My wife and I took advanatge of this unbelieveable weather to travel to a village near where we live to have breakfast at one of our favourite places. We like the food, we love the waitress who is a 75-year old, slow-moving crank with a heart of gold and the owners look like a couple out of a Gahen Wilson cartoon.  We hadn't been there for a while, and so we didn't know until we read the hand-written poster stuck in the window that HE is running for deputy mayor.   There are pamphlets by the cash register that ask, "Are you better off than you were 4 years ago?" The question that cost Jimmy Carter the White House in 1980 might resonate again in rural Ontario, but the man asking it all these years later is no Ronald Reagan. It was bordering on painful to watch him today trying  to make nice as befits a politicain I guess. His smile looked as warm as a crack in a watermelon, as someone once said of Pierre Trudeau (the slut).  And his new found "hale fellow well met" routine was equally forced.  In real life he's tacitern and crotchety.   But in political life he pretends he isn't.  So even in the boondocks, people don't realize that real is better than fake.