Somebody once said that no good deed ever goes unpunished. (Googlegooglegoogle… Apparently it was Claire Boothe Luce. Well, certainly there are worse people to quote in a story-driven blog than a doyenne of mass market communications.)

Harking back to my previous update, the day after I carted five large boxes of mostly military books, newly retired from my library, over to Ottawa’s Perley-Rideau Veterans Health Centre (PRVHC), I received an e-mailed message from them. After a cheery introduction (“Your boxes of books were passed on to me this morning. I peeked in the boxes and they are beautiful books to be sure!”), they got down to business:

“Could you please tell me to whom you spoke regarding this donation as we do not usually accept hardcover books for our library, and I would like to know if there were special circumstances associated with this donation. In our residents’ library, we have very little room left for new books; and also, the residents and their spouses usually find these books too heavy to pick up, hold and read.”

Well poop. I had a couple thoughts after I read this, first of which was the question: How could I have gotten such an enthusiastic response to my initial telephone overtures on the one hand when this message, on the other hand, makes it pretty clear that not only do they not have room for more books, they don’t want any hardcovers at all?

That last was especially disappointing to hear. Several of the books I had passed along were of the “coffee table” variety – big hardbound albums with lots of colour and black-and-white photos, battlefield maps and the like. Included were several collections of things like the best of the wartime picture magazines, Signal and Adler, produced and distributed respectively by the German army and the German air force for the same ends as the US wartime military published and distributed the more widely known Stars and Stripes, and Yank – propaganda for “our side”, whether your comrades wore khaki or field grey, flew a P-51 Mustang or a Ju-87 Stuka, or favoured Betty Grable’s legs or Leni Riefenstahl’s curls* as their choice of pin-up.

* Speaking of whom, read on after this item.

There were also massive biographies of several of the War’s great Allied leaders and generals: Churchill, Montgomery, Patton, Bradley. No lightweight volumes, to be sure, but as weighty with detail as they were with the actual amount of paper required to tell their stories.

And (and I know this admittedly is a bit of a stretch) in the back of my mind was the thought that some of the dwindling numbers of WWII vets in particular might find some information specific to their own service in the war, and share it with their families and visitors.

(“Look Pollyanna – when sunlight shines on these crystal-shaped pieces of plain glass, it makes rainbows on the wall!”)

But the final gentle kick was in the letter’s concluding paragraph:

“If you leave them with us, please know that we cannot guarantee they will be placed in the Library. We sometimes donate books to other organizations, we sometimes have an internal book sale to raise funds for resident activities and services.”

Have you seen the movie, Lilies of the Field? There’s a scene where Homer (Sidney Poitier) Smith and his Mexican helper, who are well along in building their adobe church, watch as a huge flatbed truck rolls onto their little job site with a load of high-quality bricks that a local contractor has decided to donate to them. Homer and his helper scratch their heads and conclude, “Well, I guess we could crush them to make mortar”, which reduces the donor – who drove the truck onto the site – to a spluttered, “Crush them… but this is brick!”

In seeking out the Perley-Rideau, I had hoped to give the books to people who would appreciate them for much more than a minuscule portion of their monetary value at a book sale, or by fobbing them off in bulk to someone who makes a business of selling used books. To read the suggestion that they might ultimately wind up going for that purpose was more than a little disappointing. After all, I could have done that myself.

But the PRVHC message did end on a slightly more – for me – optimistic note that at least some of the hundreds of books might wind up in places closer to what I had been hoping:

“Sometimes staff, volunteers, residents, family members take books that are out on display back to their homes for their own use and enjoyment.”

My reply was to express, gently, my disappointment, but to repeat a note I had put in an accompanying cover letter – the donation came with no strings attached.

End of story. (It’s my blog and I’ll whine if I want to.)

= = =

(Disclaimer: I am not, nor have I ever been, a member of the Nazi Party, original or neo.)

Now here’s a movie credit you don’t see every day. It shows up on Amazon.com as the list of people who brought to the screen a movie I just ordered, now that it’s finally come out in a Special Edition DVD:

“by Leni Riefenstahl, Adolf Hitler, Sepp Dietrich, and Josef Goebbels (DVD - 2006)”

The movie is, of course, the propaganda masterpiece, Triumph of the Will. I have no idea why Hitler, Dietrich and Goebbels’ names are even on it, because it is Riefenstahl’s film. But I suspect they’re there for the same reason that Brian Mulroney’s insufferable Minister of Communications weasel Marcel Massé went to Hollywood for the 1989 Oscars when the National Film Board was presented an Honorary Oscar on its 50th anniversary, and proceeded to monopolize the traditional “I’d like to thank…” microphone time normally accorded the people who actually put the product together. Hitler and Goebbels, just like all the people with pockets who bankroll artists, obviously feel they’re every bit as eligible for recognition as the genius who realizes the work.

That still doesn’t explain Dietrich’s presence on the list. For anyone not up on the movers and shakers of the Third Reich, he was best known as a field commander for the Waffen SS, a highly mobile elite division in the German Army that was often the spearpoint of the Nazis’ feared blitzkrieg attacks. He is also generally held up as the man behind the “Malmedy Massacre” of over 80 US soldiers taken prisoner during the early hours of the December 1944 Battle of the Bulge. But in 1936? He was head of a unit called the Liebstandardte. A good friend of both Hitler and Goebbels, to be sure, but I’m still puzzled about why he appears in the credits of Triumph of the Will.

I might as well confess here and now that I am an unabashed Leni Riefenstahl groupie (a virtual fan, I guess that would have to be, now that she’s passed on – after reaching the venerable age of 101). My small Riefenstahl print collection is presently home to her rather hefty memoirs and an excellent biography of her by Audrey Salkeld. And my Riefenstahl film collection has exactly three titles in it: the aforementioned Triumph of the Will; Olympia, her stunning documentary on the 1936 Olympics in Berlin (where a black US sprinter named Jesse Owens stamped “Paid in Full” to Hitler’s claims for the mastery of the Aryan race by waxing the teutons with an astonishing performance that saw three world records fall and a fourth tied as he – Owens – captured one team and three personal gold medals in a span of 45 minutes! And in the eventual spirit of forgive and forget, in 1984 a street in Berlin just south of the Olympic stadium was named Jesse Owens Alle; and the Jesse Owens Realschule/Oberschule is a local high school.); and a documentary film about her by Ray Muller, with the fascinating title, The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl.

The documentary covers her pre-war celebrity as a dancer and actress and, indeed, as the main rival to Marlene Dietrich for the title of Germany’s most popular entertainer, her wartime service to the Nazis as a film-maker, and her late-in-life fascination with scuba diving and Africa’s Nuba people. Of her films for the Nazis, and her post-war castigation for same, Riefenstahl steadfastly maintained she was neither an ardent Party member, nor was she even aware of their malevolent side until almost the end of the War. She argued that she simply made – apolitically – her films the best way she could. The “horrible” part of the documentary’s title, of course, arose post-war when she was widely condemned as a strongly pro-Nazi artist, especially for Triumph of the Will, which portrayed Hitler and company in a profoundly sympathetic, indeed almost worshipful, light.

The dissipating haze of six-plus decades since the War’s end has pretty well seen Riefenstahl restored to her position as the architect of one of the finest pieces of propaganda ever committed to celluloid. That it happened to be about one of mankind’s greatest evils was just her rotten luck.

But whether you’re a film student, or merely someone with an interest in a unique story about a unique film-maker, the Ray Muller documentary is certainly worth a watch. And if the idea of viewing film purely as stunning art appeals to you, you will be hard-pressed to find anything that comes even close to her two masterworks. Triumph of the Will and Olympia, to take just one example, will immediately silence anyone who argues in favour of colourizing black-and-white film.

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Ottawa Public Library – Dart and Laurel (with apologies to the Columbia Journalism Review)

Recently, I travelled virtually to the Ottawa Public Library’s web site to reserve a book. This online service is outstanding. You first search the book under one of several – even half-remembered – options, for example, title, author, keywords, etc. You click on your nearest branch and when the book arrives there, you receive a phone call at home giving you a week to come and pick it up. The system even tells you how many people are ahead of you in the “I would like to reserve this book” queue.

In my case, however, I wasn’t even allowed through the cyber front door because it was time, I was told, for my library card to be renewed. (The logic of having to appear in person to renew a tool you use most often via the internet escapes me, but the onscreen message at least came with a “Contact us” link that included a phone number.)

Within seconds, I was speaking to a person who turned out to be most helpful. She explained the personal renewal was required in the event you had any outstanding overdue book fines, or your personal information had changed in the year since your last renewal.

(For several other reasons, I still don’t entirely agree that this policy requires a personal appearance, but at least they have a policy, and someone with the patience to explain it to me, politely, over the phone.)

She then asked me what book I was trying to reserve. When I told her, there was a pause of about six seconds, after which she asked, “Branch?” “Alta Vista,” I replied. Another pause – four seconds or thereabouts. “OK,” she said, “I’ve reserved it for you. You’re first on the list and they have it at the Alta Vista Branch so it shouldn’t take more than a day or two. When you go pick it up, you can renew your card at the same time.”

I thanked her very much, but she hung up before I could ask her if she might consider serving as the inaugural Dean of a new Faculty of Client Services that I would be prepared to propose to every Library School in Canada.

Swift, courteous, efficient. Problem identified; problem solved. What in heaven’s name is this woman doing in Ottawa in the year 2006?

Alas, my follow-up experience was not pleasant.

Within 24 hours, my phone’s voicemail was in possession of the automated message telling me my book was waiting for me. So off I went to pick it up.

When I got to the checkout counter, the person behind the counter (let’s call him the weaselly little turd, just to ensure there is no confusing him with the person with whom I had dealt the day before), looked at the title and cover illustration, and offered this unsolicited commentary: “I hate reading alternate history novels by people like this guy and Harry Turtledove and such. They’re always so ‘America rah rah’ and blah blah blah… waste of reading time.”

Now what I should have said was, “Well thank you Sammy Sunshine. But you know what I hate? I hate people who feel they have the right to pass judgement on my choice of recreational reading material… and most especially when they work in a library.” Then what I should have done was reach across the counter and pull his face forward towards the book until Conquistador, by S.M. Stirling utterly filled his field of view. Then I should have added, “You might want to look at ‘The Peshawar Lancers’, by the same author. It’s a lavishly descriptive novel of alternative history set during the Raj – the period of British Colonialism in India. There might be Americans in it, but they’re peripheral players, at best. Now if you’ll just give me my book and take yourself away from the counter here where you actually deal with people and maybe consider instead re-directing your library career into the lively and challenging sub-major of dusting the stacks, I’m sure absolutely everybody will be just delighted.”

That’s what I should have said. Instead, I managed a wan smile, took my book and left. (I’m already a couple chapters into it. It’s going to be a great summer read!)

Damn my Canadianness, anyway.

= = =

“Beginning tomorrow, I’ll be working on making my political career toast.” :

"’Beginning tomorrow, I'll be working for Pointe-aux-Trembles, beginning tomorrow I'll be working for Quebec and beginning tomorrow I will be working for the country of Quebec,’ Boisclair told jubilant supporters.”

(Newly-elected Québec MLA for Pointe-aux-Trembles and leader of the [provincial] separatist Parti Québécois, André Boisclair, celebrating the August 14 by-election win that finally got him a seat in Québec’s provincial “National Assembly”. Reported at CTV.ca, August 15)

= = =

Um…

(News sentence from the mouth of Nancy Wilson, CBC-TV Newsworld, August 14: “Our top story: A ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah appears to be holding although there have been several reported skirmishes”.)

Let’s put it together, shall we? “Ceasefire” is an English-language compound word that means, literally, “stop shooting”. The quantity of fire is irrelevant. If it is “any”, then there is no “ceasefire”. Got it?

Really glad I could help. Call me anytime.

You flaming idiots.

= = =

Pet peeve time!

I’ve been buying a wave of DVDs and CDs recently, and I have a whine about the way they are packaged. Given that they’re all shrink-wrapped anyway, is it really necessary to stick a strip of unbelievably adhesive “security seal” tape on three edges of the product’s case before the shrink wrap goes on?

(The correct answer is “no”.)

Because when you peel off the security seal tape, you inevitably leave behind the band of adhesive that fails to come off with it. And that little strip is so powerfully glue-like, I swear you could stick a DVD or CD case up merely by pressing it against the wall. Which also means, of course, that it will fuse itself to any piece of paper or wayward cat fur clumps that, tumbleweed-like, happen to be in the vicinity of your recently unwrapped latest bit of home entertainment.

= = =

And on a musical note, here are a couple recommendations, depending on your mood:

The soundtrack for Grosse Point Blank. When I really enjoy a movie, I almost always find that its soundtrack brings it all back simply by sliding the disc into the CD player. This movie is a quirky black comedy about a contract killer (John Cusack) who returns home to attend his high school graduating class’s tenth reunion. Minnie Driver plays a woman he intended to take to their prom night, but never picked up. The movie is their first meeting in a decade. It won’t be entirely a happy reunion and the dialogue for these scenes just crackles with wit. Dan Aykroyd plays a rival contract killer who is trying to persuade Cusack to abandon his lone-wolf approach to his profession and join a syndicated group of guns for hire that he, Aykroyd, is trying to put together. And Alan Arkin has a hilarious turn as Cusack’s therapist, who knows what his client does for a living and yet who tries to bring normal therapy regimens to bear in order to help him deal with his issues. (This may be where the idea for the Billy Crystal / Robert de Niro twin pics, Analyze This and Analyze That found its roots.)

The music matches the film’s wild roller coaster of emotional bounces back and forth between the mundanity of a high school reunion and the vicious brutality of Cusack’s chosen profession. It flows from the lilt of Johnny Nash’s I Can See Clearly Now to quasi-punk new-wave pieces from bands like The Clash and The Violent Femmes. Those in the latter genre set a tempo reminiscent of those road movie scenes where all you see are the white lines on the pavement relentlessly clicking by to mark either the good guy’s drawing closer to what awaits him, or the sinister tension as the bad guy gains on him.

It’s a great sound track and, if you can imagine such a blend, a darkly hilarious film.

Light years away is the soundtrack for the movie Good Night and Good Luck, a relatively brief (it only runs 90 minutes) dramatization of a very public disagreement between CBS News’ Edward R Murrow and the House Un-American Activities Committee’s Joe McCarthy. Directed by George Clooney (who also has a minor role), the movie has a painfully obvious parallel agenda evident in dialogue lines like McCarthy’s mantra, “Well if you don’t agree with me, you must be a communist” **, and discussion about locking people up without following due process.

** From the Washington Post, Monday, August 14, 2006:
“By insinuating that the sizeable majority of American voters who oppose the war in Iraq are aiding and abetting the enemy, Vice President Cheney on Wednesday may have crossed the line that separates legitimate political discourse from hysteria.”

In one sequence that captures all too well Cheney’s – sorry, McCarthy’s – excesses, during one hearing he browbeats a luckless middle-aged black woman who had worked as a stenographer in a highly secure department and who had several “Secret” and “Top Secret” documents flow across her desk. The woman is plainly trying not only to understand the intensity of McCarthy’s grilling, she’s also plainly trying to get across to the Senator that she barely understood the text of the material she worked with, much less had any idea that it might be valuable to a foreign power. There are some very well rendered on-air editorials from Murrow where the label, “the Junior Senator from Wisconsin” is used like a club. McCarthy, in fact, only ever appears in actual documentary footage, which makes him all the scarier by eliminating any possibility that critics could accuse Clooney of over-dramatizing the Senator’s paranoia.

The soundtrack is billed as “music from and inspired by” the movie. In the film, there are a few scenes where the CBS staff around Murrow retire to a favourite, smoky watering hole to deal with the growing rift between Murrow and McCarthy, and the growing concerns of CBS chairman Bill Paley (played in a tour de force by Frank Langella). There are also transition shots where cast members either sit in the control room for, or simply pass by, a studio where a blues / jazz program is in progress. And it is this music, which comes in bare snips during the movie, that makes up the album. I call this my late-night-on-the-back-porch-third-glass-of-red-wine genre of music. Lots of stand-up bass… and you can almost hear thick, lazily drifting cigarette smoke in every song… People who are fans of singers like Julie London or Blossom Dearie will absolutely love this album. It’s riddled with standards like Straighten Up and Fly Right, How High the Moon and One for My Baby – not the originals, but covered gorgeously and lushly by a woman named Dianne Reeves.

Amazon.com’s summary of the album includes one editorial review that describes Reeves and her musicians as a “cool contralto, fronted by a quicksilver combo”. Mood and genre in exactly seven words. I’ll shut up about it now.

= = =

And finally, recalling a couple entries ago when I mentioned discovering how easy it is to upload photos, here’s a pair that relate to my typical work day. I’ve whined on several occasions about the concrete-and-stone “Garden of the Provinces and Territories” alleged-to-be-a-park that I pass through twice each day, whose entrances are now blocked by steel posts in preparation for the coming winter when they will be further barricaded by a heavy chain. Well, here it is in its early morning glory:



And here is the reason why, for all the griping I do about the execrable examples of government communication that cross my desk, I never complain about my physical space:



This is the view from my cubicle, in the afternoon when the sun has moved around behind the building in which I work. This is looking… oh, pretty well southeast (Montreal would be about a two-hour drive away along this line). The building in left centre with the new copper (not green) roof is the Supreme Court of Canada. To its right – with the green copper roof – is the Bank of Canada and to its right, the building with the three-storey lid whose tiny windows look like little black spots is the National Library. Not to be confused with the building farther left that also sports a “hat” – that’d be the Radisson Hotel with its revolving restaurant.

Until next time.

It’s probably as much a reflection of the simple fact of my age as it is of anything else, but when I sit, remote in hand, flipping mindlessly around the television dial (actually, calling the remote-directed channel run “flipping around a dial” is also a reflection of my age, but I digress), I will always be brought to an abrupt halt by anything about Hiroshima.

Given that the anniversary of the bombing has just passed, it’s no surprise that several related programs cropped up over the past few days, but one of the most compelling was a feature-length documentary that ran on CBC-TV’s “The Passionate Eye” the evening of August 7.

Here’s how its bumpf appears at one of the CBC’s websites:

“It was the defining moment of the 20th Century - the scientific, technological, military, and political gamble of the world's first atomic attack. This drama-documentary attempts to do what no other film has done before - to show what it is like to live through a nuclear explosion, millisecond by millisecond.

Set in the three weeks from the first test explosion in New Mexico to the eventual dropping of the bomb, the action takes viewers into the room where the crucial political decisions are made; on board the Enola Gay on her fateful voyage; inside the bomb as it explodes; and on the streets of Hiroshima when disaster strikes.

Parallel storylines interweave, unfolding the action from both US and Japanese perspectives, and revealing the tensions and conflicts in the actions and minds of people who were making history. Special effects recreate the reality of the mission - even going inside the workings of the bomb – and archive film replays the horrific aftermath.”

That description doesn’t do it justice. “Horrific”, for example, falls far short of describing the program’s dramatization of what followed the bomb’s detonation. I don’t know the word or words, in fact, but so [a word far beyond “horrific”] was it, I had to turn off after watching a scene where a young mother sat by helplessly after trying unsuccessfully to pull her children from the rubble of their shattered home. Badly injured herself, she could do nothing as an encroaching fire first approached, then consumed her unseen shrieking daughter, the mother all the while apologizing through her tears for being a “bad mother” because she couldn’t pull her children free. The scene was a dramatization of a real survivor’s recollection. No doubt there were thousands, if not tens of thousands of similar tragedies in the seconds and minutes following the blast. But personalizing it to the level of one small family is a powerful and effective way of trying to get you to relate to the impact of that unimaginably terrible day in Hiroshima.

An estimated 90,000 killed outright? A total of 200,000-plus estimated dead by the end of the year? Numbers. But one mother and the agony of her shrieking dying child? Numbing. Your mind has to anaesthetize the intensity of the pain you feel.

Before that heart-ripping sequence, I had been mesmerized by the process of putting into action the decision to use the bomb. The program combined dramatizations with actual documentary footage and many post-war interviews, including several segments with Paul Tibbets, who piloted the Enola Gay, the US Army Air Corps’ B-29 – he named it for his mother – that carried the bomb to Hiroshima. Watching from the perspective of a viewer in 2006, I was at first appalled by what seemed to be an ice-cold clinical analysis by Tibbets of how he felt when the white-hot light of the explosion filled the cockpit of his bomber. His principal emotion, he honestly reported, was one of enormous relief that his mission had been successful. Period.

He also told of how often after the war he was savaged by critics and activists for his role in the world’s first nuclear attack.

And yet the program is sympathetic to the airmen. Another of Tibbets’ crew members on that mission said in a separate interview that, at 30,000 feet, they had no way of seeing the total destruction they had caused, not least because of the smoke, but also because the moment the bomb was released from the aircraft, Tibbets put the Enola Gay into a steep, fast 180-degree turn in order to build the aircraft’s speed up to receive what he had been told would be an especially violent shockwave. But in the intervening years, he (the other crewman) admits he hasn’t been entirely successful at coming to terms with what he knows now of the blast he helped unleash.

And then there’s the finality of a simple statement from the crewman who actually armed the bomb before it was released from the aircraft. The program goes into some detail of not only the process he followed, but also the fact that he practised it for fully half the previous day, and refused to wear gloves at 30,000 feet because he thought he needed to feel the arming parts with his fingers to be sure they were inserted correctly. His statement: “Afterwards, I realized I was the last person to actually touch the bomb. I hadn’t thought of that at the time.” Obviously, he thinks of it now. A lot.

I have read several books detailing the battles fought during the Pacific campaign in World War II by US Marines and Japanese soldiers on the Japanese-held islands of Guadalcanal, Okinawa, Tarawa, Iwo Jima and dozens of others, battles in which the Japanese fight-to-the-death ferocity increased the closer the campaign came to their homeland.

I commend to you in particular a recent book entitled “Flags of Our Fathers”, a highly evocative group biography of the six men who were the accidental subjects of arguably the Second World War’s most famous American photograph – the raising of the stars and stripes atop Mt Suribachi early in the battle for Iwo Jima. The book takes you through pre-war America in a look at the childhood of six boys who almost seem to have been chosen by script, so widely and completely do they represent the backgrounds of the ordinary men who fought that war, then follows them through the battle for the Island and its aftermath.

Some of the American sextet, in fact, never left Iwo Jima. They were killed as the battle went on for weeks after the famous flag-raising. The book follows the post-war popularization, indeed near-deification, of the survivors and the widely varying degrees of success each had coming to terms (or not) with the process of becoming the idols that America would make of them. (The book’s author is the son of one of the flag-raisers.) If you’ve seen the William Wyler movie, “The Best Years of Our Lives”, you will recognize that this book walks a similar path in exploring the difficulty of returning to “ordinary” life after the brutality that these men had lived with as “ordinary” during much of the time since their enlistments. Not surprisingly, the image-laden “Flags of Our Fathers” is presently in production as a movie under the direction of Clint Eastwood. I expect it to be an especially wrenching film experience.

But my point? “Little Boy”, the innocuously nick-named Hiroshima bomb, left San Francisco aboard the USS Indianapolis just two hours (!) after the successful atomic bomb test at the Trinity test site. From the comfort of 2006, it is easy to castigate US President Harry Truman’s unseemly haste in setting in motion the chain of events that would lead, just days later, to the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But from the perspective of a war-weary US home front, where mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters had several times seen newsreel images of Pacific Island beaches awash in the blood and bodies of dead marines, it is also easy to understand why even today the twin detonations are – not dismissed – but certainly understood and accepted by many survivors as the price of ending that war without suffering the huge number of American casualties that were forecast had it proven necessary to invade Japan.

Several years ago, while visiting the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington DC, I stood in a silent, reverently lit but almost empty gallery and watched, discreetly, while an elderly Japanese man gingerly approached and then, ever so hesitantly, reached up to touch the nose of the Enola Gay. He displayed no emotion whatsoever.

An estimated 90,000 killed outright. A total of 200,000-plus estimated dead by the end of the year. Numbers. But to touch, to physically touch the messenger of God-only-knows what memories you now harbour. Numbing. Your mind surely has to anaesthetize the intensity of the pain you feel.

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When you live in Ontario and work in Quebec, probably the single most depressing day of the year – workwise – is the first Monday in August.

It’s a holiday in Ontario, and it is generally called by an only-in-Canada title for a celebration – the “Civic Holiday”. (Who else but a Canadian would celebrate civic-ness with its own holiday?)

But for me, it means that my better half is enjoying a day off while I have to rumble out of bed early on a beautiful temperate morning that promises a perfect summer’s day, and drag myself down streets that are almost painfully deserted en route to my bus stop. Just me and, for company, some frisky squirrels and loud early morning arguments among a few crows in the treetops.

Then, of course, I discover that OCTranspo is running on a holiday schedule, which means that instead of a bus coming along every ten minutes, one shows up every hour in the early morning. And also, of course, the bus I take is one that crosses the river into Québec so when it finally arrives it is chock full of people who, like me, have to work on Ontario’s Civic Holiday.

And we’re all surlier than hell for two reasons. First because, as already noted, we’re on our way to work and have all arrived at our bus stops by walking along early morning streets that are so quiet, we heard the snores through the open windows of our neighbours’ homes. And second, because the bus is so crowded with Québec-bound workers, the only people lucky enough to have grabbed a seat are those who boarded very early along the once-every-hour-or-so route.

(Now to be fair, my wife did offer to get up on this year’s Civic Holiday morning and drive me to work. So technically, I probably have abrogated my right to a full-throated whine about the commuting portion of my two-topic complaining. But I opted for bonus husband points by letting her sleep in instead.)

And to be equally fair, I get my own back every June 24th – St-Jean-Baptiste Day – when Quebec workers (and federal government workers like me whose cubicles are in the province) have a holiday that the rest of the country doesn’t. But that’s part of the end-of-June-early-July time when it feels like the whole country’s vacationing anyway, even people at work. A month later, it’s a lot lonelier to be among the few people in Ottawa who actually have to go to work because the statutory holiday where my house is doesn’t cross the river to where my office is. To make the knife cut even more deeply, all the sources I normally engage as part of my job are all based on the Ottawa side of the river, so there was zero material on hand even when OC Transpo finally did get me to work.

= = =

Righting a wrong

Baby ducklings whose brains were not reduced to putty by my last entry will recall I whined about having to pay more at my local Thai take-out the day after the federal Goods and Services Tax (GST) had been reduced a solitary percent by the Harper government. But not only did I have to pay more, I was faced with an entire counter staff telling me that my recollection of what I had been paying every week for several months was wrong.

Well, someone’s ears must have been burning because the following week, after I’d muttered about it here in this little online place, I walked in and suddenly found myself the centre of attention at that same counter.

In very short order, I was told that the staff had met after the lunch rush died down that day – just because I had seemed so sure of the amount I had been paying. And sure enough, I had been overcharged for an item on my first post-GST reduction visit. Apologies were unanimous and vigorously expressed, and I was handed a refund personally, with yet another apology, by the cashier who had originally rung in the slightly higher amount and then joined in the “No, you must be mis-remembering” chorus. There seemed to be some genuine concern that I had been seriously offended by their 16-cent mistake.

We remain friends, you’ll be glad to know. And Thai Fridays will go on with no further wondering on my part about exactly where the disconnect had occurred.

= = =

My family already knows the linguistic affection I harbour for the overuse of the word “virtually”, when it is virtually always “almost” that the user means.

They no doubt will be delighted to know that the snarly tone I use whenever it makes its oral or print appearance in something I am reading or listening to is slowly but surely being replaced by a new target: “on the ground”.

I’m sure it’s been around for longer than I have been noticing it, but it has only been in recent weeks that it has begun to trip my “What the hell do you mean?!!” wire. In many contexts, it is a phrase inserted so uselessly and so devoid of meaning that almost every sentence in which I’ve noted its use would suffer not a whit for its elimination, or its replacement with the single word, “there”. Consider these random citations from a quick search of Google News:

"As I was already on the ground in Lebanon, I decided to stay to put logistics in place, to make sure all of the aid is received by the people directly.” (The Vice President of the American University of Dubai, in al Jazeera online, July 24)

“Nir Rosen is one of a handful of extraordinary investigative reporters who offer English-literate readers the on-the-ground reality of the war in Iraq.” (book reviewer Michael Schwartz, Asia Times online, July 22)

"The intensity right now of the bombing is such that to send people there, even to send buses or armoured cars, we don't have that equipment on the ground." Then two sentences later: "Once they're on the boat there will be time to decide whether the flights have to take off right away, whether there might have to be an overnight. All of those logistical plans will be worked out by the teams on the ground.” (Canadian Foreign Affairs minister Peter MacKay, Winnipeg Free Press, July 18)

“It's called the fog of war and at this point it's better left to the experts on the ground to find the solutions.” (Editorial, Calgary Herald, July 20)

Try it. In MacKay’s quotes, “on the ground” can be replaced by “there”. In each of the others, when you delete it entirely, does the meaning change?

At least I can draw some consolation from the thought I am not alone. In the July 9 St John’s Telegram, columnist Jamie Baker rips the “sea of political bafflegab [and] well-worn clichés” used and overused by speakers of “official or professional jargon”. Of “on the ground”, he sarcastically notes: “As in, ‘We have people working on the ground to solve the problem.’ A great idea that works particularly well when dealing with soil-management issues.”

Now I will readily admit that it is an essential clarifying phrase in these sentences: (i) in a July 4 article in the Whitehorse Star describing the rescue of a pair of eagle nestlings: “A local resident saw the eaglets on the ground at around 5 p.m. and called the City of Whitehorse.” (ii) in a July 18 Globe and Mail preview of this year’s British Open golf tournament (I know, to purists, it’s “The Open”, period. But here in Canada, we’re on the verge of the 2006 Canadian Open and I offer “British” to avoid even an outside chance of someone’s mixing them up… but I digress): “There's going to be a lot of running the ball on the ground because you won't be able to stop the ball at the flag.” and (iii) here, in an article about Toronto rooftop gardens that appeared in the July 19 Halifax Chronicle-Herald: “Space on the ground is at a premium, and there are a lot of environmental benefits from green roofs."

But my family can take this as a heads-up. I am probably due to start yelling things like, “As opposed to ‘up in the air’???!!!” whenever this phrase shows up, as it increasingly seems to do so, in the utterly meaningless way of the above examples.

(But the consolation to them is that I’ve pretty well written off decrying the use of “virtually” when “almost” is meant. It’s virtually a lost cause.)

= = =

Spare, if you will, a passing thought for Floyd Landis and elite sport in general. Floyd is a US cyclist and was first across the finish line at this year’s Tour de France. (I am deliberately avoiding the use of the word, “winner” because as everyone now knows, Floyd twice tested positive for artificially high levels of testosterone. In other words, all evidence at present points to his having crossed the finish line “juiced”.)

One thing all the coverage has since made clear is that Floyd’s sin is nothing unique at that level of competitive cycling. Nor is it, for that matter, unknown in other elite level sports.

And when the dreaded first test return is positive (which, ironically, in a drug test is anything but!), then you hear some truly astonishing excuses as the accused bends him/herself inside out to show that his or her star in the lofty firmament of elite sports will not fade away. In Floyd’s case, he claimed he’s always been capable of naturally producing levels of testosterone up to ten times what is considered “normal”. Several callers who voiced their opinions during one of several phone-in radio shows aired after the failed second test was reported swore their absolute fealty to the belief that Landis has been the victim of a European (and probably French)-led conspiracy, because they saw their coveted trophy heading off once more in the hands of a hated American, in the first year after seven successive wins by another American (may his pee remain forever clean), Lance Amstrong.

But they are the last vestiges of a dying bleat. More and more athletes and sports governing bodies, including a great many Americans, are now taking a position that essentially involves a head-shake and a mumbled, “Too bad, Floyd; busted!”

But whether it changes, or even begins to change the sports culture of win-at-any-cost remains to be seen.

One thing that seems to be happening though, is a growing number of reports that argue the sports-watching public is getting sick and tired of riding the emotional roller coaster that follows the “Thrill of Victory” with the “Agony of Defeat”.

And if it continues for not too very much longer, I am afraid that even when competitors pass the drug tests, this ever more jaded public will inevitably conclude that it was because they, or their attending physicians, had developed better performance-enhancer masks. And I find that sad. Because as more and more of such events’ wins turn out to be tainted, there will come a last straw, when the public says, “Enough!” And the public will treat such competitors the same way they treat World Wrestling Federation competitors now – bad actors and good showmen, for sure, but “sportsmen” or “athletes”? Hardly.

= = =

And finally, I am embarking on a sad little exercise for me – reminiscent of that scene in “Ghost” where Whoopi “Oda-May” Goldberg has to part with a cheque for several million dollars in ill-gotten gains (not hers) by passing it over to a pair of nuns collecting for charity. She holds the cheque in a grip of iron and only releases it after yielding to the combined forces of a nun’s tugging on one end and Oda-May’s omni-present conscience – the ghost of the Patrick Swayze character – telling her over and over, and over, that she can’t keep it.

In my case, it’s a modest but four-large-box chunk of a lifetime’s collection of military books that I have to release. At home, we have simply run out of storage space and the camel’s back-breaking straw came when we made the move to convert a room that was part store-room into a bedroom / computer workstation space. So after a little research, I spoke to someone at Ottawa’s Perley-Rideau Veterans Hospital / residence and was told that such a contribution would be much welcomed into their library. I just know I’ll offload them from the dolly with not a little reluctance but, at the same time, just how many illustrated accounts of the Battle of Britain does someone really need to own?

We’ll soon be culling other sections of the home library as well and I undoubtedly have still to experience a few more twinges. But as my wife drove pointedly home in a recent conversation on the subject, how often have I opened any of our many do-it-yourself books recently? (Um… not once in the last five years.) Even the instructions for building a loft bed turned up on a most informative DIY website that included a great how-to video clip!

Can the world of Fahrenheit 451* be very far off?

* 1. "Monday burn Millay, Wednesday Whitman, Friday Faulkner, burn 'em to ashes, then burn the ashes. That's our official slogan."

* 2. “Is it true that a long time ago, firemen used to put out fires and not burn books?”

= = =

And finally (for real)…

On the subject of partings, recently my in-laws had to say good-bye to a much-loved family pet. Mac was a faithful-with-a-capital-F wheat-coloured little sort-of-terrier-looking dog who, when he finally left the family, was roughly 115 or thereabouts in comparable human years. To say he had a good long life is an understatement. In his final months, he simply started shutting down – sight, hearing, and what really brought his condition home: bladder control. Family vigilance went into high-alert-watch-you-don’t-step-on-Mac mode as Mac took to dropping and dozing usually smack in the middle of the most heavily travelled routes in whatever space he happened to be.

If he was suffering, he didn’t let on. (Unless you accidentally stepped on him, in which case he could still muster a pretty remarkable howl. Regrettably, I speak from experience.) But when the most elementary of tasks – a walk across the room, for example – finally became a study in lost brain-to-legs links, Mac’s family bowed to the inevitable truth of the signs.

In both our house and theirs, there are lots of photos of Mac, starting right from puppyhood when some days he was everywhere at once and possessed of a loud, razor-sharp single bark that would shatter glass – not to mention seriously startle everyone within earshot – to alert them that a visitor’s car had arrived in the driveway, or someone had just reached the front door. Spiritual grandfather to at least six cats with whom he shared his residence over the years, that’s the Mac everyone will remember.

Don’t believe everything you read. Some dogs do have souls.

Until next time.