Vast ideas and half-vast ideas.

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You’re never too old to learn something new… like English is a pretty stupid language. (Except for all the others.)

At work, we recently received an internal department-wide memo congratulating us for, among other things, our work on programs by which Canadian workers "re-skill" themselves.

When I read that, my first thought was, Oh hell, our resident bafflegabbers have managed to painfully enverbiate another word that has no business being a verb.

So I checked with an actual book on a shelf not too far from my desk – The Canadian Oxford Dictionary – and the shocker? I discovered that it allows the verb "re-skill".

The follow-up shocker? The same dictionary doesn't allow "skill" as a verb.

Which of course makes me wonder how someone can re-skill when apparently you can't skill, but if Oxford Canada sayeth it, then be so it must, he Yoda-ed. (For the record, they also allow "couth" as an antonym backformed from "uncouth", so maybe in a future edition they'll allow us to "skill" as an after-the-fact construct from "re-skill".)

Oxford’s permission notwithstanding, “re-skill” made me cringe and I was still grumbling about it at the dinner table that evening when I got home. It took my daughter about a half a second after I’d finished to slap me right back in my place. That was the gap in time between when I finished my little rant, and she said, “So what? People can be retarded with ever having been tarded.”

I may just turn Baby Duck over to her.

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Brought up short.

Here’s a quote I read recently in a blog about contemporary politics:

“Christ's goal was clear and simple: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ He gathered his followers behind that straightforward statement. Because this teaching was simple, crisp, clear, and understandable, enabling the broad masses to stand behind it, it in the end conquered the world.” (Source: a speech entitled “Knowledge and Propaganda” to Party officials in Berlin on January 9, 1928. The Party was, of course, the National Socialist Party of Germany. The speaker was Josef Goebbels.)

In the discussion group where I read a pile of comments about this speech, was this quick rejoinder: “Uh, how scary is it that Goebbels understands Christ better than Bush does?”

- 0 -

Of course, just to keep things in balance, farther along the discussion thread was this quote (JG = Goebbels) and follow-up:

“No one can say that your propaganda is too crude or low or brutal, or that it is not decent enough, for those are not the relevant criteria. Its purpose is not to be decent, or gentle, or weak, or modest; it is to be successful.” (JG)

“Pretty well sums it up right there. OK folks, this way to the dark side...”

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I was going to make some snide remarks here about yet another recent memo we all received at work whose purpose is to bring us into the picture about the still nebulous process by which a new department – Service Canada – will be carved off our present Human Resources and Skills Development Canada, which itself was carved off the former Human Resources Development Canada… (It’s like working inside a matryoshka -- one of those Russian nesting dolls where the hollowed-out carved figurines stack up inside each other.)

As an aside, we have also been told that, in a bit of magic that would cause Houdini to gape awestruck, the eventual reduction from 14,000 employees to 2,500 will be accomplished with no jobs lost. In the words of bureaucraville, they will be driftnetted into a process called a “realignment of resources”. I haven’t been employed in Government long, but I have been around at least long enough to discover that Canadian public servants tend to run for cover when we hear the phrase “realignment”. It has been known to mean, for example, that oh sure, you’ll still have your job, but your workstation’ll just be in Flin Flon, Manitoba.

None of which is relevant to the point that got my attention in this most recent memorandum.

Which was this. Given that it contains phrasing like, “This policy exercise has been engaging employees across branches in a truly horizontal collaboration.” and, “Additionally, and equally important, the realignment gives us opportunities to demonstrate leadership and provide synergy to the policy agenda through reaching out and engaging provinces and key stakeholders.” this stuff doesn’t need an agent of satire. It’s a self-starter.

(Our 2005 crop of summer students has recently begun arriving. I believe I’ll make one feel welcome. “Excuse me, miss, would you care to engage in a truly horizontal collaboration?” *SLAP!* “Hey! I was just quoting the Deputy Minister!”)

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I’m still trying to decide whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing that Cineplex Odeon has just bought out Famous Players for $500 million.

In the short term, I can see already usurious popcorn prices going up even more until they manage to discharge that little mortgage, but on the other hand I can also see people saying “Pfffft! To hell with your whole shtik!” and staying home in droves if the only choice offered by the promise of a night at the cinema becomes, “This movie: take it or leave it”. After all, it doesn’t take too many nights at Silver City and coming home with a wallet lightened by $25 a person for movie and snack to make buying a home theatre look like a really smart purchase.

Even more off-path wander (I’ll be back in a few lines, really. Well c’mon, lots of people can give you topics that begin at the beginning and end at the end with no diversion. Only Baby Duck gives you a product from someone who doesn’t just do cryptic crossword puzzles, I actually live them in my writing! Try to guess what the original subject was after you’ve come 30 seconds into a typical rant’s re-directions.):

But let’s get back to my digression. (Can you do that?) Recently, I was chatting with a group of friends in a conversation prompted by Alanis Morrisette’s “Jagged Little Pill redux” album being available exclusively at Starbuck’s for a couple months. (It was only the earliness of the hour during my last visit to the Ringling Brothers of coffee houses that kept me from asking how they’d appreciate having Venti-double-half-caff-toil-and-trouble coffee sold at the nearest Music World.) Anyway, as a group we pretty well concluded that North America seems ultimately headed for exactly two retail streams: 1. “THE STORE”, a retail complex roughly the size of Magrathea…

(Point of order, Mr Blogger. Not everyone has read or seen “A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. Oh… sorry: Googlegooglegoogle: “Magrathea: The ancient planet of Magrathea was one of the wealthiest in the galaxy due to its extraordinary trade. Its inhabitants built customised planets to order. These were fabulously expensive, so during the great galactic stock market crash they went into hibernation. Magrathea was slowly forgotten, and many believed the stories about the people who made planets were mere legend. The inhabitants of Magrathea were woken by a special order from some pan-dimensional beings, whose first custom-made planet had been destroyed. Shortly afterwards, Zaphod Beeblebrox arrived on the planet in search of fabulous wealth and some answers to some questions he didn't know he wanted to ask. This resulted in a large new crater being formed on Magrathea's otherwise unexciting surface due to the sudden impact of a large Sperm Whale.”)

Uh, and no I am not going to explain how it was that a “large Sperm Whale” made a “sudden impact” on the surface of Magrathea. Read the trilogy – all five parts of it.

and 2: a web of tiny boutiques whose merchandise is so exclusive and so prohibitively expensive, a buyer will actually be compelled to shop in separate stores for a left and a right shoe.

Where was I? Oh yes…

So, as the result of the recent theatre chain purchase you now have, with the exception of a few independent repertory movie houses in cities big enough to support them, a nation-wide movie-house business in the hands of a man (Gerry Schwartz) married to a woman (Heather Reisman) with a nation-wide bookselling business (Chapters Indigo), which pretty well governs the vast majority of material that is sold to the Canadian reading and candle-buying public. That kind of wipes out any ground at all between the two alternatives offered up in the old promo, “You liked the book, now see the movie!”

It also means that with an ever-shrinking list of exceptions (restaurants, bars, live theatre, sports arenas) for Canadians a night out is starting to look like My Dinner with Gerry and Heather. And if they don’t like it, you’re not going to see it or read it.

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Lord, no wonder the Conservatives are having such a hard time getting anyone to support them. During a recent reading of a number of conservative blogs, I read over and over again that the “MSM” (a new buzz-cronym meaning the “mainstream media”) only ever deals in witchhunts where the Conservatives are concerned, and never in the “meat” of where they stand.

So I decided maybe it behooves me to take a look at where they stand.

Well, here’s just one point of a 22-point list of founding principles, this one about health care (because it’s been in the news fairly recently):

• A belief that all Canadians should have reasonable access to quality health care regardless of their ability to pay;

Sheesh! It’s like they groped through a thesaurus and decided to entrench the word that carried the least possible meaning. (Hey, we can’t be accused of diverting from our policy when our policy is defined in such broad strokes, right?) I mean… pick a word. What does it tell us that that the Conservatives will do better? Well, first of all, they won’t actually _do_ anything. But oh my, how they will believe! And they believe “that all Canadians should have reasonable access to quality health care regardless of their ability to pay.”

What does “reasonable” mean? “Access”, “quality”? Who the heck knows?

(All 22 points are available in all their equally gelatinous solidity at a website carefully watched over by the benign countenance of Mr Harper: http://www.conservative.ca/EN/founding_principles/ )

Why don’t they just save their flacks the trouble and attenuate that load of weasel snot to its fundamental: “We promise that our government will be whatever the hell we say it is”?

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The Government of Canada / OCTranspo “EcoPass” (Why not leave the car at home and take the bus to work?) beat goes on.

Baby Ducklings might recall that, an entry or two ago, I whined long and bitterly about the fact that the 19-page contractual agreement required to get into this program, all in exchange for saving about six and a half dollars a month on a $63 bus pass, was so cumbersomely worded it would make a real estate lawyer weep. Well, it appears I’m not the only one who had problems with it. Turns out even the people who decided to wade into the sea of bafflegabbery have set off alarms.

Here’s a brief note from an all-employee e-mail that arrived recently:

“It has been brought to our attention that the Compensation and Benefits Section has received some OC Transpo’s ECOPASS enrolment forms that were not completely filled out. To ensure that ECOPASS’s are issued and returned to you on time, it is very important that all mandatory fields of the form are completed and that a return work address label accompanies the form. The Compensation and Benefits Section cannot process the information until all the information is provided.

Should you require assistance in completing the form or require further information concerning the Transit Pass Program, please contact the FAS Business Centre.”

(“FAS” is our resident acronymically correct abbreviation for Financial Administrative Services. Ironically, they’re usually quite SLO.)

But for some reason, the thought of upsetting the “Compensation and Benefits Section” causes me to shudder ominously. I see a black-uniformed Otto Preminger “Stalag 17” Kommandante Von Scherbach type, complete with monocle, rocking back and forth on his mirror-bright riding-booted heels as I sweat bullets trying in vain to figure out where on the contract I had missed out in such a way as to trigger his visit to my cubicle. Through razor thin lips, he would hiss, “Und zo… you maybe haff relatives on whom you vould like to continue to spend some uff ze money ve pay you… vell zen, Englisch-schpeaking SCHWEINHUND! Ve must haff your papers, und ve must haff zem NOW!”

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This isn’t Ebert and Roeper, but I do have to put in a plug for a new movie we (the family) just saw – and a broad note of approval for the whole genre from which it springs.

It’s possible that the name Hayao Miyazaki may be completely alien to you, but as the father of someone for whom anime – the uniquely Japanese form of animated film – has been a passion for probably half of her life so far, I have come to know the stunning work of Mr Miyazaki through several films. We started watching them because they seemed a natural extension of my daughter’s fan-following of the Pokémon and Sailor Moon television cartoons and, later, Inuyasha. But they are to Miyazaki what Kraft Blue Cheese dressing is to unpasteurized English Stilton.

The day we rented “My Neighbor Totoro” on the advice of a Japanese friend was the day we discovered Mr Miyazaki. Since then, we have either bought or rented, or seen theatrically, “Kiki’s Delivery Service”, “Castle in the Sky”, “Princess Mononoke”, “The Cat Returns”; and we are awaiting the arrival of borrowings of “Nausicaa”, and “Porco Rosso” from another friend. I’m name-dropping profusely here as an encouragement to Google any of those titles in order to give you (a) an introduction to his work, and (b) the opportunity to read some of the most glowing movie reviews you’ll ever read. People, it seems, almost universally love the works of Miyazaki. Here in North America, he exploded into prominence when his 2001 film, “Spirited Away” won the 2003 Oscar for Best Animated Film (I’m not sure why the time lag – I suspect dubbing it into English made it a late entry into the American competition). And of course we own that one on DVD, too.

His most recent work is another feature-length film with jaw-dropping visuals and a stunningly imaginative plot that seems to owe as much to some pretty powerful hallucinogens as it does to its claimed inspiration – a novel by Diana Wynne-Jones from which the film also draws its title: “Howl’s Moving Castle”.

The reason I have loved Japanese horror / monster / fantasy movies going all the way back to the cheesy “Godzilla” series is, in part, because of the completely pragmatic approach the Japanese take to bizarre and unexpected events.

In an American movie, the emergence of a glowing green blob from beneath the sea inevitably requires half the movie to find some scientists to try to figure out what it is. But the Japanese approach always seems inevitably to be: “Oh a monster – good or bad?” Or “Oh, a powerful spell – good or bad?” Bad. OK, seek out / pray for a good one to fight it. Monsters fight / Good sorcerer fights bad sorcerer / Good magic wrestles with bad.

That sounds overly simplistic, but it’s not. When you begin with the acceptance of forces of good and evil in the world, and their occasionally coming into conflict, your storytelling takes on the aspect of a quest. (You need look no further than “Lord of the Rings” to see a masterful employment of exactly this plot device.)

Miyazaki’s movies are usually variations on the theme as well. In “Howl’s Moving Castle” (this isn’t a spoiler, because it sets up in the first few minutes), a young woman named Sophie finds herself in a predicament as the result of an encounter with a dark sorceress that consequently sends Sophie out into the world to try to find a way to overcome what has happened to her.

See the darned movie. It’s completely – with one exception – breathtaking. The exception is the fact that one of the movie’s quirkier characters has been voice-dubbed by Billy Crystal in the English version. And Billy Crystal is just way too recognizable a voice to fit into a story that wanders so far from a typical Disney or Pixar animated movie. That being said – Lauren Bacall also voices a key character and she is perfect. So who am I to criticize the use of famous voices to broaden its appeal to North American audiences?

(But my wife also expressed thumbs-down to the same nagging Billy Crystal vocal intrusion into an otherwise perfectly wonderful movie. So it’s not just me, he said defensively.)

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So for this entry, over and – with a couple of groans – out.

A Baby Duckling and good friend has recently re-located just about as far west of Ottawa as it is possible to be and still be bound by Canadian laws – to Victoria BC. In addition to regular exchanges of e-mail, to keep in touch I make a point of dropping in on his new employer’s website from time to time and reading the most recent edition of the corporate newsletter. I felt it necessary to provide that background just to let you know that it was there I found this recent bit of humour. Because there is no way I am going to be held accountable for anything more than passing this along:

(Oh, and there really is a US Olympic alpine skier named, credibility-stretchingly, Picabo Street. Google her if you don’t believe me.)

“The famous Olympic skier Picabo (pronounced peek-a-boo) Street is not just an athlete… she is now a nurse currently working at the Intensive Care Unit of a large metropolitan hospital. However, she is not permitted to answer the hospital telephones because it caused too much confusion whenever she picked up the receiver and said, ‘Picabo, ICU’”.

(I – pass along a thank you to Ms England, svp)

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Finally…

I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

But when I saw this headline recently in The Globe and Mail’s online version: “Son shoots bear that killed his father”, what immediately flashed to mind was that old joke about the bear who walks into a bar with one of his legs all bandaged up and says, “I’m lookin’ for the man that shot my paw.”

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(*Eesh*)

Here’s a quote from a Globe and Mail (online) story about Gomery inquiry witness Paul Coffin, the day (May 31) it was announced he had elected to plead guilty to 15 counts of fraud:

“Testifying before the inquiry earlier this year,
Mr. Coffin had admitted that he issued inflated
invoices as part of his handling of sponsorship
contracts. Mr. Coffin told the inquiry that he
discovered during his dealings with Public
Works Canada that, although his agency did
not keep accurate timesheets, he could tailor
his invoices to match the maximum budgets he
could claim. ’When year-end would arrive, we'd
get a phone call from somebody at the office at
Public Works [saying], ‘There's still so much in
the budget. Are you sending more invoices?’ ‘
he recalled. Then, ‘we would immediately send
more invoices to complete the budget,’ Mr. Coffin
said.”

And here’s a key sentence in a recent public opinion survey on how little Canadians trust their politicians as a class (an oxymoronic collective noun, in this case, if ever there was one):

“Canadians have grown increasingly dissatisfied
with all politicians, with nearly two-thirds saying
they have little or no confidence in their political
leaders, according to an Environics poll
commissioned by the CBC.”
(CBC news website, May 30)

You don’t think there’s a possible cause-and-effect thing happening there, do you? Or as the Star Trek writers would describe it, a “temporal causality loop”*?

* (From memory.alpha.org): “A temporal causality loop is a special condition of time in which time runs for a certain period, then resets itself to a point back in time, after which the events play out over again.”

And again, and again, and again, and again… (Sigh.)

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Munchkin and I had a couple D&D days recently (Dad ‘n’ Daughter), so like any Dad would do when given such an opportunity, I took her out for a little good old-fashioned vicious onscreen violence, specifically, Star Wars episode XXVII-B(ii), “Revenge of the Sith” (which I will render as the bandwidth-conserving ROTS from this point forward).

I confess I quite liked it and, if a voiced 3-4 word review is anything to go by, so did she.

But I also confess to thinking that George Lucas is in serious need of a consultant on the imagery of names. Consider, for example, his Christopher Lee character. In this movie, the often-sinister Mr Lee plays one of the especially darker villains in Lucas’ multi-part universe – a Sith Lord. And in this movie, Mr Lee can generate lightning bolts from the palms of his hands with a mere gesture. Now you would think a character who is both nasty and possessed of great power that he has channelled for purposes other than good would have a suitably sinister-sounding swath of syllables by which his cowering underlings are required to address him.

But no, and picture this. (This is a hypothetical scene, so it’s not a spoiler if you haven’t yet seen ROTS.) A large fortress has just been reduced to smouldering rubble as the result of a successful, but costly onslaught of combined land and air weapons. The victory secure, the dark forces step aside as a sinister-looking towering starship descends, touching down amid a sea of freshly created bodies. Its ramp extends and a herald steps forward. Taking a deep breath, he announces loudly, “Now all bow down before your new lord or suffer the instant wrath of… Count Dooku”.

I strongly suspect the required reverential silence would be broken by more than a couple stifled snickers… “Did he say ‘Dooku’? (mmmmmpppph)”

There’s also a Darth Vidious (not too bad, but in the previous movie there was a Darth Sidious. Probably the Mary Kate and Ashley of the Dark Side of the Force) and a General Grievous. With that second one, you can just imagine Lucas saying, “I know, we’ll use that and say he gave his name to what eventually became the word – like Dr Joseph Ignace Guillotin, or Shirley Temple, or the southern France village of Condom.”

And does Lucas have an uncle in War Amps, or something? I swear that almost every light saber fight scene I’ve seen across the whole three decades of this sextet involves someone getting one or another of his limbs simultaneously hacked off and cauterized. The concept goes to the extreme in ROTS. In fact, I can promise you that for everyone whose entertainment experiences include both this movie and “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”, there is a point in this movie where Lucas probably intends to bring tears of pain to your eyes, but to both me and my daughter (Yep. Fandom four decades apart, which oughta show you the staying power of the British comedy troupe), it brought tears of laughter as we both recalled a certain infamous duel:

ARTHUR:
Now stand aside, worthy adversary.
BLACK KNIGHT:
'Tis but a scratch.
ARTHUR:
A scratch? Your arm's off!
BLACK KNIGHT:
No, it isn't.
ARTHUR:
Well, what's that, then?
BLACK KNIGHT:
I've had worse.
ARTHUR:
You liar!
BLACK KNIGHT:
Come on, you pansy!
[clang]
Huyah!
[clang]
Hiyaah!
[clang]
Aaaaaaaah!
[ARTHUR chops the BLACK KNIGHT's right arm off]

ARTHUR:
Victory is mine!
[kneeling]
We thank Thee Lord, that in Thy mer--
BLACK KNIGHT:
Hah!
[kick]
Come on, then.
ARTHUR:
What?
BLACK KNIGHT:
Have at you!
[kick]
ARTHUR:
Eh. You are indeed brave, Sir Knight, but the fight is mine.
BLACK KNIGHT:
Oh, had enough, eh?
ARTHUR:
Look, you stupid bastard. You've got no arms left.
BLACK KNIGHT:
Yes, I have.
ARTHUR:
Look!
BLACK KNIGHT:
Just a flesh wound.
[kick]
ARTHUR:
Look, stop that.
BLACK KNIGHT:
Chicken!
[kick]
Chickennn!
ARTHUR:
Look, I'll have your leg.
[kick]
Right!
[whop]
[ARTHUR chops the BLACK KNIGHT's right leg off]

BLACK KNIGHT:
Right. I'll do you for that!
ARTHUR:
You'll what?
BLACK KNIGHT:
Come here!
ARTHUR:
What are you going to do, bleed on me?
BLACK KNIGHT:
I'm invincible!
ARTHUR:
You're a looney.
BLACK KNIGHT:
The Black Knight always triumphs! Have at you! Come on, then.
[whop]
[ARTHUR chops the BLACK KNIGHT's last leg off]

BLACK KNIGHT:
Oh? All right, we'll call it a draw.
ARTHUR:
Come, Patsy.
BLACK KNIGHT:
Oh. Oh, I see. Running away, eh? You yellow bastards! Come back here and take what's coming to you. I'll bite your legs off!

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(Sigh… maybe get a map that has something on it other than “Unexplored” up there, you howling moron!)

Here’s a headline from Matt Drudge’s website, “The Drudge Report”, June 3: “Flight to New York diverted over terror scare; jet sent to remote site as precaution”.

The “remote site”?: Halifax International Airport, which annually routes about three million passengers and 100,000 plane movements off and on its runways. Halifax International Airport operates 24 / 7 with over 160 departures daily to 38 destinations in North America and Europe.

But I guess if your benchmark is “New York”, pretty much everywhere else in the world is “remote”. Then again, if you’re Matt Drudge, pretty much everyone else in the world is a genius.

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Note to Tory headquarters… You’re reduced to defending the indefensible.

It’s like my father-in-law told me recently about a restaurant he used to frequent. On his last visit, he had occasion to visit the gentleman’s lav. He pronounced it filthy. Now you can extrapolate that one of two ways: either “Oh, well I guess they concentrate all their attention to cleanliness in the kitchen then.” Or the other way. He hasn’t been back.

“In Search of Excellence” author Tom Peters used to be fond of telling an anecdote about travelling by air with the President of the airline. When Peters folded down his tray, he commented on how spotless it was. To which the airline President replied that a flying passenger, faced with a coffee ring on his fold-down tray, would not see a coffee stain. He’d see faulty engine maintenance and a slapdash approach to safety. So, said the airline President, “We spend a lot of money keeping our trays clean.”

So to bring this back to my memo to the Tories. It no longer matters if every last remaining audible word on the damned Grewal tapes is accurate, once you’ve admitted to their having been altered at all, whether by accident or design, then you’ve immediately called into question the entire content. Period. Yes, all of it.

Neither the transcript nor your stupid MP (no racism intended; anyone doing something so idiotic as releasing a doctored transcript would be stupid were he possessed of 16 eyes suspended on mauve stalks and a passport from Alpha Centauri.) is defensible. I suggest you abandon hitching any future message to anything connected with the tapes. And I also suggest you immediately separate Gurmant Grewal from his Radio Shack credit card.

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And while we’re on the subject, I think the most recent outburst from Mr Grewel compels us to declare “MBPE” a legitimate disease.

What’s MBPE, you ask? A couple years ago, a Baby Duckling introduced me to the phrase “management by psychotic episode” to describe the occasional outbursts by a mutually known manager whose responses often seemed way out of synch with the place of the triggering problem in the grand scheme of things. It Googles up with only a single source as reference, a memo written on August 28, 2002 by a NASA manager offering some observations on why morale had declined so much in the US space agency. The memo includes this reference:

“Mr. Goldin… eagerly accepted budget cuts, without the political difficulties of commensurate mission cuts, in a business that had no budget to spare. He decided in his own mind that sufficient chanting of the right mantra could make up for all the talents and resources that he was happily tossing away; he erected a framework of management by psychotic episode the like of which has probably not been seen since the Roman Emperors.”

And among a limited number of people of my acquaintance, MBPE now conveys, with a gritted-teeth smile and a clenched-fist nod, a precisely understood set of circumstances.

Which brings us back to the hapless Mr Grewel. As this is being written, it has just made the news that he is taking a stress leave from the House of Commons. This, after it had been confirmed by Air Canada that he was under investigation for soliciting Ottawa-bound passengers in the Vancouver airport to carry a package for him to the capital on a flight on which he was not ticketed to travel.

Now in the US, that sort of nonsense would have immediately seen a horde of Homelands Security SWAT team members descend on the airport which, in its turn, would already have been completely shut down to any, and I mean any, ground and air traffic, waterborne, too, were there a nearby canal. Trying to get an unaccompanied package aboard an airliner? That’s the stuff of terrorists.

And this man is an elected member of the Government of Canada? As my wife recently said, we really need to institute an intelligence test for MPs.

I think – perhaps over-generously given the man’s checkered history with ethics – that it’s possibly more like Svend Robinson’s not-so-long-ago MBPE, when Mr Robinson shoplifted an expensive ring from an auction house and promptly left politics. Has to be. That, and something damned peculiar in the air west of the Rockies.

Stress leave. No doubt a prescription written jointly by Dr Conservative Party leader Stephen Harper and Dr Communications Director Geoff Norquay. And no, “SOB” on the prescription form, in this case does not mean “Shortness Of Breath”.

Wanna bet the BC Stress Leave Centre is a back-to-the-earth community somewhere on Saltspring Island for whom electricity, and hence contact with the outside world, is the devil’s right hand? Like the good old days when drug-blown celebrities used to check routinely into the Betty Ford rehabilitation clinic because of “exhaustion”.

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And finally, what a difference a year makes – at least to the CBC.

It’s the difference between “young and hip” and “old fart” if this sentence in a recent programming note announcement is anything to go by:

“The Saturday evening Vinyl Tap begins its 10-week run on July 2, and although the program airs an hour earlier than Finkleman's 45s did (7 p.m., as opposed to 8 p.m.), the younger, hipper Bachman, aged 61, is essentially replacing the quirky, elder Finkleman, 62.”

On a related note, I’m going to miss “Finkleman’s 45s”. I was an occasional, not a regular listener but there is nothing on the planet to equal his mellow recollections when you’re sitting at a campsite with a fire gently crackling and the radio is in the background softly regaling your night-air, oxygen-saturated, port-mellowed brain with Mr Finkleman’s voluminous sense of recall, and his great love of the old “doo wop” tunes. I suspect Mr Bachman’s oldies will be more high-powered, given his place in the pantheon of Canadian rock guitarists as frontman for, in turn, Brave Belt, The Guess Who and Bachman Turner Overdrive.

Take us out, Mr B:

“You get up every morning
From your alarm clock's warning
Take the 8:15 into the city
There's a whistle up above
And people pushin', people shovin'
And the girls who try to look pretty
And if your train's on time
You can get to work by nine
And start your slaving job to get your pay
If you ever get annoyed
Look at me I'm self-employed
I love to work at nothing all day
And I'll be
Taking care of business [No, not “bakin’ carrot biscuits”]
every day
Taking care of business
every way.
I've been taking care of business,
it's all mine
Taking care of business
and working overtime
Work out.”