We had a poster go up in the elevator foyers of our office tower recently. It announced that, this year, “Aboriginal Awareness Week” was “May 23 and 24”. I guess their thinking was that, if you couldn’t become aware of aboriginals in two days, you probably were never going to get it. Either that, or it’s an overwrite of an old poster and what used to be a week is now two days in metric.
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How long have I been a Government of Canada employee, you ask? Hey lemme tell ya, youngster. Why I can remember back to a time when it was called the Canadian War Museum, before the Liberals changed its name to the Canadian Museum of Disagreeable Overseas Encounters with Foreigners. How long have I been a Government of Canada employee, you ask? Why in the department I in which I work, I’ve just seen my fourth new Minister come through the door. Four Ministers! That’s how long I been in government, ya whippersnapper.
("Let’s see: Stewart, Volpe, Robillard, Stronach… so that’d be less than two years, then… right?")
Oh alright, be like that.
At least I started before they changed the Department’s name to Moulin Rouge.
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Groucho lives! (Globe and Mail editors, on the other hand, are obviously dead.)
Here’s a photo caption from The Globe and Mail’s May 20 online edition:
“A man reads the British tabloid paper 'The Sun' carrying a picture of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein in his underwear at a coffee shop in central London on Friday.”
Being me, of course, I immediately fired off a letter to the Globe castigating them for missing the real story: What the hell was Saddam Hussein doing in a central London coffee shop in his underwear?
(Oh: why Groucho, you ask? Because in the 1930 movie, "Animal Crackers", he said, “One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don't know.”)
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File this under, “When God’s got your number, you cash in.” Here are a few sentences from a larger story I read recently about the 60th anniversary of the Nagasaki atomic bomb explosion. They recount the unbelievable chain of events that befell the man who, so far as is known, is the only Briton to have been killed in the blast:
“Corporal [Ronald] Shaw, from Edmonton, North London… was an engine fitter at the RAF base at Kalidjati on the island of Java, now Indonesia. On the way to Java, his aircraft was shot down and he was the only survivor. He was taken to hospital before being captured by the Japanese. In 1944 he was on his way to Japan, but the transport ship was sunk, almost certainly by an Allied torpedo. After being rescued, he was taken to Kyushu, the southernmost of the Japanese islands. In August 1945 he was working in the Mitsubishi shipyard in the centre of Nagasaki. The atom bomb dropped by the American B29 ‘Bock’s Car’ exploded a few hundred metres away and he was killed by falling masonry.”
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For the past couple weeks, I’ve had this old tune from the Five Man Electrical Band rattling around in my head. Because with the simple change of a single consonant, it’d be perfect for Peter MacKay to karaoke at this summer’s Conservative Party barbecue, doncha think?:
“Hello, hello Melinda,
I hung around and waited for ya.
This time you’ve gone too far;
I can’t take no more.
I told you so, Melinda,
Told you that you’d better start changin’ your ways;
Runnin’ round on me ev’ry day;
You say you’re gonna change. There ain’t no way;
I’m leavin’ even though you say you love me.
Hello Melinda, hello.
Melinda good bye.
I almost died, Melinda,
Thinkin’ ‘bout the time we had together
And wonderin’ why you ever
Changed your mind; treatin’ me unkind.
Don’t you cry Melinda.
There’s lots of other people in the world to love you,
Lots of people to be proud of you;
I’ll always think well of you,
Knowin’ for just a little while you loved me.
Hello Melinda, hello.
Melinda good bye.”
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Childhood bleats for the new millennium (first in a series: reader contributions welcome). Or things I never said to MY parents:
“It’s bedtime; tomorrow’s a school day!” I hollered recently to my daughter. “Just a sec,” came the reply, “I have to get to a save point in this game.” “A sec” stretched into about ten minutes as she battled either to slay yet another gatekeeper dragon and capture another hundred jewels (Spyro), or was it to find the medicine necessary to treat her sick pet chicken (Harvest Moon)? Whatever, being a Dad, I finally stomped downstairs to the family room and said, “I know where the ‘save’ button is…” and reached for the “Off” switch. “Ack!” she rebutted. We compromised. She turned off the monitor (remember when they were called “televisions”?), but left the PS2 running, her quest still short of having reached the next “save” point.
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Childhood bleats for the new millennium (second in a series: reader contributions welcome).
Sunday night, 10:30: “My printer’s colour cartridge isn’t working and I’ll lose marks if I turn in my assignment in black-and-white.”
For the record, the grown-ups in the house are tied to a printer that only prints black-and-white, so using it was out as an option. Phone Staples. “Do you have a walk-in colour print service if someone brings in a four-page long document on disk?” “Yes we do, but it’s first-come, first-served and right now it’s about a 45 minute wait.” (For four pages??!!!) Sigh.
Tugging on my jacket and pulling a pair of sweatpants on over my pajama bottoms, into which I had happily settled in “lazy rainy Sunday night mode” a couple hours earlier, I steeled myself for a trip out into the cold wet night and a drive to Staples, 15 minutes away by car, there to slump down beside what I suspected would be about a dozen other surly dads whose offspring were enrolled in a school that awards merit points for providing essay information on a colour print-out and who, like myself, were just told by those same offspring that the family’s state-of-the-art colour printer – inevitably tied to the kids’ computer because, well because everything in the house that’s state of the art belongs to the kids, right? – is either failing to connect or has suddenly lit up its cheerless “Replace Colour Cartridge Now!” light because offspring has spent the afternoon printing out colour images of Anakin-bloody-Skywalker that used enough colour ink to illustrate the gay rights rainbow coalition's pamphlets for the next decade!
Oh… it turned out that through some as yet not-fully-understood (by me) miracle combination of rebooting the computer, removing the printer’s colour ink cartridge and banging its nozzle repeatedly on a sheet of paper, offspring was able to announce, “Got it working!”
For every high tech problem, there is a low tech solution. That’s surely destined to be the epitaph for our e-driven information age. (Just out of curiosity, have we already reached the place where teachers are hearing, “I don’t have my homework done because my dog accidentally pushed the ‘file delete’ button”?)
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Every once in a while something gets under my skin that, in the grand scheme of things, probably doesn’t merit the attention my bent mind decides I should give it, but which nonetheless makes me go mentally beyond a shrug to a snarl, voiced to no one in particular, “What the… are you people thinking?!!!”.
This is one such something. In fact, were Douglas Adams still alive, I know he’d find grist enough here for an entire new Hitchhiker’s novel.
It sure seemed like a really good idea when I first heard about it. At work, a couple weeks ago, posters went up announcing that the department had agreed to partner with OCTranspo (our local public transit company) to offer a reduced-fee bus pass in an effort to encourage more people to take public transit to work. The only rider (pun intended) is that you have to commit to use public transportation for at last a year.
I’ve been a regular for about three years now and have no intention of changing my pattern, especially given that even if I should suddenly decide we’re going to buy a second family car and I’m going to apply for a parking space, there’s about a four to five-year waiting list. So, as they say, it was a no-brainer for me. When I saw the poster, I figured I’d just wait for the W5 note and happily hop aboard the program.
Well, who knew that they would apply the exact same philosophy (absence of brain) to the whole damned (*** WARNING: Upcoming utterly meaningless government noun ALERT ***… in 3 – 2 – 1 – ) initiative?
Recently, the terms and conditions of participating in the program landed in all employee e-mailboxes. For sheer weight of ponderous, intrusive bureaucracy gone mad and lawyers run amuck, it’s tough to beat. Take a nice friendly idea like “Ride the bus and we’ll save you a few bucks”. Add equal parts lawyers and bureaucrats. Blend and bake. (Well… half-bake, anyway.)
The actual message announcing the “Here are the how-to’s” was a staggering 1,250 word introduction to the program (yes, I ran it through the word count, and this just for Ontario residents). In it, there are no fewer than 16 separate points of agreement. You cannot, in other words, simply say, “OK, sounds good to me”. Nope, you’ve got to sign onto a regimen of conditions that makes Donald Trump’s most recent pre-nup look like the recipe for re-heating soup.
And all of them are worded just like this (this is the actual point number 16 in the agreement): “I acknowledge and agree that the duration and validity of the transit privileges incorporated in my Transit Pass are dependent on the duration and continued validity of the Transit Pass Program adhered to by my Employer, and that in the event the said program is terminated at the initiative of OC Transpo or my Employer, my transit privileges under the pass issued to me will, as a consequence thereof, cease on a date to coincide with the date of termination of the Program, without recourse on my part against either OC Transpo or my Employer.”
In no fewer than four separate places among those 1,250 words, you are directed to a follow-on link that takes you to a 14-page (!) legally binding agreement under the headline, “Transit Pass Program”.
And it begins, “WHEREAS the Employer and OCTranspo wish to implement, on the terms hereinafter set forth, the Transit Pass Program, designed to reduce air emissions in the National Capital region (NCR) by encouraging the use of public transit to and from work by the Employer’s Employees through the purchase, at discount rates, of transit passes offered by OC Transpo to the said Employees in the NCR, and payable by the said Employees through payroll deductions periodically remitted to OC Transpo; WHEREAS the Employer is a federal Employer operating in the NCR willing to facilitate the adherence of its Employees to the said program by making the independent purchase of a transit pass issued by OC Transpo at discount rates, feasible to Employees through payroll deductions...”
The contract then goes on helpfully to list six “clarifying” definitions, including: “’Adherence form’ means the form hereunto annexed as Appendix ‘F’ whereby any of the federal departments, agencies or instrumentalities operating or having a presence in the National Capital Region (NCR) and listed in Appendix B agrees, through execution of the form, in the same way and to the same extent as is the said federal department, agency or instrumentality, through its Deputy head or counterpart, had executed this agreement in the place and stead of the Deputy Minister of Transport;”
You get the idea. For heaven’s sake, the purpose of this program is nothing more complicated than to get people to walk to their nearest bus stop and jump aboard. Thanks to the Government of Canada and OCTranspo, it’s been introduced with enough bureaucratic bafflegab to fertilize Prince Edward Island’s potato crop for the next ten years.
All to save myself $6.30 a month?
$75.60 a year?
I can’t even begin to imagine the legal fees that have been consumed drafting up the terms and conditions and “annexed” documents, but it is surely in the tens, if not the hundreds of thousands of dollars because the massive document that landed with a “Whumph!” in my e-mailbox clearly suggests the peristaltic work of whole teams of lawyers, no doubt on both the government and OC Transpo sides of the agreement.
But wait, there’s more! Once you’ve cleared the actual steps required to join the program, you then have to sign on to one of the most cumbersome systems ever invented to pay for something. Say hello to “payroll deduction”, and a mountain of fresh bureaucracy I would next have to scale to instruct my payroll unit to process the fees required.
No. Thank you very much. But no.
If Henry Ford had hit walls like this when he first proposed a wheeled vehicle, we’d all still be packing horse-poop shovels in our landaus.
So I’m considering taking an even wiser step to initiate a much more effective reduction of air emissions – the air in question being of the “hot” variety – and telling these idiots to go to hell. Maybe, in future, they’ll craft a program that features, oh, I don’t know, maybe something like a cheerily worded poster that directs me to a work-site desk where I will show my current OCTranspo pass, pay the reduced fee and get a new pass for the coming month.
But I’m not holding my breath.
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And finally, I’m just finishing up a letter to the Vatican nominating my brother-in-law for sainthood. He volunteered to take some time off work on Friday (the 27th) and brave the online traffic in what I was sure would be a wasted effort to somehow get tickets to the August 28th Rolling Stones concert here in Ottawa. Well, son of a gun if he didn’t manage to score them! Very early this morning, he pre-set himself up with a Ticketmaster account. Then, about ten minutes before the online sales opened up at 10:00 am, he dialled in the site, and just began hitting the “Refresh” button on his link. In no time, he was rewarded when the “Ticket sales begin at 10:00 am” flash was replaced with “Tickets now on sale”. Bingo! (And a good thing, too. Two hours later, the concert was sold out.)
So a whole gang of us who are only slightly younger than the performers themselves are going to the Raging Grandpas show! (Step 1: Find your seat. Step 2. Note the location of the nearest defibrillator.)
"Start me up!"
Friday, May 27, 2005
Monday, May 16, 2005
I woke up one recent morning to a radio discussion of “voter disenchantment”, something I expect we’ll hear a lot more of as those Honourable Members currently in the fractious House of Commons take to the streets and country biways in an effort to persuade voters to return them to their seats. Here’s what it reminded me of:
Brick: Somethin' hasn't happened yet.
Big Daddy: What's that?
Brick: A click in my head.
Big Daddy: Did you say, 'click'?
Brick: Yes sir, the click in my head that makes me feel peaceful.
Big Daddy: Boy, sometimes you worry me.
Brick: It's like a switch, clickin' off in my head. Turns the hot light off and the cool one on and all of a sudden, there's peace.
Big Daddy: Boy, you're, you're a real alcoholic!
Brick: That is the truth. Yes sir, I am an alcoholic, so if you'd just excuse me...
Big Daddy: (grabbing him) No, I won't excuse you.
Brick: Now I'm waitin' for that click and I don't get it. Listen, I'm all alone. I'm talkin' to no one where there's absolute quiet.
Big Daddy: You'll hear plenty of that in the grave soon enough. But right now, we're gonna sit down and talk this over.
Brick: This talk is like all the others. It gets nowhere, nowhere, and it's painful.”
-- from “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”, by Tennessee Williams
For me, “voter disenchantment” is a similar “click”, as people reach a specific point at which we literally turn off the rhetoric, the ranting, the manufactured rage, frothing, fulminating and foaming at the mouth, and in our minds we shriek, “Enough!”
Not “Enough – Shut up the lot of you!” because we know that won’t happen, but rather, “Enough – I have stopped listening, because I no longer care a whit what any of you has to say, so repulsively have you behaved!”
(Brace yourself: because I have a perfect quote to capture that particular “click”, but it’s from a current country and western music hit. Over to you, Jo Dee Messina: “My give-a-damn’s busted!”)
I am on the verge, in fact, of deliberately – and for me, painfully – for the first time ever choosing not to vote in the coming election. And I am someone who has for all my adult life maintained a belief in those two old anti-ennui adages aimed at non-voters: 1. You therefore give up your right to complain about the government; and 2. Consequently, you get the government you deserve.
But truth be told, I likely will drag myself snarling and spitting to the polling station on voting day, so powerfully entrenched is the core principle represented by those two adages. Because there are still places in the world where people walk for three days simply to get to a polling station and exercise a privilege for which some of their friends and family members quite possibly have died earning. And there are places in the world where people are blasted to atoms by a bomb while waiting in line to vote, simply because someone else wants to demonstrate the alleged futility of allowing democratically elected representatives to run the country.
But my Lord I can’t recall a more worthless collective group to wear the banner “government” than those mired in the process we see on the news night after tiresome bickering night. And bafflingly, the collective “we” who have the power to remove the lot of them will inevitably return many of its elders for yet another go-round. By “government” (he self-qualified), I am not referring only to the Liberals, as the Party in power. I also include – collectively – the Conservatives, the NDP and the Bloc Québécois.
Undeservingly harsh? Maybe. I certainly know that there are so-called “constituent Members” whose priority is to win concessions for the people back home. And their motives, I have no doubt, are honourable. But regardless of the individual ethics they bring in their wide-eyed naivete the morning after the election, when they hit this town, where Party engines tirelessly swirl the sewage daily, they are swiftly mired in a system that so far has refused to give up an iota of its sleaze, whatever Party logo adorned their riding’s campaign posters. As former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney said, “Ya dance with them what brung ya.”
Here’s how a very angry columnist named Andrew Coyne described the system of essentially buying your way to power in this country: “It's a nauseating little tableau, repeated countless times across the country, not just now but usually, as a matter of routine. That's what our politics has become, that's what they've made of us: a nation of peculiarly aggressive beggars -- by turns craven and belligerent, tugged forelock and open palm, permanently impoverished and perpetually aggrieved.”
And for pie in the sky contrast, here’s a vintage speech that helped make “Capra-corn” a part of Hollywood’s film lexicon. In Frank Capra’s 1939 film, “Mr Smith Goes to Washington” the naive junior Senator Jefferson (Jimmy Stewart) Smith, nearing the end of an hours-long filibuster, hoarsely croaks out one of the movie’s more memorable bursts of idealism:
“Just get up off the ground, that's all I ask. Get up there with that lady that's up on top of this Capitol dome, that lady that stands for liberty. Take a look at this country through her eyes if you really want to see something. And you won't just see scenery; you'll see the whole parade of what Man's carved out for himself, after centuries of fighting. Fighting for something better than just jungle law, fighting so's he can stand on his own two feet, free and decent, like he was created, no matter what his race, color, or creed. That's what you'd see. There's no place out there for graft, or greed, or lies, or compromise with human liberties… Great principles don't get lost once they come to light. They're right here; you just have to see them again!”
Capra, by way of Smith’s speech, requires that our politicians sit just below the current roster of beatified saints. In Coyne’s world view, they’re somewhere around Dante’s 8th circle of Hell in The Inferno.
Personally, I'm looking for someone who sits somewhere between the two extremes. I’m certainly not asking for saints. In fact, when it comes right down to it, I don’t think I’m asking for anything the least bit unreasonable, especially from someone seeking to be elected to a position in which he or she has a share of running a country of 30 million people.
I’d really just like someone to believe in again.
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A day late and a dollar short: “I am CANADIAN!”
Meanwhile, our fearless quartet of party leaders, supposedly fearful of a snap election vote being snuck into the House while they were away, were they to take part in honouring our veterans overseas at the 60th anniversary observance of VE Day, delayed and delayed and delayed, and finally got their act together sufficiently to get their butts over to Holland to celebrate V-E Day when they figured out that if they all left at the same time, no one would have an unfair advantage back in Parliament.
Thing is, they got overseas so late that they only managed collectively to be in attendance at a wreath-laying on Monday, May 9, the day after the event was celebrated in Holland by the Dutch, by Canadian veterans, and by the rest of the Allied world. (Sunday May 8 being the actual 60th anniversary and all.) But what the hell? One war-ending observance is pretty much the same as another, right? Monday the 9th, it turns out, is the anniversary of the day in 1945 on which Josef Stalin accepted a separate German capitulation to the Red Army. So our fearless leaders actually wound up celebrating the birth of a half century of Soviet hegemony.
We are all comrades. Nastrovya!
Stephen Harper blamed the Prime Minister for getting them all across the water too late to take part in the actual V-E Day anniversary observances. Harper claimed that making such travel arrangements is solely up to the Prime Minister’s Office. I understand he also has to get Martin’s permission to go to the bathroom. (Now remember Mr H: raise one finger if you have to go Number 1; two if you have to… you know.)
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And if this isn’t a word, it darned well should be!:
“The Conservative-sponsored motion asks the Commons finance committee to recommend that the government resignliamentary experts say…” (from a story on the Canada.com website, May 9)
That’s what this country needs, more specialists who work their entire careers advising Parliamentarians when they should resign: “resignliamentary experts”!
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This week, two rants for the price of one!
Recently, Ottawa saw the arrival of two brand new free daily newspapers named Metro and Dose*. Metro is owned by something called the Metro International group and, in Canada, publishes editions in Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver and Montreal. Worldwide, they are distributed in 100 cities across 17 countries and are published in 16 different languages.
Dose was launched on April 4 in five Canadian cities, Toronto, Ottawa, Edmonton, Calgary and Vancouver, by CanWest News Service. Their claim is that they offer a “different perspective” and aim for a target market of “urban, intelligent and fun 18 – 34 year olds” with a “breezy run-through of the daily news”.
Since both papers launched, this city has been inundated with hundreds of green Metro boxes and red-and-black Dose boxes on every corner in the downtown area, and at countless other locations around town. During each weekday morning rush hour, downtown commuter stops are flooded with vest-wearing people trying to force copies of one or the other into the hands of passers-by, many of whom probably accept one just to avoid being persistently solicited by another such “distributor” a half block farther on.
I’ve read a few copies of both and, frankly, this city needs neither. “Breezy” seems to mean “dumbed down”, if their typical coverage of a topical issue is anything to go by in either paper. (The Dose website, for example, recently showed that its five “top search” hits were #1: “Ottawa”, followed by four separate night clubs / dance bars, which pretty well sums up its readers’ priorities.)
None of which is my point, however. What prompts a whine here is that, because both these papers are not merely free, but are thrust unsolicited into passers-by’s hands, they are received by less-than-enthusiastic commuters, especially on rainy days, with no sense of any attached value whatsoever. In consequence, a great many copies of both papers are swiftly discarded. Now when you walk through downtown Ottawa, you are as likely to see creatively parked copies of both jammed between fence rails, notched into tree branch clefts, wherever, or simply tossed into a passing gravity well and allowed to fall where that Newtonian force carries them. Worst of all, they are stacked by the hundreds in the larger bus shelters where the distributors’ undistributed copies are left at the end of their shift.
“Breezy” is the appropriate description, because the winds that bluster among the downtown high-rise office towers are now routinely blowing tabloid-sized sheets from both newspapers freely along the streets.
In this case, to crib the old saw, no news would be, indeed, good news.
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* And, I’m sorry, but I just can’t read that name “Dose” without ear-worming:
“Don't give a dose to the one you love most
Give her some marmalade...give her some toast
You can give her the willies or give her the blues
But the dose that you give her will get back to youse…”
(And so on, by Shel Silverstein, as sung by Dr Hook and the Medicine Show)
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People who are well-named for their job.
In a not-so-long ago e-mail message from a Baby Duckling, I was told that there is a taxi driver in New Hamburg, Ontario, who is named Rick Shaw.
And on a recent weekend, my wife and I hiked optimistically off to our local bank to finalize arrangements for getting the money for our new porch renos into the hands of our contractor, Nino, and at the same time give the bank permission to take away our house were we to suddenly pack up and run away.
As we walked into the office belonging to the bank official who would present us the final papers either approving or disapproving the financing, I wondered about the psychological impact on other people coming hat in hand to the bank in order to solicit a loan, only to be shown into an office whose name plate identified the man you were about to meet: Les Hope. When I mentioned it to him, he laughed and said it was even more unsettling for people seeking him out in any form of print directory where he is, of course: Hope, Les.
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If you can figure out what this $208,000 has bought, you’re a heck of a lot smarter than I am! Here is a paragraph from a recent news release announcing a government grant of just over $208,000 to fund a project of the Canadian Labour Congress:
“Under the project, the Canadian Labour Congress will develop information and orientation packages that will analyze and identify gaps in the current capacity of Ontario unions to effectively respond to the needs of their members who have been laid off. This project will reduce duplication in the work performed by Ontario unions.”
Now when I read that, I read that the government is spending a pile of money that will demonstrate clearly that what someone who has just been laid off really needs is a good stiff drink. Oh, and the best way to reduce duplication in the work that is performed by unions? Lay some people off.
How hard was that? Glad I could help. If someone in government wants to drop me a line, I’ll let you know what bank account to use to deposit my $208,000.
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And finally, I reserve this spot for a moment to say good bye to a sweet old friend. Just this morning, we had to give a veterinarian permission to put our 15-year old calico cat to sleep. In her last days, she was obviously a mess. Even consuming liquids was getting to be beyond the ability of her diseased mouth. And while she spent a great deal of time during her last weeks with us at home resting, and purring when we rubbed her tired old back, she clearly was nearing a point where even the simplest of motions was just too much of a bother.
On the day we first saw Calli, we noticed she had two spiky black tufts of hair that defined the tips of her ears and as she grew up, she never lost them. And we’ll remember the kitten who fearlessly bounded around our first home in a small room that became the nursery when our daughter was born just a few months later. She probably was taken from her own Mom a few days too soon because she seemed never to have received the pivotal lesson of making a cat sound. All her life, all she ever managed was a hoarse raspy croak that would give a rusty door hinge cause to plead plagiarism. In her later adult years, even the croak vanished and her call was a mouth that would open to the “meow” position, but from which, most days, no sound at all would emerge.
We’ll remember, too, the 11-year old queen of the house who grudgingly accepted the wholly unsolicited intrusion into her reign of two other feline princesses, sisters from the same litter, some four years ago. To them, Calli’s angrily lashing tail was a wonderful plaything until she figured out they were here to stay, so the tail-lash, she concluded, was a useless expenditure of energy.
Personally, I’ll remember a cat who never seemed to grasp that not every trip I took into the kitchen meant I was going to put food in her bowl, and who stoically suffered my repeated stumbling accidental kicks in the darkened room as I wandered in either to shut things down late at night, or start things up early on a cold and dark winter’s morning. In fact, I tripped over her often enough that I think she probably thought her full name was actually a three-part string that began with “Jesus CHRIST!...”
Calli is the second cat we’ve bid good bye to. Our first, Ilsa, was a tabby terror who never really fully warmed to the idea of humans as friends. The more so when we added, first, Calli, and then our daughter into what had been Ilsa’s exclusive command of our attentions. Our two remaining four-year old cats, however, inhabit the other extreme. They don’t merely tolerate attention, they demand it.
Whoever coined the phrase, “It’s a dog’s life”, really missed the mark. The life of leisure and expectation of total subservience the phrase implies belongs clearly to cats. One does not own cats; they deign to allow you to share their home and, if you do a good job, they keep you around. Obviously, we did a great job with Calli. She kept us around for 15 years.
We’ll miss her.
Brick: Somethin' hasn't happened yet.
Big Daddy: What's that?
Brick: A click in my head.
Big Daddy: Did you say, 'click'?
Brick: Yes sir, the click in my head that makes me feel peaceful.
Big Daddy: Boy, sometimes you worry me.
Brick: It's like a switch, clickin' off in my head. Turns the hot light off and the cool one on and all of a sudden, there's peace.
Big Daddy: Boy, you're, you're a real alcoholic!
Brick: That is the truth. Yes sir, I am an alcoholic, so if you'd just excuse me...
Big Daddy: (grabbing him) No, I won't excuse you.
Brick: Now I'm waitin' for that click and I don't get it. Listen, I'm all alone. I'm talkin' to no one where there's absolute quiet.
Big Daddy: You'll hear plenty of that in the grave soon enough. But right now, we're gonna sit down and talk this over.
Brick: This talk is like all the others. It gets nowhere, nowhere, and it's painful.”
-- from “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”, by Tennessee Williams
For me, “voter disenchantment” is a similar “click”, as people reach a specific point at which we literally turn off the rhetoric, the ranting, the manufactured rage, frothing, fulminating and foaming at the mouth, and in our minds we shriek, “Enough!”
Not “Enough – Shut up the lot of you!” because we know that won’t happen, but rather, “Enough – I have stopped listening, because I no longer care a whit what any of you has to say, so repulsively have you behaved!”
(Brace yourself: because I have a perfect quote to capture that particular “click”, but it’s from a current country and western music hit. Over to you, Jo Dee Messina: “My give-a-damn’s busted!”)
I am on the verge, in fact, of deliberately – and for me, painfully – for the first time ever choosing not to vote in the coming election. And I am someone who has for all my adult life maintained a belief in those two old anti-ennui adages aimed at non-voters: 1. You therefore give up your right to complain about the government; and 2. Consequently, you get the government you deserve.
But truth be told, I likely will drag myself snarling and spitting to the polling station on voting day, so powerfully entrenched is the core principle represented by those two adages. Because there are still places in the world where people walk for three days simply to get to a polling station and exercise a privilege for which some of their friends and family members quite possibly have died earning. And there are places in the world where people are blasted to atoms by a bomb while waiting in line to vote, simply because someone else wants to demonstrate the alleged futility of allowing democratically elected representatives to run the country.
But my Lord I can’t recall a more worthless collective group to wear the banner “government” than those mired in the process we see on the news night after tiresome bickering night. And bafflingly, the collective “we” who have the power to remove the lot of them will inevitably return many of its elders for yet another go-round. By “government” (he self-qualified), I am not referring only to the Liberals, as the Party in power. I also include – collectively – the Conservatives, the NDP and the Bloc Québécois.
Undeservingly harsh? Maybe. I certainly know that there are so-called “constituent Members” whose priority is to win concessions for the people back home. And their motives, I have no doubt, are honourable. But regardless of the individual ethics they bring in their wide-eyed naivete the morning after the election, when they hit this town, where Party engines tirelessly swirl the sewage daily, they are swiftly mired in a system that so far has refused to give up an iota of its sleaze, whatever Party logo adorned their riding’s campaign posters. As former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney said, “Ya dance with them what brung ya.”
Here’s how a very angry columnist named Andrew Coyne described the system of essentially buying your way to power in this country: “It's a nauseating little tableau, repeated countless times across the country, not just now but usually, as a matter of routine. That's what our politics has become, that's what they've made of us: a nation of peculiarly aggressive beggars -- by turns craven and belligerent, tugged forelock and open palm, permanently impoverished and perpetually aggrieved.”
And for pie in the sky contrast, here’s a vintage speech that helped make “Capra-corn” a part of Hollywood’s film lexicon. In Frank Capra’s 1939 film, “Mr Smith Goes to Washington” the naive junior Senator Jefferson (Jimmy Stewart) Smith, nearing the end of an hours-long filibuster, hoarsely croaks out one of the movie’s more memorable bursts of idealism:
“Just get up off the ground, that's all I ask. Get up there with that lady that's up on top of this Capitol dome, that lady that stands for liberty. Take a look at this country through her eyes if you really want to see something. And you won't just see scenery; you'll see the whole parade of what Man's carved out for himself, after centuries of fighting. Fighting for something better than just jungle law, fighting so's he can stand on his own two feet, free and decent, like he was created, no matter what his race, color, or creed. That's what you'd see. There's no place out there for graft, or greed, or lies, or compromise with human liberties… Great principles don't get lost once they come to light. They're right here; you just have to see them again!”
Capra, by way of Smith’s speech, requires that our politicians sit just below the current roster of beatified saints. In Coyne’s world view, they’re somewhere around Dante’s 8th circle of Hell in The Inferno.
Personally, I'm looking for someone who sits somewhere between the two extremes. I’m certainly not asking for saints. In fact, when it comes right down to it, I don’t think I’m asking for anything the least bit unreasonable, especially from someone seeking to be elected to a position in which he or she has a share of running a country of 30 million people.
I’d really just like someone to believe in again.
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A day late and a dollar short: “I am CANADIAN!”
Meanwhile, our fearless quartet of party leaders, supposedly fearful of a snap election vote being snuck into the House while they were away, were they to take part in honouring our veterans overseas at the 60th anniversary observance of VE Day, delayed and delayed and delayed, and finally got their act together sufficiently to get their butts over to Holland to celebrate V-E Day when they figured out that if they all left at the same time, no one would have an unfair advantage back in Parliament.
Thing is, they got overseas so late that they only managed collectively to be in attendance at a wreath-laying on Monday, May 9, the day after the event was celebrated in Holland by the Dutch, by Canadian veterans, and by the rest of the Allied world. (Sunday May 8 being the actual 60th anniversary and all.) But what the hell? One war-ending observance is pretty much the same as another, right? Monday the 9th, it turns out, is the anniversary of the day in 1945 on which Josef Stalin accepted a separate German capitulation to the Red Army. So our fearless leaders actually wound up celebrating the birth of a half century of Soviet hegemony.
We are all comrades. Nastrovya!
Stephen Harper blamed the Prime Minister for getting them all across the water too late to take part in the actual V-E Day anniversary observances. Harper claimed that making such travel arrangements is solely up to the Prime Minister’s Office. I understand he also has to get Martin’s permission to go to the bathroom. (Now remember Mr H: raise one finger if you have to go Number 1; two if you have to… you know.)
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And if this isn’t a word, it darned well should be!:
“The Conservative-sponsored motion asks the Commons finance committee to recommend that the government resignliamentary experts say…” (from a story on the Canada.com website, May 9)
That’s what this country needs, more specialists who work their entire careers advising Parliamentarians when they should resign: “resignliamentary experts”!
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This week, two rants for the price of one!
Recently, Ottawa saw the arrival of two brand new free daily newspapers named Metro and Dose*. Metro is owned by something called the Metro International group and, in Canada, publishes editions in Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver and Montreal. Worldwide, they are distributed in 100 cities across 17 countries and are published in 16 different languages.
Dose was launched on April 4 in five Canadian cities, Toronto, Ottawa, Edmonton, Calgary and Vancouver, by CanWest News Service. Their claim is that they offer a “different perspective” and aim for a target market of “urban, intelligent and fun 18 – 34 year olds” with a “breezy run-through of the daily news”.
Since both papers launched, this city has been inundated with hundreds of green Metro boxes and red-and-black Dose boxes on every corner in the downtown area, and at countless other locations around town. During each weekday morning rush hour, downtown commuter stops are flooded with vest-wearing people trying to force copies of one or the other into the hands of passers-by, many of whom probably accept one just to avoid being persistently solicited by another such “distributor” a half block farther on.
I’ve read a few copies of both and, frankly, this city needs neither. “Breezy” seems to mean “dumbed down”, if their typical coverage of a topical issue is anything to go by in either paper. (The Dose website, for example, recently showed that its five “top search” hits were #1: “Ottawa”, followed by four separate night clubs / dance bars, which pretty well sums up its readers’ priorities.)
None of which is my point, however. What prompts a whine here is that, because both these papers are not merely free, but are thrust unsolicited into passers-by’s hands, they are received by less-than-enthusiastic commuters, especially on rainy days, with no sense of any attached value whatsoever. In consequence, a great many copies of both papers are swiftly discarded. Now when you walk through downtown Ottawa, you are as likely to see creatively parked copies of both jammed between fence rails, notched into tree branch clefts, wherever, or simply tossed into a passing gravity well and allowed to fall where that Newtonian force carries them. Worst of all, they are stacked by the hundreds in the larger bus shelters where the distributors’ undistributed copies are left at the end of their shift.
“Breezy” is the appropriate description, because the winds that bluster among the downtown high-rise office towers are now routinely blowing tabloid-sized sheets from both newspapers freely along the streets.
In this case, to crib the old saw, no news would be, indeed, good news.
– 0 –
* And, I’m sorry, but I just can’t read that name “Dose” without ear-worming:
“Don't give a dose to the one you love most
Give her some marmalade...give her some toast
You can give her the willies or give her the blues
But the dose that you give her will get back to youse…”
(And so on, by Shel Silverstein, as sung by Dr Hook and the Medicine Show)
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People who are well-named for their job.
In a not-so-long ago e-mail message from a Baby Duckling, I was told that there is a taxi driver in New Hamburg, Ontario, who is named Rick Shaw.
And on a recent weekend, my wife and I hiked optimistically off to our local bank to finalize arrangements for getting the money for our new porch renos into the hands of our contractor, Nino, and at the same time give the bank permission to take away our house were we to suddenly pack up and run away.
As we walked into the office belonging to the bank official who would present us the final papers either approving or disapproving the financing, I wondered about the psychological impact on other people coming hat in hand to the bank in order to solicit a loan, only to be shown into an office whose name plate identified the man you were about to meet: Les Hope. When I mentioned it to him, he laughed and said it was even more unsettling for people seeking him out in any form of print directory where he is, of course: Hope, Les.
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If you can figure out what this $208,000 has bought, you’re a heck of a lot smarter than I am! Here is a paragraph from a recent news release announcing a government grant of just over $208,000 to fund a project of the Canadian Labour Congress:
“Under the project, the Canadian Labour Congress will develop information and orientation packages that will analyze and identify gaps in the current capacity of Ontario unions to effectively respond to the needs of their members who have been laid off. This project will reduce duplication in the work performed by Ontario unions.”
Now when I read that, I read that the government is spending a pile of money that will demonstrate clearly that what someone who has just been laid off really needs is a good stiff drink. Oh, and the best way to reduce duplication in the work that is performed by unions? Lay some people off.
How hard was that? Glad I could help. If someone in government wants to drop me a line, I’ll let you know what bank account to use to deposit my $208,000.
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And finally, I reserve this spot for a moment to say good bye to a sweet old friend. Just this morning, we had to give a veterinarian permission to put our 15-year old calico cat to sleep. In her last days, she was obviously a mess. Even consuming liquids was getting to be beyond the ability of her diseased mouth. And while she spent a great deal of time during her last weeks with us at home resting, and purring when we rubbed her tired old back, she clearly was nearing a point where even the simplest of motions was just too much of a bother.
On the day we first saw Calli, we noticed she had two spiky black tufts of hair that defined the tips of her ears and as she grew up, she never lost them. And we’ll remember the kitten who fearlessly bounded around our first home in a small room that became the nursery when our daughter was born just a few months later. She probably was taken from her own Mom a few days too soon because she seemed never to have received the pivotal lesson of making a cat sound. All her life, all she ever managed was a hoarse raspy croak that would give a rusty door hinge cause to plead plagiarism. In her later adult years, even the croak vanished and her call was a mouth that would open to the “meow” position, but from which, most days, no sound at all would emerge.
We’ll remember, too, the 11-year old queen of the house who grudgingly accepted the wholly unsolicited intrusion into her reign of two other feline princesses, sisters from the same litter, some four years ago. To them, Calli’s angrily lashing tail was a wonderful plaything until she figured out they were here to stay, so the tail-lash, she concluded, was a useless expenditure of energy.
Personally, I’ll remember a cat who never seemed to grasp that not every trip I took into the kitchen meant I was going to put food in her bowl, and who stoically suffered my repeated stumbling accidental kicks in the darkened room as I wandered in either to shut things down late at night, or start things up early on a cold and dark winter’s morning. In fact, I tripped over her often enough that I think she probably thought her full name was actually a three-part string that began with “Jesus CHRIST!...”
Calli is the second cat we’ve bid good bye to. Our first, Ilsa, was a tabby terror who never really fully warmed to the idea of humans as friends. The more so when we added, first, Calli, and then our daughter into what had been Ilsa’s exclusive command of our attentions. Our two remaining four-year old cats, however, inhabit the other extreme. They don’t merely tolerate attention, they demand it.
Whoever coined the phrase, “It’s a dog’s life”, really missed the mark. The life of leisure and expectation of total subservience the phrase implies belongs clearly to cats. One does not own cats; they deign to allow you to share their home and, if you do a good job, they keep you around. Obviously, we did a great job with Calli. She kept us around for 15 years.
We’ll miss her.
Friday, May 06, 2005
Let’s start by standing up and giving our heads a shake until our brains fall out. As you will note from the following two lead sentences, published in a front page story in The Globe and Mail on Friday, May 6, the Liberals have already done that:
“The House of Commons will vote within two weeks on a motion calling on the government to resign after the Speaker of the House of Commons ruled against Liberal attempts to scuttle the vote. But government House Leader Tony Valeri announced the Liberals would not call an election should they lose that vote, because they don't consider it one of confidence.”
To repeat: if a majority in the House of Commons votes to adopt a motion calling on the (Liberal) Government to resign, the Liberals will not consider that to be an expression of non-confidence.
Which kind of makes me wonder just what kind of statement it will take to make them understand that the House has lost confidence in their ability to govern.
A regular Baby Duckling occasionally sends me stuff with the accompanying note, “These people need a good thumping with the clue stick.”
The Speaker in the House of Commons has access to a large ceremonial object known as The Parliamentary Mace.
http://www.wsd1.org/SargentPark/JrHigh/JH_Main_Heritage_Fair/hfair2000/mace.htm
When the vote on the motion to resign carries, it is my fervent hope that he takes the Mace in hand, strolls the full length of the Government side of the House, firmly bashing each and every one of them (starting with Mr Valeri) wherever in hell it is that their brains are located, all the while repeating, “Get the $@%#!! OUT OF HERE!!!”
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Three little words.
Nat King Cole rendered the thought with the lyrics:
“Three little words
Oh what I'd give for that wonderful phrase
To hear those three little words
That's all I'd live for the rest of my days…”
and parlayed it into a monster hit.
Mr Cole was singing about “I love you”. But in our case at home, we’ve also started with three little words: “Fix the porch”, and we’ve also parlayed them into a monster hit.
A monster financial hit.
A bit of background. It began several years ago when we noticed cracks had appeared around the edges of the top landing on our porch. Now, I don’t know what image enters your mind when you hear “porch”, but for it to reflect the one on the front of our house, you need to think of something akin to a fortification that a medieval army would think twice about attacking, even with siege towers and battering rams. It’s a massive structure that combines an enormous elevated concrete platform reached by a half-storey of concrete steps and which is surrounded on three sides by brick walls a foot thick, and whose fourth side is the front of our house. Close to ground level, the concrete steps give way to several large stone steps, and a five-foot square stone landing from which you turn a corner to descend to another stone step before finally reaching our driveway. In other words, it’s like an advertising poster for the entire “masonry” section of the yellow pages covering cement workers, stonemasons and bricklayers. Determining its total weight would require a scale graduated in tonnes. Many of them.
One grim day several years ago, we finally realized that the entire upper concrete platform was slowly sagging towards the centre and, in the process, was pushing outwards on three boundary walls – the two sides and the front face. Further complicating the problem is the fact that one of the porch’s side walls is irrevocably bound into the brickwork in the wall of our house that frames our side door. Its outward pressure was also slowly pulling that part of the brick veneer out of line as well. So we contracted with a bricklayer who coincidentally was building a new school gymnasium a couple blocks away. He tore down a portion of the brick, re-laid it and patched the cracks. Actually, he didn’t so much re-lay the bricks according to any plumbline as did it in such a way that they came gradually back to where they needed to be. The visual result, if you eye-balled the side wall in just the right way, was what a tradesman would call a “wow” (a word I now think derives its etymological roots from “Way-Out of-Whack”). He told us it was probably good for about five years before we’d need to get it “seriously rebuilt”.
That was about six years ago.
Early last year, we contracted with a building designer to blueprint the structure and give us an estimate of what it would cost to have his company rebuild the porch. He blueprinted the structure, sent us a lavish invoice for same, and then told us that he’d changed his mind and was no longer going to do that kind of construction work in his business. (If anyone in the National Capital Region is looking for the name of a contractor with whom NOT to do business, drop me a line, but I digress.)
So this year, at the first sign the snow was indeed gone and the spring thaw complete, we turned to a trade rule of thumb – if you’re going to have anything done in brick, stone or concrete, find a guy whose first name ends in a vowel. This we did, and after the briefest of back-and-forthing (because he’d already done a fantastic job for us on an indoor ceramic floor tile project), we agreed to have Nino and his company do a complete porch replacement.
On May 2, he embarked on Day 1, during which time he managed the astonishing feat (to me, just because I had figured that what took him a day should actually have required about three) of tearing away everything that was brick.
At that point, had Nino been a surgeon and had the project been a minor appendectomy, he would have leaned forward over the patient’s incision and said, “Uh oh”, only to break the news that the patient needed multiple internal organ replacements.
As it was, he had uncovered scads of evidence of what can only be called “cutting corners” when the porch had been first built. At the end of the day, as he walked me through the many construction failings on the old porch, I was truly amazed that the entire structure hadn’t long ago collapsed under the dead weight of its own slipshod assembly.
The removal of the brickwork revealed, for example, that the back edge of the porch abutting the house was supported in its entirety on the butt end of a 2-inch diameter pipe protruding from the wall. One entire side wall of the porch had been built up of cement blocks – as was the whole structure, but in this case with a single intermediary layer of brick, apparently for the sole reason that it was sitting on a slightly lower part of our sloping front yard and the original builders, rather than level the land to match the porch’s opposite wall, had simply (and stupidly) thrown in an approximate equivalency in unrelated brick. (It was red brick; our entire house is bricked in grey. Once in place, it had been plastered over to remain hidden until the day after May Day 2005)
Nino also found that the bricks appeared to have been mortared with something not a whole lot stronger than wet sand, because tearing it down required no machinery whatsoever, indeed most of it could just be pushed over. A “foundation”, as such, was non-existent and the entire porch was supported on nothing but crumbling cement blocks. Also, no accommodation had been made for drainage and there was water pooling among the bottom courses of those same cement blocks.
Nino sounds a bit like Chico Marx, and so I heard a litany of things like, “I’m-a-gotta tell you. I have-a NO idea how cumma this-a thing no falla down before now.”
(And you can no doubt see exactly where this is going.)
“I’m a-gotta tell you, this-a gonna take about tree times da cement I first thought; plus we gotta build a foundation all-a da way aroun’, four foot down, one foot up; plus-a we gotta add four new support posts because-a nothin’ is a-holding uppa da whole top platform.”
* Ka-ching * (That’s the sound of the original estimate having about a third of itself added to the bill.)
So now we’re going to have a new front porch that I’m pretty sure costs more than my parents paid for their entire house some 35-odd years ago.
“But it’s-a-gonna be a good one!”
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Why government news releases are landfill-clogging tree killers:
Here’s roughly half the lead sentence from a recent Government of Canada news release announcing a Government of Canada announcement:
“The Honourable Eleni Bakopanos, Parliamentary Secretary
to the Minister of Social Development with special emphasis
on Social Economy, and Member of Parliament for Ahuntsic,
on behalf of the Honourable Lucienne Robillard, President
of the Queen's Privy Council for Canada, Minister of
Intergovernmental Affairs and Minister of Human Resources
and Skills Development, today announced…”
Sheesh! If just the “Who” part of “W5” takes that many words to spit out, is it any wonder that the typical government news release gets fired across an assignment editor’s desk into the wastebasket so swiftly?
(Shades of the way the dangerously buffoonish Ugandan dictator Idi Amin used to have himself introduced – and no, I am not making this up: “His Excellency President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea, and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular.”)
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The people of North Point Douglas, Manitoba, should really get out more. The town is home to one of the most painfully acronymed groups I’ve seen in a long time: Sisters Initiating Steps Towards A Renewed Society: SISTARS. (reported in The Winnipeg Free Press)
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As the old adage has it, Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Well, newspapers hath seen no fury like that of Star Trek fans when they read a technical error. Obviously, such fury was visited upon The Newark [New Jersey] Star-Ledger in the wake of a story they ran last month, witness the near panic evident in this apology. (Nod to an April 13 entry at a website entitled “Regret The Error / Mistakes Happen”, found at www.regrettheerror.com )
“Attention, Star Trek fans: No more calls or e-mails, please! Captain Kirk did not often "cloak" the Starship Enterprise to make it invisible, as was erroneously reported in the "Biz Buzz" feature in yesterday's Business section. In fact, the first known use of cloaking technology was by the Romulans in 2266, according to "The Star Trek Encyclopedia: A Reference Guide to the Future." Kirk and Commander Spock were sent on a mission to steal a cloaking device from the Romulans in 2268 during the first Star Trek series. And Klingons used cloaking in the movie "Star Trek III: The Search for Spock." This prompted theories of a Romulan-Klingon alliance, in which the Romulans may have traded their cloaking secrets for warp drive, reports An-swers.com. The Star-Ledger really, really regrets the error."
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And in the continuing world of odd typos, this was the very large-font headline on an Associated Press story that appeared in The Globe and Mail’s online edition April 27:
“Bush wrecked in bid to beat Sri Lanka train”
The story was about a bus / train collision that resulted in many of the bus passengers being killed, so obviously that first word should be “Bus”.
Makes me wonder if AP – or maybe it’s The Globe – has set its auto-correcting spellcheck to assume that every time one of its stringers types “Bus”, he or she really meant “Bush”.
I know mine makes that same automatic correction whenever I accidentally type “$#@!!!ing pathologically dangerous spawn of Satan!”.
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Echoes of George Carlin and his famous “Seven dirty words you can’t say on television” schtik: (Did I say “echoes”? I meant out-and-out plagiarism.) This little note appeared on a blog called The Wonkette:
“I received these e-mails from my Career Development Officer at the Department of State, and from the E-Mail System Attendant: ’Hi Everyone – You may have just gotten a message that I was trying to send naughty stuff through the e-mail. It turns out that the computer program seized on the description of how blood will be drawn at the health fair, which used the phrase ‘finger prick’. Evidently that was enough to set off system alarms. If you want to see the notice, go to Dept. Notices on the intranet. I’m certainly not going to try sending it again! Have a good weekend, NAME REDACTED”
(For the record, on Mr Carlin’s album, the line was “And while it’s OK to prick your finger, just don’t finger your…”)
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I just read (John Barber, “Toronto’s own Bridge of Sighs”, The Globe and Mail, May 4) that the cost of NOT building a land link / bridge from the Toronto waterfront to the Toronto Island airport is going to run to about $35 million in penalties for cancelled contracts and the like. Cancellation of the project was included among the current Mayor’s election promises a couple years ago.
But the budgeted cost of building the bridge, before Mayor David Miller persuaded the Toronto voters it wasn’t needed because Toronto had so many other priorities before reducing Bay Street financiers’ commuting time, was $22 million.
What’s that old Red Rose Tea commercial tag: “Only in Canada, you say? Pity.”
Piti-ful.
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Here’s a bit of trivia: Who was the first President of the United States? George Washington, right?
Not necessarily. The answer depends on the date from which you accept the existence of the United States of America. And if you believe it’s November 15, 1777, when the Continental Congress first ratified the Articles of Confederation that followed the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, then George Washington is actually the country’s ninth President. Between that date and Washington’s Presidency, no fewer than eight Washington predecessors served in the office: John Hanson (1781-82), Elias Boudinot (1782-83), Thomas Mifflin (1783-84), Richard Henry Lee (1784-85), John Hancock (1785-86), Nathan Gorman (1786-87), Arthur St. Clair (1787-88), and Cyrus Griffin (1788-89).
But if you date “The United States of America” from the year it adopted that “ensure domestic peace, protect the general welfare, establish a just legal system, and provide for a common defense for the current citizens and their heirs” thingie, then the country was officially brought into being on March 4, 1789, the effective date of its first Constitution. Shortly thereafter, the House of Representatives met for the first time and elected as its first President on April 6, 1789. George Washington’s inaugural took place on April 30.
Just be sure when you challenge a whole bar full of well-lubricated Sam Adams drinkers to pay up when you win your “John Hanson was the first President of the United States” bet, you’re armed with an unarguable documentation of these facts. Or a well-filled wallet to buy all the losers a consolation drink.)
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Uh… Globe and Mail editors (1):
“The Liberals are attempting to rally their wagons in the face of a possible no-confidence vote from the Conservative opposition, which could come as early as this week.” (Globe and Mail online, May 2)
The spelling’s fine, but it’s circle the wagons, or rally the troops. The only way the Liberals can “rally their wagons” is by entering them in the annual Monte Carlo race of the genre, or one of its clones.
- 0 -
Uh… Globe and Mail editors (2):
“The allegation made by Mr. Guité against Mr. Martin is based on hearsay from someone who has since died and cannot be called before the inquiry.” (Globe and Mail online, May 5)
(You can safely delete those last seven words.)
Uh… Globe and Mail editors (3):
“As well, the proposed changing the format of the debates, saying the original way the political talks ran.” (Globe and Mail online, May 5)
Hellllllllllp!
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And finally, there’s a very sociable gentleman who works as a commissionaire at the security desk at the entrance to our office tower. His shift changes most days just as I’m returning from my lunch break, so I usually have a word or two as he’s putting on his jacket. Mostly a variation on some joke about these “long days” he puts in where he gets to go home in the early afternoon. Recently, prompted by all the coverage attending the opening of the new Canadian War Museum just across the river, I asked him if he was planning on attending any of the related events. He said he was going to wait until the crowds thinned, but there were a couple of exhibits he wanted to see because they reflected some of his own experiences. “Oh?” I said. “Were you stationed overseas?” He leaned a little closer, and said, “I was wounded three times.”
“That’d be a yes, then?” I concluded, before wishing him a very good afternoon.
Here’s a PS in this 60th anniversary year of the end of World War II to anyone in government who receives a request from a veteran. Grant it, immediately. Men and women who have watched comrades die or suffer permanent disability for their country have too much respect for the memory and the courage of those comrades to ask for anything unreasonable or undeserved for themselves and their surviving relatives. The same applies to veterans of more recent service, who might not necessarily have seen combat, but who most certainly will have seen hardship, simply by virtue of serving in Canada’s woefully underpaid and badly equipped armed forces.
For the record, a good many of those veterans who now are looking for help and support from the government of Canada actually bought this democracy, paying in blood, so that you are able to sit on your… chairs and pass judgment on the value and validity of their petitions.
What a veteran will ask for – without exception – will only ever be fairness. Keep that in mind, please.
“The House of Commons will vote within two weeks on a motion calling on the government to resign after the Speaker of the House of Commons ruled against Liberal attempts to scuttle the vote. But government House Leader Tony Valeri announced the Liberals would not call an election should they lose that vote, because they don't consider it one of confidence.”
To repeat: if a majority in the House of Commons votes to adopt a motion calling on the (Liberal) Government to resign, the Liberals will not consider that to be an expression of non-confidence.
Which kind of makes me wonder just what kind of statement it will take to make them understand that the House has lost confidence in their ability to govern.
A regular Baby Duckling occasionally sends me stuff with the accompanying note, “These people need a good thumping with the clue stick.”
The Speaker in the House of Commons has access to a large ceremonial object known as The Parliamentary Mace.
http://www.wsd1.org/SargentPark/JrHigh/JH_Main_Heritage_Fair/hfair2000/mace.htm
When the vote on the motion to resign carries, it is my fervent hope that he takes the Mace in hand, strolls the full length of the Government side of the House, firmly bashing each and every one of them (starting with Mr Valeri) wherever in hell it is that their brains are located, all the while repeating, “Get the $@%#!! OUT OF HERE!!!”
= = = = = = = = = =
Three little words.
Nat King Cole rendered the thought with the lyrics:
“Three little words
Oh what I'd give for that wonderful phrase
To hear those three little words
That's all I'd live for the rest of my days…”
and parlayed it into a monster hit.
Mr Cole was singing about “I love you”. But in our case at home, we’ve also started with three little words: “Fix the porch”, and we’ve also parlayed them into a monster hit.
A monster financial hit.
A bit of background. It began several years ago when we noticed cracks had appeared around the edges of the top landing on our porch. Now, I don’t know what image enters your mind when you hear “porch”, but for it to reflect the one on the front of our house, you need to think of something akin to a fortification that a medieval army would think twice about attacking, even with siege towers and battering rams. It’s a massive structure that combines an enormous elevated concrete platform reached by a half-storey of concrete steps and which is surrounded on three sides by brick walls a foot thick, and whose fourth side is the front of our house. Close to ground level, the concrete steps give way to several large stone steps, and a five-foot square stone landing from which you turn a corner to descend to another stone step before finally reaching our driveway. In other words, it’s like an advertising poster for the entire “masonry” section of the yellow pages covering cement workers, stonemasons and bricklayers. Determining its total weight would require a scale graduated in tonnes. Many of them.
One grim day several years ago, we finally realized that the entire upper concrete platform was slowly sagging towards the centre and, in the process, was pushing outwards on three boundary walls – the two sides and the front face. Further complicating the problem is the fact that one of the porch’s side walls is irrevocably bound into the brickwork in the wall of our house that frames our side door. Its outward pressure was also slowly pulling that part of the brick veneer out of line as well. So we contracted with a bricklayer who coincidentally was building a new school gymnasium a couple blocks away. He tore down a portion of the brick, re-laid it and patched the cracks. Actually, he didn’t so much re-lay the bricks according to any plumbline as did it in such a way that they came gradually back to where they needed to be. The visual result, if you eye-balled the side wall in just the right way, was what a tradesman would call a “wow” (a word I now think derives its etymological roots from “Way-Out of-Whack”). He told us it was probably good for about five years before we’d need to get it “seriously rebuilt”.
That was about six years ago.
Early last year, we contracted with a building designer to blueprint the structure and give us an estimate of what it would cost to have his company rebuild the porch. He blueprinted the structure, sent us a lavish invoice for same, and then told us that he’d changed his mind and was no longer going to do that kind of construction work in his business. (If anyone in the National Capital Region is looking for the name of a contractor with whom NOT to do business, drop me a line, but I digress.)
So this year, at the first sign the snow was indeed gone and the spring thaw complete, we turned to a trade rule of thumb – if you’re going to have anything done in brick, stone or concrete, find a guy whose first name ends in a vowel. This we did, and after the briefest of back-and-forthing (because he’d already done a fantastic job for us on an indoor ceramic floor tile project), we agreed to have Nino and his company do a complete porch replacement.
On May 2, he embarked on Day 1, during which time he managed the astonishing feat (to me, just because I had figured that what took him a day should actually have required about three) of tearing away everything that was brick.
At that point, had Nino been a surgeon and had the project been a minor appendectomy, he would have leaned forward over the patient’s incision and said, “Uh oh”, only to break the news that the patient needed multiple internal organ replacements.
As it was, he had uncovered scads of evidence of what can only be called “cutting corners” when the porch had been first built. At the end of the day, as he walked me through the many construction failings on the old porch, I was truly amazed that the entire structure hadn’t long ago collapsed under the dead weight of its own slipshod assembly.
The removal of the brickwork revealed, for example, that the back edge of the porch abutting the house was supported in its entirety on the butt end of a 2-inch diameter pipe protruding from the wall. One entire side wall of the porch had been built up of cement blocks – as was the whole structure, but in this case with a single intermediary layer of brick, apparently for the sole reason that it was sitting on a slightly lower part of our sloping front yard and the original builders, rather than level the land to match the porch’s opposite wall, had simply (and stupidly) thrown in an approximate equivalency in unrelated brick. (It was red brick; our entire house is bricked in grey. Once in place, it had been plastered over to remain hidden until the day after May Day 2005)
Nino also found that the bricks appeared to have been mortared with something not a whole lot stronger than wet sand, because tearing it down required no machinery whatsoever, indeed most of it could just be pushed over. A “foundation”, as such, was non-existent and the entire porch was supported on nothing but crumbling cement blocks. Also, no accommodation had been made for drainage and there was water pooling among the bottom courses of those same cement blocks.
Nino sounds a bit like Chico Marx, and so I heard a litany of things like, “I’m-a-gotta tell you. I have-a NO idea how cumma this-a thing no falla down before now.”
(And you can no doubt see exactly where this is going.)
“I’m a-gotta tell you, this-a gonna take about tree times da cement I first thought; plus we gotta build a foundation all-a da way aroun’, four foot down, one foot up; plus-a we gotta add four new support posts because-a nothin’ is a-holding uppa da whole top platform.”
* Ka-ching * (That’s the sound of the original estimate having about a third of itself added to the bill.)
So now we’re going to have a new front porch that I’m pretty sure costs more than my parents paid for their entire house some 35-odd years ago.
“But it’s-a-gonna be a good one!”
= = = = = = = = = =
Why government news releases are landfill-clogging tree killers:
Here’s roughly half the lead sentence from a recent Government of Canada news release announcing a Government of Canada announcement:
“The Honourable Eleni Bakopanos, Parliamentary Secretary
to the Minister of Social Development with special emphasis
on Social Economy, and Member of Parliament for Ahuntsic,
on behalf of the Honourable Lucienne Robillard, President
of the Queen's Privy Council for Canada, Minister of
Intergovernmental Affairs and Minister of Human Resources
and Skills Development, today announced…”
Sheesh! If just the “Who” part of “W5” takes that many words to spit out, is it any wonder that the typical government news release gets fired across an assignment editor’s desk into the wastebasket so swiftly?
(Shades of the way the dangerously buffoonish Ugandan dictator Idi Amin used to have himself introduced – and no, I am not making this up: “His Excellency President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea, and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular.”)
= = = = = = = = = =
The people of North Point Douglas, Manitoba, should really get out more. The town is home to one of the most painfully acronymed groups I’ve seen in a long time: Sisters Initiating Steps Towards A Renewed Society: SISTARS. (reported in The Winnipeg Free Press)
= = = = = = = = = =
As the old adage has it, Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Well, newspapers hath seen no fury like that of Star Trek fans when they read a technical error. Obviously, such fury was visited upon The Newark [New Jersey] Star-Ledger in the wake of a story they ran last month, witness the near panic evident in this apology. (Nod to an April 13 entry at a website entitled “Regret The Error / Mistakes Happen”, found at www.regrettheerror.com )
“Attention, Star Trek fans: No more calls or e-mails, please! Captain Kirk did not often "cloak" the Starship Enterprise to make it invisible, as was erroneously reported in the "Biz Buzz" feature in yesterday's Business section. In fact, the first known use of cloaking technology was by the Romulans in 2266, according to "The Star Trek Encyclopedia: A Reference Guide to the Future." Kirk and Commander Spock were sent on a mission to steal a cloaking device from the Romulans in 2268 during the first Star Trek series. And Klingons used cloaking in the movie "Star Trek III: The Search for Spock." This prompted theories of a Romulan-Klingon alliance, in which the Romulans may have traded their cloaking secrets for warp drive, reports An-swers.com. The Star-Ledger really, really regrets the error."
= = = = = = = = = =
And in the continuing world of odd typos, this was the very large-font headline on an Associated Press story that appeared in The Globe and Mail’s online edition April 27:
“Bush wrecked in bid to beat Sri Lanka train”
The story was about a bus / train collision that resulted in many of the bus passengers being killed, so obviously that first word should be “Bus”.
Makes me wonder if AP – or maybe it’s The Globe – has set its auto-correcting spellcheck to assume that every time one of its stringers types “Bus”, he or she really meant “Bush”.
I know mine makes that same automatic correction whenever I accidentally type “$#@!!!ing pathologically dangerous spawn of Satan!”.
= = = = = = = = = =
Echoes of George Carlin and his famous “Seven dirty words you can’t say on television” schtik: (Did I say “echoes”? I meant out-and-out plagiarism.) This little note appeared on a blog called The Wonkette:
“I received these e-mails from my Career Development Officer at the Department of State, and from the E-Mail System Attendant: ’Hi Everyone – You may have just gotten a message that I was trying to send naughty stuff through the e-mail. It turns out that the computer program seized on the description of how blood will be drawn at the health fair, which used the phrase ‘finger prick’. Evidently that was enough to set off system alarms. If you want to see the notice, go to Dept. Notices on the intranet. I’m certainly not going to try sending it again! Have a good weekend, NAME REDACTED”
(For the record, on Mr Carlin’s album, the line was “And while it’s OK to prick your finger, just don’t finger your…”)
= = = = = = = = = =
I just read (John Barber, “Toronto’s own Bridge of Sighs”, The Globe and Mail, May 4) that the cost of NOT building a land link / bridge from the Toronto waterfront to the Toronto Island airport is going to run to about $35 million in penalties for cancelled contracts and the like. Cancellation of the project was included among the current Mayor’s election promises a couple years ago.
But the budgeted cost of building the bridge, before Mayor David Miller persuaded the Toronto voters it wasn’t needed because Toronto had so many other priorities before reducing Bay Street financiers’ commuting time, was $22 million.
What’s that old Red Rose Tea commercial tag: “Only in Canada, you say? Pity.”
Piti-ful.
= = = = = = = = = =
Here’s a bit of trivia: Who was the first President of the United States? George Washington, right?
Not necessarily. The answer depends on the date from which you accept the existence of the United States of America. And if you believe it’s November 15, 1777, when the Continental Congress first ratified the Articles of Confederation that followed the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, then George Washington is actually the country’s ninth President. Between that date and Washington’s Presidency, no fewer than eight Washington predecessors served in the office: John Hanson (1781-82), Elias Boudinot (1782-83), Thomas Mifflin (1783-84), Richard Henry Lee (1784-85), John Hancock (1785-86), Nathan Gorman (1786-87), Arthur St. Clair (1787-88), and Cyrus Griffin (1788-89).
But if you date “The United States of America” from the year it adopted that “ensure domestic peace, protect the general welfare, establish a just legal system, and provide for a common defense for the current citizens and their heirs” thingie, then the country was officially brought into being on March 4, 1789, the effective date of its first Constitution. Shortly thereafter, the House of Representatives met for the first time and elected as its first President on April 6, 1789. George Washington’s inaugural took place on April 30.
Just be sure when you challenge a whole bar full of well-lubricated Sam Adams drinkers to pay up when you win your “John Hanson was the first President of the United States” bet, you’re armed with an unarguable documentation of these facts. Or a well-filled wallet to buy all the losers a consolation drink.)
= = = = = = = = = =
Uh… Globe and Mail editors (1):
“The Liberals are attempting to rally their wagons in the face of a possible no-confidence vote from the Conservative opposition, which could come as early as this week.” (Globe and Mail online, May 2)
The spelling’s fine, but it’s circle the wagons, or rally the troops. The only way the Liberals can “rally their wagons” is by entering them in the annual Monte Carlo race of the genre, or one of its clones.
- 0 -
Uh… Globe and Mail editors (2):
“The allegation made by Mr. Guité against Mr. Martin is based on hearsay from someone who has since died and cannot be called before the inquiry.” (Globe and Mail online, May 5)
(You can safely delete those last seven words.)
Uh… Globe and Mail editors (3):
“As well, the proposed changing the format of the debates, saying the original way the political talks ran.” (Globe and Mail online, May 5)
Hellllllllllp!
= = = = = = = = = =
And finally, there’s a very sociable gentleman who works as a commissionaire at the security desk at the entrance to our office tower. His shift changes most days just as I’m returning from my lunch break, so I usually have a word or two as he’s putting on his jacket. Mostly a variation on some joke about these “long days” he puts in where he gets to go home in the early afternoon. Recently, prompted by all the coverage attending the opening of the new Canadian War Museum just across the river, I asked him if he was planning on attending any of the related events. He said he was going to wait until the crowds thinned, but there were a couple of exhibits he wanted to see because they reflected some of his own experiences. “Oh?” I said. “Were you stationed overseas?” He leaned a little closer, and said, “I was wounded three times.”
“That’d be a yes, then?” I concluded, before wishing him a very good afternoon.
Here’s a PS in this 60th anniversary year of the end of World War II to anyone in government who receives a request from a veteran. Grant it, immediately. Men and women who have watched comrades die or suffer permanent disability for their country have too much respect for the memory and the courage of those comrades to ask for anything unreasonable or undeserved for themselves and their surviving relatives. The same applies to veterans of more recent service, who might not necessarily have seen combat, but who most certainly will have seen hardship, simply by virtue of serving in Canada’s woefully underpaid and badly equipped armed forces.
For the record, a good many of those veterans who now are looking for help and support from the government of Canada actually bought this democracy, paying in blood, so that you are able to sit on your… chairs and pass judgment on the value and validity of their petitions.
What a veteran will ask for – without exception – will only ever be fairness. Keep that in mind, please.
Sunday, May 01, 2005
Finally! (You say…) The final chapter of the story of Spring Break 2005!
Back to Las Vegas.
But first, this musical tribute:
“Bright light city gonna set my soul
Gonna set my soul on fire.
Got a whole lot of money that’s ready to burn,
So get those stakes up higher.
There’s a thousand pretty women waitin’ out there
And they’re all livin’ devil may care,
And I’m just the devil with love to spare.
Viva Las Vegas! Viva Las Vegas!
How I wish that there were more
Than the twenty-four hours in the day
’cause even if there were forty more,
I wouldn’t sleep a minute away.
Oh, there’s blackjack and poker and the roulette wheel,
A fortune won and lost on ev’ry deal.
All you need’s a strong heart and a nerve of steel.
Viva Las Vegas! Viva Las Vegas!
Viva Las Vegas with your neon flashin’
And your one-arm bandits crashin’
All those hopes down the drain.
Viva Las Vegas turnin’ day into nighttime
Turnin’ night into daytime.
If you see it once,
You’ll never be the same again.
I’m gonna keep on the run
I’m gonna have me some fun
If it costs me my very last dime.
If I wind up broke up, well
I’ll always remember that I had a swingin’ time!
I’m gonna give it ev’rything I’ve got.
Lady luck please let the dice stay hot.
Let me shout a seven with ev’ry shot.
Viva Las Vegas! Viva Las Vegas,
Viva, Viva Las Vegas!”
-- “Viva Las Vegas”, as sung by Elvis Presley (Words & music by Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman)
= = = = = = = = = =
If you should ever happen to be in Springdale with Las Vegas as your next destination, I highly recommend getting there by car. It’s only a couple hours and a bit, and the drive is somewhat akin to taking one of the passes through the Canadian Rockies, not surprising since a quick look at an atlas reveals that we were spilling off the junction of the Wasatch Range and the Colorado Plateau, which – several name changes notwithstanding – you can reach by tracing that part of the continent-long line that flows southward from the Canadian Rockies.
On that road, there are long stretches where it seems your descent just goes on forever. But unlike Canada’s Rockies, where the stones’ tones are cold and imposing shades of gray, in this part of the world the chain’s landforms are still principally rendered in variations of the much warmer colours suggested by sand.
Something I noticed, which made me grateful that there wasn’t even a trace of the previous week’s snowfall on the roadways as we drew closer to Las Vegas, was that a number of the enormous highway truck transports were actually hauling three separate trailers. I wondered what three-trailer equivalent of Ontario’s two-trailer “jackknife” would be used to describe the loss of control of one of these behemoths. (“And here’s a report from the KVEG traffic helicopter: traffic is backed up into the next time zone because of an accordioned transport on the I-40 that has spilled 1900 tons of lumber across all twelve lanes. Commuters are advised to find another job for at least the next month or so that will enable you to walk to work.”)
And a scant two hours after leaving the mountain country behind, we rolled once more onto flat land where the southern part of the Great Basin meets the northern part of the Mojave Desert, and into the urban environment that is Las Vegas, Nevada.
This time we were booked into a hotel called Circus Circus. CC’s gimmick is – what are the odds? – a circus theme that permeates almost everything about it. At random places throughout the hotel, there are permanent installations where actual circus acts perform several times a day, including a place that is the structural equivalent of a Big Top’s centre ring, complete with all the accompanying overhead paraphernalia of trapeze and high-wire equipment.
CC, however, despite a website that lists a “Krispy Kreme” doughnut shop among its “Dining options”, also projects an aura suggesting that she probably is getting a bit tired among her newer, sleeker companions on the Las Vegas Strip. But then, she is almost 40 years old. The hotel opened in 1968 and now counts almost 3,800 bedrooms arrayed among two enormous towers and an adjacent barracks-like line of smaller bedroom blocks. Carpets are worn in some places. Furniture is chipped. Hallways retain faint olfactory reminders that at least two generations of smokers have stayed in this hotel.
But we chose it with an eye to ending our teens’ trip on a high-activity note. Because Circus Circus is also home to a five-and-a-half acre glass-enclosed amusement park called the Adventuredome, which the hotel’s website breathlessly promotes as “filled with action and thrills… for the whole family, young and old.” I’m still wondering who “old” is capable of coping with a roller coaster that whirls you through two complete corkscrew turns and a double loop-the-loop before depositing you, sans whatever was in your stomach, at the end of the ride. Or something called the Slingshot, a “ride” that blasts you up a 100-foot tower at four times the force of gravity. (On that ride, you retain your stomach contents; they’re just compressed to the density of an adobe brick. Actually, come to think of it, I believe that in the reign of Torquemada, a similar experience could be had if you were denounced for heresy.)
Our schedule was painfully simple, and by the time we completed it, simply painful:
Check in.
Have a meal or two.
See the Cirque de Soleil show, “Ka”.
Stay up for 34 hours non-stop.
Go to bed at home.
(You’re wondering about that 34 hour bit, right? Well, the morning after the Cirque de Soleil show was the day our outbound flight left Vegas at midnight. I can’t sleep on a plane. We arrived back in Ottawa at mid-day. I can only occasionally fall asleep during the day. And sadly, not on this day. But I’m getting just a bit ahead of myself again.)
In the original Star Trek series, in an episode entitled “The Mark of Gideon”, Kirk is kidnapped by aliens, who place him on a down-to-the-last lightbulb replica of the Enterprise with a woman from their race. (Young, blonde, good looking, with a wardrobe that sadly consists only of a diaphanous nightgown – in other words, the typical Star Trek alien that Kirk was so often forced to reluctantly confront.) Gideon is a planet hideously overcrowded and Kirk’s mission is to instill some good old Earth viruses into this woman’s bloodstream (exactly how is never specified – this after all was still the era of “family values” television) so that she can then carry them back to her people. Bereft of antibodies, the hapless alien multitudes will then serve as rich anti-virus-free incubators for a host of fatal Earth diseases, and the consequent series of pandemics would thereby reduce the population to a manageable level, creating at the same time a Darwinian survivalist’s strength among the survivors.
Several times during the course of this episode, the audience is treated to views of a typical Gideon streetscape – a sea of humanity, shuffling vacantly but relentlessly and teemingly forward; their eyes gazing off only “somewhere” into an undefined distance. Occasionally bumping into someone from among the listlessly oncoming crowds, they simply shift to one side or the other and then move on, automaton-like. They look stupefyingly drug-addled and utterly uncaring.
All I can say is that Star Trek producer Gene Roddenberry must have drawn his inspiration for Gideon by wandering through the arcade-level hallway of Circus Circus at about four in the afternoon.
Las Vegas is an entire compact universe created solely for the purpose of parting you from as much of your money as it possibly can. The Greater Las Vegas Committee to Fleece Visitors has obviously done an enormous amount of homework, because clearly they sat down and thought of every last genre of tourist that will ever come to this city – from infant through toddler through teenager through young adult through senior citizen. And they know that there is something to which each and every one of us will succumb – from a simple flash of child-arresting colour and motion all the way up to fulfilling your wildest fantasies under the guise of hiring a private “dancer” to come and entertain you in your hotel room. Plus give you a souvenir to take home in that empty space in your wallet where your money used to be, assuming you’ve still got your wallet, of course. On our flight back, I sat beside a sad-looking individual who told me he'd been relieved of his wallet -- which was full of cash, traveller's cheques and his wife's passport, at 1:30 am in the outdoor parking lot of one of the city's gaudiest hotels -- the Egyptian-themed, Great Pyramid of Giza-shaped Luxor. What he was doing in an outdoor parking lot at that hour with a wallet full of cash and hard-to-replace identification, he didn't say and neither I nor my other appropriately sympathetic ("Why you idiot!", we no doubt simultaneously thought) seatmate asked.
But I was speaking of souvenirs. You can, for example, have your photograph taken with a photoshopped merging that places you on the back of a galloping cheetah. You can have a video made that begins with you sitting on a mock-up of a Harley-Davidson “hawg” (big motorbike) that is then merged with video which makes it look like you’ve joined a biker gang as they race through the streets of Las Vegas, dodging police all the way.
I could spin out the details, but frankly, the Las Vegas story’s already been written countless times in 48-point Kitsch. Even though we were there for only a time measured in hours, we certainly experienced generous measures of it. Here are some tracings from the How We Spent Our Las Vegas Vacation sketchbook:
Circus Circus was conveniently (and this is not said sarcastically) at the opposite end of the Las Vegas Strip from the MGM Grand, where Ka was playing. This was quite a happy discovery on our part because we had deliberately bought tickets to the late performance in order to give ourselves an opportunity to see the lights. Walking the Strip from Circus Circus to the MGM Grand, we saw the lights.
As we strolled along, every 50 feet or so, some Hispanic looking individual, usually sporting a yellow vest emblazoned with a variation of the banner, “Stripper?” would actually thrust a full-colour playing card-sized business card into my hand. (I was the only guy in our group, remember.) At first, this astonished me because I was clearly one quarter of an obvious family group. But that was no deterrence at all to these persistent marketers and within two blocks I had collected a couple dozen of these things before I realized the images on the cards were a tad raunchy for someone in an obvious family group… Oh alright! If truth must be told, I was accumulating pictures of naked women just as fast as I possibly could before my wife finally realized I wasn’t throwing them away! My sheepish “Free souvenirs?” explanation washed about as well as an oil slick, so I was compelled to ditch them in the next available municipal garbage can, and refrain from collecting any more for the balance of our stroll.
(The truth will set you free!)
I was in Las Vegas once before, in 1976. At that time, the flashiest sign on The Strip was the multiply-changing large neon oval outside the Stardust Hotel. I remember that I thought it was mesmerizing and I shot the whole sequence of changes on Super-8 movie film. In March 2005, it was old hat (although I did notice it still exists) as entire massive hotel fronts 20 and 30 storeys tall, full city blocks in length and width, are now awash in computer-controlled jaw-droppingly complex light shows.
We passed an artificial volcano that spouted flame and smoke and was bathed in the glow of powerful accent lights of orange and yellow. We were told that the part of the outdoor “Krakatoa” show that featured scantily clad showgirls draping themselves from the rigging and the spars of a lagoon-docked pirate ship had been cancelled because it was too windy this evening to be slinging young ladies from masts several dozen feet tall. (Dang!)
When we reached the MGM Grand, we had no trouble finding the restaurant where we had booked a dinner reservation, because it was something called The Rainforest Café, which the hotel promotes as having: “a lush jungle canopy; a spectacular fiber-optic starscape; the rumble of tropical thunderstorms; animated wildlife”. Oh, and almost incidentally: “creative cuisine. Inspired by the flavours of Mexico, the Caribbean, and Asia.” (If you haven’t figured it out, we chose it because we strongly – and correctly – suspected that offspring and friend would love it.) Needless to say, an indoor jungle from which emanates the occasional eruption of a synthetic thunderstorm made it an easy place to find.
After dinner, we walked through the MGM Grand to see the most recent Cirque de Soleil’s addition to the Las Vegas theatrical entertainment scene, Ka. At one point on our way to the theatre, we paused in a glass-enclosed tunnel as we looked up to see a pair of full-grown real live lionesses dozing on the glass plate directly over our heads. (There’s something less than majestic about seeing one of these magnificent animals with the fur along one entire side of her body pressed flat against what is to her a floor, but is to you a skylight.)
Why lions here at the MGM Grand and not at Circus Circus, you ask? Well, how has every MGM movie you’ve ever seen opened? http://petcaretips.net/famous_lions_tv.html
Ka, for the record, as an example of “an evening at the theatre” is what the Grand Canyon is as an example of “erosion”. In a word, it’s transcendent. It takes the experience of watching a stage performance and turns it – quite literally – on its end. The entire Ka stage is fully capable of being raised, lowered, rotated 360 degrees and, even though it looks to be roughly half the size of an aircraft carrier’s flight deck, pivoted from horizontal to vertical. In that astonishing configuration, it places you, in the audience, in the simulated position of being overhead looking down on the actors. The show is a breathtaking combination of mythology, fantasy, quest, adventure and seemingly impossible performers’ gymnastics all the while accompanied by an eerie musical score that seems rooted somewhere in Asia. Somewhere in Asia, that is, where Alph the Sacred River still runs.
“Cirque” is, of course, French for “circus” but Ka is a distant cousin many times removed from what Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey put on the road. There’s a ton of stuff online about Ka. So I won’t repeat the glowing reviews here. But if you’re going to Vegas, pick any of the Cirque’s shows. (I have since heard that “O”, a water-based spectacular – “eau”, get it? – is to some people equally if not more memorable than Ka.) And do feel free to gasp at the ticket price. It’s certainly gasp-inducing. But pay it; you won’t regret it.
Next day, we turned our teens loose in The Adventuredome for about five hours, while my wife and I sat in The Adventuredome for what seemed like ten hours, trying unsuccessfully to find a place where the overhead thunder of the roller coaster passing every ten minutes could not be heard.
Well after dark, we drove our rented car back to the airport, gassed it up a block shy of the rental car return (thus avoiding their refill bill, which for car agencies usually begins at about triple the pump price) and boarded our flight out of Sin City.
Home was two flights, a random luggage drug search and a disheartening but bulky 5:30 am breakfast at the Chicago O’Hare Airport Chili’s restaurant later. And bedtime was several hours after that, because having arrived home early Sunday afternoon, I was being governed by a brain that only finally acceded to my body’s demand for sleep well after it got to be dark -- some 34 – 35 hours after we last woke up.
- - -
Up next: back to whining, wailing and gnashing of teeth. It’s starting to look like election time again! Time to dig out a Steve Earle CD:
“Yeah, the revolution starts now
In your own backyard,
In your own hometown.
So what you doin’ standin’ ‘round?
Just follow your heart;
The revolution starts now.”
Well… one can always dream.
Back to Las Vegas.
But first, this musical tribute:
“Bright light city gonna set my soul
Gonna set my soul on fire.
Got a whole lot of money that’s ready to burn,
So get those stakes up higher.
There’s a thousand pretty women waitin’ out there
And they’re all livin’ devil may care,
And I’m just the devil with love to spare.
Viva Las Vegas! Viva Las Vegas!
How I wish that there were more
Than the twenty-four hours in the day
’cause even if there were forty more,
I wouldn’t sleep a minute away.
Oh, there’s blackjack and poker and the roulette wheel,
A fortune won and lost on ev’ry deal.
All you need’s a strong heart and a nerve of steel.
Viva Las Vegas! Viva Las Vegas!
Viva Las Vegas with your neon flashin’
And your one-arm bandits crashin’
All those hopes down the drain.
Viva Las Vegas turnin’ day into nighttime
Turnin’ night into daytime.
If you see it once,
You’ll never be the same again.
I’m gonna keep on the run
I’m gonna have me some fun
If it costs me my very last dime.
If I wind up broke up, well
I’ll always remember that I had a swingin’ time!
I’m gonna give it ev’rything I’ve got.
Lady luck please let the dice stay hot.
Let me shout a seven with ev’ry shot.
Viva Las Vegas! Viva Las Vegas,
Viva, Viva Las Vegas!”
-- “Viva Las Vegas”, as sung by Elvis Presley (Words & music by Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman)
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If you should ever happen to be in Springdale with Las Vegas as your next destination, I highly recommend getting there by car. It’s only a couple hours and a bit, and the drive is somewhat akin to taking one of the passes through the Canadian Rockies, not surprising since a quick look at an atlas reveals that we were spilling off the junction of the Wasatch Range and the Colorado Plateau, which – several name changes notwithstanding – you can reach by tracing that part of the continent-long line that flows southward from the Canadian Rockies.
On that road, there are long stretches where it seems your descent just goes on forever. But unlike Canada’s Rockies, where the stones’ tones are cold and imposing shades of gray, in this part of the world the chain’s landforms are still principally rendered in variations of the much warmer colours suggested by sand.
Something I noticed, which made me grateful that there wasn’t even a trace of the previous week’s snowfall on the roadways as we drew closer to Las Vegas, was that a number of the enormous highway truck transports were actually hauling three separate trailers. I wondered what three-trailer equivalent of Ontario’s two-trailer “jackknife” would be used to describe the loss of control of one of these behemoths. (“And here’s a report from the KVEG traffic helicopter: traffic is backed up into the next time zone because of an accordioned transport on the I-40 that has spilled 1900 tons of lumber across all twelve lanes. Commuters are advised to find another job for at least the next month or so that will enable you to walk to work.”)
And a scant two hours after leaving the mountain country behind, we rolled once more onto flat land where the southern part of the Great Basin meets the northern part of the Mojave Desert, and into the urban environment that is Las Vegas, Nevada.
This time we were booked into a hotel called Circus Circus. CC’s gimmick is – what are the odds? – a circus theme that permeates almost everything about it. At random places throughout the hotel, there are permanent installations where actual circus acts perform several times a day, including a place that is the structural equivalent of a Big Top’s centre ring, complete with all the accompanying overhead paraphernalia of trapeze and high-wire equipment.
CC, however, despite a website that lists a “Krispy Kreme” doughnut shop among its “Dining options”, also projects an aura suggesting that she probably is getting a bit tired among her newer, sleeker companions on the Las Vegas Strip. But then, she is almost 40 years old. The hotel opened in 1968 and now counts almost 3,800 bedrooms arrayed among two enormous towers and an adjacent barracks-like line of smaller bedroom blocks. Carpets are worn in some places. Furniture is chipped. Hallways retain faint olfactory reminders that at least two generations of smokers have stayed in this hotel.
But we chose it with an eye to ending our teens’ trip on a high-activity note. Because Circus Circus is also home to a five-and-a-half acre glass-enclosed amusement park called the Adventuredome, which the hotel’s website breathlessly promotes as “filled with action and thrills… for the whole family, young and old.” I’m still wondering who “old” is capable of coping with a roller coaster that whirls you through two complete corkscrew turns and a double loop-the-loop before depositing you, sans whatever was in your stomach, at the end of the ride. Or something called the Slingshot, a “ride” that blasts you up a 100-foot tower at four times the force of gravity. (On that ride, you retain your stomach contents; they’re just compressed to the density of an adobe brick. Actually, come to think of it, I believe that in the reign of Torquemada, a similar experience could be had if you were denounced for heresy.)
Our schedule was painfully simple, and by the time we completed it, simply painful:
Check in.
Have a meal or two.
See the Cirque de Soleil show, “Ka”.
Stay up for 34 hours non-stop.
Go to bed at home.
(You’re wondering about that 34 hour bit, right? Well, the morning after the Cirque de Soleil show was the day our outbound flight left Vegas at midnight. I can’t sleep on a plane. We arrived back in Ottawa at mid-day. I can only occasionally fall asleep during the day. And sadly, not on this day. But I’m getting just a bit ahead of myself again.)
In the original Star Trek series, in an episode entitled “The Mark of Gideon”, Kirk is kidnapped by aliens, who place him on a down-to-the-last lightbulb replica of the Enterprise with a woman from their race. (Young, blonde, good looking, with a wardrobe that sadly consists only of a diaphanous nightgown – in other words, the typical Star Trek alien that Kirk was so often forced to reluctantly confront.) Gideon is a planet hideously overcrowded and Kirk’s mission is to instill some good old Earth viruses into this woman’s bloodstream (exactly how is never specified – this after all was still the era of “family values” television) so that she can then carry them back to her people. Bereft of antibodies, the hapless alien multitudes will then serve as rich anti-virus-free incubators for a host of fatal Earth diseases, and the consequent series of pandemics would thereby reduce the population to a manageable level, creating at the same time a Darwinian survivalist’s strength among the survivors.
Several times during the course of this episode, the audience is treated to views of a typical Gideon streetscape – a sea of humanity, shuffling vacantly but relentlessly and teemingly forward; their eyes gazing off only “somewhere” into an undefined distance. Occasionally bumping into someone from among the listlessly oncoming crowds, they simply shift to one side or the other and then move on, automaton-like. They look stupefyingly drug-addled and utterly uncaring.
All I can say is that Star Trek producer Gene Roddenberry must have drawn his inspiration for Gideon by wandering through the arcade-level hallway of Circus Circus at about four in the afternoon.
Las Vegas is an entire compact universe created solely for the purpose of parting you from as much of your money as it possibly can. The Greater Las Vegas Committee to Fleece Visitors has obviously done an enormous amount of homework, because clearly they sat down and thought of every last genre of tourist that will ever come to this city – from infant through toddler through teenager through young adult through senior citizen. And they know that there is something to which each and every one of us will succumb – from a simple flash of child-arresting colour and motion all the way up to fulfilling your wildest fantasies under the guise of hiring a private “dancer” to come and entertain you in your hotel room. Plus give you a souvenir to take home in that empty space in your wallet where your money used to be, assuming you’ve still got your wallet, of course. On our flight back, I sat beside a sad-looking individual who told me he'd been relieved of his wallet -- which was full of cash, traveller's cheques and his wife's passport, at 1:30 am in the outdoor parking lot of one of the city's gaudiest hotels -- the Egyptian-themed, Great Pyramid of Giza-shaped Luxor. What he was doing in an outdoor parking lot at that hour with a wallet full of cash and hard-to-replace identification, he didn't say and neither I nor my other appropriately sympathetic ("Why you idiot!", we no doubt simultaneously thought) seatmate asked.
But I was speaking of souvenirs. You can, for example, have your photograph taken with a photoshopped merging that places you on the back of a galloping cheetah. You can have a video made that begins with you sitting on a mock-up of a Harley-Davidson “hawg” (big motorbike) that is then merged with video which makes it look like you’ve joined a biker gang as they race through the streets of Las Vegas, dodging police all the way.
I could spin out the details, but frankly, the Las Vegas story’s already been written countless times in 48-point Kitsch. Even though we were there for only a time measured in hours, we certainly experienced generous measures of it. Here are some tracings from the How We Spent Our Las Vegas Vacation sketchbook:
Circus Circus was conveniently (and this is not said sarcastically) at the opposite end of the Las Vegas Strip from the MGM Grand, where Ka was playing. This was quite a happy discovery on our part because we had deliberately bought tickets to the late performance in order to give ourselves an opportunity to see the lights. Walking the Strip from Circus Circus to the MGM Grand, we saw the lights.
As we strolled along, every 50 feet or so, some Hispanic looking individual, usually sporting a yellow vest emblazoned with a variation of the banner, “Stripper?” would actually thrust a full-colour playing card-sized business card into my hand. (I was the only guy in our group, remember.) At first, this astonished me because I was clearly one quarter of an obvious family group. But that was no deterrence at all to these persistent marketers and within two blocks I had collected a couple dozen of these things before I realized the images on the cards were a tad raunchy for someone in an obvious family group… Oh alright! If truth must be told, I was accumulating pictures of naked women just as fast as I possibly could before my wife finally realized I wasn’t throwing them away! My sheepish “Free souvenirs?” explanation washed about as well as an oil slick, so I was compelled to ditch them in the next available municipal garbage can, and refrain from collecting any more for the balance of our stroll.
(The truth will set you free!)
I was in Las Vegas once before, in 1976. At that time, the flashiest sign on The Strip was the multiply-changing large neon oval outside the Stardust Hotel. I remember that I thought it was mesmerizing and I shot the whole sequence of changes on Super-8 movie film. In March 2005, it was old hat (although I did notice it still exists) as entire massive hotel fronts 20 and 30 storeys tall, full city blocks in length and width, are now awash in computer-controlled jaw-droppingly complex light shows.
We passed an artificial volcano that spouted flame and smoke and was bathed in the glow of powerful accent lights of orange and yellow. We were told that the part of the outdoor “Krakatoa” show that featured scantily clad showgirls draping themselves from the rigging and the spars of a lagoon-docked pirate ship had been cancelled because it was too windy this evening to be slinging young ladies from masts several dozen feet tall. (Dang!)
When we reached the MGM Grand, we had no trouble finding the restaurant where we had booked a dinner reservation, because it was something called The Rainforest Café, which the hotel promotes as having: “a lush jungle canopy; a spectacular fiber-optic starscape; the rumble of tropical thunderstorms; animated wildlife”. Oh, and almost incidentally: “creative cuisine. Inspired by the flavours of Mexico, the Caribbean, and Asia.” (If you haven’t figured it out, we chose it because we strongly – and correctly – suspected that offspring and friend would love it.) Needless to say, an indoor jungle from which emanates the occasional eruption of a synthetic thunderstorm made it an easy place to find.
After dinner, we walked through the MGM Grand to see the most recent Cirque de Soleil’s addition to the Las Vegas theatrical entertainment scene, Ka. At one point on our way to the theatre, we paused in a glass-enclosed tunnel as we looked up to see a pair of full-grown real live lionesses dozing on the glass plate directly over our heads. (There’s something less than majestic about seeing one of these magnificent animals with the fur along one entire side of her body pressed flat against what is to her a floor, but is to you a skylight.)
Why lions here at the MGM Grand and not at Circus Circus, you ask? Well, how has every MGM movie you’ve ever seen opened? http://petcaretips.net/famous_lions_tv.html
Ka, for the record, as an example of “an evening at the theatre” is what the Grand Canyon is as an example of “erosion”. In a word, it’s transcendent. It takes the experience of watching a stage performance and turns it – quite literally – on its end. The entire Ka stage is fully capable of being raised, lowered, rotated 360 degrees and, even though it looks to be roughly half the size of an aircraft carrier’s flight deck, pivoted from horizontal to vertical. In that astonishing configuration, it places you, in the audience, in the simulated position of being overhead looking down on the actors. The show is a breathtaking combination of mythology, fantasy, quest, adventure and seemingly impossible performers’ gymnastics all the while accompanied by an eerie musical score that seems rooted somewhere in Asia. Somewhere in Asia, that is, where Alph the Sacred River still runs.
“Cirque” is, of course, French for “circus” but Ka is a distant cousin many times removed from what Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey put on the road. There’s a ton of stuff online about Ka. So I won’t repeat the glowing reviews here. But if you’re going to Vegas, pick any of the Cirque’s shows. (I have since heard that “O”, a water-based spectacular – “eau”, get it? – is to some people equally if not more memorable than Ka.) And do feel free to gasp at the ticket price. It’s certainly gasp-inducing. But pay it; you won’t regret it.
Next day, we turned our teens loose in The Adventuredome for about five hours, while my wife and I sat in The Adventuredome for what seemed like ten hours, trying unsuccessfully to find a place where the overhead thunder of the roller coaster passing every ten minutes could not be heard.
Well after dark, we drove our rented car back to the airport, gassed it up a block shy of the rental car return (thus avoiding their refill bill, which for car agencies usually begins at about triple the pump price) and boarded our flight out of Sin City.
Home was two flights, a random luggage drug search and a disheartening but bulky 5:30 am breakfast at the Chicago O’Hare Airport Chili’s restaurant later. And bedtime was several hours after that, because having arrived home early Sunday afternoon, I was being governed by a brain that only finally acceded to my body’s demand for sleep well after it got to be dark -- some 34 – 35 hours after we last woke up.
- - -
Up next: back to whining, wailing and gnashing of teeth. It’s starting to look like election time again! Time to dig out a Steve Earle CD:
“Yeah, the revolution starts now
In your own backyard,
In your own hometown.
So what you doin’ standin’ ‘round?
Just follow your heart;
The revolution starts now.”
Well… one can always dream.
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