I wanted to get the low-down on the leaders of the Ontario Provincial parties for the upcoming election, but always looking for the easy way out I thought why not use a special search engine like Trivago does for its hotels? According to their ad man, Trivago looks at all the other hotel browsers and finds the best accommodation for you. So I created a command to search and compare information using Google, Bing, Baidu, Yahoo, and Duckduckgo. I thought I would search for Doug Ford first so I typed in his name and hit the escape key.
I guess my coding leaves more to be desired than I thought. My screen went pink, blue, orange, green and finally winked and settled down to the greyish background I like. My program looked for a keyword, found Ford and gave me an ad for a Ford Escape SUV. Not what I wanted although the red one looked quite attractive. I tried the CTRL ALT combination to recover but I got a list of attributes for Ford, Doug: he has an auto stop and auto start feature. This governs the mouth opening and closing when the brain shuts down, except when somebody mentions Gas Plant Scandal. There was more.
Doug apparently has an assisted park feature where he can automatically, hands-free, maneuver into and out of tight spaces. He can automatically say ‘bleep, bleep’ when Wynne or Horwath get too close to his bumpers. The advance-warning feature kicks in whenever there is a possibility of a collision, such as when Wynne mentions Hydro.
Apparently, the Doug Ford Escape has a lane departure warning system where his lieutenant, our man Fedeli, advises him to change direction or remove his lead foot from the accelerator. This system can be overridden by placing both hands on the wheel and saying special words (see the manual – but they were redacted). There is also a cruise control system; however, this can only be engaged above election promises speed which is becoming fast and furious. Putting your foot under and behind a Doug Ford Escape can be a win-win situation for a tailgate-raising funding party.
This was all good information but I wanted to compare the leaders. So I typed in ‘compare’ and got a screen saying enter models with which to compare the Doug Ford Escape. So I typed in Wynne Cadillac, Horwath Camry Hybrid, and Schreiner Tesla as ‘models’. I’ve seen these comparison programs before and they always seemed biased towards the product for which you were using the search engine.
In the litres per 100 kilometres, the Green award went to Schreiner. That seemed fair enough to me because Horwath came in second in the category while the Doug Ford Escape came in third. The Wynne Caddy came in dead last as the most expensive vehicle to operate. Maybe my coding wasn’t all that wrong.
In the Family-Friendly column, the Ford was rated as adventure friendly; the Cadillac as Comfortable with Luxurious seating; the Camry was given 4 stars as All-Around best choice, while the Green Tesla was flagged as being limited in range and unsuitable for camping where there were no plug ins, although there was a footnote mentioning the Premier’s promise of charging stations everywhere. Even in Northern Ontario. That’s where Doug Ford has promised to build a Ring of Fire road with his bulldozer.
Having been in some precarious situations in a vehicle (like the trip into Ogascanan – but that’s another story) I wanted to check the rollover protection in each model. I typed in Roll Over by Model. Maybe that was too cryptic. My amateurish search engine came up with Doug Ford Role Model is Don Trump; Kathleen Wynne role model is Hillary Clinton; Andrea Horwath admires Tommy Douglas and Mike favours Liz May. Who knew?
I was about to relinquish my search when the phone rang. It was the PC party calling on behalf of Stockfish Motors, our local Ford dealer. I said I was going with the ‘Stick with Vic’ program just to get rid of them. That’s the problem with search engines – they tell their clients what you were looking for and you are bombarded with ads and phone calls. These vaunted social media programs are becoming a pain in the tailgate area.
While I am still puzzling about the June election, I am not interested in a new car. Just saying, car dealers.
