Ah, nothing says Christmas quite like… recalling a horrific sequence from the television mini-series “Band of Brothers”.
This year, at our department’s Christmas party, our Director presented no fewer than 16 (!!) “Ovation Awards of Excellence”, which meant that a variation of the phrase “above and beyond the call of duty” was rendered pretty well 16 separate times. Each winner had to come up to the front of the room, receive his / her plaque and handshake, then wait at the front of the room until all 16 citations had been read. Finally, as the award winners collectively returned to their seats, the guy manning the sound system lit up the theme for “Band of Brothers”. In my newly-thickening “I’m not going to let that pass” skin, (see last entry: Starbucks), I got up quietly, walked over to the music table and said with a question mark, “The theme for ‘Band of Brothers’?”
“Yep,” he said. “I was looking for something that conveys the idea of teamwork… and reward.”
I haven’t yet fully developed my “Ca ne passerait pas” curmudgeon philosophy to the point where I deploy the natural sequel: “Well let me just tell you what I think about that!” So I simply asked the guy working the music at the Christmas party, “For Christmas?” (I knew him; had he been a stranger, I wouldn’t even have asked that.) He just smiled.
For me, of course, hearing the theme doesn’t quite work that way. Instead, it brings back a flood of some of the show’s most affecting images and, for “Band of Brothers” that pretty well defaults to “grim”.
One of the most prominent – in my memory – is part of a sequence set in the Ardennes, appropriately in December 1944, during what history has come to record as The Battle of the Bulge. A unit of front-line US soldiers is under a vicious German artillery barrage. One soldier, caught in the open, is crawling frantically toward a foxhole in which two of his fellow GIs have already taken cover. As he gets to within a few yards of it, the foxhole itself takes an enormous direct hit. The crawling soldier is showered by the dirt and snow of the explosion. A few seconds later, he crawls the last few feet to the edge of the crater. We see his face, washed by a few feathery wisps of smoke, as he peers over its rim. It’s all we really need to see.
“Band of Brothers” is a true story. This sequence portrays something that actually happened during the Battle of the Bulge and is a part of Stephen Ambrose’s book of the same name (“Band of Brothers”, that is). It’s a most graphic production, filmed with the same harsh brutality as “Saving Private Ryan”. Which is not a coincidence; the producer of “Band of Brothers” was the star of “Saving Private Ryan” – Tom Hanks. The Ardennes episode is one of the entire series’ most brutal and the shelling sequence one of the most searing among many memorable images.
Now in fairness, there aren’t a lot of followers of military history in our unit; no doubt even fewer would recognize the theme for “Band of Brothers”. And it is a soul-stirring musical theme, even without the visual affiliation. But I have the feeling I might well be the only person at our office festive gathering this year who was moved to give a passing thought to the Nazis’ 1944 Ardennes offensive.
Maybe for next year’s Ovation Awards of Excellence, they’ll award a Purple Heart instead of a framed certificate. After all, it’s quite pretty and probably not too many people will make the original connection to its marking a soldier who has been wounded in combat. But even if someone does – well, have you ever been to a Ministerial Event planning meeting?
= = = = = = = = = =
While we’re (loosely) on the subject: Memo to the headline writers at the Ottawa Citizen. Twice in your Saturday December 17 issue, you used precisely the same phrase. In one story, about the previous day’s somewhat larger-than-usual snowfall, the headline was: “A terrible beauty arrives”. (Apparently, the “terrible” part was intended to be descriptive of the fact that some 54 city buses slewed off the roads, forcing passengers to have to walk for varying distances either to another bus, or all the way to where they were going if they just threw their hands up in the air and gave up on the buses entirely. The “beauty” part, I assume, was in the artful and appropriately seasonal blending of the red-and-white OC Transpo buses with the pristine white of the various snowbanks into which they had embedded themselves all over the national capital region.)
Then, just a few sections later, in a story about insects being used as the basis for patterns in fabric featured in a new exhibit at the Textile Museum of Canada in Toronto, the Citizen headlined, “Going buggy: terrible beauty at textile museum”. Apparently, the “terrible” part in this story was the simple fact of using symmetrically arranged bugs as the basis for what, as accompanying photos showed, are actually some pretty stunning designs.
Well, here’s the thing, Citizen. I have a title among the hundreds of military books on my shelves. It’s “A Terrible Beauty: the Art of Canada at War”. It is, as its title suggests, a collection of material from Canada’s National Museums that reflect the experience of Canadian soldiers, sailors, airmen, doctors and nurses on foreign fields, foreign seas and in foreign airspace. But not just pictures. The book includes poetry and diary entries as well, from both World War I and World War II. (The title is sourced to a line in a poem by WB Yeats, “Easter 1916”: “All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.”)
Also in the book are items from some pretty iconic names in Canadian arts and letters: Lawren Harris, Earle Birney, FH Varley, AY Jackson, Jack Shadbolt, Alex Colville. (Trust me on this one: if I’ve heard of them, they’re among Canada’s arts legends.)
And some of the images are genuinely terrible. Colville has two simple sketches he drew of bodies that he saw when Canadian soldiers entered the Belsen concentration camp. And I have yet to see the war-weary soldier’s famous “thousand yard stare” captured as perfectly – in any medium – as it is in Charles Comfort’s painting of a Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry soldier, “Sergeant PJ Ford”.
Others are quite breathtaking in their beauty, perhaps surprising in light of their subject. Lawren Harris’s painting, for example, of Sherman tanks boiling across a valley floor, “Tank Advance 1944”, meshes their camouflage foliage with the dust thrown up by their speed to create an image that evokes hounds in hot pursuit of their quarry.
My point, Ottawa Citizen? “Terrible beauty” is taken. A winter snowstorm is not it; neither are bugs presented on fabric as if choreographed by Busby Berkeley. So find another metaphor.
= = = = = = = = = =
But back to our office Christmas party for a moment. For some reason that has yet to be made clear to me, we had to sit through the third consecutive annual display by one of our colleagues that is about as far removed from Christmas as is the Battle of the Bulge. When she breaks out of her government communications shell, she attaches bells to her hips and styles herself as a belly dancer named “Aziza” (Queen of the palindromic belly dancers, one presumes).
Let me qualify what I am about to say by noting that I harbour considerable respect for anyone who takes part in any form of pastime that combines an obvious enjoyment of what he or she does with the added benefit of exercise. And I am hardly in a position to be critical when it comes to exercise. But I don’t fling myself in front of a crowd of a couple hundred of my work colleagues when I do my exercise, either.
“Aziza” is probably a very pleasant person. But unfortunately, she just is not winning the war on one of the twin fronts of exercise and enjoyment. Certainly it is very obvious that she enjoys what she is doing. A lot, in fact. But the plain and simple fact of the matter is that… well, let’s just say she really, really, really puts the “belly” in “belly dancing”.
In previous years, she’s at least had a medium-sized dance floor to work with, which enables her to move about without endangering anyone else in the room. For this year’s party, however, the organizers obviously had acted on the experience of previous years where the “end of formal proceedings / please stay for some dancing” invitation created a dust cloud in the rush for the exit that took a good couple hours to settle.
Cancelling the dance floor, however, reduced Aziza to standing on a chair. And yes, whatever you’re trying to picture insofar as an image of an overlarge belly dancer shaking everything between her ankles and her shoulders is indeed what stung our eyes on this snowy afternoon. It didn’t take Aziza long, though, to realize that the chair was just too limiting and so she embarked on a “work the room” routine that reduced a great many of her colleagues to doing almost anything to avoid eye contact. (“Oh please, please, PLEASE don’t come over to my table! Oh my, that’s a lovely glass of water. Hmm… isn’t it amazing how long ice will last in a liquid that’s been on the table for at least an hour? Well-starched table linens, too! Please PLEASE go past this table…”)
A couple times, it turned into almost a strip club sort of atmosphere, as the zaftig Aziza waggled her hips past one or another of several of her cringing co-workers, all of whom were no doubt lamenting the Mint’s termination of the dollar bill in favour of the loonie coin.
(Or… uh… that is to say, that at least is what I have been given to understand reflects an occasional event that takes place in a strip club… * cough *)
Wait a minute… now that I think of it, maybe the whole theme of this year’s Christmas party was meant to be The Battle of the Bulge!
= = = = = = = = = =
Something I overheard very recently in a large department store. A husband was talking to his wife, a young staff person at the store who clearly had just given him a list of things to go shop for while she worked out the remainder of her shift. I picked up the conversation obviously just as they were finishing up.
She: “Got it all?”
He: “Yes I’ve got it all.”
She: “Need a list?”
He: “No I don’t need a list.”
(pause)
He: “I’m also going to pick up a router.”
(She) [gasped]: “What do you need to buy an expensive thing like a router for?!!”
He: “It’s only about $25. It’s so that Jeffrey can get on the Internet.”
She (and me to myself): “Oh, that kind of router.”
(I refer you back a couple posts ago to the lyrics of Bob Dylan’s “The Times, They are a-Changing”.)
= = = = = = = = = =
That time of year… and so to all Baby Ducklings I just want to say Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. (Please translate as required if your “mas” celebrates Someone other than Christ and your personal year actually begins on the calendar at someplace far removed from January 1. Most of the country will be celebrating something in the next couple weeks. I know I will, and I plan to enjoy myself. I sincerely hope that you do, too.)
Mike
Monday, December 19, 2005
Monday, December 12, 2005
I was rabbiting about looking for something else to say to augment this most recent addition to Baby Duck, but in light of the recent exchange of pleasantries between the Conservatives and the entire world – or that ever-shrinking part of it that gives a damn about the Canadian election – over a Liberal staffer’s charge that families couldn’t be trusted with the Conservatives’ promised $100 per month for daycare cash because they’d spend it all on “popcorn and beer”, the level of discourse has abruptly begun its retreat from the relatively civil tone of the early campaign.
So while it’s still topical…
(I never promised to stay away from election chat entirely… did I? So permit me a minor rant.)
Early in the second week of this month, you may recall that the Conservatives unveiled their plan for daycare, followed a day later by the Liberals doing exactly the same thing. (By this I mean unveiling their plan, that is, not unveiling the exact same plan.) There followed several days of commentary in which everyone from the media talking heads to the ordinary Joe or Jill in the street (interviewed, often as not, in a daycare centre) had something to say – and usually something reasonably intelligent to say – about the merits of one plan vs the other.
And lo, I say unto thee, a miracle occurred. A number of pundits suddenly seemed to wake up to the fact that people were actually engaging one another in a debate about an issue. “What,” they asked, “is going on here? There’s no name-calling. There’s no dirt. There’s no news conference hastily called for the purpose of attacking an opponent for (a) acting like a Nazi; (b) trashing viewers of a Toronto multi-cultural channel; (c) insulting a riding’s entire Ukrainian community. There’s actually debate happening here!”
But then something else happened. As the media pointed out that the election conversation had taken a decided turn towards the meaningful, the media tone seemed to change to, “Well, that’s not news.”
And as swiftly as they noticed it was happening, the media turned back to waiting for the politicians to start slinging mud and dirt because, “Dammit, that’s what we like to report on.”
I read a bunch of articles and editorials, watched a bunch of TV news stories and heard a bunch of radio rants that seemed to sail off on a decidedly Eliza (Audrey Hepburn's that is) Doolittle – “Just you wait, ‘enry ‘iggins, just you wait!” – tack. In fact, they seemed to be saying to their readers / listeners / viewers, “Don’t worry, the Parties have all promised that immediately after Christmas, they’re going to roll out their attack ads, and viciously respond to the same when it is rolled out by the other guy.” In other words, don’t touch that dial folks!
After all, what kind of audience-grabbing soundbites are,
-- “Martin suggested it's up to voters to decide which vision they prefer, highlighting the fact that Harper opposes government-funded day care.” (London Free Press), or
-- “Mr. Martin said Tuesday his Liberals would make government-subsidized childcare a permanent social program, suggesting that his approach is a basic policy difference with the Conservatives, but one based on principles.” (Globe and Mail), or
-- “[The Prime Minister] said Harper’s plan wasn’t truly costed out because it doesn’t provide operating funds for day-care centres. ‘There’s going to be no early learning, no regulation, no insistence on high quality, so it’s simply an empty box. That’s not a child-care plan. What it really is maybe a kind of baby bonus, but that’s it.’” (Toronto Star) or, on another issue,
-- “‘It's kind of strange to go around preaching that you believe greenhouse gases should be reduced as a number 1 priority and then you preside over a 25 per cent increase in greenhouse gas emissions,’ Conservative Leader Stephen Harper said while campaigning in Saint John, N.B.” (CBC.ca news)
My God, they’re actually back-and-forthing on the merits of respective policies and promises, instead of insulting each other’s hairstyles!! We can’t have that!
(The image that comes to my mind is the old often-repeated cartoon scene where the main character is bracketed by a little devil sitting on one shoulder and a little angel on the other, both vying for the hero’s attention as he or she agonizes over what way to tilt in response to a clear moral choice. Do I let the cute little bird drown in the pot of water and then enjoy the soup, or do I rescue it?)
Sadly it seems to me that many in the media, having pointed out the absence so far of evidence of what they had all agreed a month ago was going to be one of the ugliest campaigns in Canadian political history, actually have now taken to goading the issue-focused campaigners into getting back over to the seamy stride of the street pronto.
As one medium seems to note hopefully, if not downright wistfully, in a recent article on its website, “CTV's Ottawa bureau chief Robert Fife said he expects the mudslinging attack ads to be unleashed after the holiday season ends. ‘What's surprised me, at least in the first week of the campaign, is that we've had a discussion of ideas and there hasn't been a campaign at this point about character assassination,’ Fife said, appearing on CTV Newsnet. ‘But anybody you talk to in the camps will say just hang on here, wait until the real campaign starts after the new year.’”
“C’mon guys,” they seem to be bleating as the campaign continues to emphasize substantive exchanges, “let’s have some more of,”
-- “‘I heard and read Mr. Duceppe's remarks and I find there's a little Nazi-like tone to them,’ Mr. Lapierre told reporters.” (Globe and Mail); or
-- “Translation, according to the Liberals? Mr. Harper doesn't love Canada. Some Liberal party members then went to their Blackberries to send out that message. For the rest of the day, it became a ‘who-loves-Canada-more’ match as both the Tory Leader and Liberal Leader Paul Martin professed their undying love for this country.” (Globe and Mail)
The annoyingly hypocritical follow-up, of course, is that if the Parties really do switch over to getting down and dirty after Christmas, these selfsame, self-proclaimed media protectors of all that is good and decent will hit the printed page / airwaves will breast-beating laments wondering whatever happened to the good old days when election campaigns focused on the issues?!!
Well, not that anyone’s polled me but if I were to be given the choice, I’d respond loudly and clearly to the Party war-roomers, keep up the good work! Keep telling me why I should support your people and your platform, not why you believe your opponents will make supper out of a stewed blend of babies and kittens. After all, we can watch abuse every day of the week during Question Period when the House gets back in session after the election.
= = = = = = = = = =
As Offspring so thoughtfully reminded me recently, in just two more years I’ll be able to order from the Seniors’ menu at our neighbourhood Perkins Family Restaurant.
And I’m beginning to wonder, as the world swirls around me, if I’m starting to turn into a bit of a curmudgeon – “Old Fart” is how it was proposed recently by someone else in the family who is not Offspring. (We are a candid group, we are.)
What triggered this thought most recently was yet another head-bangingly frustrating experience at the coffee store everyone likes to criticize – Starbucks. My goal on this early afternoon was incredibly simple in the home of more choice than a Punjabi election ballot – I was feeling Picardesque, and all I wanted was, “Tea, Earl Grey, hot”.
(A digression. I know Star Trek fans will instantly recognize the allusion, For those for whom “Trek” still means “Boers”, the Captain of television’s post-James T Kirk Enterprise was Captain Jean-Luc Picard. And his favourite post-, if not mid-crisis calming diversion is to stand by a food replicator and order himself exactly what I wanted this day from Starbucks. Starbucks, it will be recalled from previous rants, seems to feel that “Small”, “Medium” and “Large” are beneath them. So its sizes are called… oh well, whatever the hell they are. For purposes of this jotting, the Starbucks name for its sizes is irrelevant.)
What I noticed, as I stood waiting for the person in front of me to finish delivering his order for something that sounded like the formula for one of the early atomic test explosions at Los Alamos, was that on their enormous wall menu, beside “tea”, they had one price for their small, then a 50-cent increase for their medium, followed by the puzzling revelation that their large was precisely the same price as their medium.
So here’s what makes me think I’m becoming a bit of a curmudgeon. I decided on the spot that I was just not going to let that pass. When the fellow in front of me had finally finished redefining nuclear fission in a coffee cup, I stepped forward, announced I was going to request a cup of tea, but before I did, I added, would the charming young barrista behind the counter first answer a question? “No problem,” she said. So I asked her, why is there a 50-cent price vault between the small and medium tea, but a large can be had for the same price as a medium?
The amount of water and, of course, a minuscule extra cost for the few extra micrograms of waxed cardboard in the larger cups are the only variables in a Starbucks tea order. They use the same size of tea bag for all three sizes. So I was fully expecting to hear a carefully rehearsed message about how the amount of energy required to heat the water does not change very much at all between the two largest sizes, but actually needs a significant thermal kick to make the anything-bigger-than-small jump required in order to satisfy the needs of the overly thirsty or caffeine-deprived customers who want to go for more gusto. But instead, without missing a beat, she replied, “Actually, they’re all the same price.”
Brought up short, I looked again at the board to check that my bifocals hadn’t caused a visual glitch, causing me to misinterpret the price line for the triad of choices listed next to the three-letter menu item, “tea”. But no -- $1.55 for a small, and $2.05 for the next two larger sizes. “So, um...” I pressed on, “Are they all… $1.55 or all $2.05?”
“$1.55,” she said quite firmly.
And this is the other reason I think I’m becoming a bit of a curmudgeon. For half a second (no more, I assure you) I wanted to grab her by her festive green Starbucks apron, yank her halfway across the counter and scream into her oh-so-young and oh-so-confident face, “THEN WHY IN HELL ARE THERE TWO DIFFERENT PRICES LISTED FOR THE THREE DIFFERENT SIZES??!!!!”
But what I said, instead, was, “Oh that’s great. I’ll have a [Starbucks word for ‘medium’]”.
“And that’s all for today?”
[Oh my Lord, no, my dear. Have a seat. I want to talk to you at length about the apparent inability of more and more businesses these days to operate in the same space-time continuum where sits a rational human being’s understanding of simple common sense. Along the way, we’ll explore pretension and the all-too-frequent clash between a customer’s need for fundamental information when pitted against a medium – in this case your enormous, painted, wall menu – which fails to satisfy even that uncommonly simple requirement. I expect you and I will be chatting – well, me ranting, you listening is perhaps a more accurate description of the conversational exchange I have in mind – for the better part of the next two hours.]
“Uh… yes, that’s all for today. Thank you.”
= = = = = = = = = = =
So while it’s still topical…
(I never promised to stay away from election chat entirely… did I? So permit me a minor rant.)
Early in the second week of this month, you may recall that the Conservatives unveiled their plan for daycare, followed a day later by the Liberals doing exactly the same thing. (By this I mean unveiling their plan, that is, not unveiling the exact same plan.) There followed several days of commentary in which everyone from the media talking heads to the ordinary Joe or Jill in the street (interviewed, often as not, in a daycare centre) had something to say – and usually something reasonably intelligent to say – about the merits of one plan vs the other.
And lo, I say unto thee, a miracle occurred. A number of pundits suddenly seemed to wake up to the fact that people were actually engaging one another in a debate about an issue. “What,” they asked, “is going on here? There’s no name-calling. There’s no dirt. There’s no news conference hastily called for the purpose of attacking an opponent for (a) acting like a Nazi; (b) trashing viewers of a Toronto multi-cultural channel; (c) insulting a riding’s entire Ukrainian community. There’s actually debate happening here!”
But then something else happened. As the media pointed out that the election conversation had taken a decided turn towards the meaningful, the media tone seemed to change to, “Well, that’s not news.”
And as swiftly as they noticed it was happening, the media turned back to waiting for the politicians to start slinging mud and dirt because, “Dammit, that’s what we like to report on.”
I read a bunch of articles and editorials, watched a bunch of TV news stories and heard a bunch of radio rants that seemed to sail off on a decidedly Eliza (Audrey Hepburn's that is) Doolittle – “Just you wait, ‘enry ‘iggins, just you wait!” – tack. In fact, they seemed to be saying to their readers / listeners / viewers, “Don’t worry, the Parties have all promised that immediately after Christmas, they’re going to roll out their attack ads, and viciously respond to the same when it is rolled out by the other guy.” In other words, don’t touch that dial folks!
After all, what kind of audience-grabbing soundbites are,
-- “Martin suggested it's up to voters to decide which vision they prefer, highlighting the fact that Harper opposes government-funded day care.” (London Free Press), or
-- “Mr. Martin said Tuesday his Liberals would make government-subsidized childcare a permanent social program, suggesting that his approach is a basic policy difference with the Conservatives, but one based on principles.” (Globe and Mail), or
-- “[The Prime Minister] said Harper’s plan wasn’t truly costed out because it doesn’t provide operating funds for day-care centres. ‘There’s going to be no early learning, no regulation, no insistence on high quality, so it’s simply an empty box. That’s not a child-care plan. What it really is maybe a kind of baby bonus, but that’s it.’” (Toronto Star) or, on another issue,
-- “‘It's kind of strange to go around preaching that you believe greenhouse gases should be reduced as a number 1 priority and then you preside over a 25 per cent increase in greenhouse gas emissions,’ Conservative Leader Stephen Harper said while campaigning in Saint John, N.B.” (CBC.ca news)
My God, they’re actually back-and-forthing on the merits of respective policies and promises, instead of insulting each other’s hairstyles!! We can’t have that!
(The image that comes to my mind is the old often-repeated cartoon scene where the main character is bracketed by a little devil sitting on one shoulder and a little angel on the other, both vying for the hero’s attention as he or she agonizes over what way to tilt in response to a clear moral choice. Do I let the cute little bird drown in the pot of water and then enjoy the soup, or do I rescue it?)
Sadly it seems to me that many in the media, having pointed out the absence so far of evidence of what they had all agreed a month ago was going to be one of the ugliest campaigns in Canadian political history, actually have now taken to goading the issue-focused campaigners into getting back over to the seamy stride of the street pronto.
As one medium seems to note hopefully, if not downright wistfully, in a recent article on its website, “CTV's Ottawa bureau chief Robert Fife said he expects the mudslinging attack ads to be unleashed after the holiday season ends. ‘What's surprised me, at least in the first week of the campaign, is that we've had a discussion of ideas and there hasn't been a campaign at this point about character assassination,’ Fife said, appearing on CTV Newsnet. ‘But anybody you talk to in the camps will say just hang on here, wait until the real campaign starts after the new year.’”
“C’mon guys,” they seem to be bleating as the campaign continues to emphasize substantive exchanges, “let’s have some more of,”
-- “‘I heard and read Mr. Duceppe's remarks and I find there's a little Nazi-like tone to them,’ Mr. Lapierre told reporters.” (Globe and Mail); or
-- “Translation, according to the Liberals? Mr. Harper doesn't love Canada. Some Liberal party members then went to their Blackberries to send out that message. For the rest of the day, it became a ‘who-loves-Canada-more’ match as both the Tory Leader and Liberal Leader Paul Martin professed their undying love for this country.” (Globe and Mail)
The annoyingly hypocritical follow-up, of course, is that if the Parties really do switch over to getting down and dirty after Christmas, these selfsame, self-proclaimed media protectors of all that is good and decent will hit the printed page / airwaves will breast-beating laments wondering whatever happened to the good old days when election campaigns focused on the issues?!!
Well, not that anyone’s polled me but if I were to be given the choice, I’d respond loudly and clearly to the Party war-roomers, keep up the good work! Keep telling me why I should support your people and your platform, not why you believe your opponents will make supper out of a stewed blend of babies and kittens. After all, we can watch abuse every day of the week during Question Period when the House gets back in session after the election.
= = = = = = = = = =
As Offspring so thoughtfully reminded me recently, in just two more years I’ll be able to order from the Seniors’ menu at our neighbourhood Perkins Family Restaurant.
And I’m beginning to wonder, as the world swirls around me, if I’m starting to turn into a bit of a curmudgeon – “Old Fart” is how it was proposed recently by someone else in the family who is not Offspring. (We are a candid group, we are.)
What triggered this thought most recently was yet another head-bangingly frustrating experience at the coffee store everyone likes to criticize – Starbucks. My goal on this early afternoon was incredibly simple in the home of more choice than a Punjabi election ballot – I was feeling Picardesque, and all I wanted was, “Tea, Earl Grey, hot”.
(A digression. I know Star Trek fans will instantly recognize the allusion, For those for whom “Trek” still means “Boers”, the Captain of television’s post-James T Kirk Enterprise was Captain Jean-Luc Picard. And his favourite post-, if not mid-crisis calming diversion is to stand by a food replicator and order himself exactly what I wanted this day from Starbucks. Starbucks, it will be recalled from previous rants, seems to feel that “Small”, “Medium” and “Large” are beneath them. So its sizes are called… oh well, whatever the hell they are. For purposes of this jotting, the Starbucks name for its sizes is irrelevant.)
What I noticed, as I stood waiting for the person in front of me to finish delivering his order for something that sounded like the formula for one of the early atomic test explosions at Los Alamos, was that on their enormous wall menu, beside “tea”, they had one price for their small, then a 50-cent increase for their medium, followed by the puzzling revelation that their large was precisely the same price as their medium.
So here’s what makes me think I’m becoming a bit of a curmudgeon. I decided on the spot that I was just not going to let that pass. When the fellow in front of me had finally finished redefining nuclear fission in a coffee cup, I stepped forward, announced I was going to request a cup of tea, but before I did, I added, would the charming young barrista behind the counter first answer a question? “No problem,” she said. So I asked her, why is there a 50-cent price vault between the small and medium tea, but a large can be had for the same price as a medium?
The amount of water and, of course, a minuscule extra cost for the few extra micrograms of waxed cardboard in the larger cups are the only variables in a Starbucks tea order. They use the same size of tea bag for all three sizes. So I was fully expecting to hear a carefully rehearsed message about how the amount of energy required to heat the water does not change very much at all between the two largest sizes, but actually needs a significant thermal kick to make the anything-bigger-than-small jump required in order to satisfy the needs of the overly thirsty or caffeine-deprived customers who want to go for more gusto. But instead, without missing a beat, she replied, “Actually, they’re all the same price.”
Brought up short, I looked again at the board to check that my bifocals hadn’t caused a visual glitch, causing me to misinterpret the price line for the triad of choices listed next to the three-letter menu item, “tea”. But no -- $1.55 for a small, and $2.05 for the next two larger sizes. “So, um...” I pressed on, “Are they all… $1.55 or all $2.05?”
“$1.55,” she said quite firmly.
And this is the other reason I think I’m becoming a bit of a curmudgeon. For half a second (no more, I assure you) I wanted to grab her by her festive green Starbucks apron, yank her halfway across the counter and scream into her oh-so-young and oh-so-confident face, “THEN WHY IN HELL ARE THERE TWO DIFFERENT PRICES LISTED FOR THE THREE DIFFERENT SIZES??!!!!”
But what I said, instead, was, “Oh that’s great. I’ll have a [Starbucks word for ‘medium’]”.
“And that’s all for today?”
[Oh my Lord, no, my dear. Have a seat. I want to talk to you at length about the apparent inability of more and more businesses these days to operate in the same space-time continuum where sits a rational human being’s understanding of simple common sense. Along the way, we’ll explore pretension and the all-too-frequent clash between a customer’s need for fundamental information when pitted against a medium – in this case your enormous, painted, wall menu – which fails to satisfy even that uncommonly simple requirement. I expect you and I will be chatting – well, me ranting, you listening is perhaps a more accurate description of the conversational exchange I have in mind – for the better part of the next two hours.]
“Uh… yes, that’s all for today. Thank you.”
= = = = = = = = = = =
Wednesday, December 07, 2005
Overheard at a recent weekend brunch was this masterpiece of a business plan spilling over from an adjacent table:
“Yeah, I think I’m going to quit my job and open up one of those… oh you know, one of those whaddyamacallit places…”
Based on a foray into self-employment a few years back, I discovered that I’m hardly the model of a successful entrepreneur, but it does seem to me that a critical hallmark of a successful marketing plan would be at least to know what kind of business you are setting out to succeed at. Memo to the unknown would-be job quitter: I would really discourage you from embarking on Step 1 until you’ve got a better handle on Step 2 and all the others that follow. (Of course, “Shauvon’s Whaddyamacallits” is exactly the sort of storefront sign that would probably find a welcome and a clientele in Ottawa’s Glebe, a painfully trendy zone of little specialty boutiques and a glut of coffee shops staffed with barristas selling $6.00 mochaccinoppélattebrûlissimos.)
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Icy sidewalks: Bring ‘em on!
In a recent burst of common sense – yes, unusual for me (I’ll save everyone else the trouble of rejoining), I recently bought a full set of snow tires for the car and, within a couple days of that purchase, a pair of these things:
These are incredible winter urban footwear! On a recent Ottawa morning, our city woke up to one of those freezing rain mornings where absolutely everything was glazed over in a layer of ice. In previous years, I had always resigned myself to the likelihood of having my feet shoot out from under me at least once or twice a winter in exactly this sort of weather. There is, for example, an especially evil parking lot beside a church close to home that I have to cross on my morning commute to the bus stop. It’s cleaned pretty regularly, but it is never sanded or salted. And it has been an annual event – sometimes two or three times annually – and last year four! – for me to have my feet shoot out from under me and for me to land firmly on my butt in that lot.
Now why, you might perfectly reasonably ask, do I persist in walking across this Parking Lot of the Damned? The short answer is that it is so positioned that it lies squarely between where I am and where I want to be. Not crossing it would require my travelling its perimeter. And in the winter, going around it one direction takes me on a longer path of precisely the same slickly polished pavement surface and, the other way, through snow whose depth only increases as the winter goes on. (There’s also a case to be made for “I’m stupid” but since this is my blog, I have chosen to discount that line of reasoning.)
Last year, I bought a pair of Icer’s ** for my Dad on the recommendation of a friend (whose intelligence is beyond question – she’s a regular Baby Duck reader). After trying them out, Dad told me there was nothing better for navigating glare ice or plow-flattened snow. So this year, I got a pair for myself and this past week was their debut underneath my winter boots.
(** For the record, no they don’t belong to some guy named “Icer” and although I was really, really disappointed to see a business that sells products with the high quality reputation that normally attends the Lee Valley catalogue take such a cavalier approach to apostrophes, I was also surprised to discover that “Icer’s” is precisely how the name is permanently embossed on the underside of each sole… but I digress.)
Now I have read that one reason the Roman Army was so successful was due in part to the sandals worn by their Legions. Enormously durable, the combination of hobnailed soles and Roman roads gave the Legions of the Caesars mobility unmatched by their more barbaric and often barefoot opponents. “Caligae”, as they were known, proved to have such staying power that, even today, they have spawned a modern replica:
(I have no idea where you’d wear something like this. Officially, they’re sandals, but I suspect that most tropical hotels would have some difficulty with a tourist in hobnailed footwear grinding across their terrazzo-tiled mezzanine en route to the pool.)
But with Icer’s on my feet as I step out onto the ice, I have a sense of how those Roman conquerors must have felt (minus, of course, the weight of armour, the vocabulary entirely in Latin, the prospect of going into battle against hordes of barbaric foreigners each of whose most passionate wish is to skewer you on the end of his sword, and the knowledge that supper tonight is once again going to be a bowl of mashed chick peas in olive oil with a half cup of vinegary wine to drink, but otherwise exactly the same feeling, I’m sure of it.) It’s like wearing little army tanks of pedestrian invincibility. Don’t mess with me, parking lot. I’m ready for you this year.
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If you hear a crow making a sound like it’s being throttled, look up.
Twice in recent weeks, I’ve heard that sound coming from a crow and, in both cases, was rewarded with precisely the same scene.
I have no idea why it is, but a strangled (and loud!) sound coming from a crow seems to mean, “C’mon crow buddies, I’ve got a falcon cornered and I need help!”
The first time was a couple weeks ago when I was out hanging up some outdoor Christmas lights. I heard the sound and looked up just as an arrow-like blur flashed by not too far overhead. Abruptly, the blur became distinct as an absolutely gorgeous peregrine falcon flared its wings and tail and landed on a nearby maple tree branch. With no leaves to screen it, it was fully in view – and not only to me. In a few seconds, a trio of crows had swung down and landed, each in a different one of three other nearby trees. They proceeded to set up a racket of loud and frantically repeated calls that I’m pretty sure were not, “Hey baby, d’you come here often?”
I was actually quite surprised. Because where a crow has a beak, a mature falcon has a meat-ripping hook and where a crow has feet, the falcon is possessed of talons that look as if they could embed themselves in steel. To me a crow – or even three crows – hardly seems possessed of enough of an arsenal to take on a falcon. The falcon sat for a couple minutes until it obviously felt it had had enough – perhaps of just the noise. Then it rocketed off to another more distant tree, the crows in hot pursuit.
On a more recent early morning walk to work, I was passing a fence-enclosed yard when from a branch on a tree just on the other side of the fence, I heard that same loud strangled cry coming from a crow. This time, I stopped, but not because I remembered my previous encounter with the sound. Rather, it sounded so pained and so close, I thought was about to come upon a scene of a crow being throttled by a squirrel or something. As I looked up to try to see just where the sound was coming from, once again I caught the flash of a streak of feathers travelling blindlingly fast in a perfectly straight flight path towards a nearby tree.
It was the falcon – or a different one. But a majestic hawk it was, and the circumstances were precisely the same. This time, he planted himself on a branch directly over my head, according me an absolutely wonderful view of his speckled breast feathers and his yellow beak. He didn’t look the least bit perturbed as a hornet’s nest of no fewer than 10 or 15 crows swirled around the tree, angrily calling either each other, or howling for even more reinforcements. But even with those odds tilted that far to their favour, none was foolish enough to try even a passing tangle with the falcon’s array of avian offensive weapons.
After a few seconds, he tore off in another perfectly straight line as the crows displayed all the organization of a flock of keystone cops, dipping, swirling, nearly colliding with one another. I saw where the falcon landed some distance away, but it was clear that probably not one of the crows had managed to successfully track him, no doubt because avoiding the other members of their gang required all their in-flight attention. By the time they got their aerial bearings, the falcon was already resting on a new perch about a hundred yards away from where the crows circled in a loud and angry search.
In hindsight, I'm now thinking that strangled crow sound might well be that bird’s equivalent of a loud, “Damn it! He got away again!”
Either that, or a falcon just killing himself laughing.
= = = = = = = = = =
And finally, I have often proclaimed that I do love the Internet, but every once in a while it gives me a moment to pause and ponder a display of its near Twilight Zone-esque bit of reasoning.
Recently, I embarked on a Google dictionary search for the meaning of the word “estop”, which I have occasionally encountered in crossword puzzles. Google replied that there is no such word in English. (Now I know there is, and frankly, this non-reply from Google’s “define” feature surprised me.) However, added Google, if I were willing to check out this online Russian dictionary of International Trade Law, I will find the word. So, I clicked on the suggested link, and sure enough. In the online Russian Dictionary of English – Russian trade terminology, this:
“лишать права возражения, лишать сторону права ссылаться на какие-либо факты”
means “estop”. So what the heck? In for a penny, in for a pound. Capturing that very text, I went next to Alta Vista’s Babelfish, the online language translator, pitched that unpromising jumble into the open window and gave it a “Russian to English” request. Out came this: “to deprive the rights of objection, to deprive the side of the right to refer to any facts”.
With the Internet, all things are possible. Sometimes you just have to travel West to catch up to the sunrise. So to quote Peter Trueman when he was the first-ever news anchor on the newly-launched Global TV late news program:“That may not be news, but it sure is reality.”
“Yeah, I think I’m going to quit my job and open up one of those… oh you know, one of those whaddyamacallit places…”
Based on a foray into self-employment a few years back, I discovered that I’m hardly the model of a successful entrepreneur, but it does seem to me that a critical hallmark of a successful marketing plan would be at least to know what kind of business you are setting out to succeed at. Memo to the unknown would-be job quitter: I would really discourage you from embarking on Step 1 until you’ve got a better handle on Step 2 and all the others that follow. (Of course, “Shauvon’s Whaddyamacallits” is exactly the sort of storefront sign that would probably find a welcome and a clientele in Ottawa’s Glebe, a painfully trendy zone of little specialty boutiques and a glut of coffee shops staffed with barristas selling $6.00 mochaccinoppélattebrûlissimos.)
= = = = = = = = = =
Icy sidewalks: Bring ‘em on!
In a recent burst of common sense – yes, unusual for me (I’ll save everyone else the trouble of rejoining), I recently bought a full set of snow tires for the car and, within a couple days of that purchase, a pair of these things:
These are incredible winter urban footwear! On a recent Ottawa morning, our city woke up to one of those freezing rain mornings where absolutely everything was glazed over in a layer of ice. In previous years, I had always resigned myself to the likelihood of having my feet shoot out from under me at least once or twice a winter in exactly this sort of weather. There is, for example, an especially evil parking lot beside a church close to home that I have to cross on my morning commute to the bus stop. It’s cleaned pretty regularly, but it is never sanded or salted. And it has been an annual event – sometimes two or three times annually – and last year four! – for me to have my feet shoot out from under me and for me to land firmly on my butt in that lot.
Now why, you might perfectly reasonably ask, do I persist in walking across this Parking Lot of the Damned? The short answer is that it is so positioned that it lies squarely between where I am and where I want to be. Not crossing it would require my travelling its perimeter. And in the winter, going around it one direction takes me on a longer path of precisely the same slickly polished pavement surface and, the other way, through snow whose depth only increases as the winter goes on. (There’s also a case to be made for “I’m stupid” but since this is my blog, I have chosen to discount that line of reasoning.)
Last year, I bought a pair of Icer’s ** for my Dad on the recommendation of a friend (whose intelligence is beyond question – she’s a regular Baby Duck reader). After trying them out, Dad told me there was nothing better for navigating glare ice or plow-flattened snow. So this year, I got a pair for myself and this past week was their debut underneath my winter boots.
(** For the record, no they don’t belong to some guy named “Icer” and although I was really, really disappointed to see a business that sells products with the high quality reputation that normally attends the Lee Valley catalogue take such a cavalier approach to apostrophes, I was also surprised to discover that “Icer’s” is precisely how the name is permanently embossed on the underside of each sole… but I digress.)
Now I have read that one reason the Roman Army was so successful was due in part to the sandals worn by their Legions. Enormously durable, the combination of hobnailed soles and Roman roads gave the Legions of the Caesars mobility unmatched by their more barbaric and often barefoot opponents. “Caligae”, as they were known, proved to have such staying power that, even today, they have spawned a modern replica:
(I have no idea where you’d wear something like this. Officially, they’re sandals, but I suspect that most tropical hotels would have some difficulty with a tourist in hobnailed footwear grinding across their terrazzo-tiled mezzanine en route to the pool.)
But with Icer’s on my feet as I step out onto the ice, I have a sense of how those Roman conquerors must have felt (minus, of course, the weight of armour, the vocabulary entirely in Latin, the prospect of going into battle against hordes of barbaric foreigners each of whose most passionate wish is to skewer you on the end of his sword, and the knowledge that supper tonight is once again going to be a bowl of mashed chick peas in olive oil with a half cup of vinegary wine to drink, but otherwise exactly the same feeling, I’m sure of it.) It’s like wearing little army tanks of pedestrian invincibility. Don’t mess with me, parking lot. I’m ready for you this year.
= = = = = = = = = =
If you hear a crow making a sound like it’s being throttled, look up.
Twice in recent weeks, I’ve heard that sound coming from a crow and, in both cases, was rewarded with precisely the same scene.
I have no idea why it is, but a strangled (and loud!) sound coming from a crow seems to mean, “C’mon crow buddies, I’ve got a falcon cornered and I need help!”
The first time was a couple weeks ago when I was out hanging up some outdoor Christmas lights. I heard the sound and looked up just as an arrow-like blur flashed by not too far overhead. Abruptly, the blur became distinct as an absolutely gorgeous peregrine falcon flared its wings and tail and landed on a nearby maple tree branch. With no leaves to screen it, it was fully in view – and not only to me. In a few seconds, a trio of crows had swung down and landed, each in a different one of three other nearby trees. They proceeded to set up a racket of loud and frantically repeated calls that I’m pretty sure were not, “Hey baby, d’you come here often?”
I was actually quite surprised. Because where a crow has a beak, a mature falcon has a meat-ripping hook and where a crow has feet, the falcon is possessed of talons that look as if they could embed themselves in steel. To me a crow – or even three crows – hardly seems possessed of enough of an arsenal to take on a falcon. The falcon sat for a couple minutes until it obviously felt it had had enough – perhaps of just the noise. Then it rocketed off to another more distant tree, the crows in hot pursuit.
On a more recent early morning walk to work, I was passing a fence-enclosed yard when from a branch on a tree just on the other side of the fence, I heard that same loud strangled cry coming from a crow. This time, I stopped, but not because I remembered my previous encounter with the sound. Rather, it sounded so pained and so close, I thought was about to come upon a scene of a crow being throttled by a squirrel or something. As I looked up to try to see just where the sound was coming from, once again I caught the flash of a streak of feathers travelling blindlingly fast in a perfectly straight flight path towards a nearby tree.
It was the falcon – or a different one. But a majestic hawk it was, and the circumstances were precisely the same. This time, he planted himself on a branch directly over my head, according me an absolutely wonderful view of his speckled breast feathers and his yellow beak. He didn’t look the least bit perturbed as a hornet’s nest of no fewer than 10 or 15 crows swirled around the tree, angrily calling either each other, or howling for even more reinforcements. But even with those odds tilted that far to their favour, none was foolish enough to try even a passing tangle with the falcon’s array of avian offensive weapons.
After a few seconds, he tore off in another perfectly straight line as the crows displayed all the organization of a flock of keystone cops, dipping, swirling, nearly colliding with one another. I saw where the falcon landed some distance away, but it was clear that probably not one of the crows had managed to successfully track him, no doubt because avoiding the other members of their gang required all their in-flight attention. By the time they got their aerial bearings, the falcon was already resting on a new perch about a hundred yards away from where the crows circled in a loud and angry search.
In hindsight, I'm now thinking that strangled crow sound might well be that bird’s equivalent of a loud, “Damn it! He got away again!”
Either that, or a falcon just killing himself laughing.
= = = = = = = = = =
And finally, I have often proclaimed that I do love the Internet, but every once in a while it gives me a moment to pause and ponder a display of its near Twilight Zone-esque bit of reasoning.
Recently, I embarked on a Google dictionary search for the meaning of the word “estop”, which I have occasionally encountered in crossword puzzles. Google replied that there is no such word in English. (Now I know there is, and frankly, this non-reply from Google’s “define” feature surprised me.) However, added Google, if I were willing to check out this online Russian dictionary of International Trade Law, I will find the word. So, I clicked on the suggested link, and sure enough. In the online Russian Dictionary of English – Russian trade terminology, this:
“лишать права возражения, лишать сторону права ссылаться на какие-либо факты”
means “estop”. So what the heck? In for a penny, in for a pound. Capturing that very text, I went next to Alta Vista’s Babelfish, the online language translator, pitched that unpromising jumble into the open window and gave it a “Russian to English” request. Out came this: “to deprive the rights of objection, to deprive the side of the right to refer to any facts”.
With the Internet, all things are possible. Sometimes you just have to travel West to catch up to the sunrise. So to quote Peter Trueman when he was the first-ever news anchor on the newly-launched Global TV late news program:“That may not be news, but it sure is reality.”
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