor is charged with breach of trust by a public official, fraud and uttering forged documents. I was at the court house twice last week, the first time during Mayor Joe’s trial, when the place was abuzz with what passes for excitement there.

A judge is now deciding whether to believe Joe’s explanation for making numerous changes to an expense report and then submitting it for payment for something entirely unrelated to its original purpose. Not to jump the gun, but if that doesn’t constitute fraud, I’m not sure what the word means.

In my case, a judge – and I wish I knew which one but I can’t decipher his signature on the Endorsement Record I received in the mail today – ruled in my favour against Mystery Matt.

For those just catching up, the fine folks at Mr. Lube on Oxford at Wonderland botched my oil change in late January, stripping the oil pan plug and causing a gushing oil leak about eight weeks later. I needed a new oil pan. Not having one on hand, I had to pay Leavens VW about $600 to install one. Mystery Matt’s second banana, Mike Morrow, offered to pay half the cost of the repair but declined to refund the cost of the original oil change, a whopping $126. So I sued. For more details, read earlier posts, below.

The winning judgment

The judgment is for the cost of the repair, the cost of the oil change and $215 in court costs, just under $1,000 in total. The judge did not allow my claim for the cost of a rental car I had for four days whilst my car was being repaired. Fair enough. I also was awarded interest on all of these costs, which isn’t all that important unless Mystery Matt continues his strategy of avoiding me at every turn.  

I won the case because he didn’t respond to the suit within the allotted three weeks. Now that I have a judgment, it’s up to me to wrest the money from Matt and his high-road company, Cardoc Enterprise. I’ll start this week by contacting Mike Morrow and asking for a cheque next week. On the off chance Matt can’t find his cheque book or is out of town taking an ethics course, I would have to follow up with the court and ask for assets to be seized and so on.

That, of course, is a worst case scenario. I’m confident old Matt will happily pay up. There might even be a cheque in my mailbox right now. I’m going to see…

Part three on suing #MrLube #BotchedOilChange #LdnOnt and #JoeFontana

For a minute yesterday, I thought maybe everyone suddenly was interested in my ongoing legal dispute with Mr. Lube franchise owner Matt Rowswell.

I went to the London court house to file a default motion against old Matt because he had failed to respond to the claim I filed three weeks ago in Small Claims Court.

Matt Rowswell?

The background of this story is available below in earlier blog postings, but suffice to say one of his Mr. Lube technicians (loosely defined) wrecked my oil pan in late January in the midst of a $125 oil change. Eight weeks later, that led to a gushing oil leak that cost about $600 to repair, required me to rent a car for several days and got me thinking perhaps I should get a refund of my original $125.

Matt’s right hand man, Mike Morrow, offered to pay half the cost of the repair, which I thought missed the mark by a significant amount. So I sued Matt’s company, Cardoc Enterprise Inc., for $2,000, which is a rather conservative estimate of all my costs, including the time I’ve spent chasing around after the elusive Matt and Mike duo. With their aversion to contact of any kind, they make Howard Hughes and J.D. Salinger look like Kim Kardashian and Kanye West. (Matt, I’ll explain that reference if I ever have the pleasure of meeting you.)

I got to court just after 10 yesterday morning, and the place was abuzz. Of course, I soon realized that wasn’t because of my motion but because our fair city’s mayor, Joe Fontana, was in the second day of his trial, charged with breach of trust by a public official, fraud and uttering forged documents. The actions are alleged to have taken place when Fontana was serving his country as a Liberal MP and cabinet minister in 2005.

Mayor Joe Fontana

One wonders how many backbench Liberals decided to get out of politics the day Joe Fontana was chosen ahead of them to be Minister of Labour in the Paul Martin cabinet. Yikes Martha, if I can’t nose out this guy, what am I doing here?

Several floors below Joe’s trial, it was a good news-bad news day in Small Claims Court. I managed to file my default motion against Matt, which allows me to proceed and try to collect $2,000 from him.

However, because I am claiming damages – as in, his company damaged my car – I have to ask a judge to determine if my damage claim is reasonable. Which means I have to file more paperwork, this time around a Notice of Motion and Supporting Affidavit. I’ll do that in the next few days and swing by the court house a fourth time.

By then, we may know the fate of our second-rate mayor, and the courthouse should be far less crowded.

On @LondonMusicHall and the #deadmau5 turning point

In October, 2010, many of the journalism students I teach at Western University were beside themselves with excitement. They were looking forward to a concert in downtown London by an artist whose name crashed my spell checker: deadmau5.

 In one of my classes, students write a review of some kind – movie, book, restaurant or whatever interests them. That year, roughly half wrote about the concert. So I read numerous accounts of the performance and eventually came to understand a few basic facts.

Deadmau5 live at iTunes festival London Roundhouse, Camden, 2012. 

For starters, deadmau5 is pronounced ‘Dead Mouse’. That is something closer to common knowledge today, after Mr. Maus appeared on the Grammys in 2012 among other high-profile venues. I also discovered what exactly he does on stage that excites so many fans. He’s a DJ and one of the pioneers of progressive house music, aka electronic dance music.

Like another music pioneer also named Zimmerman a couple of generations earlier, Niagara Falls native Joel Zimmerman chose a catchier name with which to launch his career.

Early in 2010, London promoter Derek Hsiung started talking to London Music Hall owner Mike Manuel about bringing deadmau5 to London and staging an event unlike anything the city had ever seen. “They had been doing this in Europe for years, but it hadn’t been done here,” Hsiung recalls.

I talked to Hsiung when I was writing about Manuel and the Music Hall for this month’s Business London magazine cover story.

London Music Hall has become one of the country’s best and most popular live music venues, gaining the respect and admiration of artists, agents and promoters across Canada. It will host 275 events this year, entertaining about 200,000 people in the process. A renovation last fall transformed an already popular venue into something worthy of its recent nomination for Top Club Venue at the Canadian Music and Broadcast Industry Awards in Toronto.

Four years ago, Manuel and Hsiung envisioned a huge downtown tent party, headlined by deadmau5. As Hsiung says in this month’s story, “It was crazy. Half the people buying tickets for $40 or $50 had no idea what they were buying.” They sold 6,000 tickets and threw a party that impressed not just the crowd under the tent that night, but plenty of influential people in the Canadian music scene.

Reading student accounts of the concert, I quickly realized how popular and innovative deadmau5 was and is. What I didn’t understand was how the event had burnished the reputation of the London Music Hall, putting it in the big leagues from that day forward. As Manuel says, it took years to build a reputation for excellence among agents and promoters. “They need more than just the space. They need perfection. They’re booking 500-1,000 shows a year and don’t have time for mistakes.”

The deadmau5 show was the biggest and best demonstration of the Music Hall’s ability to achieve perfection. Of course, it also raised expectations, something Manual and Hsiung realized immediately.

“We looked at each other that night and asked, ‘What now?’ What would people expect after that,” Hsiung recalls. What followed was an ongoing collaboration that stages an annual Block Party the first week of September and an annual Tent Party that coincides with Western’s Homecoming weekend, both of which continue to be popular among students at Western and Fanshawe College.

The original deadmau5 concert demonstrates precisely how and why the London Music Hall has achieved everything it has in the last nine years. From the beginning, when he opened the smaller venue Rum Runners next to his laser tag business, Mike Manuel has dreamed big and remained steadfastly focused on achieving those dreams. When Rum Runners was sitting empty for weeks at a time, he resisted the temptation to simply open up as a night club. “We were a venue, booking events. We stayed true to that philosophy, even when we were empty for a whole weekend.”

When he converted the larger laser tag operation into the London Music Hall, continuing Rum Runners alongside, he ran the operation with a level of professionalism that impressed everyone he dealt with. Word started to spread throughout the music community: This was a venue worth playing. Last year, Manuel spent about $1-million to renovate the venue into something rather spectacular. Check out Steve Martin’s excellent photos in Business London to see for yourself.

Or get down to the venue itself. It’s the heart of London’s music scene, and less of a secret every day.

The latest on suing #MrLube #BotchedOilChange #LdnOnt

            Here’s the latest on my epic legal battle with Matt Rowswell, the owner of two Mr. Lube franchises here in London.

            To recap: I took my VW Tiguan in for an oil change in January. The technician (loosely defined) stripped the threads on my oil pan whilst replacing the oil pan plug. As you might suspect, that’s not ideal and led to a gushing oil spill a few weeks later, the evidence of which is still on my garage floor. (For more details, read my previous post.)

            I filed my claim today at the London court house. It took about 45 minutes and cost $75. A surprisingly pleasant experience. The guy ahead of me in line was filing the last paperwork for his divorce and seemed jubilant.

            I took my officially stamped document over to Mr. Lube at 1149 Highbury Ave., the headquarters of the Rowswell empire, officially known as Cardoc Enterprise. There was no sign of Matt and no sign of his second-in-command Mike Morrow. I was sort of hoping to see Mike to make sure he was OK. Three weeks ago, he promised to call me back after discussing my situation with his boss, and since he hadn’t called I started to worry he might have suffered some kind of terrible accident or been stricken with a flesh-eating disease.

My VW Tiguan

            In their absence, I gave the paperwork to store manager Jerry De Lyzer. He was very agreeable and took the envelope from me after making a quick phone call. I now have to file an affidavit with the court letting them know Jerry was the one who took the paperwork. It’s worth noting he didn’t seem the least bit surprised to be served with legal papers, leading me to wonder if that was part of his job description at Cardoc Enterprise. 

While he was outside making his clandestine phone call, a friendly employee not working on a car came over to chat me up. She saw my Tiguan outside and told me Matt Rowswell’s wife drives the same car. And then she told me they are “tricky to work on,” because they require special tools and such.

Mrs. Rowswell's TW Tiguan

Presumably, Matt is aware of that, given that he owns two Mr. Lube franchises and is co-owner of a Tiguan himself.

            Now, Matt has 20 days to file a defence. If he doesn’t, I file another claim and he’s found guilty. If he files a defence we meet in a settlement conference, followed by an actual trial if we can’t reach a settlement.

            I kind of hope we have a settlement conference. That might be the only time I get to meet Matt face-to-face. I want to ask him where his wife gets her oil changed.

Why I'm suing #MrLube #BotchedOilChange #LdnOnt

For most people, the court system is little more than the backdrop for some of our favorite movies and TV shows. We might get a glimpse of the courthouse when called for jury duty, as I was two years ago. But even then, we’re likely to be done that day -- not chosen for a case or rejected by one of the two sides, as I was after my name was called.

Here in London, Ont., the courthouse is one of the ugliest buildings in the downtown skyline, a dreary concrete edifice with all the charm of the Grinch on Christmas Eve. Thousands of people drive by the building every day without giving any thought to what goes on inside.

I’ll be heading down there sometime in the next week or so. I’m going to sue someone.

I’ve only ever sued one person, a deadbeat who hired me to write some promotional copy for his business and then refused to pay. I won rather easily since he didn’t really have – or offer – a defence. Winning easily in small claims court is not really that easy. It takes time and money to fill out the various forms and it takes months for your little action to snake its way through the bureaucracy. But it does eventually.

Winning also doesn’t mean you swing by the courthouse to pick up the money the court has awarded you. What you get is a judgment saying the defendant owes you the money. Then it’s up to you to collect it. In my case, after trying for weeks to contact the deadbeat, I simply walked into his office and demanded payment. Surprised to see me, he offered a weak excuse and wrote a cheque. He then asked me to sign a form indicating I would cease further legal action after being paid. That he had this form handy suggested maybe getting sued was not a new experience for him.

Next week I’m going to sue Matt Rowswell. He owns at least two Mr. Lube franchises in London, at 1149 Highbury Ave. and 591 Oxford St. W. I don’t know much more about him because he refuses to talk to me.

At the end of January, I went to his Oxford St. location and had my oil changed for $126.25. That’s a lot to have the oil changed, but I drive a Volkswagen and that seems to inflate the cost of oil changes regardless of where they’re done. What I didn’t know that day was that the technician (loosely defined) stripped the threads on the oil pan when he screwed in the oil pan plug. As a result, within six weeks, I had a gushing oil leak.

Because it was still winter and because the floor of my garage was always wet from melting snow, I didn’t notice the oil on the floor right away. I think a week went by before I noticed a slick even Capt. Joseph Hazelwood of Exxon Valdez fame would have found impressive. So I took the car, a 2012 Tiguan, to my VW dealership, Leavens Volkswagen here in London. The car was and is under warranty. I left the car early that morning, hopped on the shuttle and looked forward to having it fixed that night.

Alas, it was not to be.

The Leavens technicians (appropriately defined) discovered the damaged oil pan threads and let me know the only fix was to order a new oil pan, which would take two or three days to arrive. My car could not be driven at that point, so I rented a car and sashayed over to Mr. Lube to let them know what had happened. I talked to store manager Ryan Dick and asked him to call Leavens to arrange to pay for the repair. It seemed obvious to me that the botched oil change six weeks earlier had caused the subsequent leak. Funny how these things work, but Ryan Dick was unable to connect with anyone at Leavens. And he was unable to pay me directly for the repair.

He did give me the name of his area supervisor, Michael Morrow (Michael.mrlube45@gmail.com) whom I called after I got my car back. By then I knew exactly what the repair cost: $591.21. Michael Morrow would not give me Matt Rowswell’s contact information, saying “that’s my job, to make sure you don’t talk to him.”

2012 VW Tiguan

After a lengthy soliloquy about Mr. Lube policies and the vagaries of changing VW oil pan plugs, he offered to pay for half of the repair. I responded by asking if he believed I was half to blame for the damage to my car. Oh no, he said, I wasn’t to blame at all. That was good to hear. I could sleep better that night.

I told him I expected his employer to pay for the entire repair. I also said that if I didn’t hear back, I would sue him for the repair costs, the cost of the rental car and for the $126 I paid in January for the crappy oil change.

That comes to something over $1,200, not including the fees I will pay to file the claim, not including the time I’m wasting by doing all this, for which I expect to be compensated as well. (On a side note, just because Enterprise will ‘pick you up’ when you need a car, don’t expect to save any money. It cost more than $500 for me to rent a Dodge Avenger for four days. Ouch.)

That conversation with Michael Morrow was April 14. He must be a busy man because he has yet to get back to me to let me know what his owner said when he passed along my message.

Several people have suggested they might be stalling or putting me off to see if I’m serious about suing. I can’t believe they would do that. Michael Morrow promised to call me back. Maybe he lost my number. Also, when Mr. Lube sends regular emails with special offers and links to surveys, their representatives make it very clear they consider customer service to be their top priority. So I’m sure there has just been a mix-up.

Just to be sure though, I’ll file the court papers next week. And when I need my next oil change, I’ll go to my dealership. Turns out they charge $25 less and seem to know what they’re doing.

Retail stupidity -- What's up at #Superstore and #Michaels?

The woman rushed up to me with all the urgency of an ER nurse, her expression presaging the importance of what she was about to say.

            “If you want your tax refunded,” she said earnestly, “you need to go over to customer service.”

            Huh?

            I was at the Real Canadian Superstore, a grocery store familiar to many Canadians, where service has been slashed -- but not quite to the bone. One of its sister stores, Loblaws, is slightly fancier while the other sister – the homely one – is aptly named No Frills. And indeed, there are no frills to be found there, only empty boxes stacked high near the checkout area where you are invited to pack your own groceries, and by pack I mean balance them precariously in flimsy boxes with half their original rigidity, before dodging traffic while hauling them out to your car.

            But I digress. I was at the Superstore, on what turned out to be No Tax Day. Since we don’t pay sales tax on most groceries in Ontario, the No Tax hoopla that Superstore rolls out every few months doesn’t register with me. If I were about to buy a TV from my local grocery store, or maybe outfit my whole family with Joe Fresh disposable clothes, then I would punch No Tax Day into my Google calendar and synch it with every device in my house. My toaster would tell me it was No Tax Day.

            However, since I tend to buy mostly non-taxable groceries at the Superstore, my toaster remains out of the loop.

            Where once I balked at the idea of scanning my own groceries, I now search out the opportunity, confident I can get out of the store more quickly than going through the conventional check-out line. (I’ve even been known to steal the odd 5-cent plastic bag – going all Naomi Klein on the global capitalist power structure. Occupy This.)

            I scanned my groceries and then paid quickly and painlessly by simply tapping my credit card on the magic payment screen. That’s when the cashier/ER nurse arrived to tell me what was required if I wanted to get in on Tax Free Day.

            “I tried to get here before you paid, but you were too quick,” she said. Amid my confusion, I felt a twang of guilt for being so gosh darn efficient. “I was going to credit your tax before you paid,” she continued. “But now that you’ve paid, you have to go to customer service to get your tax back.”

            That’s when I noticed how much tax I had paid: 82 cents. I don’t know how low that number needed to go before I would have walked away, but 82 cents was enough incentive for me to head to customer service, where, like all customer service counters, there are two inalienable rules: We move at our own pace and there is always one person at the counter buying lottery tickets.

            I walked out with an 82-cent credit, marveling at the software engineering and development Superstore and its Loblaw parent company were using. They have a machine that allows me to scan anything in their store and then weighs what I’ve scanned to make sure I’m being honest. They allow me to pay by simply tapping my credit card on a pad. But, to rebate the equivalent of the tax I’ve paid, they require their employees to dash amongst six self-check kiosks, interceding just as customers attempt to pay. If they are late or distracted or trip or are perhaps making someone else’s rebate magically appear, well the only recourse is to direct the uber-efficient shopper to customer service.

            Do the IT people at Loblaw head office blush when they send out instructions to hundreds of stores in preparation for No Tax Day? Do they apologize for not being able to insert a line of code that would credit the tax automatically, circa 1986?

            The stupidity of that transaction was still rattling around in my head the next day when I went to buy a picture frame at Michaels, the arts and crafts store that works very hard to bring together two modern-day vices – hoarding and extreme couponing. Clutter is the operating philosophy at Michaels, as is the endless distribution of 40-per-cent-off coupons.

            Standing in line to pay for my picture frame, which, to be fair, was discounted 60 per cent, I got to hear the cashier spiel several times. In addition to asking the inane, “Did you find everything you were looking for today?” question and pimping for a donation to the charity-of-the-day, the friendly woman asked each customer for her email address. In response, every shopper, all clearly regulars, said she had already given Michaels her email address and received coupons that way.

            To that, the cashier had this remarkable comeback: “The more often you give us your email address, the more offers you get. It’s a kind of loyalty program.”

            If I hadn’t heard her explain it several times, I wouldn’t have believed it. The good folks at Michaels have instituted a system that encourages all their customers to dictate their email addresses to the cashier every single time they shop at the store!

            Four deep in line, picture frame in hand, I heard every person ahead of me list her email address in the same manner by which the U.S. president takes the oath of office on inauguration day – section by section, so the cashier could keep up as she entered the information into the computer.

            On an average April weekday afternoon, this ridiculous process created quite an impressive bottleneck at the check-out counter. Imagine how much more havoc it could create on a busy Saturday afternoon. How about in December when every second person is lining up to buy materials to fashion a jolly Christmas wreath?

            Companies everywhere, from Apple to Starbucks, WestJet to Zappos, are simplifying their products and processes to make every interaction as simple and enjoyable as possible. And then we have the Superstore and Michaels, designing systems that do the opposite, in the guise of a customer benefit.

            I guess I should be thankful Michaels doesn’t sell lottery tickets.

#OpeningDay and my #BlueJays

It’s baseball Opening Day, a cause for celebration among hardcore fans.

            Despite the fact that MLB officially started the season last week with a couple of games in Australia – natch, makes perfect sense – this truly is Opening Day: the launch of another 162-game grind that stretches through spring, summer and fall, providing endless storylines for seven months.

            There’s a lot of romance associated with baseball generally and Opening Day in particular. Most of it is garbage. Yes, the field theoretically extends infinitely along its foul lines, making all the world a baseball diamond. But come on George Will, how relevant is that? And yes, an Iowa corn field cum baseball diamond is a beautiful thing to behold, at least viewed through a Hollywood lens.

            The truth is people who get excited about Opening Day rarely are thinking of W.P. Kinsella and his poetic, fanciful spin on the game. Rather, they are dipping into a sparkling well of memories. That those memories coincide with the arrival of spring only heightens the enjoyment of reminiscing about games and seasons gone by.

            For me, it’s all about listening to Toronto Blue Jays games, late at night, from a radio tucked under my pillow long after my parents had sent me to bed. A friend took me to see a Jays game in 1977, the team’s inaugural year. I recall vividly the wonder I felt walking out of the tunnel at Exhibition Stadium to see the field bathed in light, ringed by 40,000 fans.

            I didn’t know what a dump Exhibition Stadium was; didn’t realize the Jays were awful, as most expansion teams are; didn’t know many of the rules, actually. But none of that mattered. Beginning that night, I was a Blue Jays fan. I listened to their games nearly every day. I watched on TV too, although TV games were the exception, not the rule back then. And every spring I got the official Shoppers Drug Mart Blue Jays calendar – not a tiny fold-up schedule of games that would fit into your pocket, oh no. This was a poster-sized layout of the entire season, with little boxes where I could record all the scores, which I did with manic dedication and a rather basic color scheme.

            Using a pen that included multiple ink colors selected with a switch at the top, I recorded winning scores in blue and losing scores in red. I would also make short notations if a player had done something exceptional that day. When Otto Velez hit four home runs in a doubleheader, I made a note of that, possibly the only time Otto the Swatto’s name appeared on my calendar.

            In the mid-80s, the Jays started to play well and were in contention for the playoffs almost every year. For a team starting from nothing in 1977, that was a remarkable achievement. That achievement was lost on me at the time but has been brought home with painful clarity over the last two decades as the Jays have failed to make, or even contend for, the playoffs – playoffs, I might add, that have expanded several times to include more and more teams.

            In 90 minutes, the Jays will kick off their 38th season with a game in Tampa, the only modern ballpark that makes long-forgotten Exhibition Stadium look like an Iowa corn field. I hope they win, but I expect them to lose. I share that pessimism with fans of teams that have been around for a lot more than 38 seasons. The Cubs, famously, haven’t won the World Series since 1908. That’s a lot of suffering, but the truth is once a couple of generations of fans have watched their team lose, they share most of the feelings of fans whose teams have been losing for much longer than that.

            It’s often said that on Opening Day, every team has an equal chance to win a pennant, to get into the playoffs and maybe get into the World Series. That, too, is garbage. The Houston Astros are 250/1 long shots to win the World Series this year. It simply won’t happen. So no, not every team has a chance to win this year, but the thing about baseball is that fans will watch anyway. They cheer for their team for seven months, even if they are out of contention for more than half the season – even if the goal quickly becomes trying to avoid losing 100 games.

            That’s not true of other sports, at least not to the same degree. If there’s romance in baseball, that’s where it resides: in the dedication of fans to follow their team no matter how bad it is, no matter how slim are its chances to win.

            Before they take the field for game #1, the Jays are 25/1 to win the World Series. That’s in the top half of the list of teams. I don’t think it will happen, but I can’t help myself. I’m hopeful. And that – my illogical but rock solid hope -- is why baseball is so great.

#Spring is on the way. Honest. And here's why... #ldnont

April arrives next week, and this morning people living anywhere from Detroit to Toronto awoke to a dusting of snow and the promise of more to come this afternoon. Worse than the snow are the ongoing sub-freezing temperatures, which continue to stiff-arm the arrival of anything even resembling spring.

                  In most parts of the world, the changing of the seasons is a rhythm we expect and rely on in the same way we expect the sun to rise each morning. Our entire society is organized around the seasons, so when winter refuses to leave the stage for spring, we get grumpy. And not just because we’re still brushing snow off our windshields three months after Christmas.

                  Last week, some poor soul was trudging around our neighborhood trying to sign up homeowners for lawn maintenance this summer. That’s a tough sell when you can see his footprints in the snow, tracking from door to door. Sure, we know eventually we might need his services, but the idea of agreeing to spend money on that right now, with mounds of snow still dotting parking lots and cul-de-sacs everywhere, well, that’s a tough sell.

Perfect confluence of sun and snow           Photo: John Barwell

                  Deep down, however, we know the next season will arrive. It may be later than average, it may be wetter or cooler or drier or warmer than we would like or than we think we remember compared to that one year when everything was absolutely perfect, but we never really doubt the next season will arrive. We’ve been conditioned to expect it; it’s happened every year of our lives. So that’s why it’s so amazing to think about everything that had to happen, millions of years ago, to establish season-friendly conditions.

                  There are two factors that create seasons on any planet in our solar system – the shape of its orbit around the sun and the tilt of the planet on its own axis. On the Earth, it’s only the tilt that has any effect on our seasons. Our orbit is pretty close to a perfect circle, which means our distance from the sun varies only slightly during the year. To demonstrate how insignificant the change in distance really is, consider: Earth is closest to the sun during winter in the Northern Hemisphere.

                  Mars, by contrast, is 10 per cent closer to the sun during its summer than its winter. That makes for a serious change in climate. Good luck keeping your lawn watered during a Martian summer. The orbital effect is so dramatic that the atmospheric pressure on the planet is 25 per cent lower in the winter than the summer. That’ll cause some earaches.

                  It may feel as though we have large temperature swings on Earth, but they’re nothing compared to other planets that swing wildly closer and further from the sun. The thing that dictates our temperature changes, and thus our seasons, is the 23.5 degree tilt of the earth on its axis. The axis is imaginary, but the effect mostly certainly is not.

                  Think of the earth as a melon you’re considering buying at the local market – a melon that’s pretty much perfectly round. There isn’t really an axis running through it; you can turn the melon any which way and it’s still a sphere. But you know the seeds are running a certain way, and you cut it open so they run from top to bottom. The Earth’s axis is like those seeds, only they’re tilted 23.5 degrees. So what, you say?

                  That tilt wakes up hibernating animals each spring. It prompts migrating birds to begin their travels twice a year. It delivers the glorious oranges and reds of fall foliage. And it’s the reason we know the mounds of dirty, grey snow all around us will melt…eventually.

                  Millions of years ago, a big rock called Theia slammed into Earth. No one was around at the time, so there aren’t any selfies of people standing near the impact zone. It caused quite a mess, lots of dust and such, the same kind of thing we think spelled the end for the dinosaurs much later. Theia, we think, knocked Earth from rotating straight up and down – along the line of seeds in that melon – to rotating on its current tilt. And ever since then, parts of Earth get more direct sunlight at different times of year. When the Northern Hemisphere is facing the sun, it’s summer up there and winter down under mate.

                  Somehow, among all the billions of planets and stars and dark matter and space dust whizzing through a universe so large it’s nearly impossible to comprehend, we live on a planet tilted at just the proper angle to deliver the same four seasons year after year after year. Somehow, our orbit and distance from the sun are set just right to give us consistent temperatures from season to season. Climate change may be inching those averages up a tiny bit, but stop and think how amazing it is that our summer temperatures this year will be within a few degrees of what they were 10 years ago, 100 years ago, 1,000 years ago and beyond.

                  This summer may be hotter than average, by what, one degree? On Venus, the daily temperatures fluctuate by more than 600 degrees Kelvin. You’d better take a coat if you go out at night. It’s gonna get chilly.

                  It’s one week until April, and grumble as we might, those of us in this part of the world know spring will arrive in the next few weeks. We never really doubt it will happen; we just complain about the timing. Instead, consider how amazing it is that it returns every year in the same form with the same collection of wonderful sights and smells, as it has for tens of thousands of years.                 

                 It’s worth pondering while you sip a hot chocolate in mid-April, wondering when your tulips will finally poke their heads through the frozen tundra that is your garden. 

Filling out your brackets #marchmadness

Today I heard someone describe the NCAA basketball tournament as the single best sports tournament in the world. It's hard to disagree, especially this week when everyone is eagerly filling out their brackets, picking teams they're vaguely familiar with to beat teams they've never heard of. 

Quick, where (or who?) is Stephen F. Austin? Were there so many Stephen Austin schools that it had to include the middle initial to differentiate itself? And what about Wofford? Who the heck are they? 

None of that matters. We make our picks on other criteria, largely name recognition. My girlfriend, Erin, picks Duke every year because she loves Coach K and the whole Duke aura. It should be said there are plenty of people less enamored with everything Duke who take pleasure in picking against the school. Gonzaga used to be a favorite of many, but it became too popular to continue as a plucky underdog and today is just another team. (As Yogi Berra said about a restaurant in St. Louis, "No one goes there anymore. It's too crowded.")

BTW, Erin is off the Duke bandwagon this year, going completely the other way and taking Mercer to beat them in the first round. (Update: March 21 -- Mercer beats Duke! Erin celebrates with multiple fist pumps!)

Speaking of brackets, check out Anne Elk (Miss) and her theory about dinosaurs, courtesy of Monty Python.

I started watching the tournament in the late 80s, with my university roommate Mark. We would stay up to watch the games on tape-delay, the only way CBS showed games on weeknights. You were lucky to see more than one game per night, and if you wanted a bracket you had to hunt for it in a newspaper. No one bothered. 

For the win...Keith Smart from the corner for Indiana

We cheered in 1987 when Keith Smart sunk the game-winning bucket to give Indiana a 74-73 win over Syracuse in the championship game. It was the most exciting stuff we had ever seen on TV.

Since then, the tournament has expanded several times, becoming more of a spectacle with every change. It is too large for a single TV network now, which means you can watch every game if you can carve out the time. And carve out the time people do. Is there anything better than the first Thursday and Friday of the tournament, with 16 games each day, one rolling into another so by sometime around midnight when the last buzzer sounds, you can't possibly remember everything you've seen that day?

You don't have to remember. You can look at your brackets, creased and folded or pristinely blinking at you from a tablet screen. Either way, they track your success and failure while building hope for the next day when your upset picks surely will deliver. 

Everyone has their own way to pick their bracket, including some cheaters who fill out multiple brackets. If the teams are playing one-and-done, shouldn't we do the same? If you're looking for a new way to increase your odds of winning the pool you're in, check out this bracketology approach that emphasizes finding the bargains between favorites and long shots:

Picking a winner like a hedge fund manager

My final four is: Kansas, Iowa St., Arizona and Wichita St. And I'll take Kansas over Wichita to win it all. Good luck to all. Enjoy the games. 

Oh, one more thing: Stephen F. Austin State University is in Nacogdoches, Texas. The F stands for Fuller. And Wofford is a school of fewer than 2,000 students in Spartanburg, SC. 

David Brenner was one of the greatest

David Brenner died Friday, age 78. He was one of the funniest people I ever saw perform.

More than two decades ago, I saw him in Toronto, at a theatre then known as the O’Keefe Centre. There was a musical opening act whom I have long-since forgotten. Then Elayne Boozler came out and did about 20 minutes, mostly about being a single woman with few prospects. “I don’t have a kitchen table. I just have an extra kitchen sink to stand over while I eat.”

Next came Brenner who spent about 90 minutes ostensibly spinning one story – about going to the dentist. Every comedian has done bits about the dentist. Jeremy Hotz has a great bit about the hygienist criticizing his bleeding gums. “Well, maybe if you stopped poking them with those sharp metal instruments…”

David Brenner started talking about the dentist and veered into every facet of life. He was probably just past the zenith of his career, when he was a regular guest host on the Tonight Show, filling in for the oft-absent Johnny Carson. I remember very little of what he actually said that night in Toronto, only that he constructed the perfect 90-minute performance, leveraged on one story about going to the dentist. Most of the audience had forgotten about the set up when he finally got around to the punch line to conclude the evening. It was a master example of writing and performing.

I never saw him perform again, something I now wish I had done.

RIP David Brenner, a very funny man.