(Please recall that the title of this blog features the word, “whine”...)

Has anyone else noticed this phenomenon recently, or has it been going on for a while and I’m only just later than everyone else at becoming aware of it?:

1. A few days ago, I was in a drug store with a bag of Miss Vicky’s potato chips in hand. As I plopped it onto the counter beside the cashier, she picked it up, brandished it and exclaimed, “Ohhhh... GREAT choice! These are my FAVOURITE chips! I used to only eat the plain but then I discovered their cheddar and onion flavour. Have you tried THOSE?”

2. In a restaurant setting, after I deliver my choice to the waiter / waitress / gender neutral table attendant, he / she will look at me and say something like, “Excellent choice! You are REALLY going to enjoy that! It’s what I usually have when I eat here.”

The common thread here is my being complimented – beyond a typical word of acknowledgement or confirmation, actually praised – for making the choice I did. It’s been happening for a few months in restaurants, but the drug store praise for a flipping bag of chips made me wonder if something new is afoot in the retail / service industry.

You can almost imagine a market share consultant a few years back sitting down trying to find some way to push his or his company’s name to the top of the consultancy heap. “I’ve got it!” he yelled late one night after it came to him in a dream – “Don’t just serve the customer. Make him feel that he’s shining out like a lighthouse beacon from among all the other dimbulbs in the room. Make him feel that your entire staff has just been waiting all day for someone to walk through the door and make exactly THAT choice!”

Because in recent weeks there’ve been times when customer servers enthusiastically have tried to make me feel as though I were Indiana Jones right after he picked the correct Grail.

“Scrambled eggs and BROWN toast for breakfast, sir? That’s our SPECIALTY! The chef just LOVES to make scrambled eggs. Not only that, we just got a FRESH loaf of brown bread. You are SO going to enjoy your breakfast!”

And so I’m trying to work up some way I can bounce it back the next time it happens. “EXCELLENT choice, sir, you are really going to enjoy that!...” (Me / fortissimo voce): “Oh I DO hope so. Because the last time I tried it, I had to be rushed to the hospital about an hour after I got home with what the crew in emergency called the severest case of ptomaine poisoning they’d ever seen. They asked me where I’d eaten last. I just pretended I couldn’t remember the name – but if it happens again, you can be sure I won’t just tell them, I’ll send a note to every local dining out in Canada’s Capital blog on the whole damned Internet! Oh, and could I please have another Alexander Keith’s Red Amber**? Thank you so much.”

Might even get a beer on the house.

(** Although rather schizophrenically named, Alexander Keith’s Red Amber Ale is excellent. Full-flavoured but not overpowering, it’s an outstanding way to launch a meal. Especially if you’re blessed with a purveyor who provides it on draught.)

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In my last entry, you may recall I was in search of the difference between “among” and “amongst”. Well, since I have still a dictionary readily to hand, I checked, and sure enough, one definition of “skinny” is: “confidential information about a topic or person; for example, ‘he wanted the inside skinny on the new partner’”.

I mention that simply to issue here and now, even though it is only (at this writing) still relatively early in December, a loud and immediate call for a ban on any further use of the word “skinny” in headlines on diet-related stories.

(Why yes, since you ask, I wrote that after having just read yet another, “The skinny on diets” headline over one more of the type of story that masochistic line-up editors seem to feel should be published in the run-up to the coming holiday.)

= =

It’s an easy shot to whack away at the rampant consumerism that pretty well defines “Christmas” from about mid-November to the end of the year (and beyond, for those cutting-edge merchants who have introduced January as “Boxing Month”). So it’s a genuine treat to be able to bring to y’all a good news story of a wholly unexpected random act of generosity I observed recently while sitting in a most unlikely setting – the seat of a homeward-bound OCTranspo bus.

I noticed, a few stops after I had boarded, that the driver was in conversation with another passenger who had just boarded. From what I heard, it was clear that the little machine that issues paper transfers had stopped working. (OCTranspo – in common with most large city transit services – has a structure that will let you pay only once and still be able to change routes, if required, to get you to where you want to go, perhaps even through more than one change of bus, but only so long as you have a paper transfer ticket issued by the driver of the first bus you got on. The transfers do have a time limit, but it is a generous one. Plus you can’t use them to travel the reverse direction on the same route. So don’t plan on using the transfer you were issued in the morning to carry you home at the end of the day.)

When another passenger boarded with cash, I watched as the driver actually placed his hand over the coin box. I didn’t hear exactly what he said, but from the passenger’s bemused expression, it was pretty clear the driver had refused to take his money, and instructed him to pay at the next bus he boarded, where he would then receive a transfer if he needed one. But what elevated this simple act from logical business to unexpected generosity was that the driver did this for every cash-paying or ticket-using customer who boarded, never even bothering to ask if he or she was going to request a transfer.

So OC Transpo undoubtedly lost a few shekels for the time that the broken transfer printer sat on a bus in service, but I suspect what they gained in surprised riders’ good will is of considerably more value than the few lost dollars they lost in unpaid fares.

= = =

And finally, here’s the lead sentence from a CTV.ca news item, December 5:

"Calgary's Catholic School Board is pulling 'The Golden Compass' from school shelves -- a children's fantasy novel that criticizes strict religious dogma and encourages readers to keep an open mind."

The irony is not lost on me that a school board based on a religion that is based entirely on the writings in a Book has issued instructions to pull a book from its school libraries’ shelves. Nor was the irony lost, thankfully, on the writer of that lead sentence.

Until la prochaine.

Once in a while– very rarely, I’ll admit – but once in a while, I wake up with the feeling that it just sucks to be Canadian.

Early in the last week of November, in a co-ordinated torrent of announcements, a whole bunch of anti-poverty activist groups led by the Campaign 2000 coalition issued reports condemning the lack of progress on reducing poverty, especially child poverty, in this country.

Government spokespersons and editorialists leapt into action. By the end of the week, newspaper op-eds and letters-to-the-editor pages were filled with boiling arguments over the statistical standards that are used to define poverty in this country. In Canada, that argument revolves around something called the Low-Income Cut-Off (LICO) vs the Low-Income Measure (LIM). But it’s not even that simple. There’s an argument over whether the LICO should be used in a before-tax configuration, or an after-tax configuration.

No one, it seems, can agree. Because Canada has a “progressive” tax system, argue those in favour of pre-tax LICO, the taxes themselves have a bearing on the definition of poverty because they are used to fund services that poor people would otherwise have to pay for themselves, or go without. So defining “income” as the after-tax LICO, according to its supporters, means you should include services that people receive in addition to their actual cash-in-hand income. And that means a different level – a much lower gross dollar income level – at which one can be called “poor” than under the pre-tax LICO number. Which means fewer poor people. And so it goes.

Needless to say, the government loves the after-tax LICO as the poverty line. Because when the bean counters arbitrarily decide that, instead of being poor when, say, you have an annual household income of $25,000 or less, now you are poor when you have an annual household income of $20,000 or less. Suddenly all those people who fall in that $20,000 to $25,000 range are no longer poor! And out come the positive government news releases – in a flood.)

Many years ago, the Department for which I worked announced a new standard that it spent literally years to develop – something called a “Market Basket Measure” (MBM). It was remarkably uncomplicated. It began with a list developed by a massive bureaucratic process. The “market basket” was a week’s supply of ordinary but typically essential household expenses. And it factored in things like transportation and recreation, including some very reasonable leisure-related purchases such as admission to a community swimming pool or skating rink. The cost of that cost-of-living list, naturally, would vary depending on where in the country you live. (A bunch of broccoli purchased in a remote Arctic community’s general store is going to cost at least three or four times what a bunch of broccoli will cost in an Ontario farm belt supermarket, for example. But the standard, “a bunch of broccoli”, is something to which everyone can relate no matter where in Canada they live.)

What made you “poor” under the MBM? Again – ridiculously simple. If you could afford the basket where you lived, you were above the poverty line. If you couldn’t afford it, you were below the poverty line. The beauty of the MBM lay in its flexibility, its real world application to ordinary family needs and the fact that it was based on the daily cost of living where they lived. In short, it made sense; it was easy to understand; it was easy to explain.

It lasted about a year.

Not surprisingly, it melted away in a sea of discussion over details like why the MBM’s “standard” family car was a four-year old Chevy Nova, or why a car was even factored in as “necessary” at all in areas where public transportation is readily available. And on and on and on the dance went.

So here we sit – with everyone agreeing that we have poor people in Canada – but no one agreeing how many we have, at what level they stop being poor, or even whether the number has risen or fallen since the last time the census of poor people was taken.

From all this morass, this week the Government of Ontario launched its new four-year term with a quintessential Canadianism – a Speech from the Throne. And here’s what Premier Dalton McGuinty and company pledged to do about poverty in this province – verbatim from his end-of-November Speech:

"A new cabinet committee will begin work developing poverty indicators and targets and a focused strategy for making clear-cut progress on reducing child poverty."

Warms your heart in the cold winter month of December, doesn’t it? Problem? Poverty in general and child poverty in particular. Solution? Create a committee… to develop new indicators… that will form the basis of a new strategy… a “focused” strategy, mind you… that will give us… progress, clear-cut progress. No ordinary progress that. “Clear-cut” progress! Does anyone understand what the hell that means? Because I don’t.

You can ruddy well bet that one group that won’t be poor will be the dozens, perhaps hundreds of bureaucrats who will be involved in the process of crafting that committee, sending it on a round-the-province whirl of “public and stakeholder consultations”, and developing all the reports and events through which it will herald its own “success stories” in the coming years – all in the name of developing a “focused strategy for making clear-cut progress”. Those stories will be trumpeted in news releases loaded with language like “bold new initiative”, “aggressively committed to dealing with the issue”, “an agenda for excellence measured in progressive strides taken to reduce poverty”.

Heck, maybe we’ll even get a whole new provincial government Department with a “broad mandate aimed at giving families a hand up, not a handout”.

But if you have any doubts at all what “throne” that speech comes from, here’s a hint: the flush handle is right behind the speech reader.

= =

There is no end to the learning curve of being a homeowner. I say this because I am, even as I write this, still learning about the system with which our house is heated. And I am doing that now (learning, I mean), because it recently broke and we are in the process of having it fixed.

Here is what I have learned so far:

1(a) If you use a pipe made of something called black iron, there are two things with which it should never, ever come in contact: water, because water rusts iron (which you might already have known), and concrete, because the lime in concrete will corrode black iron (which might actually be news for you, because it was for me).

1 (b) I have just learned that our heating system includes a 15 to 20-foot length of water-carrying black iron that is buried underneath the cement of our basement floor. Not surprisingly, apparently it has corroded.

Our heating system is called a “hydronic” system, (which I personally believe to be a combination of the Greek words for “water” and “haemorrhoid” – to put it colloquially, a big wet pain in the ass).

In a hydronic system, water comes into the house, is heated by a boiler almost to the temperature of steam, and then is pumped through pipelines into radiators throughout the house. From the last radiator in the chain, a return line then returns the now cooler water back to the start.

There are many elements in the system whose very names suggest not only the system’s inherent safety, but also a varying range of possibly calamitous outcomes should any of them fail: a pressure relief tank, a low pressure cut-off switch, individual radiator bleed valves, Mrs McGillicuddy’s ointment for first-degree scalding burns, to name but a few.

It is a closed system. This means that if something happens to interrupt that closure, such as a leak or the accumulation of enough air to create a system-blocking bubble (a hydronic system’s equivalent of an embolism) then it is likely that the pressure will fail throughout the system. If that happens, there are two ways a system will attempt to rebalance itself.

The worst water interruption you can experience with a hydronic system is if the water flow is cut off by a leak along the line that brings it into the system. Because what will happen next is that your boiler will begin firing itself up to do what it thinks is heating water – because your upstairs thermostat is calling for hot water to warm the radiators that heat the house. And the boiler, lacking a brain (I was just kidding about it “thinking” in that previous sentence), will just go right on firing until, as our gas inspection guy told us recently and a little too cheerfully, I thought, something could melt – maybe the burners after almost constantly burning in the blue bath of a natural gas flame.

This is not a good outcome, and is what a low water cut-off switch is specifically designed to prevent. If it should ever happen that the water is interrupted as it flows into the system, the cut-off switch, which is set to a very safe low pressure level, will immediately shut off the burner. Nothing melts. Of course, nothing gets any warmer either, which means that if this happens on a really cold day, you will want to get it repaired before your house looks like a local domestic setting in the movie, “The Day After Tomorrow”.

If you’re still with me here, you will not be surprised to read that the other place a leak can develop is in the water return part of the system. In this event, warm water will leak – slowly or quickly, depending on the size of the leak – out of the system until the leak is either patched or bypassed. Sometimes you will be lucky and it will be readily apparent where in the water return line the leak is occurring. However, in a closed hydronic system, there is typically not a whole lot of lines that are in plain view. Most of the system – being pipes – is usually placed out of sight, unless your home’s original designer was big on “industrial chic” or his previous job was designing your local East Side Mario’s.

With a leak in the water return end of the hydronic process, what will happen is that your system, seeking to maintain its pressure to keep even the most distant radiators warm, keeps calling for the water necessary to keep its internal pressure up. In this scenario, nothing melts, but if you don’t get the leak fixed or bypassed, eventually you will find you are being billed for roughly the same amount of water as that required to stage an Esther Williams movie remake.

At this writing, we are in the middle of the repair process. First, nothing melted (*phew*). But we have been hearing an almost constant gentle stream of water being pumped into the system. Pressure is holding, because our upstairs radiators – the ones farthest along the line – are warm. So – those of you still awake should by now (correctly) have concluded that we have a leak in our water return line.

And is it in a part of the line that is easy to get at? No, of course not.

“Watch this,” said the plumber we brought in to confirm the process. Pointing what looked like a fat automatic pistol at our basement floor, he pressed the trigger and a bright little laser light spot appeared on the floor. Meanwhile, a small LED screen mounted on the back of the pistol registered a temperature. “This,” he said, “is the temperature of your floor.” As he moved the laser dot across the floor, suddenly (and I mean suddenly) the temperature reading shot up about 10 degrees. “That shouldn’t happen,” he said. “It means something is under the floor making it a lot warmer than the rest of the floor.”

“I think that’s where your water return pipe is leaking.”

“But,” he added quickly – obviously noting that my face reflected the gawd-awful possibility of smashing my basement concrete floor apart to excavate and replace a leaking pipe – “there’s good news.” I looked at him bleakly.

“Your return pipe comes into the basement on the other side of that wall” (he pointed to one end of our basement), “and comes out right there” (he pointed to a pipe emerging from the floor very close to our boiler). “And on the other side of that wall” (pointing back to the first location), “is your crawlspace.”

I’m not the world’s fastest thinker, but immediately I saw a possibility and asked him, “Can we just cut the leaky part of the line right out of the loop, patch a new length of pipe into the line from there (now I pointed to the first location) to there (second location) and just bring it across the top of the floor – maybe tucked right against the wall?”

“Yep, yep and yep.”

So that’s what we’re going to do. The bad news for the City’s water department is they’ll have to find someone else to fund their staff Christmas party this year because pretty soon, the municipal coffers we’ve been swelling will dry up – quite literally in fact.

And now I know a huge pile more about home heating the hydronic way.

Now if I can just get my hands around the neck of the idiot who used a length of black iron pipe to carry water right through a concrete floor. (Because, added our plumber, this is not new knowledge. Black iron is typically used to carry gas, and its combination water / concrete corrosion properties have been known for... forever.)

= = =

Finally, a couple one-offs…

My wife and I were recently kicking around the difference, if any, between “among” and “amongst”.

I honestly didn’t know, but my suspicion has always been that the latter is simply an archaic version, because for the life of me I can’t think when it would apply, and “among” not do so.

So off to Google… Well knock me over with a feather! (Admittedly after a skin-deep quick internet search) I was unable to find an online dictionary reference site that allows it, despite Amazon.com’s listing it in a whole lot of places, often (as will be seen) amongst the titles.

Our Compact Oxford (snarf -- that's the massive two-volume edition with a combined weight of about 30 lbs and a typeface so small that you have to read it with a magnifying glass "compact") allows it, but it ain't pretty. They call it an "adverbial genetive" version of "among" that essentially was a 16th C "corruption" of "among". No wonder you won't find it in too darned many contemporary dictionaries.

= =

‘Tis the season. A lot of radio ads are using all manner of enticements in the coming consumer orgy in a sustained promotional effort by various merchants to get you to come into their stores to do your Christmas shopping. So why not a car for Christmas, asked one local auto dealership whose ad I recently heard? And to get you to visit and into (hopefully) one of their cars, they were also offering a “free gift” with every test drive. Which – me being an anal dork and everything – begged the question, what other kind of “gift” is there?

Until la prochaine.

"No… when I said, 'Keep in touch', I meant…"

A couple months back, we bid adieu to a co-worker who transferred to a different government department. One of the last things I said was, “Keep in touch”.

Now, about every third day or so, I get an e-mailed note with an embedded link either to an “Odd News” media article or a You Tube video. The actual message text is almost always a variation on “LOL – this is SO cool!” (On the odd chance that you’ve just emerged from a cave or are actually a 20-year cicada who last appeared in 1987, “LOL” is a “netcronym” that stands for “Laughing Out Loud”. It’s a three-letter way of saying, “I found this to be somewhat amusing and am sending it along by e-mail to share with you on the odd chance that you, too, might find it to be funny.” It’s also a chuckling version of the netcronym "ROTFLMAO", which literally means “Rolling On The Floor Laughing My Ass Off”. Translation? You can change the “somewhat amusing” in the above explanation to “really hilarious”.)

I think I was hoping for more of an occasional brace of sentences that ventured a description or an opinion of some part of the new job. But I can’t grouch too loudly, because I have to confess that I also do it myself.

Which leads to today’s question o’ de day: Has the Internet improved or wrecked the process of the kind of communication we used to conduct by means of letter-writing? There’s an essay in there somewhere… I’m just not sure that a blog I routinely fling into people’s e-mail is the best place in which to make that ramble.

= =

If anyone is polling bloggers about the RCMP’s tasering Robert Dziekanski, that disoriented Polish visitor in the Vancouver airport, and subsequently causing his death, here’s where I am (after viewing the actual video several times and reading an enormous amount of print reporting of the story, editorial and columnists’ reaction to it, listening to “talking head” discussions on both radio and TV and the RCMP’s official responses beginning with the very first pack of CYA (cover your ass) lies they spun out to the Vancouver Sun just hours after the man died):

- The RCMP has been wrong, probably criminally so, every single step of the way from the moment those four officers first entered the passenger waiting area.

So on the sliding scale of satisfaction, you’ll find me right at the end under “strongly dissatisfied”. Just for the record.

= =

I guess the Globe and Mail’s sports page readers are… uh… less fiscally astute than their wider business readership, as evidenced by this golf-related stream that appeared in a recent sports story:

“The championship also would include an annual $10-million bonus pool. The winner will receive $1.66 million.
The Order of Merit will be renamed The Race to Dubai, with the player finishing No. 1 at the end of the season receiving $2 million.
If a player wins both the Dubai World Championship and the overall season title, he will earn a total of US$3.66 million.”

(That last sentence seems to have been for the benefit of those incapable of adding 2 + 1.66. Which the Globe, I guess, assumes describes its sports news readers.)

= =

Random musical notes based on recent acquisitions:

Really, really, REALLY lovely blues album: Suitcase, by Keb Mo. A voice like a satin curtain brushing a varnished mahogany window sash in a light breeze on a warm summer evening. A way with a guitar that makes it sound ridiculously easy… until you pause and really listen to the complexities of what he’s doing. Accompanying beverage of choice? A rich smoky single malt scotch.

Really, really, REALLY rip-em-up blues album: timeBomb, by the Blues Caravan (Sue Foley, Deborah Coleman, Roxanne Potvin) I saw two of these three live a few months back and they simply owned the Centrepointe Theatre stage for two fantastic hours. Blues with a thumping drive and voices that suggest way more living than these youngsters have actually done. And who knew the lyric, “Don’t start the car if you ain’t gonna drive”, could be rendered with such a sexual intensity?

And speaking of lots o’ living… Really, really, REALLY excellent new stream of fan loyalty: “Washington Square Serenade” by Steve Earle. I don’t know where Steve’s music all comes from, but it’s been coming from there for years and it’s still wonderful stuff! Physically, he has just uprooted himself from Nashville and moved to New York City. I saw him interviewed recently by CBC’s George Stroumboulopoulos and his politics have lost none of their anti-Bush edge. But this album is more about his music and, in that, he is still utterly true to self. (That, I realize, will say nothing to someone who doesn’t know him, but his fans will go, “Great!”) He may well be on the verge of having a whole genre named after his style – Nashville Soul. All I need to hear is that there’s a new Steve Earle album (Thanks, Angela!) to send me off to buy it.

Really, really, REALLY excellent retro album: DYLAN. 18 of Bob’s best, slung out in order from “Blowin’ in the Wind” to “Forever Young”. For some reason, Columbia spun off this single album from the larger, more complete three-disc compilation but unless you’re a hard-core Dylan career follower, these 18 are the only ones you need and it’s about a third of the price of the three-disk set. (Although I would also suggest adding his “Highway 61 Revisited” on the shelf beside “DYLAN“ because… well, “Desolation Row” is because.)

Really, really, REALLY big piece of disappointing self-indulgent claptrap (well, besides this blog, I mean): Led Zeppelin’s “Mothership”. Guys, guys, guys. Wishing it was 1972 again doesn’t make it so. Long whiny guitar solos are nice, for one or two tracks. Just to remind us what was once really meaningful after overindulging in the reality-altering substance of our choice, then nesting in a near-fetal position in a corner beside a four-foot tall stereo speaker and murmuring “Oh wow!” as our eardrums sought desperately to evolve swiftly and sufficiently to fold over on themselves. But, well, we’ve kind of moved on and were hoping “re-mixed” meant “emphasis on the music”. (Of course, the Internet is partly to blame here. Try, for example, to listen to “The Immigrant Song” without flashing on the Viking Kittens video -- You Tube-able, I suspect -- someone made of it a few years back. Maybe that’s where LedZed assumes their fan base lies now.) But how can Jimmy Page compile a two disc, greatest hits collection and not include “Living, Loving Maid (She’s Just a Woman)”? Feh.

The really, really, REALLY great reminder that behind the big hair, some folks in the 80s could still spit out some hard rocking pop: “Best of the J Geils Band”. You-Tube yourself on over to “J Geils Band, Centrefold” and try to sit still (admittedly while snickering at the parade of big-haired, bird-of-prey-eyed beauty that was the eye candy of the 80s). But the album also displays a much wider versatility than just their two monster hits: “Centrefold” and “Freeze Frame”. Great fun!

And finally, if you never, ever thought that Country and Western could work a successful fusion with Rhythm and Blues, well not only need you wonder no more, you could have stopped wondering in 1970, and don’t click “stop” on this one until the very last second. (With apologies to anyone not yet video linkable. But that’s just so 2006! Get with the program already. … :-) … )

LOL! C-U L8R.

I'm not ignoring y'all. In my job, whenever government does something major -- such as a Speech From the Throne (SFT) or a budget, my work-related bustle increases for a while. Well, for anyone inside the fishbowl that is the National Capital Region, this won't be news, but the rest of the country probably missed the press-stopping headlines announcing that we recently suffered exactly that -- those, in fact -- an SFT followed just days later by an "Economic Fiscal Update" that was, for all intents and purposes (or as played on my desk... "for all intensive purposes"), a mini-budget.

Which is why the Duck got bumped.

Just in case you were wondering.

We now return you to our regular stuff 'n' nonsense.

= =

Things I’m starting to realize I don’t want to make time for any more…

- Continuing to read a book I am not enjoying, or at best coming to a compromise with myself and “bleeping” over the unenjoyable parts if I’m far enough into it that I just want to know how the story comes out. Recently I started a new book by an author with whom my previous experience was, quite literally, a “couldn’t put it down” page turner by the time I reached its last 150 pages. But in the next of his books that I started, he embarked early on into some horribly graphic “flashback” descriptions of Nazi concentration camp atrocities (Actually, I think that might be a triple redundancy) that simply didn’t suit the experience I want from “recreational reading”, no matter how exciting the eventual storyline was going to turn out to be.

Now it wasn’t that long ago that with a book I bought (rather than borrowed), for whatever reason it was bad – its writing or its subject matter – I felt an obligation to read it through to its end.

Well no more, and it seems I have a mighty kindred spirit. And wow, does she have clout in the world o’ reading! Nancy Pearl is a woman who is not only a librarian, she is so good at it she has actually been rendered as an action figure (“with amazing push-button shushing action!”).

Here’s what she has to say about unpleasant reading experiences. (Both quotes were pulled from the web. Google her if you’re using Baby Duck as a reference for an essay and you need the authoritative citations.):

"’A bad book,’ she explains, ‘is any book you don't like. A good book is any book you like. Time is short and the world of books is very large,’ she says. ‘To slog through a book you're not loving is a waste of your time. If you don't like a book, no matter how old you are, you should stop reading it.’"

I especially like the fact that she at least advocates giving a bad book a slight chance. It gives people like me a happy compromise between never buying a particular book in fear of not liking it, vs trudging all the way through it long after you’ve clearly decided you don’t like it. She calls it the Rule of 50:

“To answer the question ‘How long should I read a book before I give up?’ Nancy developed the Rule of 50: ‘If you are 50 years of age and younger, you should read the first 50 pages of the book then ask ‘Do I really love this book?’ If at the bottom of page 50 all you really care about is who the murderer is, read the end and put the book away. If you’re over 50, subtract your age from 100 and the resulting number is the number of pages you should read before giving up.’ Nancy says it’s one of the few rules that rewards people for getting older.”

Bad news for high schoolers and book club members, though. She makes it quite clear that her Rule of 50 doesn’t count for a book group’s assigned works, or for homework.

So suffice to say that I simply closed this book at that point in my early morning bus commute where I ran first into the unpleasantly rendered atrocities; and at lunch hour I re-embarked among the novel’s pages with my “new eyes” -- skipping those parts while still deriving considerable enjoyment from its suspense-laden balance.

Thank you, Ms Pearl. Guilt-free book and/or chapter abandonment. (I just have to tell myself not to dwell on how much more widely read I’d be today had I only started doing this years ago.)

= = = =

Had a hearty laugh recently at some poor nameless Wal-Mart employee’s expense. There’s a colour photo making the rounds of the Internet that shows a custom-decorated cake that someone ordered from a Wal-Mart bakery on which the orderer directed (obviously over the phone) that what should appear on the cake was the message:

“'Best Wishes Suzanne', and underneath that, 'We will miss you'”.

Here’s what came back from Wal-Mart (the photo is a thing of beauty, so try the link first. But Neatorama is an extremely active blog and I don’t know how long the link will live… so the text of the actual icing-rendered message follows immediately below this link.

"Best Wishes Suzanne
Under Neat that
We will Miss you"

I’m really going to validate my gray hair here, but this reminded me of an episode that dates from one of my early office jobs obtained when the ink was still wet on my Carleton University Bachelor of Journalism.

True story.

I was in a communications unit where we all had dictaphone microphones on our desks. You dictated the letter into a microphone; it went to a central word processing unit, and a half day or so later, you received a paper copy on your desk to proofread before sending it out.

Everyone had their little dictating conventions for clarifying what they were saying (because, on a tape, things like “e”, "d", "b" "t", “p”, “v” can all sound very similar, especially to someone not used to your pronunciation).

My boss at the time showed me a letter he received for proofreading.

What he had dictated was:

"This is a letter to B – B for 'Bob' – Wilson..." and then he went on to dictate the letter.

When it came back, Word Processing had typed the first line of the address as:

"B Beaver Bob Wilson..."

= = = = =

And surprise! – I actually have something good (with a qualification) to say about a cellphone service provider.

I don’t use a cellphone often enough to justify entering into one of those “anytime” plans for large amounts of money and right up-to-date hardware. Instead, I have a cellphone that… well, it rings when someone calls me and it lets me call out when I want to do so. My daughter has also discovered it plays rudimentary games. But it does not, for example, take pictures (I have a camera for that), upload / download music (I have a CD player, turntable and a radio for that), download movies (I have a TV and DVD player for that), make coffee (coffeemaker) etc, etc. It is, in other words, a phone. It's just smaller and wireless, by way of marking its difference from previous phones I’ve owned.

The billing plan I have is called PayGo, short for “pay as you go”. It is simplicity itself. Each month, you re-charge its balance, either by phone or by going to the Rogers website to add however much credit you think you’ll need that month. So long as you reload each and every month by the due date, your balance carries over and you’re good for another month.

The catch, however, is that if you forget and let the date slide by, your balance just vanishes. Where? Who the hell knows? But my suspicion is that I can’t be the only idiot in the Rogers PayGo customer list and that Rogers shows a heck of a “Miscellaneous Revenue” line each year solely on the strength of all the forgetful customer balances they absorb as the deadlines pass.

Well recently, and probably for about the fifth time in my life, I let a re-charge deadline go by because I was out of town and frankly just forgot about it. (That’s a refreshing reason to be able to offer, by the way. The previous times it’s happened, the best I can plead is “I forgot”.) The balance in my account at the time was $31. Now I know that $31 in the grand scheme of things is just not a whole heck of a lot. But ask yourself two things: 1. How many times have other $31-ers contributed to the Rogers coffers over the life of their PayGo plan? (Subtract five from your guess, because those would be mine.) And 2. If someone gave you $31 and said take it out in the backyard and set fire to it, how would you feel? Probably a little angrier than the relative value of $31 merits, but that’s an understandable function of your -- and my -- perception of pointless waste.

Not so long ago, my wife embarked on an attractive cellphone package agreement with Virgin Mobile, and at the same time set a separate one up for our daughter. In the process of setting up the payment options, she discovered (in persistent research that was probably on the order of extracting one of your own molars, because initially she was actually told by a Virgin rep that it was not possible) that setting up an automatic monthly deduction was indeed possible.

So to make their long story* short, not only was it possible, both she and my daughter are now on Virgin Mobile’s carefree “Just give us your credit card number and let us worry about topping up your account” plan.

* No such luck, however, about shortening _my_ story. Onward.

So she suggested I look into it with Rogers.

When I had first joined the PayGo plan, I had been given one payment option. Period. And it went like this: Once a month, no later than midnight on the renewal date, let us know that you want to renew and for how much. Forget to let us know and we de-activate your account and the balance resets at zero. Even if you renew the very next day.

Well after my most recent teeth-gnashing let-the-date-slip-by, my wife suggested that maybe Rogers has buried something similar deep among its PayGo options – in the same way as Virgin turned out to have just such a plan – and just like Virgin, they just weren’t going to wave signs around in front of their customers promoting the option because… well, because it’s… you know – a service. And convenient. And less stressful… all of those things that make perfect sense to customers but less revenue to the company.

And sure enough, about four layers deep under the main 1200-question FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) directory, there it was: the PayGo Auto Saver Plan. Automatic monthly renewal with no need to call in or confirm online once you’d set the basic plan in place. And no loss of unused balance as each renewal date passed.

My reason for saying good things – despite the layers-deep hunt to find the option – is this: I had to confirm my identity to an honest-to-goodness real person, rather than the recording that takes you through the first ten minutes or so of the “convenient” automated renewal process. And when that honest-to goodness person (named Mark) heard that I’d lost my previous balance due to my having been out of town when the renewal date slid by, he restored it! Just like that.

Oh -- but my “qualified” re the “good things”? The previous night, when I’d tried to enrol in the Auto Saver plan, after those same ten minutes that it took for me to reach the point where I was transferred to an honest-to-goodness person, I was kicked over instead to a recording informing me that their office was closed and no one was available to take my call and I should call during their regular hours of business.

Why, I wondered, could that message not have been put up front? For example, “Welcome to Rogers automated Customer Service hotline. If you’re calling to change your method of billing, please stop now because eventually you will have to speak to a representative and they are only available during regular business hours.” Not ten ferschlugginer minutes after I’d wasted all the time it took to get through all the recorded options to get there, for heaven’s sake.

So thank you Rogers.

I think.

= =

And finally, a big welcome to the new kid on the Internet, YouTube Canada, which was officially launched in Toronto on November 6.

(Actually, it doesn’t look a whole lot different from YouTube central. But I do confess a twinge of pride at seeing that teeny Canadian flag in the top right corner of the site’s front page.)

Until la prochaine…

Add this to the list of niggling little things I REALLY think the effin’ media should have managed to get straight by now, but obviously haven’t… (And so you just KNOW it’s going to be front page news in a blog devoted entirely to niggling little things.)

From a Canadian Press news release, October 7, about the latest political photo-op trip to Afghanistan, this time by Conservative cabinet ministers Maxime Bernier and Bev Oda:

“They hopped aboard armoured vehicles, donned
flack vests and helmets, took rides aboard an
immense twin-rotor Chinook helicopter and quizzed
soldiers about the workings of the military and its machines.”

I don’t expect the media – necessarily – to know that the word “flak” is a much-compressed rendition of the German word, Fliegerabwehrkanone, which translates literally as “air defence cannon”. But what I do expect the media to know is that the flying flurry of bits of metal from bursting anti-aircraft shells, and the word as used in that context, is “flak”.

I also expect the media to know that it is this “flak” that has since come to mean everything from those flying bits of metal that first gave it its name (hence the designation of a bulletproof vest as a “flak jacket”) to the critical tirades that appear in everything from performance appraisals to film reviews (i.e., “Ontario Conservative leader John Tory took a great deal of public and media flak over his ill-conceived advocacy of public funding for religion-based separate schools, so Ontario Conservative leader John Tory got his ass handed to him in the recent provincial election.”)

But what I would really have hoped the media to have known by now, in the near century that has passed since anti-aircraft guns first began hurling flak into the path of enemy airplanes, is that a “flack” is, most often, a sycophant, a PR person, an intermediary between celebrities and the great unwashed who seek to meet with or write about them. From time to time in fact, flacks even take flak. But a “flack vest”? If it’s a Harry Potter-like cloak of invisibility that shields you from unwanted attention from butt-kissers (or “fart-catchers”, as Frank Magazine loves to call them), sure. But if it’s the personal body armour such as is worn in Afghanistan to provide some modest protection from enemy snipers, then it is a “flak” vest.

GOT IT, MEDIA???

= = = = = = = = = =

Canada is a pretty generous country when it comes to welcoming foreign refugees. Really, you need look no farther than our major cities and the variety of immigrant communities manifest in their “Little Italy”s “Chinatown”s, “Little Vietnam”s, “Little Somalia”s and so on and on and on, to get the idea.

Recently, I was triggered into wondering just what such people must think, when they first arrive on our shores, as they begin to observe our so-called culture and priorities by way of our media. More specifically – and here is what I’m really getting at – as new arrivals to our shores look at the things we feature in our advertising, I can’t help but think that after even just a few minutes of watching what we are being sold, they must push themselves back from the printed page or the TV screen and ask themselves (in an endless variety of bodily-function based obscenities, such usually being the basis for any language’s more colourful cursing), “What the [bodily-function-adverb / bodily-function noun] is the matter with these people?!!”

The most recent "trigger" that led me to this musing was a 66-page (66... PAGE?) full-colour advertising supplement that arrived with this weekend’s New York Times Sunday edition entitled “Watch Your Time”. Astonishingly (Well, to me “astonishingly”. Maybe it’s perfectly normal to other people.) it is an entire special New York Times advertising supplement devoted to wristwatches. Not even wall clocks or decorative hourglasses or garden sundials... just... wristwatches.

Perhaps even the mighty Gray Lady was painfully aware that this one is a tad over the top, because the supplement opens with an editorial, no less, by its publisher, one wholly unpronounceable (or at least over-consonanted) Christian Llavall-Ubach. On his page, Mr Llavall-Ubach (I am tempted to address him as “Baron” solely on the strength of his hyphenated vaguely Teutonic-looking name) waxes rhapsodic about the fact that the US of A is so vast it requires no fewer than four separate time zones just to manage the continental part of the country. Adding Alaska and Hawaii to the total requires six separate temporal zones – for one country !!

Says the Baron, “The USA is a huge country, so big that it requires four main time zones just to manage the time across the continental USA.” Well golly gee willikers! For my part, when I read that, I was reminded immediately of Douglas Adams’ efforts to get us to understand the size of the universe in “A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”:

“Space is big - really big - you just won't
believe how vastly, hugely mind-bogglingly big it is.
You may think it's a long way down the road to the
chemist, but that's just peanuts to space."

But the Baron’s awe doesn’t end with a country so vast it requires six time zones. No, he is, in fact, given to ponder the weighty import of the wristwatch itself in our lives:

“A fine wristwatch helps us value precious memories
(how and when we got our watches and the things we did
while wearing them), thus making us more aware of what
we have accomplished and what is yet to be done.”

Let me just say this to you, Baron... I don’t think I want to know the kind of person who could pull me aside at a dinner party, yank up his sleeve, point to his wristwatch and ask, “Know what I was doing when I got this?”

And let me just say this to you, too, Baron... Were that ever to happen, I’m really afraid my response would be a somewhat puzzled facial expression, followed by, “Ummm... wondering what time it was, and lacking a timepiece to tell you?”

Because really, why the f%#$k else does one buy a wristwatch anyway?

As I wandered through the pages of this waste of trees, I discovered in short order that John Travolta wears a Breitling; Tiger Woods sports a TagHeuer (“chronograph with perpetual retrograde calendar!!!”... Actually, on second thought, swap those “!!!” for “???”). Friedrich Nietzsche may not have worn a watch, but via this quote: “Whatever does not destroy me makes me stronger”, he has been brought into endorsing the “muscular chassis with alveolar structure, high performance engines strengthened by anti-shock bridges...” that apparently buttress the Zenith “Defy Xtreme” line of “chronographs”... Girard Perregaux includes a photo of a bottle of Chateau Lafite-Rothschild 2000 in its ad – presumably to give you something to swill while you’re waiting for the stock market to open, because their watchface features red pointers on the hour ring to tell you when each of the world’s major stock markets opens. Nicolas Cage has joined with Montblanc to “make a joint commitment to social responsibility”. Each MontBlanc “TimeWalker” purchased will result in a “significant donation” to something called “Heal the Boy”.

And so it goes. Oh, apparently one of the Wright Brothers – we’re not told whether it was Wilbur or Orville – owned a Vacheron-Constatin Pilot’s watch. Which makes me wonder just how shrewd their marketing department must have been. “Hey boss... coupla bicycle repairmen out in North Carolina are trying to make the world”s first powered flight in a heavier-than-air flying machine. And guess what boss! The guy driving it? Apparently he’s going to be called the ‘pilot’” “Omigod! Quick, send him one of those two thousand gobblers we couldn’t get the Kaiser to endorse when he sacked Bismarck. We may yet sell these things!”

(Gosh don’t you just LOVE Baby Duck? Where else can you leap from Francis Ford Coppola’s son to one of the most famous cartoons in Punch Magazine’s long history... over a span of a mere 100 or so words?)

Where was I?

Oh yes... So there are 66 pages of this crap! Were it a bound guide to a museum exhibit about the history of personal timepieces, I could maybe see 66 pages. But a 66-page glossy full-colour magazine solely to sell the damned things?

To quote my anonymous and hypothetical new arrival friend (above), “What the [bodily-function-adverb / bodily-function noun] is the matter with these people?!!”

(Me? I wear a NeXXtech... $19.99 at The Source. It tells me what time it is. I am so NOT the “chronograph” demographic.)

= = = = = = = = = =

Meanwhile… here’s another chapter in my continuing adventures in the world o’ consumers.

We pick up our story in a large Ottawa housewares supply store – in this case, a Home Outfitters at the corner of Old Innes and Blair, right beside RONA… if you’re taking notes – where your intrepid blogger had actually gone in search of a new toaster to meet the family’s requirements of, oh you know… the ability to make toast. At a recent dinner with our in-laws, we noticed they had a really great looking model made by T-FAL, and we’d received very good reports from them about its abilities to brown everything from bread to fresh bagels. (Its appearance, admittedly, is a factor. Our toaster sits permanently on our kitchen counter beside an espresso machine and a coffee mill, both of which are clad in stainless steel. So obviously a toaster finished in, say, walnut, would clash. The T-FAL is finished in steel.)

So anyway, there I am in Home Outfitters and there is a display model of the T-FAL toaster sitting right on the shelf in front of me. Life is good. At this point, a saleslady (who in a few minutes will have told herself to never, ever again walk up to a customer and ask, “Can I help you?”) asked me, “Can I help you?”

Pointing to the display model of the toaster, I said, “Can you tell me how much that costs?” Little did I realize I had just launched a storewide search that would, in short order, make Jason’s quest for the Golden Fleece seem like the annual White House children’s Easter egg hunt. The toaster, we discovered, was the only appliance on the whole shelf lacking a shelf-mounted price tag. Nor did it have a visible “SKU number” (that’s the code number usually found in little digits beside, above or below the bar code).

Eventually, after a good 15 minutes of looking, she informed me that not only could she not tell me the price, she was unable (because of the absent SKU) to tell me if any were actually in the store. Finally, she drew in two other employees who, after ten minutes’ searching of their own, both came back with the information that neither of them could tell me the price or if there were any left in the store (3 employees X their collective hourly wage X 15 minutes. Since it was Sunday, I won’t include my normal waiting fee.)

Another few minutes passed while one of the searchers actually seized the toaster and marched it over to (I assume) a manager because he came back with it, presented it like a Japanese salesman offering a business card, and solemnly announced, “He said we can let you have this one for $40.00.”

The next few phrases, I hasten to add all went no further than my own mind. What I actually said will follow.

What I thought was, “You mean to tell me you have just tied three staff people in knots looking for the answer to (what I thought was) a pretty straightforward question – How much does it cost?; you can find neither a price nor a new one in the box – (To emphasize: you have just told me you have no idea in hell what this thing costs) – and you are pitching a random number to me as a favour??? What you’re really saying is, ‘Please, will you just go away?’ Right??”

That’s what I thought. What I said: “Thanks, but I really prefer a new one in the box, with all the warranty cards and instructions included.”

He responded, “Right, I understand.” And back to the shelf went their “bargain”.

The day may come when the sad little T-FAL toaster, eventually taken home by a sympathetic Home Outfitters employee, causes an Antiques Roadshow appraiser to light up with a sparkling smile and an, “Oh my! You have an early millennial T-FAL electric toaster in beautiful condition… but of course because you have no provenance, it’s only worth $40.00. A pity, because with an owner’s manual, I would definitely have recommended to you that you insure it for, oh… say, $250,000.”

And I will laugh most merrily, watching along with the rest of my bunkmates in the Old Age barracks.

= = = = = = = = = =

Finally, recently I popped in to a lighting store in Ottawa in search of a bulb to replace a burned out one in a wall light we had purchased there months earlier. (Rather than even try to find a replacement bulb anywhere else, I decided to go right to the source.)

The bulb was a small one with two little wire loops protruding from the bottom – the contact points with the electrical source in the fixture.
It actually looked quite a bit like the flashbulbs I used to have to buy about a century and a half ago to use with my Kodak Brownie Starmite.

There wasn’t a mark on the burned-out bulb to tell me what brand it was, or its size, or even its brightness. So no one should be surprised to hear that, after explaining that I was looking for a replacement for the burned out bulb I had brought with me, the clerk behind the counter held it up, looked closely at it and asked,

“What watt?”

“What?”, I replied. (Of course I did.)

Then we both realized how idiotic the previous utterings had just sounded and started laughing.

To make a long story short, she was actually able to call up our purchase of the fixture on their computer – despite its having been several months ago. With a quick cross-reference to the make and model, she turned up precisely one bulb that went with it. And they had several in stock, sitting right under the cash register.

After I marvelled at the speed of her ability to discover exactly the bulb I needed, I bought two and as I paid, I said, “Thank goodness, I thought we were going to get into Abbott and Costello’s ‘Who’s On First?’ there.”

“Who?” she said.

I stifled a massive urge to respond, “Yes,” dreaming that she would then say, “What?” to which I would reply, “No, he’s on second.”

“Abbott and Costello,” I replied.

Blank.

Have you ever tried to explain “Who’s on first?” to someone who has never heard of the routine, or never even heard of Abbott and Costello?

I don’t recommend it. Because when you try to explain it, not only does it not sound even the least bit funny, it swiftly comes to sound as if you, the explainer, are just one psychiatric examination away from a Royal Ottawa Hospital room where the door locks are on the outside.

After spluttering away for a bit trying to elucidate the unexplainable, wishing desperately for another customer to come along so she could exit gracefully from having to listen to me for even one more second (“And the name of the guy on third is ‘I Don’t Know’... hahahahaha”), finally I said, “Do you have the internet at home?” “Of course,” she replied. “Well when you go home after work, just go to You Tube and search 'Who’s on first?' Trust me; you’ll laugh.”

And feeling very, very old, I took my new bulbs, bid her adieu and slunk off in search of enlightenment elsewhere. Knowing full well that seeking out Abbott and Costello had probably vaulted right up there with drawing smiley faces on her toenails as her priorities after work.

Until la prochaine.

A story in two parts

Part 1: “I admire your honesty.”

Recently, I opened a savings account that actually offers a moderately attractive interest rate – it’s at President’s Choice and is one of the non-grocery services offered by the Loblaws people about which I have no complaints. (The other is the ready availability of some excellent Ontario wines that are in their in-store Vintages locations, saving the need for a separate trip to the liquor store.)

A simple concept, PCF (President’s Choice Financial) reduces “banks” essentially to kiosks in their grocery stores staffed by one or, at most, two knowledgeable people. PCF levies no fees on all the ordinary little week-to-week banking transactions such as cheque-writing and bank machine withdrawals, which other banks use to make the obscene levels of profit that their investors and shareholders like but the average depositor, with low-maintenance service needs, loathes.

A few months ago Loblaws decided, with very little fanfare, that no longer will they require a signature on grocery purchases under $100 that are made with a credit card. And recently, little signs have appeared at all the checkout stations touting this “service” and adding the apparently encouraging assurance, “With no loss of security”.

Needless to say, this left me more than a little baffled because how, I wondered, can the elimination of the one remaining personal i.d. verification – my signature – maintain any protection against the fraudulent use of my card, were I, for example, to drop it on the way out of the store and have it fall into the hands of a less than scrupulous stranger?

My new account application required an in-person appearance. (That’s another story – the online process requires you to use your Social Insurance Number as i.d. If you wish to use any other piece of i.d., you have to appear in person. I greatly prefer not to use my SIN for this sort of thing. And the nice thing about Canadian law is that you cannot be compelled to use it for anything other than Government of Canada services, which was the original intent of that particular piece of i.d.)

Anyway, I thought that since I was actually meeting a real person face-to-face, I figured I’d seek an explanation. And by the time I was half a dozen words into my question, it was obvious she knew exactly where I was going because this knowing “Here comes another one” smile appeared on her face. Obviously I am not the first person to ask about this, because her reply was issued with all the confidence of someone who not only has memorized the store’s policy talking points on this issue, she clearly has been called upon more than once to employ them in order to answer just this question.

As it turns out, Loblaws – not to mention the credit backers – have a damned peculiar definition of “security”. Because what she told me was, if a bank is faced with a claim of fraudulent use of its credit card, and if the billed amount is less than $100 and if there is no signature, then the bank, by law, has to accept the borrower’s claim and cancel the billing. (No I don’t know what law that’d be. I’m just passing along what I was told by someone who at least projected an air of knowing what she was talking about.)

When she had completed this explanation, I paused for a few seconds while it sank in, then looked at her and said, “Do you realize you’ve just told me a way to get free groceries for the rest of my life?” She laughed – a little nervously – and said, “Maybe for a month or two at most. If they detect a pattern, they’ll cancel the card.”

*Phew* I really feel better about that. (Let’s just say that if the day comes when I see “Loblaws Baghdad Market*: Falafel: $99.00” on my monthly bill, someone’s going to get a call, pattern or no pattern.)

* Did you know that if you Google “Loblaws Baghdad Market” (without the quotes), you’ll get (at this writing) 22,600 hits? You do now.

- -

Part 2: “Take it. It’s only money.”

In tandem with opening up a savings account, I wanted to obtain a new credit card, in my name, with a maximum allowable billing of $500. My purpose here is to have a card that I can use for online purchasing, online charitable donations and the like, without causing simultaneous shudders on Wall, Bay and Bond Streets were it to be caught up in some hacker’s driftnetting.

My first query went to the helpful young lady who cheerfully advised me of Loblaws “equal security” no-signature-required policy (above). Sadly, she informed me that they could not issue a second card to me in my own name. Oddly enough, they were quite happily prepared to issue me up to three separate cards, each assigned to someone different, who would share my credit limit. Their thinking here is, of course, “Get the missuz and the kids their own credit cards!” Equally of course, all I had to do was sign a form assuming responsibility for all debts incurred on all the other cards. But issue a second, meager-limit card to me? Nope. Can’t do.

After prowling around a few sites online, I opted to apply for a basic no-fee American Express card. “Basic” meaning Air Miles included, the absolute minimum strip-down I could get on a line of cards that began with double-extra-good-platinum-plus-you-can-buy-a-surplus-aircraft-carrier-no-questions-asked-with-this-baby and gradually slid down the scale to “Basic”, which included Air Miles. Which, as a matter of note, I didn’t even want. I had an Air Miles card once. After a year and a half of using it, I had accumulated enough air miles to roll from the Ottawa Airport’s departure gate to the beginning of their east-west runway.

And if you ever doubted the power and integration of the Internet, consider this: The site promised an evaluation and an answer to my application in 60 seconds. That means they are capable of verifying my i.d. and assessing my financial situation before returning either an approval or rejection in less time than it takes to peel an apple.

It actually took even less than that – about 30 seconds later, Whang! Up popped a box on my screen congratulating me, and cheerfully telling me that a full package, with approved card, would arrive within ten days and with a maximum credit amount of $19,000. (“Please contact us if you wish to increase this amount!”)

I didn’t want to increase the amount. I wanted, in fact, to decrease it by a divider of 38. So I phoned Amex and after wading through a pile of options their helpful voicemail compiler figured would be among the most likely reasons people call (“If you are calling to request a decrease in your monthly limit, press…” was not even on the list. What are the odds?) I finally got to press the “If you would like to speak to a customer representative, press...” button in order to talk to a real person.

Who promptly told me to wait until my package arrived and when I called the number to activate the card, I could request a decreased monthly limit at that time. However, I think that policy is a last-ditch effort to get people to change their minds because when I pressed the question (“But I was just given online approval, so I assume the package is not in the mail already! Can you not request a lower limit on this card?”), I received a swift acquiescence. (“Oh you want to request a lower limit? Well I guess I can do that for you.”)

Turns out their lowest limit is $1,000, but I can live with that.

And the world wonders why so much of the population in capitalist countries is mired in soaring personal debt loads.

Just to put a coda to this story, the day after my contact with Amex, I spun the story out for a co-worker and he told me that he heard people seeking credit are assigned an overall “global” credit limit based on a whack of factors like income, previous borrowing history, etc. If you accumulate several cards whose combined limit approaches that amount, the number of new card issuers who will approve an application from you suddenly begins to shrink dramatically. So if you do apply for a new card and you still have a significant gap between the limit you have, and the limit to which you are entitled according to this credit ranking, you shouldn’t be surprised to discover that a single card provider will all but wipe out that gap by giving you a limit that takes all of your remaining allowable monthly borrowing limit and assigns to it one card – theirs. That way, you’ve maxed out your so-called “global” credit ranking on one card, effectively forcing you to make all your credit purchases on that card simply because you aren’t able to get approval for new cards issued anywhere else.

I don’t know if that’s true, but it sure sounds plausible.
…

And finally… I don’t know what title to put on this. But here’s the story. Very recently, I actually bought a CD at Starbuck’s – it’s John Fogerty’s new album, Revival (which, come to think of it, he could have named Reviver and placed its name in an endless circle on the cover… Come to think of it even more, I guess “endless circle” is redundant, not to mention kinda stupid when you think of it. But I digress.)

When I got to the cash, in addition to my long double espresso, I slid the CD across the counter and suddenly noticed the price sticker had two prices: one in $US and one in $Canadian. And the Canadian price was $2 more. And this on a day when I’d heard in the news that the loonie actually closed the day ahead of the almighty greenback.

So being the pain in the ass that I am, I asked the kid behind the cash (and it really was a kid; this guy had to still be viewing his 17th birthday on some distant horizon) why that was. To his credit, ho looked me square in the eye and said, “I don’t know.” At which point a helpful older kid – probably the night manager, cause she had to be at least 18 – came over and offered, “I know the reason. It’s because we can’t keep up.”

So being the pain in the ass that I am (or has someone already said that?), I looked at her and tapped the price sticker. “OK, well then how be you sell it to me for the US dollar price and then you’ll be keeping up?” I said. Now they looked at each other, and at that point I said, “Just charge me the Canadian price; it’s not your fault.”

They seemed relieved.

A couple days ago, my wife, who is infinitely wiser than I, told me she was no longer buying books, effective immediately, until the higher “In Canada” price vanishes. As of tonight, I’m joining her in that. For several weeks, I’ve heard countless bleats from publishers trying to explain away the need for pricing in Canadian dollars that is sometimes 30 or 40 per cent above the American dollar price. And yet not once has any of them sounded the least bit credible. The bottom line is that we are at this moment pouring a pool of profit onto a publishing gravy train in this country and if enough of us just say [EXPLETIVE DELETED], maybe they’ll get the hint that http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQGXi_7ATag (alternatively, we could all channel Howard Beale.) Wouldn’t that make them think? Wouldn’t it just? Just quit buying books in Canada. And then watch how fast those US and Canadian numbers match up.

- - -

À la next time.

It’s Singalong Opposite Day!

Altogether now:

"Breakin' rocks in the hot sun;
I fought the law and the law won.
I fought the law and the law won.

I needed money 'cause I had none;
I fought the law and the law won.
I fought the law and the law won.

Well I miss my baby and I feel so bad;
I guess my race is run.
She's the best girl I've ever had.
I fought the law and the law won.
I fought the law and the law won.

Robbin' people with a six-gun;
I fought the law and the law won.
I fought the law and the law won.

Well I miss my baby and I feel so bad;
I guess my race is run.
She's the best girl I've ever had.
I fought the law and the law won.
I fought the law and the law won."

If you’d like to bring the above to life in a truly unique way, here are the Trailer Park Boys, with a mini-film (very “mini”) weaving its way around a rendition of the song performed by The Big Dirty Band (who look suspiciously like Getty Lee and company fronted by punk rocker Care Failure, formerly of what Wikipedia called the “sleaze band”, Die Mannequin and, before that, The Bloody Mannequins). Oh, and be sure to crank your sound up. Your neighbours will love you!

(Now to be fair, I did say “unique”. It's not my fault if you didn't take that as a warning.)

So why Singalong “Opposite” Day, you ask? Well, in my case, it’s because I fought the law and the law didn’t win (but if anyone asks, I’ll deny it! So don’t ask.)

A few weeks ago, I had a simple goal to meet – to get a package into the hands of a winery employee at the Opolo Vineyards in Paso Robles, California. During our little trip down there earlier this year, my wife and I passed a long, delightful lunch under canvas in the middle of that fine vineyard under the blazing sunshine of California’s Central Coast wine region at a combination lunch / wine tasting.

As was already recounted here, since I am an incurable chit-chatter, the very first time I went to the tasting bar I commented to the fellow pouring the wine that if they have an award for the farthest distance travelled to today’s tasting, my wife and I would probably win it.

The conversation grew swiftly when he found out we were from Ottawa, because he knew the Senators had just won their way into the Stanley Cup finals. (Finding a hockey fan in the middle of California’s Central Coast wine region was unusual enough; finding one who was following it closely enough to know Ottawa would play for the Cup was, well, to put it into wine terms, as frequent an occurrence as a Grand Cru year for grapes.)

Two things happened in fairly short order: first, our “tastings” rather abruptly became full four-ounce glasses of wine – to the obvious chagrin of tasters at adjacent tables as they sat down with their single-ounce shots, and saw what I was coming back from the tasting bar with; and secondly, the pourer and I discussed the possibility of a friendly bet should his team, the Anaheim Ducks, beat Detroit in their own semi-finals and then go on to become Ottawa’s opponents in the Cup finals.

After returning home, I followed up by e-mail, and we affirmed that the terms of our bet would be as follows: Should Anaheim – who did indeed beat Detroit to become Team 2 in the Cup final – win, then I was to send to him a Senators t-shirt and a bottle of Ontario icewine. Should Ottawa win, he would send an Opolo Vineyards t-shirt and a bottle of their award-winning Zinfandel north to our home.

My sojourn into lawbreaking began when the final buzzer sounded on Anaheim’s fourth win in the series.

First, I bought the booty. Then, like an idiot, I phoned Canada Post to ask if there were any restrictions applied to shipping a bottle of wine into the US. (The last thing I wanted to see was a late-evening television news clip showing a Homelands Security sniffer dog poking furiously around the periphery of a familiar-looking “suspicious package” to be followed by the inevitable clip of my wine shipment being blown to smithereens in the middle of a vacant lot near the border. This is, after all, the Agency that at one time considered toothpaste a possible threat to national security.)

Mistake number 1 (and you think I’d know this by now) was asking someone in officialdom if there are any rules about ANYTHING! [In a variation of the rule, you never phone up Canada’s tax agency around tax time each year to ask if something is taxable. Because (a) it is; and (b) it might trigger an audit.]

Need I even say so at this point? – Canada Post advised me there is but one restriction regarding the shipment of wine across the border by a private citizen – you can’t do it. Period.

Calling a couple shipping companies only resulted in my hearing elaborations of the rule. FedEx, in fact, went so far as to admonish me for even asking. “We can’t ship wine to the US! That would make us bootleggers.” (Methinks, dear, you have seen this movie maybe one too many times.)

Finally, after literally a couple weeks of my trying to find some sort of work-around, it turned out the best advice I got was from a co-worker who said, “Just package the damned bottle up and send it!” And he used to work for Canada Revenue!

As it turns out, in the end I did exactly that. In fact, I “packaged” the stuff so thoroughly that I began to think it would indeed take a Homelands Security explosives charge to open it. Fortunately, a bottle of icewine is a smaller than a typical wine bottle so right from the start I had size and weight working to my advantage when it came to allaying the suspicions of the watchful guardians of our frontiers. But no amount of wrapping was going to shield the “slosh” should one of those same guards decide to give the package a random shake.

My next bit of subterfuge, therefore, was to buy a 750 mL (typical wine-bottle-sized) bottle of Québec maple syrup to identify on the shipping label as the source of any sloshing that might be heard. (The near-Sauterne density of icewine is also such that it pretty much sloshes the same way as, indeed, does syrup.) I also wrapped it in close proximity to the icewine bottle. Now, I reasoned, only an X-Ray would reveal two bottles inside the container. And surely they’re not going to X-Ray every last shoebox-sized container crossing the border... are they? That left only the thought that maybe some far thinker in Homelands Security had devised a system of weight alerts to indicate when the package was noticeably heavier than its contents list suggested.

(I know, I know, and for the record I realize that, in my turn, I probably have watched one too many episodes of this show.)

So my final shipping label reported the syrup, the t-shirt and (surely about the same weight as a bottle of icewine) a “Special Commemorative edition of the Ottawa Citizen”. It was all packaged, as noted, under about a quarter mile of industrial strength transparent duct tape.

At the end of the day, it did indeed arrive safely and complete, precisely where it was supposed to arrive and in the message advising me he had received it, my US co-gambler added a compliment on the thoroughness of my packaging. (At least I think it was a compliment. After all, it invoked the name of the Son of God. Complete with His middle initial.)

As a footnote to this whole sordid saga of shameless flouting of Canadian shipping regulations, I most certainly do NOT recommend Canada Post’s self-touted “online tracking system”. For 19 days running, the only news the website conveyed was that my package had been “accepted for shipping” at the drugstore postal sub-station where I sent it off on a wing and a prayer. (Well, prayer anyway, since I decided I didn’t want to spend the money for air freight and ground transportation was guaranteed to be no more than ten working days to any address in California.)

On the 21st day after it left, my California friend sent me the message telling me it had arrived. Coincidentally (and why did this not surprise me?) Canada Post phoned me the very same day and acknowledged they had failed to fulfill their warranted “ten business days” shipping time so they were going to initiate a refund of the value indicated on the box’s contents list. They also told me that even if it did eventually get delivered, I would not have to return the refund. So, thinking about a half a second slower than I should have been doing – in other words, the typical speed for me – I blurted out to the friendly Canada Postie that they didn’t have to do that, because I had just received an e-mail from the intended recipient informing me the package had been safely delivered. So just close the file, I said.

(Feel free to cue Jethro Tull at this point in my story.)

(... Oh. PS... In case any official agent of either Canada Post or the Canada Revenue Agency should ever happen to be reading this, I’d like very much to thank my brother-in-law Bob for sharing the preceding hilarious story of how he worked his way around this fine nation’s justifiably protective legislation that keeps us safe from either sending or receiving harmful booze. I have actually reprinted his story here in its entirety exactly as he told it to me, hence the use of the first-person-singular pronoun throughout. So it’s him you want... not me.)

- - -

And continuing with our musical theme in this update:

25 per cent of the Beatles is still 100 per cent of the entertainment!

One of my recent music acquisitions is a Greatest Hits collection by none other than Ringo Starr, entitled “Photograph”. Besides being the title of the collection, “Photograph” is also the title of one of its biggest hits.

I have always been a fan of the post-Beatles Ringo. More than any of the Fab Four, he seemed to have the most fun making music after the quartet’s members went their separate ways. The result is a largely playful, immensely toe-tapable collection of original songs and covers, buttressed by a remarkable collection of supporting musicians who are themselves hardly slouches.

“Photograph” is also complemented by a series of liner notes in which Ringo places each tune in its context. Strangely enough, the context for almost all of them seems to be along the lines of “Well, we were sittin’ around one evenin’ ‘avin’ a bit of a lark and decided this would be fun...” Here, for example, is what he says went into “Only You (And You Alone)”:

“This version of the Platters song is good and
my voice is good because it was too high for
me so I went into this strange falsetto. And it
was like, ‘Wow, it works!’ And the video for
‘Only You’ is great. It’s just Harry Nilsson
and me on top of the Capitol Building. We just
went on the roof and filmed it. Harry was in his
bathrobe and no one thought anything about it.”

The album also features a duet with none other than country legend Buck Owens, “Act Naturally”:

“They're gonna put me in the movies;
They're gonna make a big star out of me.
We'll make a film about a man that's sad and lonely
And all I gotta do is act naturally.

Well, I'll bet you I'm gonna be a big star
Might win an Oscar you can never tell
The movies gonna make me a big star
'cause I can play the part so well.”

One of the few departures from comedy – although not entirely even here, as you’ll note – in the notes is when he describes why he wrote “Never Without You”, a lovely little tribute he wrote after George Harrison died:

“It’s all about George. This song is still very
poignant for me, and I tried not to do it on the
last tour, but I had to because it’s a beautiful
song and expressed what I felt for the man.
The song actually started with one of my
co-writers, Gary Nicholson. Then I thought
of putting Harry Nilsson, John Lennon and
George into the song – all of my friends who
had left. But in the end that got so mad, and
I thought let’s just do it about George. He
had just gone and I wanted to express my love
for him. Also the guitar solo is pretty good –
it’s by that guy who does ‘Layla’ – what’s his
name? He lives right down the road and who
else could I have? Peace and love, Eric.”

("That guy who does 'Layla'” is, of course, Eric Clapton.)

20 tunes in all. Beaucoups of fun!

So if you’ve got a few minutes left and haven’t already nodded off, thanks to the miracle that is You Tube, here are

1. Ringo and Harry doing “Only You” on the Capitol roof – with a more than nodding tribute to Klaatu and Gort, as well. (No, no major security threats were incurred. It’s the Capitol Records Building in Hollywood, not that other thingie in Washington DC.)

2. Ringo and Buck doing – well, essentially clowning their way through – “Act Naturally”.

and 3. Ringo’s touching good-bye to former bandmate George Harrison. I like this one a lot. Besides the subtly lovely touch of burying the images of George in little places like the viewscreen of a studio TV camera, the almost childish rhyming in the lyrics echo, perhaps, a much simpler time when “She Loves You, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah” went platinum overnight.

“I was in the greatest show on earth... for what it was worth.”
- “I’m the Greatest”... Ringo

All Things Must Pass.

À la next time.

Cry havoc and let slip the Ducks of War…

A couple military meanderings this go ‘round.

The Canadian mission in Afghanistan not so long ago got as close to me as it’s probably ever going to get (knock on wood) – a co-worker is the wife of someone who was injured in a recent roadside explosion of an “improvised explosive device” that killed three other people riding in the same vehicle as he was. Thankfully, his injury is “non life-threatening” although that doesn’t take into account that his wife might club him to death with his own crutches should he decide to go back when he recovers.

But in subsequent days, I read more closely those articles that talk about the public’s “support” (and that of our various elected representatives) for Canada’s mission in that country. The always politically astute group of Bloc Québécois airhead MPs happily feeding at the federal trough while chanting the mantra of a sovereign Québec, for example, have warned they are prepared to bring down the present minority federal government if a firm mission end date is not announced when Parliament resumes sitting. (The recent deployment of the much battle-honoured Royal 22nd Regiment has put francophone soldiers on the front lines, you see, and that inevitably has already led to francophone soldiers’ deaths. Can’t have that. After all, there are few enough Bloc votes left as it is.)

But snarking aside, it occurs to me that there probably is precious little about this war that will precipitate its end except a drop in public support to a level so low that political expediency, and nothing else, will bring the troops home.

Because has anyone defined a goal whose achievement will allow us to say we won?

Let’s face it, the events that caused the troops to come home in previous wars were pretty specific – the enemy, beaten so badly that his cities were rubble and his armed forces crushed, signed armistices. That’s how WWI and WWII ended. The Korean War’s actual shooting ended with the declaration of a shared agreement that both sides would simply stop shooting at each other. (Interestingly enough, in legislative terms, the Korean War is still officially not “over” because no official peace treaty has been agreed by all sides, but rather it is in abeyance by virtue of the decades-long observed ceasefire.)

When asked, I love the troops; hate the mission. I explain that by tapping into the Alcoholics’ Anonymous approach – before you can cure someone, that someone has to want to be cured. And for all the admirable things that Canadian soldiers are doing for the shattered civilian population in Afghanistan, sadly there are still many other people in the country who want to blow up the rebuilt schools, murder the women who try to make something of their education-driven sense of what’s right and fair, or more egregiously enforce their own particular religion’s core message of world peace and harmony simply by killing everyone who does not share it.

And until those people (the ones with guns and bombs) are willing to stop using them, Afghanistan is and will remain a largely fruitless mission whose only benefit will be to provide a field for live-ammunition training for our soldiers. (With the tragic downside for the “good guys” of occasional death or dismemberment.)

I honestly have yet to see a good answer to the question, “What are we doing in Afghanistan?” The short answer, that we are spelling off the US forces who should be there so that they can fight the “War on Terror” in Iraq, leads immediately to, “Well yes but, just what part of the ‘War on Terror’ is in Iraq?” Unfortunately, that’s a question even less answerable (unless of course you’re still among the by now single-digit percentage of the world’s people who are completely deluded into accepting the spin that Iraq is where 9-1-1 came from.)

For the sake of my co-worker, I hope her husband proves willing to take his hard-earned and well-deserved professional laurels, add them to his incredibly good luck, and find a much less risky but equally satisfying way to employ his skills. For her sake and that of their young child.

For the sake of all the families of all the soldiers deployed to Afghanistan, I hope someone in authority wakes up one morning and, after opening his day’s newspaper to a headline screaming of yet another terrorist-driven killing of “collateral” civilians, says, “Screw this! Everybody come home right now and when they ask for help because they don’t want to kill each other any more, we’ll come back by the thousands. Until that day, have a nice life… or whatever you call the stupidly short span of time on this earth that your actions will inevitably earn you.”

But that’s probably just me.

- - -

And on we ramble…

There is another ongoing debate in Canada with a military theme – this one over a 70-or-so-word sign that highlights an exhibit in our National War Museum. The debate, such as it is, is centred on the Museum’s contention that “controversy rages” over the purpose and results of the WWII Bomber Command offensive against Germany, especially late in the war, when attacks were launched against major cities such as Munich, Dresden, Berlin and Cologne.

I could go on at length summarizing the debate’s main points, but Maclean’s columnist Paul Wells frames both sides of it beautifully in the two quotes he placed on his blog, “Inkless Wells” on August 29:

On the one hand: “Art Smith, a former Bomber Command captain and former Conservative MP, explained: 'The words said that we were responsible for 600,000 dead. I took offence that we were just helter-skelter bombers. We always had justified targets.'"
-- The Globe and Mail, August 29

On the other hand: "The British and American navies were fully occupied with the ongoing Battle of the Atlantic. The British and American armies were engaged in North Africa, and later in southern Italy, far beyond the range of aircraft based in Britain. As a result, the only major task that the British and American air forces could entertain was a sustained bombing offensive against Germany's heartland. They applied themselves to the task with mounting ferocity.... The first 'Thousand-Bomber Raid' took place on 30/31 May 1942. Cologne, Germany's most ancient city, was trashed in the space of two hours. In August 1942 the USAAF brought over its B-17 Flying Fortresses, and began a daily programme of escorted daylight raids to supplement the RAF's night-time activities. At the Casablanca Conference of January 1943 the Allied leaders ordered that priority be given to 'precision bombing' of submarine yards, aircraft factories, railway lines and oil refineries. But this was largely ignored. On 27/8 July 1943 Hamburg, Germany's premier port, was destroyed by a firestorm in which 43,000 people perished and a million were made homeless. Berlin was repeatedly attacked, so that it resembled a moonscape of rubble long before the Red Army arrived. On 3 February 1945 a USAF raid on Berlin killed 25,000 people at one go. Less than two weeks later, a combined British and American raid on Dresden caused a second firestorm, as at Hamburg, in which perhaps 60,000 people died for no known military purpose."
-- Norman Davies, Europe At War 1939-1945: No Simple Victory, published 2006

A number of the most recent news articles about the argument included a most succinct quote from Canadian historian and author, Margaret MacMilllan (whose book, “Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World”, is the single best volume I’ve yet read about the impact that the Treaty to end World War I had on the world that followed it). Here’s how her comment was cited in the August 29 Globe and Mail:

“No one questions the veterans' bravery,
Ms. MacMillan insists. ‘But a museum
Is not a war memorial. It should allow
the public to make up their own minds.’
She warned that the decision to alter an
exhibition to satisfy the veterans could mean
‘whoever screams loudest can have their view
made known.’”

Exactly. As ugly as the pall of civilian wartime bombing deaths is, they occurred and the weapons that caused them were dropped by fliers wearing Allied insignia on their uniforms.

As for any possible dispute that the infernos of Munich, Dresden and, on the other side of the world, Tokyo, Nagasaki and Hiroshima are “controversial”, the period sits at the end of the sentence that reads, “60 years later, we’re still arguing about it.” That’s the nature of history. Trying to erase it is the nature of propaganda.

= = = = = = = = = =

And finally, on a less bellicose note, I spent a happy few hours a couple weekends ago at a Vintage Wings Ottawa Rallye (and yes, that’s how it’s spelled)

Here’s some photo evidence.

One of the National Capital Region’s resident millionaires, Michael Potter, probably could spend his money on worse things than maintaining and flying a fleet of pristine vintage aircraft. Needless to say, there are some among us who are mighty happy he doesn’t. Three of the best from his growing collection were there:

The plane that won the North:
the De Havilland Beaver


The plane that everyone except Hawker Hurricane enthusiasts will argue won the Battle of Britain:
the Supermarine Spitfire (albeit an earlier version than this high-powered lightning-fast Mark XVI, which only debuted in the war’s final months)

The plane that helped the Allies win the battle of the WWII bombing fleets, the P-51 Mustang. (Before its arrival, fighters that escorted bombers were lucky if they could manage 10 or 15 minutes over the target before they depleted their fuel to the point they had to return home, abandoning their charges to their fate at the hands of enemy fighter pilots.
This was one of the big reasons that the Luftwaffe failed to bring Britain to its knees with campaigns like the Blitz where their bombers attacked London but suffered huge losses to the RAF when their escorting Messerschmitts had to return to their bases on the continent. The Mustang carried enough gas that it was able to accompany its bombers the full round trip, with enough left over to allow them to mix it up in dogfights with enemy aircraft.)

The oddest aircraft on hand this day were a quartet of amphibious aircraft called SeaBees.
This one, absent any paint on its high-gloss aluminum skin was far and away the most beautiful of the four.

And before we exit, thank you, Leslie, for cropping these photos down to the way they appear here from what began as airplane-shaped dots in the sky, very high-resolution dots in the sky, as these cropped images will bear out, but dots in the sky nonetheless. I must find out how she does that. (I understand the initals "RTFM" may be involved.)

Until la prochaine.