Call this one, “So do you want to try ‘er out?” “No thank you!” or The Cimarron Kid… (No, not him – me.)

Recently yours truly and spouse went toilet shopping. There is, in Ottawa, a magnificently well-stocked hardware store that calls to mind the glory days before “hardware” became the domain of the impersonal big box giants like RONA and Home Depot. Preston Hardware, probably because it is physically located in the heart of Ottawa’s Little Italy community, which in turn is home to countless ceramic tradesmen and plumbing specialists who no doubt apprenticed to grandfathers who learned their trades in the Old Country, actually has a Bath Showroom. (Little Italy is also heavily populated by home winemakers and, on the day we were there, an enormous section of the warehouse was given over to literally tons of crated wine grapes in the process of being moved out into basements all over the Roman expatriates’ community.)

We had already done a preliminary online search and had seen a model called a Cimarron, made by a company called Kohler. And it turns out that the Cimarron, when we gave a Preston Hardware customer rep a general description of the features we were looking for, was the very first one he showed us.

It’s hard to listen to a toilet salesman talk up its features without snickering. We were even invited to “try it out” when he talked to us about its “comfort” features. (I toyed with the idea of dropping my pants in mid-showroom – given that one is usually in that configuration when using the fixture at home – but fortunately that “toying” lasted all of about half a second.)

There was a pregnant pause while he referred to the larger diameter water inflow pipe that ensured the… [pause]… “waste” is more effectively carried off. He also referred to the larger diameter of the seat that, he said (and this is a direct quote), “lets you get at all your bits more easily”.

Ohhhh-kay.

But you have to admit, doesn’t that look like something Enzo Ferrari had his engineers whip up on their lunch hours?

Something you don’t truly appreciate in toilet design until you see something like this in a showroom is that clearly, the outside of a one-piece toilet is going to be infinitely easier to keep clean than the standard two-piece toilet where the tank is mounted separately atop the rear of the bowl and creates a bunch of hard-to-scrub nooks and crannies. As much as a toilet can be, the Cimarron is a really sleek work of toilet design. All smooth curves with no hard angles or narrow gaps between one part and another.

Another feature (I never even knew a toilet could do this!) is that if the seat or lid, or both, accidentally slip as you’re lowering them (something that usually only happens at 3am when the last thing you want resonating through your home is a house-wide slam that inevitably is amplified by the bell-shaped bowl into an echoing boom), a – for want of a better word – brake takes hold and gently lowers the seat and lid to the porcelain, where they meet soundlessly.

So impressed were we that we bought and have already taken delivery of two of these commodious Cadillacs and, at this writing, they sit in our garage awaiting installation.

= = =

Memo to Lynn Johnson… maybe you could revisit the “Comic” part of "Comic strip".

Background: I have met and spent a full day in the company of “For Better or for Worse” comic strip author and artist Lynn Johnson. She is probably one of the nicest people in the business and all too happy to return to the world some measure of the rewards she has earned through her daily syndicated comic strip. (As a memento of that day, I have a large, board-mounted poster of one of her cartoons over which she has written, “To Mike: For Better or Perverse”, and signed it. It’s a long story.) So the following, therefore, is not meant to disparage Lynn the person.

That being said, is it really necessary to inject yet another hammering reminder into your comic strip that people die? As I write this, she has just introduced what appears to be the quiet passing of the father of the strip’s lead character, Elly Patterson. Long-time followers of “For Better or for Worse” will recall other deaths and reality bites that have found their way into her strip: the heroic death of the family’s first sheepdog, Farley; the revelation that Lawrence, a friend of Elly’s son, Michael, is gay; the death of at least a couple of peripheral old folks, including Grandma Marian, Elly’s mother; the sexual assault of one of Elly’s daughters at her workplace.

And none without plaudits. Lynn has been hailed for both the courage and compassion she showed when she dealt with any of these storylines. But c’mon, do you really want to be known as the comic strip artist who reduced a continent to tears when you killed off your strip’s beloved family dog? (Lynn would happily answer yes. Her strip is about life, she would say, and dealing with life means dealing with its end.) And so now (at this writing) we seem to be on the verge of suffering the death of Elly’s Dad, her kids’ Grandpa Jim, and the strip’s long-suffering source of countless glib observations on things that bug and amuse senior citizens. He’s even got his own link on the strip’s website that chronicles his service in the Royal Canadian Air Force, including black-and-white photos of the aircraft he worked on while serving during the war.

At times like this in the life of this strip, I think it’s a little too real. A comic strip is, for me, a momentary escape from the realities of life, not one more reinforcement that eventually we are all bound for the destination that Hollywood's Woody Guthrie bio-pic called simply “Glory”, and which William Shakespeare describes thus:

“We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots. Your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service – two dishes, but to one table. That's the end.”
(Hamlet, Act IV, Sc 3)

Lynn herself has let it be known that she intends to draw (no pun intended) the curtain on the strip one day not too far off, perhaps as early as 2007. I just hope she’s not pulling a Blackadder on us and is intending to eliminate of every last one of the For Better or for Worse characters between now and then.

= = =

And finally, memo to Jan Wong…

Jan Wong is a well known and quite-well-regarded-by-many writer who likely will forever be first remembered for a series of columns she wrote for the Globe and Mail under the title and theme, “Lunch with Jan Wong”. In it, she recounted interviews – and food orders – savoured with a wide variety of celebrities held over (no surprises for guessing) a lunch table. Recently, in the wake of the Dawson College shootings in Montreal, she wrote a column in which she (according to the same Globe and Mail) “suggested Quebec's francophone culture may have contributed to the Dawson College shootings” and that shooters like the Dawson College killer and Marc Lépine, the man pulling the trigger in the 1989 École Polytechnique massacre “were people of foreign background, not 'pure laine' Quebecers, and their anti-social behaviour stemmed from their disaffection with Quebec society and its reluctance to welcome outsiders”.

The column drew the rather unusual response of sternly critical letters from both the Premier of Quebec, Jean Charest, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Ms Wong then took it one step further and wrote a second column, in which she claimed the political heavyweights’ missives had been “crass” and “opportunistic” attempts at securing votes in the province. Said the writer, "In Stephen Harper's case, judging from his letter, I don't think he actually read the article. I think that they want votes in Quebec and they see this as a cheap and easy way to get it. Dump on a journalist." She then went to a place I thought people only go after they have exhausted all reasonable argument – she bleated racism: "’In a way, I think it might prove what I was trying to get at. I mean I'm a Quebecer,’ Wong said.” "Of course when this happens, I'm not. I'm actually one of those people in the middle that I was talking about. So, all a sudden I'm Asian."

Now admittedly that is a fairly lengthy introduction to what, as it turns out, is a pretty pithy little observation about who’s really being crass, because the article about Ms Wong concludes with this Catch 22: “Wong refused to discuss the content of her piece. ‘I didn't want to talk about what I wrote because what I wrote is out there.’ ‘If people don't want to agree, that's fine. I welcome a debate.’” (Globe and Mail online, Fri, 22 Sep 2006)

At what point, I wondered, do “I didn't want to talk about what I wrote” and “I welcome a debate” intersect? Well, it’s like this – they don’t.

So... oh yes, my memo:

Have a nice lunch, Ms Wong. Preferably somewhere else.

Until next time…

Well heck! I had a brilliantly comical post all set about the recent explosion of anger in the Muslim community, and its attendant outbreaks of violence all around the world as the result of the Pope’s comments suggesting they were a tad violent… and how the irony of it all seemed to be lost on them.

It was great, but you’ll have to trust me on this because on his September 19 comedy “fake news” show, “The Daily Show”, Jon Stewart did this brilliantly comical piece about the recent explosion of anger in the Muslim community, and its…

So rather than incur a web-wide condemnation as a plagiarist (even though mine was in draft form before Stewart’s was aired), I have voluntarily canned the brilliantly comical post I had all set about the recent explosion of anger in the Muslim community, and its…

Because nothing flies faster through the Internet than worldwide condemnation.

I will give Stewart one up for a zing I hadn’t thought of. He replayed video of a key section of the Pope’s speech (at the University of Regensburg) that triggered the rage, then added his own observation to the effect that for slamming another religion, there’s nothing that beats doing it in German.

= = =

I’m afraid I’m wasting your tax dollars at the start of every working day. Here’s how:

I am part of a unit that appears every morning at a meeting called “QRT”. Depending on whom you ask, it stands for either Quick Response Team or Quick Response Time. Its goal is to review anything that has lit up in that day’s morning media coverage that might blow up in a Minister’s face during Question Period later in the day.

For me (and this is where your wasted tax dollars come in), there is a significant problem in that the entire rest of the QRT team speaks French, often from beginning to end of the meeting.

Now I have a not-bad grasp of French vocabulary, and I am able to get hold of what’s being said – or what’s been written – en français, so long as I can hear the words articulated, or read them on paper. But francophones speak exactly the same way as do anglophones. Sometimes in slang, sometimes in a very low voice, sometimes “mumbly”, and sometimes two or more people at the same time. None of those circumstances is conducive to hearing the vocabulary. So I find that after a few minutes, the meeting’s chat begins to wash past me as alien sound. (Kind of like this blog… right? But I digress.)

I live in quiet fear that I’ll be distracted from the lulling drone one day and asked a question, like a truant high schooler caught in class with homework incomplete. Recently, for example, one of the news stories under discussion was about Coast Guard workers whose shifts include time spent bouncing all over the ocean in those inflatable Zodiac boats. They’ve complained about repetitive strain-induced back injuries, which defaults it to one of our files – occupational health and safety. And even though the news clipping was published in English, it was being discussed in our other official language. And I can just imagine what would have happened had I suddenly been thrown a question. As everyone turned to look expectantly at me, I would have blinked a couple times, mentally swirled myself back into a swift recollection of the recent tonalities that entered my brain, greenlighted on “Zodiac” and replied, “Uhhhh… Gemini”.

Like I said, I’m wasting your tax dollars.

= = =

One of the nice things about actually being read is that occasionally a BD regular will drop a note in reply to something he or she read here. 1. In the wake of my previous entry’s note that left up in the air the name for a seven-book sequence (that is, the seven-book equivalent of the three-book “trilogy”), a friend wrote to advise it is called a “heptalogy”, and sure enough, Google’s “define” feature even cites Narnia in this reference from Answers.com, which sources Wikipedia (And you just know it’s official when it opens, “An heptalogy…”):

“Heptalogy: An heptalogy is a set of seven works of art that comprise a common storyline. Trilogies and Tetralogies are the most common, and the only heptalogies known to general audiences are the Harry Potter series of books and the Chronicles of Narnia. Another well-known heptalogy is Stephen King's Dark Tower. (This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors.)”

2. In the wake of the same entry’s recollection of a long-ago visit to Oxford’s Eagle and Child pub (“The Bird ‘n’ Baby”), another friend and BD regular recounted a spectacularly serendipitous experience he and his wife had in that same city once. It began with their waiting streetside to flag a cab to take them to Magdalen College to do some research into the writings and theology of CS Lewis.

As things transpired, the cabbie who stopped immediately recognized them as tourists and, when they offered the information about why they were heading to Magdalen, he promptly informed them he was not just a cabbie, he was currently serving as the President of Oxford’s CS Lewis Society. Their day became a full-blown Lewis / Tolkien and the Inklings tour of Oxford as they wound up visiting their respective homes, their graves and many Oxford sites they touched in some way (and yes, there was time for a pint at The Bird ‘n’ Baby), all the while getting a voluminous running commentary about Lewis the man and Lewis the theologian. At the end of it all, the cabbie allowed as how he had also enjoyed the day so much, he wasn’t going to charge his passengers. (But I have nothing if not classy friends. They thanked him with a generous payment anyway, and asked him, if he wouldn’t accept it for himself as a thank you for what he had just treated them to, that he extend a complimentary ride offer to the next couple fares he picked up while once again wearing his “cabbie” hat. Somewhere in Oxford now, there’s a probably-retired cabbie with a very good impression of Canadian tourists.)

Baby Duck… sharing more than just a cheap whine among friends.

= = =

And finally… I think this is very much a sign (a) of the times, and (b) of just how far I’ve moved behind the times, because it actually took me several minutes to connect the dots and relate the sign’s message to an actual need for its being there in the first place.

By way of a brief bit of background, our office complex, as I think I’ve mentioned before, is a four-tower conglomeration called Place du Portage (Phase I through IV). Sandwiched between two of them (III and IV) is a not-too-ugly, generously treed and picnic-tabled courtyard that almost everyone in our department knows as the “L’escale Courtyard”, because a tremendously busy little coffee / lunch counter (L’escale)’s exit sits right beside a doorway into the courtyard. Another side of the courtyard is separated by an imposing wooden fence from a children’s play area that belongs to a day-care centre located in the complex. (It is also home to one of the single most puzzling sculptures I’ve ever seen – a series of ordinary objects like a chair, a table and a couple of odd symbolic representations of something or other, each mounted on a steel pole that has them all about 15 feet off the ground.)

To the sign. It’s a new addition to the courtyard and, in both English and French, says exactly this:



(I have an especially brilliant colleague who took about 30 seconds to make these links to what took me a good five minutes before my own mental “Aha!” light went on.)

- Trees attract squirrels.
- Picnic tables attract lunchers.
- Lunchers also attract squirrels.
- Squirrels, especially in the Fall when their tiny psyches are focused as much as, if not more so, on storing as they are on eating, are frequently given nuts or bread that a well-intentioned luncher might have brought in to provide himself a bit of lunchtime entertainment (and the squirrels a bit of lunch). But instead of eating the freebies, the soon-to-be snowbound rodents will often seek out hiding places for them instead.
- A big wooden fence that separates people from lots of hiding places – a large sandbox, for example – is going to seem to squirrels like an ideal place to cache nuts. (The play area is also home to patches of grass along its edges in which squirrels can dig.)

So here’s my theory: an energetic – and allergic – child recently dug up one such buried squirrel treasure, and that was the trigger for the rather convoluted string of dots that connects kids to allergies to animals that are fed by other people in the courtyard. And hence this somewhat circuitous admonition's appearance in our courtyard.

And the fact that it -- and this explanation -- have now found their way into this forum’s rambling paragraphs sure makes it an effective message, wouldn’cha say?

A la prochaine.

Just getting back to the post-summer routine… grudgingly because it’s been a heck of a great summer – weatherwise – here in the nation’s capital.

And once again this year, my brother-in-law and I were hosted by our shared father-in-law in Ancaster, Ontario, home of the Hamilton Golf and Country Club (HGCC), site of the 2006 Canadian Open golf championship.

I’ve waxed poetic in this forum before about the HGCC, which is a very old golf course. It was designed to accommodate a game that, at one time, was played with wooden-shafted clubs and ball technology that was inconsistent at best, wildly wobbly at worst. And yet it still manages to challenge the world’s best players with their custom-made computer-engineered equipment. It does so precisely because it’s shorter and tighter than the monstrous stadium style tournament courses in vogue today that reward players who can slam the ball 320 yards off the tee, and which require merely passable accuracy that goes unpunished by generously wide landing areas.

Try any of that stuff at Ancaster and you’re going to find yourself in varieties of trouble you hadn’t even imagined. For starters, the Club starts growing its rough about six weeks out from the tournament’s start date. And the HGCC puts the “Holy f**k!!” in “rough”, let me tell you. It is possible, for example, to watch your ball, after it lands, roll to the edge of the fairway and just trickle off into the rough. It is then possible to walk to the exact spot you saw it roll off the short fairway grass, and yet not be able to find your ball in the rough at that very spot. The HGCC’s regular members, who probably shell out between $4 and $6 per ball, find this especially irritating.

The Club also significantly constricts its fairway landing areas for Canadian Open play. So the big hitters can no longer get away with simply powering the ball off the tee as hard as they can possibly drive it. Now they’ve got to find a thin ribbon of fairway that, in some cases, is barely ten yards wide. And even if accurate, being “long” off the tee is often the worst thing you can be. Because a couple of the holes – the finishing number 18 most famously -- are crossed by picturesque but vicious little winding creeks that lie precisely the distance that a seriously over-powered driver will typically send the ball. Try to fly 300 yards off the tee at Ancaster’s number 18 and you’ll need waders and a GPS to recover your ball. Laying up in front of the creek, as almost everyone does, forces players to hit a 195 – 210 yard second shot that separates the good golfers from the really good golfers.

And finally, the HGCC’s greens are among the most visually misleading anywhere. Distractions like downward sloping approaches or nearby ponds will often trick the unwary golfer into thinking a putt is going to roll or break in a certain direction when, in a fact a golfer only learns after years, if not decades, of playing the course that the path to the hole lies along a somewhat different line. My father-in-law told us that he was frequently watching a golfer line up a putt and it just killed him not to be able to shout to the golfer, “Give it two inches more to the left!” Or whatever. But he knew when the golfer was about to miss a putt. And unlike the golfer in question, my father-in-law never missed with the accuracy of his warning.

When the Canadian Open was last played there in 2003, one of the pros was interviewed after one of the early rounds and, in a couple of lavishly positive observations about the course, said he really liked it because it forced him to play golf. Period.

One thing I enjoy doing at a tournament that attracts many of the best golfers in the world is to spend some time at the practice tee. The golfers are often alone, but often are warming up under the watchful eyes of caddies, trainers, coaches, in addition to the hundreds of fans arrayed behind them.

One who never fails to fascinate me is a rangy Fijian named Vijay Singh, a golfer who is presently found among the world’s top five. He has a very specific set of rituals he goes through on the practice tee to tune himself up to playing vigour. He starts by spiking a sharpened club shaft into the ground right beside him, and at exactly the angle of the plane of his swing. Then he starts a series of casually repeated swings of, first, simply a club shaft with a weighted end, then a club that has a metal rectangle on its end, making it look like a flattened croquet mallet. Only after several swings of this device does he begin to swing a regular golf club.

Mr Singh is, bar none, the single most mechanical player I have ever seen. When he first teed off, I was standing alongside the fairway by the landing area of the golfers’ opening drives, positioned so as to see their second shots into the first green. But more than watching their actual shot making, I was fascinated by their pre-shot routines. Both Vijay and his caddie, as soon as they reached his ball, immediately drew out voluminous books of notes and diagrams of each hole on the course. The caddie then sought out a fairway-side marker with a number printed on it – the exact yardage to the front of the green. Vijay would already have learned the precise distance onto the green that the hole had been drilled. (I learned that the greens keepers, the previous day, in addition to drilling the hole for that day’s pin placement, will also have marked the green with a small white spot to indicate where the pin will be placed the next day.) Meanwhile, his caddie eyeballs the position of his ball on the fairway, and then paces the distance from the fairway marker to a position parallel to the resting golf ball. Then he jogs back to his pro, and tells him that his ball lies about 2 yards closer to the leading edge of the green than the, say, 126 yards stamped on the marker. So now Mr. Singh knows he’s got 124 yards to the front of the green, plus however many more yards onto the green the hole lies. To the foot, if not the inch.

Believe it or not, all pro golfers do all of that. What makes Vijay stand out, however, is that he checks, double checks and triple checks the numbers, matching the ones in his own notebook to those of the caddie in his notebook. In the days leading up to the tournament, he will have hit literally hundreds of golf balls with every club in his bag. Add that to the millions he’s hit in his career and he knows exactly how many yards he can send a golf ball with, for example, a full (hit with all his power) eight iron on a muggy day. In Canada. In early September.

But it’s not just individual idiosyncrasies that stand out. On every single hole on the course, positioned close to where the pros’ shots would be landing, there were tripod mounted laser-ranging devices. The moment a golfer’s ball lands and stops rolling, the operator aims it at the ball and gets a reading, to the thousandth of an inch (!) of exactly how long a drive the golfer has just hit. In a time span measured in single digits of seconds, that information is uploaded by satellite to the home website of the laser company and, from there, to the commentators’ booths that are located beside each green. (If the ball is smothered by the rough, helpful volunteers will already have marked the ball’s location with a thin metal rod with a small flag atop it. The laser-operator then gets his distance reading from the flag.) And that’s why people watching on TV are able to get sentences like, “That’s right, Bob. He’s got 207 yards left to reach the hole.” And as if that weren’t enough, in several locations on the course, there were people stationed alongside fairways with long poles on which were mounted anemometers, to give an exact reading of the wind speed and direction.

And as I watched all this technological deployment in action, all I could think was, “Doesn’t anybody just wet his finger, stick it up in the air and make his best guess any more?”

I think most Baby Ducklings are familiar enough with me by now to know that I am an inveterate fan of WWII aircraft. My work cubicle is festooned with metal models and poster-mounted photos of a great many – fighters and bombers alike. Hamilton’s Mount Hope Airport is home to the Canadian Warplane Heritage (CWH) museum and there are several flying restorations of some of the best known. On Saturday afternoon, while on the golf course and long before I saw them, I heard the powerful rumble of four Rolls Royce Merlin engines. There’s no other sound quite like it and right away I knew what was in the air. Then suddenly from above the trees, scant minutes after it would have taken off, roared the CWH’s Andrew Mynarski Memorial Lancaster. Its flight path took it directly over my head and at that moment, the former Los Angeles Rams' “Embraceable Ewes” cheerleading squad could have run naked across the Hamilton Golf and Country Club’s fairways and I would have had to have read about it in the next day’s newspapers.

(For the record, Jim Furyk won this year, placing him second only to Tiger Woods in world rankings and, possibly, at number 1 on the money winnings list for the current golf season.)

= = =

And lots o’ bits o’ this ‘n’ that:

(Disclaimer: I am not an inhuman SOB…)

But…

I noted (Oh my Lord, how can anyone with eyes and ears NOT have noted?) the sad case of the late JonBenét Ramsey’s exploding once again into the limelight in full, lurid and desperately pathetic Technicolor, in the wake of news that a rather bizarre murder confession had been made in the decade-old file.

So I will say one thing – and one thing only – about ongoing speculation during the past ten years that one or both of the child’s parents might have been involved in her death. As the media frenzy re-erupted amid all the latest confession / extradition / whoops-no-way-he-could’ve-done-it release and subsequent media breast-beating over their collectively riding this story like hounds to a fox, the surviving parent (the father) expressed his distress at being tarred with a label like “unnatural”. Well sir, to you I offer the thought that parents who make up and dress their six-year old daughter to look like a miniature hooker, and encourage her to learn and perform dance routines with moves that, short of actually taking off her clothes, are the typical struts of strippers, have unfortunately given up the right to argue with those who believe their parenting to be somewhat “unnatural”.

You don’t have to actually hit a child to be an abusive mother or father.

Thank you.

We now resume our regular quacking.

= = =

I guess we should be grateful (touch wood; run out in yard and hunt for four-leaf clovers…) that some would-be terrorists seem to be lacking in the SWOT analysis department:

- - -
Cdns. linked to Tamil Tigers arrested in U.S.
Updated Tue. Aug. 22 2006 6:42 AM ET
CTV.ca News Staff
Three Canadians are among a group of Tamil Tigers' supporters facing charges of conspiring to buy surface-to-air missiles from undercover agents in the United States. The three men visited New York from Canada to purchase weapons -- including Russian missiles, launchers and AK-47s -- which they allegedly planned to send back to rebel forces in Sri Lanka, allege U.S. officials.
- - -

The duplicate “allege” thing happening in that last sentence notwithstanding, just how, I wonder, does one go about shopping for Russian anti-aircraft missiles and Russian-made AK-47 assault rifles – in New York City?

The concept is so unreal -- it must have been a lot like this scene in Star Trek IV – the Voyage Home, where Kirk and company have time-traveled back to present-day San Francisco to find a breeding pair of humpback whales. Crew thingies Chekov and Uhura’s assignment was to hunt down a nuclear-powered navy ship, from whose reactor they would extract sufficient photon energy to power up their own starship’s engines.

Here they are, on a busy San Francisco street, looking for the nearest US navy dock:

[Uhura and Chekov are lost and looking to find an aircraft carrier]

Chekov: "Can you tell us where the naval base is in Alameda? It's where they keep the nuclear wessels."
Woman passer-by: "Oh, I'm not sure. I think it's across the bay, in Alameda." (She walks on).
Chekov [to Uhura]: That’s vat I said – Al-ya-meda.
Uhura: "Right. But where's Alameda?"

[Chekov spots a motorcycle cop writing out a ticket]

Chekov: Excuse me, I'm looking for the nuclear wessels.

[Cop just looks at him]

Chekov [slowly and deliberately]: Nu-cle-ar wessels.”

= = =

Overheard recently on the office elevator.

She 1: “Oh wow, I’m so stupid. Last night I bought three containers of Haagen Daz cherry ice cream, because I like it so much. So now I’ve got to eat them.”

She 2: “Why don’t you have an ice cream party and just invite a few people over?”

She 1: “I would, but I don’t have a refrigerator or a freezer.”

(Which led me in a nicely closed loop to return to, and silently but wholeheartedly agree with, her opening statement in this brief conversation.)

= = =

Minor annoyance report:

A few days ago, I visited one of our local big box hardware stores for the specific purpose of buying an eight-foot long piece of wood to help brace a current project we have underway at home.

I can quite easily load an eight-foot long board inside our car, simply by opening the front passenger door all the way, sliding the board in at an angle to the opposite back corner of the rear window, at which point the front of the board swings easily into the passenger foot area. Then I slide the rear-window end of the board back over to the right side doors, where it happily sits until I reverse the process to remove it.

Key to this, of course, is being able to fully open the right side front door.

As I was coming out of the store, I ambled across the parking lot, board in hand, and watched an approaching car. And dangnabbit, I just absolutely knew this was going to happen – out of probably a hundred empty parking spaces the driver could have chosen, she turned into the space to the immediate right of my car.

Then at that moment, it started to rain.

I stood behind my car, waiting for her and (I counted) some or all of her three young children to exit.

After a couple minutes had gone by, I looked a little more intently at what was happening in her car. And she was in the process of firmly applying a base coat of lipstick using the rearview mirror as a guide.

“Well [four-letter word],” I said aloud. But surely this couldn’t take too long. I had underestimated, however, the time required to implement whatever physical transition this woman expected from that tiny tube. As I stood in the rain, the kids in her car were getting more and more restless. Finally, I opted for plan B. Opening my trunk, I popped one of the rear seat release levers and, going to the driver’s side of the car, opened the rear door to fold the seat forward. Then I slid the board into the trunk, all the way through the passenger compartment, until it was resting just to one side of the stick shift. And I was steadily being rained on the whole time.

When I pulled away after buttoning down the trunk and wedging the board between the passenger seat and the mid-car hump that houses the stick shift and our CD storage bin, she was still adorning herself. What in heaven’s name, I wondered, was she expecting from her visit to an enormous hardware store?

(“Hey big fella, would you show me something in a tool? Oh… these three kids? Ummm… oh, they’re not mine. I’m just watching them for my sister who… who’s got a doctor’s appointment. Yep, a doctor’s appointment, that’s it. Oh my, with those muscles I’ll just bet that you can really drive a big nail!”)

- - -

Work whine.

There is something just so wrong about the work ethic of a department, and the wider work world in general, when a system-wide announcement has to be e-mailed to all employees advising that there will be a service interruption and there will be no available access – while “regular maintenance” is carried out – to network file services, e-mail and Blackberry services, and remote access to the department’s network…

From 8 am to noon on Sunday.

I’m just saying.

And we’re the department that is home to the federal government’s “work-life balance” messaging.

- - -

Reducing stress in the workplace – Government of Canada style.

A friend who, like me, labours at the Canadian federal public service coal face, sent me a summary of how to go about registering for an upcoming seminar at his branch on how to avoid the fate of many government workers:

“The Learning and Development Directorate is offering an information session entitled ‘Preventing a burnout’.

How do I register?

By submitting an approved Training Application and Authorization Form (link to e-version provided here) to your Training Coordinator who will process the form and forward a copy to the Learning and Development Directorate for your registration. We do not accept any registration by electronic mail nor by telephone. We must receive your training form at least 15 working days prior to the information session date. Please note that this information session may be cancelled, if insufficient numbers of participants are registered. Please see cancellation policy at the following address…”


(If you can get through this registration process without snapping, you don’t need this seminar.)

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What do I do, you ask?

In a recent series of e-mails with friends, I received this quote from a British author named Philip Hensher:

“Indexers, in general, are admirable, scrupulous people, who undertake a task demanding great skill and intelligence. To provide an index to a long and perhaps complex work of non-fiction requires them to come to terms with the subject, to understand an unfamiliar argument which may not have been put forward at all competently by the author, and to master the significant points of the debate. It is inconceivable such a task could be done by mechanical means, and this arduous and demanding work will continue to be done by modest and highly intelligent people for very little money and no public acclaim whatsoever.”

Hensher, note, is describing indexers. But from now on, whenever someone asks me how I might describe my job, I’m going to point to this lovely little quote. (I would change his first word to “Analysts” and start his second sentence, “To provide an analysis…” Plus, in all honesty, I would have to delete the phrase at the end, “for very little money and”. I happen to think I’m quite well paid for what I do.) But to me, this really captures what I do – or at least what I think I do – with the attention our department gets in the nation’s media.

- - -

How to wake up really, really fast:

On a very recent day at work, just after taking a few sips of my first cup of coffee but well before the caffeine had actually linked with any part of my brain, my phone rang:

Me: "Hello"

He: "Hello, this is [name] from the Canadian consulate in Bogotá, Colombia. I'm calling on behalf of…"

Me: "I'm sorry, you're who from where???"

He: "[Name], from the Canadian consulate in Bogotá, Colombia. The RCMP security service gave me your name."

Me: "PARDON!??????"

He: "You're not [name I didn't recognize]?"

Me: "No, I'm [insert my name here] and I work with [insert name of non-security-threat government department here]."

He (laughing): "Oh sorry, I guess I've got the wrong number."

Me (not laughing): "No problem."


Sure worked faster than caffeine. (And just for the record, they told me it was athlete’s foot powder in those bags my friend sent me from Colombia!)

In a follow-up thought about this little exchange, I realized that earlier the same day, I had been Googling the name of someone who was supposed to have been a senior level Washington DC civil servant. As it turns out, he was indeed – specifically in the administrative ranks of the US Army. In the course of discovering this, I had been browsing through several publicly accessible online links to various US Defence Department websites.

So there I am, a few hours later, rather uneasily sitting by my office telephone after having just been told that the “RCMP security service” had passed along my name.

It’s that damned Bush White House, isn’t it? That, and the Harper Conservatives in this country.

- - -

Call this one: Uh… thanks but no thanks.

Here’s a recent e-mail I received after ordering a Leni Riefenstahl movie on DVD (see the Baby Duck post before this one):

“Dear Amazon.ca Customer,
We've noticed that customers who have purchased Olympia: The Leni Riefenstahl Archival Collection (1938) have also ordered Mein Kampf. For this reason, you might like to know that Mein Kampf will be released on September 5, 2006 on DVD. You can pre-order your copy at a savings of 30% by following the link below.”

Great, so now in this post 9-1-1 world, I’m probably defaulted to some US FBI neo-Nazi watch list all because I ordered a copy of one of the best Olympic documentaries ever committed to celluloid. (Which makes me wonder just what the heck kind of list I’m on because I ordered Triumph of the Will at the same time, the equally outstanding documentary about the 1934 Nazi party rallies at Nuremberg… Excuse me for a minute; there’s a very loud knock at my back door.)

(You know, it isn’t paranoia if they really are out to get you.)

- - -

Customer Service note to Danielle, who labours behind the counter at Harvey’s in the Home Depot at the 9-bazillion acre Meadowlands Centre in Ancaster. I think you need to work on your people skills. Let’s replay our recent conversation:

Me: “I’d like a double burger and two small cartons of white milk, please.”
You (After the burger came off the grill and you had ferried it to the “Have it your way” condiments counter): “Double burger?”
Me: “Mustard, relish and a lot of black pepper, please.” (Then when I saw you didn’t have a large pepper shaker and had begun to tear open a few of those little postage-stamp-sized paper bags of pepper): “Too bad you don’t have a shaker; I really like pepper.”
You: (After you had shaken the first wave of opened bags onto the burger): “Do you ever sneeze because of this much pepper?”
Me: “Not really. Not unless the person shaking it on really sprays it around.”
(Then I motioned you to open and add a second wave of same.)
You (looking really surprised as the burger’s surface began to blacken): “Do you ever CHOKE because of this much pepper?”
(This prompted one of your more customer-attuned co-workers nearby to utter a shocked, “DANIELLE!”)
Me: “Uh… no. Do you think I’d ask for something that made me choke?”
You: “Well, it sure seems like an awful lot of pepper to me.”
Me: “It covers up the taste of the meat.”

That pretty well ended our little conversation but, for the record, I eat and enjoy steaks so blackened with pepper they look like they should be the focus of a face-off at centre ice at Maple Leaf Gardens. At Kelsey’s, a local roadhouse here in Ottawa, my staple meal is a peppercorn burger that has a sea of cracked peppercorns pressed into its entire outside surface where other meats have Shake-n-Bake. See what I mean?

But here’s my Customer Service note to Danielle for future reference. Keep your editorial observations to yourself and note which direction the money travels across your counter. The “From” side (that’d be me) is free to ask anyone – even someone who seems to feel she can milk a precious little overbite into complete editorial freedom – on the “To” side to assemble his meal howsoever he wants it. If I want you to squeeze chocolate sauce on it, just smile and squeeze, kay? (I call it the poor man’s mole sauce.) And if you must talk, pass along an observation about the weather, or even feel free to ask me what in heaven’s name I am planning to do with the 16-inch long, inch-and-an-eighth diameter spade bit I have just exited the store with. But listen to your owned damned commercials and next time, please just serve me my burger a la moi. Sans les observations du toi.

- - -

Finally, at the ripe old age of none-of-your-business, I have just finished reading, for the very first time in my life, all nine books of the CS Lewis “Chronicles of Narnia”. (Many years ago, I was in awe one day when, while visiting Oxford, England, with my other half, we parked our butts on a bench in a pub called the Eagle and Child – known locally as The Bird ‘n’ Baby – that, as we discovered, had long ago been warmed by the members of an Oxford literary collective known as The Inklings, whose membership included both Lewis and Tolkien and many other “writers and lovers of imaginative literature”. But I digress.)

Not so long ago, a major new version of “The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe”, book 2 of the (whatever you call a seven-book)-ology made the rounds in movie theatres, prompting much online discussion over whether Lewis intended Aslan to be God, or Christ, and meant the entire series to be a biblical allegory.

MAJOR SPOILER HERE:

Well all I can say is that anyone who argues the “No” side never got to Book 7. Because on p. 132 of my offspring’s edition of The Last Battle, the principals enter a stable through a doorway to, as they discover, Aslan’s world, which turns out to be a passage to a place infinitely larger than the mere stable it appears to be from the outside. At this point, we read, “’It seems then,’ said Tirian, smiling himself, ‘that the stable seen from within and the stable seen from without are two different places.’ ‘Yes,’ said the Lord Digory. ‘Its inside is bigger than its outside.’ ‘Yes,’ said Queen Lucy. ‘In our world too [that’d be the “real” world they left to enter Narnia], a stable once had something inside it that was bigger than our whole world.’”

So yes, Aslan is God, folks. Don’t even waste the bandwidth trying to argue anything else. (Suffice to say the argument is made even more firmly in the final chapters, which I won’t spoil here.)

Bottom line on “The Narnia Chronicles”? Excellent. Wonderful. Witty. Delightful escapism. It’s easy to understand why CSL got along so well with JRR Tolkien. And you can speed-read them at a velocity of about a book every third day because they are, after all, children’s stories first and foremost.

Until next time…