I hope the stranger who nicked my bike in Vancouver last night pays it backwards

Probably trying to save your life given the dangerous cycling in Vancouver you mentioned.

To make matters worse, i'd only just fitted a brand new bell

Of course they know the true reasons, most of the people who came in are the ones who buy and sell there regularly, they are the ones who benefit on a daily basis. What's the matter with you today, trying to see how many people you can piss off?

"Even" in Toronto

Reporter makes her first visit to Toronto since she left 30 years ago.

Breaks her glasses and loses her purse in Tim Hortons. Presumably she meant must have left it there.

Every xmas we hear of people giving up some time (or whatever) to help out at the soup kitchen (or similar) serving up dinner to the homeless.

It's what charities and charitable people do.

But there's a local Diner whose owner has decided to open xmas day to serve up a free traditional xmas dinner (Lunch 12-3) to anyone looking for company. This can include people stuck alone, as well as homeless.

The thing is it's snowballed. From the staff and their families volunteering to help out in cooking and serving up the free differ, there are now regular customers pitching in with various contributions.

Help was originally refused but they've been so overwhelmed with offers of help they can no longer refuse.

The building's owners have given additional space in case of large numbers or people turning up or wanting to spend extra time chatting and another company has donated furniture for that use.

It's the way it snowballed that made it newsworthy.

I don't know if we're better at it but it is there, comes from pushing each other's cars out of snow and boosting each other's batteries in the winter.

Today I heard a story of kindness which gave me a "thank God we're not in America" moment. The short of it is that someone I know, a cradle (at least I think she's a cradle) has a Dodge truck with a dually, it's huge but then she's in the horse business; it'll pull eight horses. She was explaining how she got it stuck in the car park pay booth at Sunnybrook (a big hospital not near here). "They don't allow for trucks in them big city parking lots".

I wondered what she was doing there and she said she was driving the neighbours to see their son who was in the hospital. He's been there for four months after falling from a roof and needing a square cut out of his skull to relieve the pressure on his brain. The parents need driving because they're Mennonites, they don't drive for religious reasons. Mennonites aren't eligible for the Provincial healthcare scheme so they, and their community, have been drained by the cost of all this medical care. They have no money for buses or trains or whatever. Driving someone to Sunnybrook every second day, say 100 miles round trip, when you think their religion is "crazy" is, I think, some serious kindness.

Surely/Hopefully religion has/should have nothing to do with performing acts of kindness.

rr
Er, are you sure they don't qualify for OHIP? If not why not?

Found this in something called thecanadianencyclopedia

I would hope not but from an agnostic point of view it's easy to see how one could be reluctant to support people who are from a culture one finds to be alien. Of course, if one has a religion then that generally precludes treating members of other religions with kindness.

Yes, I know that to be true. And it's not just the "old order" either. Mennonites are a culture at arm's length, they're not subject to taxation and they're not beneficiaries of state hand outs. Their lack of participation in the state education system allows them to maintain a cultural preference whereby the women are barely educated but are a couple of years better educated than the men. They're not like the Witnesses in rejecting modern medicine but, standing outside the tax system, when they need it, they pay for it.

That's interesting about the Mennonites. Incidentally Witnesses only reject blood transfusions, not modern medicine in its entirety.

Not only blood transfusions. Organ donation and won't be recipients or organs either.