Hector “Toe’ Blake coached those famous Stanley Cup winning Montreal Canadiens’ teams to eight championships during the last half of the 1950s and throughout the ’60s. When asked by a sportswriter to foretell the outcome of that night’s game, he replied, “Predictions are for gypsies.”

In today’s world, he would have to rephrase that simple reply into something like this: “Astrological foretelling, unless culturally-appropriated, is the domain of individuals self-identifying as the gender female in the cultural/racial/national group Roma, who have been persecuted for centuries by means of cultural and actual genocide. “

If not couched in gobbledy-gook jargon such as this, using specially made-up words that sound as pretentious as they are meaningless, the speaker risks being besieged on social media by an army of self-proclaimed ‘social-justice warriors’. Of course these ‘warriors’ have never been in a dangerous situation in their lives, or even ever done an honest day’s work . In fact I would say they’ve probably never spent any time with anyone who has a perspective outside of an academic class pontificating about ‘equitability emancipation.’ (The term exists; I looked it up.)

What does all this mean ? I guess I really am living up to my blog’s nomenclature. If that is true, then I will have to let a mind far greater than mine phrase my apology. As Maxwell Smart used to say in a t.v. show I loved to watch in the 1960s, “Sorry about that, Chief.”

But all of this reminds me of what Oskar Schindler asked of his accountant Itzhak Stern during the darkest days of the Holocaust, “Do I have to make up a whole new language?”

To which Stern replied, “I’m afraid so… yes.”

In the bad old days it was the extreme right wing Nazis who made up language and shouted down anyone with the nerve to stand up to them. (And then of course, went far beyond just shouting their opponents down.) Today it’s the extreme left who brook no discussion, denigrating and labeling anyone whose views may differ from their own.

I can only say this with a certain amount of sadness. I was once a staunch NDP voter who did his thesis in 1978 on ‘The (left wing) Waffle Group’s role in the New Democratic Party of the 1960s.’ But then being left-of-centre meant a fairer deal for the working man and equal rights for all races and genders (Even if in that time there were considerably fewer genders than there are now.) Society wasn’t divided into umpteen categories, represented by boxes on an application sheet.

And when I say divided, I mean divided in an acrimonious way. I realize of course that those people I am bemoaning of course mean well. Who doesn’t ? But let me illustrate my point (before I forget it) with a personal anecdote.

In 1970 at Beaconsfield High School I took a course called’ North American Literature .’ It was taught by a Jewish teacher named Mr. Neiss. He had a wife who was very sick at the time and Mr. Neiss said that during his most distressed periods during her illness he would read Henry David Thoreau’s American masterpiece ‘Walden.” The book was about the author’s thoughts and experiences of his year or two living alone in a log cabin he built by himself along the shores of Walden Pond in Massachusetts. Most of my classmates thought of him as mildly muddled (both Thoreau and Mr. Neiss) but I remember one line from that classic which I still quote today. “If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.”

Maybe that’s what’s wrong with our lives today Too many professional do-gooders, all out to publicize how virtuous they are.

As for me, I’m heading back to the basement to watch the Stanley Cup playoffs. I’ll also catch some baseball, even if the Montreal Expos ceased to exist in 2004. That’s real life, real entertainment.

And that’s no bullshit. Oops, I mean intestinal excretions from the male bovine gender.