The hazards of mispunctuation:
Here’s a Google news headline that appeared on Tuesday December 21: “ABC News Attack on US-Iraqi Base Leaves 22 Dead”
It was a story uploaded from ABC News. The absence of a colon, or anything else – a hyphen or dash – to separate the source from the headline leaves an unusual, to say the least, result. It suggests someone in the embedded press pool finally snapped after being excluded once too often from the daily “Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People” military briefing.
= = = = = = = = = =
The hazards of misaligning a subjunctive clause (no relation to Santa):
Here’s a random comment culled from a Christmas-related blog discussion:
“Over the years there has been an added secular overlay of Christmas, which is OK. I like the tree (decorated mine last night with my five month old daughter!)…”
Does Children’s Aid know about this guy?!!!
= = = = = = = = = =
“And to Tiny Tim, who lived and got well again…”
Most mornings, when I get on my bus, there are no seats and people are already standing halfway along the centre aisle. One recent morning was no exception. And when it is one of those winter mornings – as it was this day – where you don’t know what to wear because freezing ice pellets are falling as you leave your house and you’ve heard a forecast for every form of precipitation up to a plague of locusts, you and everyone else leave the house sporting every kind of foul weather gear imaginable, usually in combination (a parka with a rain shell overlay, for example).
The result is a tremendous bulking up of a commuter’s personal space requirements to sometimes double the dimensions you ordinarily need. Add the accoutrements like dripping umbrellas and backpacks and a typical standee section of a city bus becomes a veritable forest of swollen, humid fabric.
Under such circumstances, even if one wants to, one can’t always pay meticulous attention to each and every footfall.
And on this morning, about six people after me climbing into the bus, a hapless boarder triggered a piercing shriek from an older woman sitting on the “Privileged Seating” (pregnant Moms-to-be; mobility-impaired people, the very elderly, blind people with seeing eye dogs, and the like). It was loud enough to draw the immediate attention of everyone within earshot (which, given her vocal volume, was pretty well the entire busload of passengers). And we all turned just in time to see someone, who had tromped on her foot while boarding, launch into an effusive stream of apology.
The woman, bending forward in obvious pain, pulled her foot back from the narrow aisle, and re-positioned her crutch.
Along with everyone else on board, I felt considerable sympathy for both her and the tromping offender. But the presence of a crutch notwithstanding, I also wonder about the wisdom of parking oneself on that particular privileged seat, right beside where passengers stream aboard, passengers whose glasses instantly fog up and, even if spectacle-less, have only a restricted downward view because of bulky coats, dripping umbrellas, and soaked backpacks slung at angles that inconvenience absolutely as many people as is humanly possible.
(I realize that smacks of "It's your own damned fault!" But that's not my intention. I'm thinking of a tone more like, "Safety begins at home.")
= = = = = = = = = =
And file this under: "Oh sorry… you meant Songsheet # 1!"
Recently we at work all received a cheery e-mailed message from our Directors who made it clear it was not going to be yet another of those yadda-yadda “Here’s what we’ve done over the past year and here are the challenges we anticipate in the future” generic seasonal senior management congratulations, to wit:
“It is the time of the year when we all get e-mails reminding us about the work we did during the year that is ending and the challenges we face ahead in the upcoming year. This e-mail will not do that. Instead, it is a call to celebrate our success as a team.”
That being said, not (and I am not making this up) 30 seconds later, a second all-employee message landed from _their_ boss, our Minister, who began,
“Over the past year, we have worked together to build a department and faced the challenges of meeting the needs of employers and workers in the context of a constantly changing world of work. We can be proud of the fact that millions of Canadians have enjoyed better access to our programs and services. The coming year will bring its share of challenges.”
I expect the New Year in the lofty boardrooms upstairs will include a Minister / Directors roundtable whose theme will be “The concept of a chorus”.
= = = = = = = = = =
Star Trek fans: The hour is come!
If we could just persuade US President George Dubya Bush and his cabinet to wear red shirts the next time any of them take a jaunt abroad… (“Uh… Mr President, we seem to have lost SecDef Rumsfeld. He was here a second ago and then,… well then he just sort of vanished!” “What do you mean ‘just sort of’ vanished’?!” “Well sir, one minute he was walking along in your wake at that respectful three-pace distance you demand. Then the next second, a streak of light appeared from the sky. It ended at the SecDef’s head. He went all shimmery, turned into a brilliant glowing silhouette… all wavy-like, and then disappeared, leaving behind that bit of white dust on the ground there.” “Well, could he have been transported into an alternate dimension?” “Possibly, sir, do you want us to ask Spock to do a full spectrum analysis of the immediate vicinity and see if there are any anomalies or unusual energy readings… or maybe try to reconstitute that powder to see if we can make him better again?” “What are you asking me for? Dammit, I’m a President not a doctor… Oh alright, go ahead… No wait! On second thought, Naaaaaaaah.”)
- - - - - - - - - -
Here’s the item that triggered that bit of mental meandering:
(From the CBC website / Dec 21)
“University offers course in 'Star Trek'
DECATUR, ILL. - A university in Decatur, Ill., is offering a course in Star Trek, the long-running series of television shows and movies.
Called The Multidisciplinary Worlds of Star Trek, the full-credit course will be taught at Millikin University by Dr. Michael O'Conner during the school's winter break.
"This class will boldly go where no one has gone before, as we explore the lore, politics, philosophy, groundbreaking multiculturalism and historical contexts of the popular science fiction series and phenomenon known as Star Trek," the school's course calendar boasts.
…
The homework assignments for students in O'Conner's course will be to watch selected episodes from the various shows.
He plans to use them as a bellwether for discussing changes in American society.
In the original series, for example, female crewmembers wore skimpy skirts as uniforms. By contrast, the Voyager series debuted in 1995 with a female starship captain played by Kate Mulgrew.
Another topic for class discussion will be the "prime directive," the rule dictating that Starfleet officers must not interfere in the development of alien cultures.
O'Conner will bring up Kirk's constant violations of the prime directive, in addition to relating the concept to current U.S. foreign policy.”
- - - - - - - - - -
Gratuitous editorial comment: I confess I _love_ the idea that violating the United Federation of Planets’ “Prime Directive” has a potential application to present US foreign policy.
= = = = = = = = = =
“And leave me to keep Christmas in my own way…”
For the past few days in the massive table-packed trough called a “food court” at the vast Place du Portage office complex in Hull, Quebec where I work, there’s been a roving accordionist wandering among the tablefuls of masticators. His purpose, one presumes, is to instil the true spirit of buying into the hearts of we would-be customers. However, our consuming focus in this setting, if my priority is anything by which to judge, is oriented more towards food than to the acquisition of still more commercial goods.
Recently, as I sat doing a bit of consuming of my own (Thai salad rolls and chicken soup), he happened to pass by, playing as he strolled. And it took a few seconds for me to register the seasonal number he had chosen to grace us with.
My thinking is that he is perhaps a recent arrival to the country, and somewhat computer literate. And maybe a well-intentioned buddy made a few suggestions meant to help him find accordion music online relevant to meaningful Christmas sentiment here in Canada. “Hey, Giuseppe,” offered his helpful friend, “I was looking in an English language Bible in the Pescara Public Library, and I found the Christmas story. Just Google ‘Glory Hallelujah’. You can’t miss.”
So on this day, true to that spirit, from his accordion came the strains of that ever-popular French Canadian Christmas classic, The Battle Hymn of the Republic.
Altogether now:
“He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.
He has loose’d the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword
His truth is marching on!
Fa la la la la… la la… la… laaaaaaaaaa.”
= = = = = = = = = =
"My dear... the children... Christmas..."
Overheard while Christmas shopping among the kitchen gadgets in The Bay at St Laurent. Two young-ish women were browsing. One held up a corkscrew for the other to view, and asked, “What about this?” The second replied, “Perfect!” And as they wandered off towards the cash to pay, “I’m not surprised she wore out her last corkscrew.”
Meoooow Pfft! Pfft!
= = = = = = = = = =
And finally, in 1999 (December 23), the UK newspaper, The Guardian, quoted the following as its “Best festive cheer scene”, a judgement with which, neither before nor since, have I found any reason to argue:
“Scrooge After being visited by The Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future, Scrooge (Alistair Sim) awakes joyfully on Christmas morning. His effusive behaviour startles Mrs Dilber (Kathleen Harrison), his housekeeper, who runs from the room screaming. He catches up with her on the stairs.
‘I'm not mad’, exclaims a jubilant Scrooge, putting something into her hand.
‘A guinea. Whatever for?’
‘I'll give you one guess.’
‘To keep me mouth shut?’
He laughs, starting with a chuckle that grows to uncontrolled gales of laughter. Finally, he breaks off in embarrassment.
‘No, no, no. It's for a Christmas present.’
‘A Christmas present. For me?’
‘Of course for you. A merry, merry, merry Christmas Mrs. Dilber. How much do I pay you?’
‘Two shillings a week.’
‘It's forthwith raised to ten.’
‘Are you sure you don't want to see a doctor?’
‘A doctor? Certainly not, nor the undertaker. Now, off you go and enjoy yourself.’
Mrs Dilber hurries away, a grin plastered from ear to ear.
‘Bob's yer uncle! Merry Christmas Mr. Scrooge, in keeping with the situation.’”
(My daughter loves that last expression; because she really does have an Uncle Bob.)
= = = = = = = = = =
Political Correctness be hanged! Merry Christmas to y’all, too! And a Happy New Year!
Thursday, December 23, 2004
Thursday, December 16, 2004
Follow-ups and mail
With reference to a recent update where I ventured a suggestion that Julia Roberts had perhaps intended to associate her male newborn twin (Phinnaeus) with the hero of “Around the World in Eighty Days”, friend and “Tonstant Weader” pointed out to me that Verne’s 115,200-minute circumnavigator was actually named Phileas and not, as I had said, Phineas.
Let’s see: Google “Phineas Fogg”: 5,090 hits, including an early one just begging to be further explored: Rear Admiral Phineas Fogg-Bottom;
Google “Phileas Fogg”: 88,400 hits
I sit corrected. (And thank you, TW).
All of which of course makes Julia’s selection of “Phinnaeus” as Hazel’s twin even more perplexing, with no populist link whatsoever except for the wave of imitators now lying in maternity wards all across the length and breadth of Fayetteville, Arkansas, presently delivering new Phinnaeusses (Phinnaei?) into the world. All will be duly sent forward about two decades’ hence to seek their fame and fortune but, alas, will find only offers of therapy when they fail to cope with the outright laughter that greets their cheery, “Hey y’all, my name’s Phinnaeus. What’s yours?” in the world beyond their gravelled driveways.
- - - - - -
And in my previous note about the collective noun used to name a group of strip club owners, I had proposed borrowing from the geese, “gaggle”, with a strong emphasis on the first syllable. Well, I think friend Ian has me beat with a recent message in which he suggested, “the collective noun appropriate to strip club owners is a ’pornucopia’.”
Perfect, that.
2. CIDA and Christmas Update
Recalling a recent rail of mine about the absence of a Christian cross from a Christmas advertisement that included the symbols of Judaism and Islam, I went an extra step and politely conveyed that concern to the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). Just recently, I received this most satisfying and equally polite response:
“Thank you for your note expressing your view about the poster announcing the Holiday Season Reception for CIDA employees.
We appreciate your concern about the fact that Christmas was not represented by a cross on the poster.
We are pleased to inform you that the poster was modified, in response to your e-mail, and a cross was added to the design on Tuesday, December 7.
We thank you for bringing this matter to our attention and we wish you a very merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.”
Well right back atcha, CIDA!
- 0 -
Did this headline and sub-headline even need an article after it? (From The Globe and Mail online edition December 15.)
Headline: “Trendy party-goers quaff date-rape drug”
Sub-headline: “Upside: No hangover and no calories. Downside: 'You can pass out and die' ”
Oooooo-kay. But I do find it interesting that a new synonym for “unimaginably stupid” appears to be “trendy”.
- 0 -
And even more from the home mailbox.
Here is the sum total of a message I received recently, printed on a thin postcard from the Columbia School of Journalism, home of CJR (The Columbia Journalism Review, a really fine bi-monthly* review of the process of news coverage, especially its abuses):
“WE ARE SORRY THAT YOU HAVE DECIDED NOT TO CONTINUE YOUR SUBSCRIPTION TO COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW MAGAZINE. BECAUSE LABELS ARE PRINTED IN ADVANCE, ONE OR MORE COPIES MAY HAVE BEEN MAILED. ANY ISSUES YOU HAVE RECEIVED ARE YOURS TO KEEP. CUSTOMER SERVICE.”
There’s a bit of a story here. I really enjoy reading the CJR and, last Spring, sent them an International Money Order (IMO) for a two-year subscription. After receiving one issue, the very next piece of mail I got was a demand for payment, or my subscription – I was told – would be cancelled. (Since they could only have got my address from the same letter that included my payment in full, I ignored it.) On and off over the past year, I have received, I think, a grand total of about three issues (of what should have been six), plus an equal number of demands for payment.
So I sent them a letter recently telling them thanks but no thanks and suggesting they might want to clean up their mailing / subscriber list handling procedures. Which earned me the above postcard.
I actually had a thoroughly good laugh over this, because “Customer Service” is obviously the dregs of an entire marketing team. In fact, in the bowels of the Columbia University Administration Building, there probably is a whole roomful of “Customer Service” people who are exactly like Douglas Adams’s telephone sanitizers and PR consultants, and who were assigned to the University’s customer service staff simply because Humankind doesn’t yet have the technology to bundle them all up and shoot them off, en masse, one-way into deep space.
I can just imagine the long discussions over what to say to subscribers whose frustration finally triggers cancellation: “Let’s see… Oh I know, let’s appeal to the environmentalist in them – are you a tree hugger? Well we’ve already massacred a hectare of old growth spruce just to print the mailing labels only for you, yes YOU! And just to be on the safe side, let’s also be altruistic: Hey, if we managed to accidentally send you an issue, then you may be surprised to hear that even though the present US administration views objective news analysis on par with a toxic nerve agent released into a city’s water supply, we are not, in fact, going to send Homelands Security Forces up your way to beat you about the head and shoulders until you excavate it from your pile of Inbox paper and return it to us. What’s that you say? YOU’VE ALREADY READ IT??!!!” (*** whack *** whack *** whack ***)
* I can’t remember how many times I’ve had the “Does ‘bi-(time)’ mean twice every (time) or every second (time)?” discussion. I swear it’s what led the English to invent the word “fortnightly” simply to avoid any confusion that “bi-weekly” could possibly mean “every second week”. But according to most dictionaries, that’s exactly what it means. A bi-weekly event, most assert, means twice per month.
Clarity wasn’t helped at all when the US loudly celebrated its “Bicentennial” in 1976 at the 200-year mark (no doubt at parties crowded with 50-year old bicentenarians).
And should you want to get all etymological about it, the confusion is only magnified. After all, doesn’t the “bi” prefix customarily mean “half” or “halve”, as in “bisect” and “bifurcate”? And of course having access to many dictionaries (reflecting the old saying: “A man with one watch always knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure.”) doesn’t help at all, because definitions of “bi” can be found identifying it BOTH as “a prefix meaning two” and “a prefix meaning ‘twice in’ ”. (If you want to drive people crazy, take the view that by defining a process of equal division, “bi” really means you are creating twice the original number of things you started with and thus, the prefix means to double something, rather than halve it.)
I’ve also worked where it was a rule to use “biannual” when you meant “every six months” – which some people contend should vanish entirely and be replaced with the unambiguous “semi-annual” – and “biennial” when you meant every second year.
So to remove all doubt, CJR is actually published every second month, which I guess means I shouldn’t have used “bi-monthly” because by my own logic (?) that means semi-monthly or… fortnightly.
But I digress. Big time.
- 0 -
And my nomination for this week’s Painfully Worded Award comes from my very own Government of Canada department’s Employee Update (and I quote):
“Private room now available for new mothers
Female employees who have recently came back from maternity leave may occasionally need private space at work in order to continue to provide their baby with their milk.”
Eesh! So I guess “nurse” now joins the list of words that “have recently came” to be politically incorrect?
- 0 -
The wisdom of the woodcutter
Often in children’s stories and Old World folk tales, a small but significant part will be played by a wise woodcutter whose sage and timely advice re-directs the hero or heroine back onto the path from which he or she had strayed, thus avoiding a fall under the spell of a geriatric crone or becoming lunch for a hungry wolf.
All I can say is that such a character could not possibly have been inspired by the tree cutters who work for the City of Ottawa.
On a recent walk into work, I happened to pass an enormous boom truck from which a City of Ottawa tree cutter had just emerged. (These big orange trucks, often pulling a wood-chipper trailer whose howling grinders reduce some pretty large tree branches to mulch in mere seconds, are staples on Ottawa’s streets. They are adorned with the company’s name, Asplundh, an especially ugly word that always looks to me like the sound you’d expect a large, flat rock to make when you drop it into a pond from about ten feet up, but I digress.) At the same time a co-commuter named Brian had just come down his driveway and, before we headed off to the bus stop, he stopped to chat with the worker.
The tree cutter had arrived to “thin” a tree on property belonging to one of Brian’s neighbours. It is an enormous old tree and its branches were still heavily laden with last week’s snowfall. Apparently some of them were at considerable risk of snapping off and falling onto the street – or worse, onto a passing pedestrian’s skull. Brian pointed to a massive tree on his own property, also close to the street, and asked the cutter if he would perform the same surgery on his tree.
“Did you phone it in?” asked the worker. “No,” replied Brian. “You gotta phone it in,” persisted the worker. “So’s I get a job sheet that tells me I gotta do the work.” Then, looking back at the tree whose “thinning” was on today’s job sheet, he determined the time was right to launch into his own sage and timely advice.
“Yep, y’know, you really gotta look after a tree. You can’t just plant it and forget it. I mean, well… it’s like a tree is like your girlfriend, or your wife. She goes off to the beauty parlour… what? Once a month or so? Spends about $50 on herself? Looks after herself? Well a tree is the same way. You gotta look after it.”
At this point, Brian patted his pocket and announced, “Whoops, forgot my bus pass,” and speedily headed right back up his driveway towards his front door. I also managed to grab the cue and said, “OK, well thanks for taking care of our trees,” to the City tree cutter and urban arboreal philosopher before heading off to the bus stop, from which point I pondered the miracle of how trees ever managed to grow at all for all those hundreds of thousands of years before City of Ottawa tree cutters came along to hack off and mulch countless numbers of their branches.
“No problem,” he had replied to my parting thanks.
Maybe. Maybe not.
- 0 -
Finally – a winter snapshot
It is early morning and I am on my way to work. It is overcast and a light snow is falling. I am walking across a large space of white. It’s a parking lot (I live in an urban landscape and, in it, there are many) but on this morning I am the first one to cross it. The previous night’s snowfall has only added about four inches of new snow, and it’s still that fluffy consistency that barely slows each step of what I call my “tank boots” – heavy lace-up Sorels with a thick hardened sole and deep tread that puts a well-insulated barrier between my feet and the weather on even the coldest days and in which I feel I can tramp anywhere.
I reach the mid-point of the parking lot and, for a few brief seconds, experience a throwback to a childhood memory of open country winter hikes that I took as a young boy scout. It’s a sensation that combines the intellectual knowledge that you are walking – because your feet are doing that walking thing – with a distinct mental disconnect from the process, because you have absolutely no reference points immediately close to hand to indicate you are moving forward at your usual pace. I’m walking – I think – but for a few seconds, I don’t seem to be getting anywhere at all. Just me, churning along on my minuscule patch of the face of the globe.
Then suddenly I’m at the edge of the parking lot. And I do what kids do – I stop, turn around and look back at the trail I’ve made. It’s straight, but not perfectly straight. The path reveals that my feet, like my mind, obviously meandered occasionally and carried me just slightly off course. And maybe the minor physical deviations occurred at the same time as the mental ones.
That momentary disengagement from all the typical sensations of walking is something utterly unique to winter. Even stumbling ahead in the pitch black of a dark night doesn’t compare, because your steps then are infinitely more cautious. On a pristine white winter surface, your steps are solid and certain, perhaps even a little more vigorous than usual as your brain drives you toward a place where it can recover the points of reference it needs in order to know “normal” again.
But for a few fleeting seconds, rather than moving ahead, I am on God’s treadmill – spatially stationary, and pushing the entire planet Earth behind me with each step.
With reference to a recent update where I ventured a suggestion that Julia Roberts had perhaps intended to associate her male newborn twin (Phinnaeus) with the hero of “Around the World in Eighty Days”, friend and “Tonstant Weader” pointed out to me that Verne’s 115,200-minute circumnavigator was actually named Phileas and not, as I had said, Phineas.
Let’s see: Google “Phineas Fogg”: 5,090 hits, including an early one just begging to be further explored: Rear Admiral Phineas Fogg-Bottom;
Google “Phileas Fogg”: 88,400 hits
I sit corrected. (And thank you, TW).
All of which of course makes Julia’s selection of “Phinnaeus” as Hazel’s twin even more perplexing, with no populist link whatsoever except for the wave of imitators now lying in maternity wards all across the length and breadth of Fayetteville, Arkansas, presently delivering new Phinnaeusses (Phinnaei?) into the world. All will be duly sent forward about two decades’ hence to seek their fame and fortune but, alas, will find only offers of therapy when they fail to cope with the outright laughter that greets their cheery, “Hey y’all, my name’s Phinnaeus. What’s yours?” in the world beyond their gravelled driveways.
- - - - - -
And in my previous note about the collective noun used to name a group of strip club owners, I had proposed borrowing from the geese, “gaggle”, with a strong emphasis on the first syllable. Well, I think friend Ian has me beat with a recent message in which he suggested, “the collective noun appropriate to strip club owners is a ’pornucopia’.”
Perfect, that.
2. CIDA and Christmas Update
Recalling a recent rail of mine about the absence of a Christian cross from a Christmas advertisement that included the symbols of Judaism and Islam, I went an extra step and politely conveyed that concern to the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). Just recently, I received this most satisfying and equally polite response:
“Thank you for your note expressing your view about the poster announcing the Holiday Season Reception for CIDA employees.
We appreciate your concern about the fact that Christmas was not represented by a cross on the poster.
We are pleased to inform you that the poster was modified, in response to your e-mail, and a cross was added to the design on Tuesday, December 7.
We thank you for bringing this matter to our attention and we wish you a very merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.”
Well right back atcha, CIDA!
- 0 -
Did this headline and sub-headline even need an article after it? (From The Globe and Mail online edition December 15.)
Headline: “Trendy party-goers quaff date-rape drug”
Sub-headline: “Upside: No hangover and no calories. Downside: 'You can pass out and die' ”
Oooooo-kay. But I do find it interesting that a new synonym for “unimaginably stupid” appears to be “trendy”.
- 0 -
And even more from the home mailbox.
Here is the sum total of a message I received recently, printed on a thin postcard from the Columbia School of Journalism, home of CJR (The Columbia Journalism Review, a really fine bi-monthly* review of the process of news coverage, especially its abuses):
“WE ARE SORRY THAT YOU HAVE DECIDED NOT TO CONTINUE YOUR SUBSCRIPTION TO COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW MAGAZINE. BECAUSE LABELS ARE PRINTED IN ADVANCE, ONE OR MORE COPIES MAY HAVE BEEN MAILED. ANY ISSUES YOU HAVE RECEIVED ARE YOURS TO KEEP. CUSTOMER SERVICE.”
There’s a bit of a story here. I really enjoy reading the CJR and, last Spring, sent them an International Money Order (IMO) for a two-year subscription. After receiving one issue, the very next piece of mail I got was a demand for payment, or my subscription – I was told – would be cancelled. (Since they could only have got my address from the same letter that included my payment in full, I ignored it.) On and off over the past year, I have received, I think, a grand total of about three issues (of what should have been six), plus an equal number of demands for payment.
So I sent them a letter recently telling them thanks but no thanks and suggesting they might want to clean up their mailing / subscriber list handling procedures. Which earned me the above postcard.
I actually had a thoroughly good laugh over this, because “Customer Service” is obviously the dregs of an entire marketing team. In fact, in the bowels of the Columbia University Administration Building, there probably is a whole roomful of “Customer Service” people who are exactly like Douglas Adams’s telephone sanitizers and PR consultants, and who were assigned to the University’s customer service staff simply because Humankind doesn’t yet have the technology to bundle them all up and shoot them off, en masse, one-way into deep space.
I can just imagine the long discussions over what to say to subscribers whose frustration finally triggers cancellation: “Let’s see… Oh I know, let’s appeal to the environmentalist in them – are you a tree hugger? Well we’ve already massacred a hectare of old growth spruce just to print the mailing labels only for you, yes YOU! And just to be on the safe side, let’s also be altruistic: Hey, if we managed to accidentally send you an issue, then you may be surprised to hear that even though the present US administration views objective news analysis on par with a toxic nerve agent released into a city’s water supply, we are not, in fact, going to send Homelands Security Forces up your way to beat you about the head and shoulders until you excavate it from your pile of Inbox paper and return it to us. What’s that you say? YOU’VE ALREADY READ IT??!!!” (*** whack *** whack *** whack ***)
* I can’t remember how many times I’ve had the “Does ‘bi-(time)’ mean twice every (time) or every second (time)?” discussion. I swear it’s what led the English to invent the word “fortnightly” simply to avoid any confusion that “bi-weekly” could possibly mean “every second week”. But according to most dictionaries, that’s exactly what it means. A bi-weekly event, most assert, means twice per month.
Clarity wasn’t helped at all when the US loudly celebrated its “Bicentennial” in 1976 at the 200-year mark (no doubt at parties crowded with 50-year old bicentenarians).
And should you want to get all etymological about it, the confusion is only magnified. After all, doesn’t the “bi” prefix customarily mean “half” or “halve”, as in “bisect” and “bifurcate”? And of course having access to many dictionaries (reflecting the old saying: “A man with one watch always knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure.”) doesn’t help at all, because definitions of “bi” can be found identifying it BOTH as “a prefix meaning two” and “a prefix meaning ‘twice in’ ”. (If you want to drive people crazy, take the view that by defining a process of equal division, “bi” really means you are creating twice the original number of things you started with and thus, the prefix means to double something, rather than halve it.)
I’ve also worked where it was a rule to use “biannual” when you meant “every six months” – which some people contend should vanish entirely and be replaced with the unambiguous “semi-annual” – and “biennial” when you meant every second year.
So to remove all doubt, CJR is actually published every second month, which I guess means I shouldn’t have used “bi-monthly” because by my own logic (?) that means semi-monthly or… fortnightly.
But I digress. Big time.
- 0 -
And my nomination for this week’s Painfully Worded Award comes from my very own Government of Canada department’s Employee Update (and I quote):
“Private room now available for new mothers
Female employees who have recently came back from maternity leave may occasionally need private space at work in order to continue to provide their baby with their milk.”
Eesh! So I guess “nurse” now joins the list of words that “have recently came” to be politically incorrect?
- 0 -
The wisdom of the woodcutter
Often in children’s stories and Old World folk tales, a small but significant part will be played by a wise woodcutter whose sage and timely advice re-directs the hero or heroine back onto the path from which he or she had strayed, thus avoiding a fall under the spell of a geriatric crone or becoming lunch for a hungry wolf.
All I can say is that such a character could not possibly have been inspired by the tree cutters who work for the City of Ottawa.
On a recent walk into work, I happened to pass an enormous boom truck from which a City of Ottawa tree cutter had just emerged. (These big orange trucks, often pulling a wood-chipper trailer whose howling grinders reduce some pretty large tree branches to mulch in mere seconds, are staples on Ottawa’s streets. They are adorned with the company’s name, Asplundh, an especially ugly word that always looks to me like the sound you’d expect a large, flat rock to make when you drop it into a pond from about ten feet up, but I digress.) At the same time a co-commuter named Brian had just come down his driveway and, before we headed off to the bus stop, he stopped to chat with the worker.
The tree cutter had arrived to “thin” a tree on property belonging to one of Brian’s neighbours. It is an enormous old tree and its branches were still heavily laden with last week’s snowfall. Apparently some of them were at considerable risk of snapping off and falling onto the street – or worse, onto a passing pedestrian’s skull. Brian pointed to a massive tree on his own property, also close to the street, and asked the cutter if he would perform the same surgery on his tree.
“Did you phone it in?” asked the worker. “No,” replied Brian. “You gotta phone it in,” persisted the worker. “So’s I get a job sheet that tells me I gotta do the work.” Then, looking back at the tree whose “thinning” was on today’s job sheet, he determined the time was right to launch into his own sage and timely advice.
“Yep, y’know, you really gotta look after a tree. You can’t just plant it and forget it. I mean, well… it’s like a tree is like your girlfriend, or your wife. She goes off to the beauty parlour… what? Once a month or so? Spends about $50 on herself? Looks after herself? Well a tree is the same way. You gotta look after it.”
At this point, Brian patted his pocket and announced, “Whoops, forgot my bus pass,” and speedily headed right back up his driveway towards his front door. I also managed to grab the cue and said, “OK, well thanks for taking care of our trees,” to the City tree cutter and urban arboreal philosopher before heading off to the bus stop, from which point I pondered the miracle of how trees ever managed to grow at all for all those hundreds of thousands of years before City of Ottawa tree cutters came along to hack off and mulch countless numbers of their branches.
“No problem,” he had replied to my parting thanks.
Maybe. Maybe not.
- 0 -
Finally – a winter snapshot
It is early morning and I am on my way to work. It is overcast and a light snow is falling. I am walking across a large space of white. It’s a parking lot (I live in an urban landscape and, in it, there are many) but on this morning I am the first one to cross it. The previous night’s snowfall has only added about four inches of new snow, and it’s still that fluffy consistency that barely slows each step of what I call my “tank boots” – heavy lace-up Sorels with a thick hardened sole and deep tread that puts a well-insulated barrier between my feet and the weather on even the coldest days and in which I feel I can tramp anywhere.
I reach the mid-point of the parking lot and, for a few brief seconds, experience a throwback to a childhood memory of open country winter hikes that I took as a young boy scout. It’s a sensation that combines the intellectual knowledge that you are walking – because your feet are doing that walking thing – with a distinct mental disconnect from the process, because you have absolutely no reference points immediately close to hand to indicate you are moving forward at your usual pace. I’m walking – I think – but for a few seconds, I don’t seem to be getting anywhere at all. Just me, churning along on my minuscule patch of the face of the globe.
Then suddenly I’m at the edge of the parking lot. And I do what kids do – I stop, turn around and look back at the trail I’ve made. It’s straight, but not perfectly straight. The path reveals that my feet, like my mind, obviously meandered occasionally and carried me just slightly off course. And maybe the minor physical deviations occurred at the same time as the mental ones.
That momentary disengagement from all the typical sensations of walking is something utterly unique to winter. Even stumbling ahead in the pitch black of a dark night doesn’t compare, because your steps then are infinitely more cautious. On a pristine white winter surface, your steps are solid and certain, perhaps even a little more vigorous than usual as your brain drives you toward a place where it can recover the points of reference it needs in order to know “normal” again.
But for a few fleeting seconds, rather than moving ahead, I am on God’s treadmill – spatially stationary, and pushing the entire planet Earth behind me with each step.
Friday, December 10, 2004
I’m here to tell you today that indeed it is possible for a red-blooded, near-geriatric member of the male gender to exclaim, loudly, “If I have to spend another minute with these damned exotic dancers, I’m going to SCREAM!”
Let me explain (Grab a coffee, or maybe a stiff… sorry, make that a strong drink; It’s a long story.):
In Canada, “exotic dancer” is a euphemism for “stripper”.
And in Canada, several years ago some bright-eyed bureaucrat actually appears to have listened to a strip club owner, or perhaps a whole group of them (I wonder what collective noun you would use to classify a group of strip club owners… “Gaggle” would be perfect. Emphasis on the first syllable. Unfortunately, it’s already taken by the geese, but I digress.) who complained they were suffering from a shortage of native-born young women willing to work in their clubs as “exotic dancers”. They (the gaggle, that is) petitioned the government and argued that they therefore should be permitted to import foreign young women to fill this “labour shortage”.
And the overseeing Canadian government department (that’d be the department tasked with “skills development” and is responsible for approving temporary foreign workers to fill government-certified labour shortages) agreed and thus approved a blanket exemption for these women. In other words, now if you were a foreigner applying for temporary work in Canada as a stripper, because of the officially sanctioned “labour shortage” you didn’t have to submit yourself to the regular admissions process, which can take up to four years for all those useless non-shortage professions like doctor, architect, engineer, university professor… etc.
So now shift gears.
Part two of the story occurs in the Canadian government department tasked with approving people who wish to immigrate into Canada. It turns out that their Minister issued a “special minister’s visa” to a would-be foreign stripper and it further happens that this young lady – from Romania – worked in the campaign office to help get this Minister elected in the most recent Canadian election.
Sniff, sniff, went the reporters. (That’s the “sniff” of smelling something rotten, not crying.) And there’s nothing the Canadian media love more than a scandal that marries an alleged abuse of a privileged office with sex. (Wait, in that previous sentence – come to think of it – delete the word “Canadian”.)
And at this point, because my business card says I am a “media analyst” (or at least it would, if I actually had a business card), Parts 1 and 2 of this story combine, and were catapulted onto my desk as part of my job. In short order, I was “analyzing” news stories filled with references to things like supposedly professional elected opposition Members of Parliament accusing the government of “pimping for the sex trade” in Canada; happily using electronic news soundbite-assured terms like “strippergate” and “peelergate” (Thanks a lot for “…gate”, Mr Nixon!)
And among all the dreck, I would scan an occasionally heartbreaking plea from someone to the government that, in its sudden interest in the “sex trade”, please not to lose sight of the fact that girls as young as 12 are frequently kidnapped in third world countries, often to wind up in places like the back rooms of many of these clubs – and even in Canada, according to one especially disturbing police citation referenced in one of the articles I read.
But even more (for me) headshaking is the government’s rationale for approving stripper (whoops, “exotic dancer”) as a legitimate labour shortage category. It seems that in fact there are lots of Canadian young women willing to – literally – dance exotically. But the reason there is a shortage is because there are widely rumoured acts that dancers occasionally are required to perform in the remote and shadowy recesses of these strip clubs that Canadian dancers won’t do – but that foreigners, so desperate are they to get out of their often horridly abusive environments at home, will agree to do.
For some reason, the huge majority of such women last year were Romanian emigrées. (Insert “Pole” joke here. And yes, jokes about assigning them to the Toronto suburban location of “Peel Region” have also already been done. “Blanket exemption”? Best not even to go there.)
And officials in the ever-accommodating Canadian government of the day, rather than recoiling in shock at what they were being asked to sanction as a legitimate “skills shortage” – in fact some of whom were rumoured to have been dispatched to the… uh… well, the… uh… ladies’ “job sites” to assess the nature of the exotic dancer “skills” in question – said, “OK, you’ve made your case. Classification approved. Keep on havin’ fun, girls!”
In fact, here’s the whole story as it appeared in The Washington Post’s Foreign Desk, of all places, on December 5. In three brief lead paragraphs are the story’s key facts and all of its essential to-get-you-to-watch imagery. (Heck, I don’t even know why I bothered writing out my long-winded explanation.):
= = = = =
“TORONTO -- Coiled around a brass pole on a barroom stage, clad only in towering stiletto heels, a 31-year-old Romanian woman named Veronica is helping to fill what has suddenly become Canada's most talked-about shortage: a scarcity of strippers.
A government program to import hundreds of ‘exotic dancers,’ which was already controversial, took center stage recently when Canada's immigration minister, Judy Sgro, was found to have given preferential visa treatment to a nude dancer who did volunteer work in her re-election campaign for Parliament.
Critics say the program turns Canada into a pimp, while local employers assert it serves a legitimate business, and dancers from struggling countries say it's a way to better their lives.”
= = = = =
Thus is Canada positioned on the world’s stage these days.
Even acknowledging the understandable titillation factor of images of “exotic dancers” on the suppertime news every night (which should remove all doubts about what gender dominates news production executive suites), the print coverage makes for pretty depressing reading for the most part.
Not “depressing” so much because of the tone of the coverage, which frequently plays the story for its humour, but rather because the Opposition members in our House of Commons know all too well that the aforementioned sex-and-scandal loving media would sooner yield up their left ventricles than one single sentence of something they have deemed a “good story!”. Together, they effectively have brought the rest of government business to a screeching halt for a solid two weeks (at last count) with their equally screeching demands that the Minister of Immigration resign while the case goes before our newly minted and shiny “independent” Ethics Commissioner for review and, quite possibly, a finding that this Minister damned well should resign.
So far, my energetically volunteering to go out into the community to conduct further research (Putting the “feel” in “field trip”… keeping abreast of the topic, as it were… the story after all has legs… Man, if I had a nipple for every stripper story I’ve read in the past couple weeks – Boom badda BING! Kissssh!) has fallen on unsympathetic ears. And I guess it’s pretty obvious why!
Some weeks I really love my job. But occasionally, I go home at the end of a day of keyboarding long reports about ick like this and really wash my hands a lot. Guess what the past week has been? (No fair checking the claw marks in the few remaining slivers of Ivory in our bathroom soap dish at home.)
- 0 -
And in our “Maybe we should actually have hired someone a couple years ago…” file,
Recently I noticed that the Government of Canada public jobs site has advertised – with a closing date of December 14th 2004 – for a: Submarine Safety Planning Validation and Verification Engineer (Location: Victoria, BC / Salary: $66,156 to $78,868 per annum. A little deeper into the ad, they ask for, apparently without the faintest hint of irony, “Acceptable experience in Ship Safety Management procedure and in developing Safety Cases (preference will be given to those candidates with experience in Canadian Submarine Material Management and Certification process.)” As part of the job description, they add, “Performs aggregate risk analysis on all defects, deviations and concessions and recommends areas of system concern.”
I guess that adding “Acceptable experience – or its equivalent – preferred in the use of a fire extinguisher, because you’re going to need it!” and offering a return PO Box in Chicoutimi (HMCS Chicoutimi is the fire-damaged Canadian submarine presently languishing in Scotland) would have been a little too over-the-top – or whatever the submariners’ version of trench warfare’s “over-the-top” is. “In-your-tubes”? “Up your scope?”
- 0 -
Here’s a typo laff (and yes, it’s a cheap one – but excusable perhaps because, after all, the transcribers in all likelihood are Republicans)
From The Washington Post’s White House Briefing column, December 3:
“The first transcript of Bush's remarks at the Pageant of Peace came over with this phrase: ‘We think of the patient hope of men and women across the centuries who listened to the words of the profits and lived in joyful expectation.’ Nineteen minutes later, a new version went out with this note: ‘*CORRECTION: PROFITS has been changed to PROPHETS.’ ”
Echoes of “God and singers dressed in style.” (My child, at about age 3, in the full throes of mondegreening “God and sinners reconciled” from “Hark the Herald Angels Sing”. In our house, ever since, we’ve never sung it any differently.)
- 0 -
And finally, I just put a CD of music from “The Lord of the Rings” on, and for the first time in my life in my computer’s CD drive. Usually I put it on my not-too-far-adjacent CD player, but it’s late and I wanted to use the headset and my headset’s wires don’t need nearly the stretch to connect to the computer as they do to reach the CD player. And what popped up was not the music I was expecting, but rather a lovely little onscreen image showing the film’s main characters and Arwen’s lips, accompanied by a background vocal by eerie songstress Enya, and a cheery little balloon labelled “For bonus features, click HERE!”. So I clicked “HERE!” and was promptly told by my computer that it doesn’t have what it needs to read that part of the disk.
My system is old by computer standards, paleolithic even. It’s still being driven in fact by Windows ’98. Most software, even now, still has all its elements written to be read by Windows ’98, but every once in a while I get something like this. It’s like receiving a visitor from the future urging me to get with the program.
And there was no option to bypass the images and simply hear the music on the CD! Gnrrrrgh! So I tried it again; got the same result. Sigh. It’s late; I just wanted to hear the gorgeous and gentle “Many Partings”.
Damn the new millennium’s multi-media convergence anyway!
Ah to heck with it. Put on the quietly dark CD “Road to Hell”, by Chris Rea instead.
…
“I come home from work.
I see my little girl;
She's crying on the floor.
She's been watching that TV.
This ain't late no, this ain't even dinnertime;
To show them things on that screen…
What's wrong with you?
You must be evil!
Oh I know why you do it;
You're just looking for sensation;
You got a hold of something.
You tell us that it's news.
You don't have to show that stuff.
Can't you show us some respect?
You can tell us we don't need to see it.
We don't need those cheap effects.
You must be evil!
You must be evil!
I wish you were here.
You don't have to show that stuff;
You ain't fooling no-one.
You made my little girl cry.
I wish you were here.
We all know why you do it.
Sometimes you even slow it down.
You're giving out some bad ideas here.
I can't believe that you don't realise
You must be evil!”
…
Goodnight Moon.
Let me explain (Grab a coffee, or maybe a stiff… sorry, make that a strong drink; It’s a long story.):
In Canada, “exotic dancer” is a euphemism for “stripper”.
And in Canada, several years ago some bright-eyed bureaucrat actually appears to have listened to a strip club owner, or perhaps a whole group of them (I wonder what collective noun you would use to classify a group of strip club owners… “Gaggle” would be perfect. Emphasis on the first syllable. Unfortunately, it’s already taken by the geese, but I digress.) who complained they were suffering from a shortage of native-born young women willing to work in their clubs as “exotic dancers”. They (the gaggle, that is) petitioned the government and argued that they therefore should be permitted to import foreign young women to fill this “labour shortage”.
And the overseeing Canadian government department (that’d be the department tasked with “skills development” and is responsible for approving temporary foreign workers to fill government-certified labour shortages) agreed and thus approved a blanket exemption for these women. In other words, now if you were a foreigner applying for temporary work in Canada as a stripper, because of the officially sanctioned “labour shortage” you didn’t have to submit yourself to the regular admissions process, which can take up to four years for all those useless non-shortage professions like doctor, architect, engineer, university professor… etc.
So now shift gears.
Part two of the story occurs in the Canadian government department tasked with approving people who wish to immigrate into Canada. It turns out that their Minister issued a “special minister’s visa” to a would-be foreign stripper and it further happens that this young lady – from Romania – worked in the campaign office to help get this Minister elected in the most recent Canadian election.
Sniff, sniff, went the reporters. (That’s the “sniff” of smelling something rotten, not crying.) And there’s nothing the Canadian media love more than a scandal that marries an alleged abuse of a privileged office with sex. (Wait, in that previous sentence – come to think of it – delete the word “Canadian”.)
And at this point, because my business card says I am a “media analyst” (or at least it would, if I actually had a business card), Parts 1 and 2 of this story combine, and were catapulted onto my desk as part of my job. In short order, I was “analyzing” news stories filled with references to things like supposedly professional elected opposition Members of Parliament accusing the government of “pimping for the sex trade” in Canada; happily using electronic news soundbite-assured terms like “strippergate” and “peelergate” (Thanks a lot for “…gate”, Mr Nixon!)
And among all the dreck, I would scan an occasionally heartbreaking plea from someone to the government that, in its sudden interest in the “sex trade”, please not to lose sight of the fact that girls as young as 12 are frequently kidnapped in third world countries, often to wind up in places like the back rooms of many of these clubs – and even in Canada, according to one especially disturbing police citation referenced in one of the articles I read.
But even more (for me) headshaking is the government’s rationale for approving stripper (whoops, “exotic dancer”) as a legitimate labour shortage category. It seems that in fact there are lots of Canadian young women willing to – literally – dance exotically. But the reason there is a shortage is because there are widely rumoured acts that dancers occasionally are required to perform in the remote and shadowy recesses of these strip clubs that Canadian dancers won’t do – but that foreigners, so desperate are they to get out of their often horridly abusive environments at home, will agree to do.
For some reason, the huge majority of such women last year were Romanian emigrées. (Insert “Pole” joke here. And yes, jokes about assigning them to the Toronto suburban location of “Peel Region” have also already been done. “Blanket exemption”? Best not even to go there.)
And officials in the ever-accommodating Canadian government of the day, rather than recoiling in shock at what they were being asked to sanction as a legitimate “skills shortage” – in fact some of whom were rumoured to have been dispatched to the… uh… well, the… uh… ladies’ “job sites” to assess the nature of the exotic dancer “skills” in question – said, “OK, you’ve made your case. Classification approved. Keep on havin’ fun, girls!”
In fact, here’s the whole story as it appeared in The Washington Post’s Foreign Desk, of all places, on December 5. In three brief lead paragraphs are the story’s key facts and all of its essential to-get-you-to-watch imagery. (Heck, I don’t even know why I bothered writing out my long-winded explanation.):
= = = = =
“TORONTO -- Coiled around a brass pole on a barroom stage, clad only in towering stiletto heels, a 31-year-old Romanian woman named Veronica is helping to fill what has suddenly become Canada's most talked-about shortage: a scarcity of strippers.
A government program to import hundreds of ‘exotic dancers,’ which was already controversial, took center stage recently when Canada's immigration minister, Judy Sgro, was found to have given preferential visa treatment to a nude dancer who did volunteer work in her re-election campaign for Parliament.
Critics say the program turns Canada into a pimp, while local employers assert it serves a legitimate business, and dancers from struggling countries say it's a way to better their lives.”
= = = = =
Thus is Canada positioned on the world’s stage these days.
Even acknowledging the understandable titillation factor of images of “exotic dancers” on the suppertime news every night (which should remove all doubts about what gender dominates news production executive suites), the print coverage makes for pretty depressing reading for the most part.
Not “depressing” so much because of the tone of the coverage, which frequently plays the story for its humour, but rather because the Opposition members in our House of Commons know all too well that the aforementioned sex-and-scandal loving media would sooner yield up their left ventricles than one single sentence of something they have deemed a “good story!”. Together, they effectively have brought the rest of government business to a screeching halt for a solid two weeks (at last count) with their equally screeching demands that the Minister of Immigration resign while the case goes before our newly minted and shiny “independent” Ethics Commissioner for review and, quite possibly, a finding that this Minister damned well should resign.
So far, my energetically volunteering to go out into the community to conduct further research (Putting the “feel” in “field trip”… keeping abreast of the topic, as it were… the story after all has legs… Man, if I had a nipple for every stripper story I’ve read in the past couple weeks – Boom badda BING! Kissssh!) has fallen on unsympathetic ears. And I guess it’s pretty obvious why!
Some weeks I really love my job. But occasionally, I go home at the end of a day of keyboarding long reports about ick like this and really wash my hands a lot. Guess what the past week has been? (No fair checking the claw marks in the few remaining slivers of Ivory in our bathroom soap dish at home.)
- 0 -
And in our “Maybe we should actually have hired someone a couple years ago…” file,
Recently I noticed that the Government of Canada public jobs site has advertised – with a closing date of December 14th 2004 – for a: Submarine Safety Planning Validation and Verification Engineer (Location: Victoria, BC / Salary: $66,156 to $78,868 per annum. A little deeper into the ad, they ask for, apparently without the faintest hint of irony, “Acceptable experience in Ship Safety Management procedure and in developing Safety Cases (preference will be given to those candidates with experience in Canadian Submarine Material Management and Certification process.)” As part of the job description, they add, “Performs aggregate risk analysis on all defects, deviations and concessions and recommends areas of system concern.”
I guess that adding “Acceptable experience – or its equivalent – preferred in the use of a fire extinguisher, because you’re going to need it!” and offering a return PO Box in Chicoutimi (HMCS Chicoutimi is the fire-damaged Canadian submarine presently languishing in Scotland) would have been a little too over-the-top – or whatever the submariners’ version of trench warfare’s “over-the-top” is. “In-your-tubes”? “Up your scope?”
- 0 -
Here’s a typo laff (and yes, it’s a cheap one – but excusable perhaps because, after all, the transcribers in all likelihood are Republicans)
From The Washington Post’s White House Briefing column, December 3:
“The first transcript of Bush's remarks at the Pageant of Peace came over with this phrase: ‘We think of the patient hope of men and women across the centuries who listened to the words of the profits and lived in joyful expectation.’ Nineteen minutes later, a new version went out with this note: ‘*CORRECTION: PROFITS has been changed to PROPHETS.’ ”
Echoes of “God and singers dressed in style.” (My child, at about age 3, in the full throes of mondegreening “God and sinners reconciled” from “Hark the Herald Angels Sing”. In our house, ever since, we’ve never sung it any differently.)
- 0 -
And finally, I just put a CD of music from “The Lord of the Rings” on, and for the first time in my life in my computer’s CD drive. Usually I put it on my not-too-far-adjacent CD player, but it’s late and I wanted to use the headset and my headset’s wires don’t need nearly the stretch to connect to the computer as they do to reach the CD player. And what popped up was not the music I was expecting, but rather a lovely little onscreen image showing the film’s main characters and Arwen’s lips, accompanied by a background vocal by eerie songstress Enya, and a cheery little balloon labelled “For bonus features, click HERE!”. So I clicked “HERE!” and was promptly told by my computer that it doesn’t have what it needs to read that part of the disk.
My system is old by computer standards, paleolithic even. It’s still being driven in fact by Windows ’98. Most software, even now, still has all its elements written to be read by Windows ’98, but every once in a while I get something like this. It’s like receiving a visitor from the future urging me to get with the program.
And there was no option to bypass the images and simply hear the music on the CD! Gnrrrrgh! So I tried it again; got the same result. Sigh. It’s late; I just wanted to hear the gorgeous and gentle “Many Partings”.
Damn the new millennium’s multi-media convergence anyway!
Ah to heck with it. Put on the quietly dark CD “Road to Hell”, by Chris Rea instead.
…
“I come home from work.
I see my little girl;
She's crying on the floor.
She's been watching that TV.
This ain't late no, this ain't even dinnertime;
To show them things on that screen…
What's wrong with you?
You must be evil!
Oh I know why you do it;
You're just looking for sensation;
You got a hold of something.
You tell us that it's news.
You don't have to show that stuff.
Can't you show us some respect?
You can tell us we don't need to see it.
We don't need those cheap effects.
You must be evil!
You must be evil!
I wish you were here.
You don't have to show that stuff;
You ain't fooling no-one.
You made my little girl cry.
I wish you were here.
We all know why you do it.
Sometimes you even slow it down.
You're giving out some bad ideas here.
I can't believe that you don't realise
You must be evil!”
…
Goodnight Moon.
Wednesday, December 01, 2004
Sleep tight tonight; your billboard erasers are awake.
Recently, on the day that His Royal Bushness was scheduled to arrive in Ottawa for his whirlwind visit, in the process setting a new record for the least number of host nation citizens actually seen by a head of state on a visit to a foreign country, I happened to notice a vandalized billboard posted along my to-work commute. It was an ad for Telus mobile phones and its caption made reference to something like, “Solve your long distance blues”. An energetic protester, working with nothing more than a can of black spray paint and a modicum of imagination, had streaked out “long distance” and overwritten “DISSIDENT”. For good measure, he (or she) had also sprayed “Bush go home!” into the part of the photo that was the phone’s viewer window.
The very next morning, Telus had a brand new ad up on the billboard, and the blues-based dissident’s message was forever gone. That sort of suggested to me that Winston Smith (of George Orwell’s “1984”), part of whose job involved re-writing the past for the Ministry of Truth – if memory is not playing tricks on me – must be alive and well and refacing defaced billboards in Ottawa.
- 0 -
Oh GAWD!
For the record, almost none of the people I know are Julia Roberts fans. In fact, I suspect a few of them harbour deep suspicions that her present oral appearance owes much to the belief that, when she was a child, her parents avoided babysitting costs through the simple expedient of wetting her lips and sticking her to the wall. Sadly, the recent news of the names that she has chosen for her newborn twins will do nothing to augment any slight softening of opinion that Julia-dislikers might have felt in sympathy with her having had to deliver twins in the first place. “A boy named Phinnaeus Walter Moder and a girl named Hazel Patricia Moder…”
Do parents like this even give the remotest consideration to what they’re imposing on their children for the rest of their lives? “Hazel” at least is somewhat manageable, but sadly the only two populist references for that name are the old Shirley Booth TV show of the same name, and the equally old, but execrable, 1966 Tommy Roe song, “Hooray for Hazel”:
(CHORUS)
“Hooray for Hazel, she put me down
Hooray for Hazel, she made me her clown
Hooray for Hazel, she's up to her tricks
Hooray for Hazel, she's gettin' her kicks…”
But Phinnaeus. Phinnaeus?!! Never mind the fact that she almost ran the vowel line on “Wheel of Fortune” to find this name, she has forever saddled this poor guy with the necessity of (a) spelling, and (b) pronouncing his first name: FIN-ee-us? Fin-AY-us? And if anyone should ever remake the movie of Jules Verne’s global travel tale in an effort to redress the hideous wrong that the Jackie Chan version did to the story, you’re going to have a whole bunch of people thinking she named her son after Phineas “Around the World in 80 Days” Fogg!
Or… and I ain’ a-gonna touch this one with a four-foot tamping rod:
(From the internet site http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~lwh/drugs/chap02.htm )
“One of the most bizarre cases of accidental brain injury is that of Phinnaeus P. Gage, a railroad worker (See Bloom et al 1985 for a detailed account). In the Fall of 1848, Gage and his crew were blasting rock. The procedure involved drilling a hole in the rock, then stuffing the hole with alternate layers of packing material and black powder. The packing material was tamped into place with a long steel rod. In a moment of carelessness, Gage apparently tried to tamp the powder layer, and a spark ignited the powder. The resulting explosion transformed the tamping rod into a four-foot projectile which entered Gage's left cheek, passed through the top of his head, and landed several feet away (Fig 2.2).”
(Figure 2.2, for the information of the really curious, is a line drawing showing just how much of the unfortunate Mr Gage’s frontal lobe was ruined by the tamping rod’s rather abrupt passage through it.)
- 0 -
On the subject of the Internet (Didn’t know we were on the subject of the internet, did you?) my daughter recently gave me cause to discover a simple (for her, but truly astonishing for me) demonstration of just how far the world of information sharing has come in the not-so-many… really-not-so-many-at-all… dammit… years that have passed since I was in high school.
It was a Sunday afternoon and she had finally settled into accepting that the time between that in which she was living at the moment and the time when her completed homework assignment was due had now been reduced to a matter of hours, not days. Opening her backpack to extract the tool she needed – her copy of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” – she found to her horror that she’d left it at school on Friday afternoon. Her assignment, unfortunately, demanded that her commentary be buttressed by several quoted citations from the book, so simply relying on her memory of the story was not going to help her in this case.
The Ottawa Public Library branch closest to us was no help – it is closed on Sunday. (It says something about the flexibility in her thinking that this suggestion came first from her, not me. In the late 1960s, this combination of circumstances would have toasted me, although I might have telephone-canvassed a few classmates to ask if any of them had brought a copy of the book home.)
But this is late 2004 and, as you might suspect given the lead sentence to this item, the Internet provided not just quotes from “Animal Farm”, but the entire danged novel, and at one site it was followed – chapter by chapter – by interpretive notes on the entire danged novel!
After extracting a firm commitment from my daughter that she both understood and would not countenance plagiarism (although she told me the “pop-up” ads associated with this site were not so moral – they were almost all for places selling pre-written term papers), I left her in the happy (and relieved!) state of having a minimized version of the work itself ready to hand as she composed her short essay in another window.
I am not so cynical as to not be completely amazed by this discovery. But I suppose I shouldn’t be. Several months ago, I did find a complete online version of one of my favourite early-teenaged-years books – Booth Tarkington’s “Penrod”. And I have read of Project Gutenberg, whose goal is simply “to encourage the creation and distribution of e-Books”. But it’s breathtaking to see it beginning to work.
At last count, Project Gutenberg had some 13,000 titles available, and included 36 languages in its catalogue ( http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/ ). If you check it out, you’ll note the helpful provision of a weekly Top 100 list, if you are stuck about where to start browsing their virtual library.
(So what is the contemporary version of, “I’m sorry, Miss, but the dog ate my homework.”? No bonus groaner points for working “byte” into your answer.)
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And speaking of my daughter… she recently came home with a homework assignment that I confess brought me up rather short. (And yes, it really did prompt a burst of “Well in my day…” recollecting, which I think must be a neurally resident psychological program that is automatically triggered when the grey hair count on your head reaches a certain pre-set number.)
At school, her class is now in the midst of a series of sessions devoted to “The Birds and the Bees” and her homework assignment was to complete a questionnaire based on describing – the process, how easily it was accomplished, and how she was made to feel about it – going to the drugstore and purchasing a condom.
When I cocked my eyebrow while reading the questionnaire, my wife informed me that she had been talking to my daughter earlier about the assignment, and learned that the class session itself had involved learning the proper technique for actually… ahem… installing one of the devices on a banana.
My daughter is, so far, just one year into that phase of her life in which the suffix “teen” is appended to her age. And she is already learning, in (to me) cringe-inducing detail, the stuff of life way beyond the particulars of stamens and pistils and pollination that I was dutifully memorizing when I was her age.
In fact, now that I think of it, I recall being about 16 or 17 when our profoundly embarrassed gym teacher in the Perth and District Collegiate Institute, a no-necked bulldog of a man named Dick Salt, had to tell us about the differences in the “plumbing systems” – and that was the term he used – of males and females.
And it was only much later that I learned officially the particulars of employing the plumbing for purposes of procreation. (Unofficially, of course, a wild mixture of several good friends’ rumoured lore and Playboy’s airbrushed imagery secretly studied in the murky corners of the magazine rack at the smoke shop next to the Perth Restaurant had given me a vague sense of what went where. But confirmation and elucidation, in the form of high school Biology lessons, only came when I was in my late teens.)
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And finally, ‘tis the season to be PC to the point of idiocy. My work-related bank branch is located right next to the main floor elevator foyer of the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). Recently, while waiting in the cash machine line, I noticed a large easel-mounted sign advertising a general invitation to join them and “Celebrate the Season”.
So far, so good. Then I noticed the randomly added large “seasonal” garnishes around the face of sign – a gold-coloured menorah topped by a Star of David (for Judaism), a gold-coloured crescent and star symbol (for Islam) and… a Christmas tree with red lights on it… an angel… a few boxes with bows on them… some holly.
No cross though. No overt symbol of He who put the “Christ” in Christmas and whose birth ostensibly launched the “season” people celebrate in a few weeks. God forbid it should be acknowledged. (And I hasten to add I harbour no grudge over the inclusion of the symbols of Judaism and Islam, but I do have a problem with the exclusion of the principal symbol of Christianity when the other two symbols are there... especially in a promotional item for a Christmas event!)
CIDA, for heaven’s sake!
(From their website: “The purpose of Canada's Official Development Assistance is to support sustainable development in developing countries in order to reduce poverty and to contribute to a more secure, equitable and prosperous world.”)
OK guys, so if it really is an “equitable… world” you’re going for, how about either adding the cross, or losing the menorah and crescent, OK?
And have a festive Mithraic Lord’s Day.
Recently, on the day that His Royal Bushness was scheduled to arrive in Ottawa for his whirlwind visit, in the process setting a new record for the least number of host nation citizens actually seen by a head of state on a visit to a foreign country, I happened to notice a vandalized billboard posted along my to-work commute. It was an ad for Telus mobile phones and its caption made reference to something like, “Solve your long distance blues”. An energetic protester, working with nothing more than a can of black spray paint and a modicum of imagination, had streaked out “long distance” and overwritten “DISSIDENT”. For good measure, he (or she) had also sprayed “Bush go home!” into the part of the photo that was the phone’s viewer window.
The very next morning, Telus had a brand new ad up on the billboard, and the blues-based dissident’s message was forever gone. That sort of suggested to me that Winston Smith (of George Orwell’s “1984”), part of whose job involved re-writing the past for the Ministry of Truth – if memory is not playing tricks on me – must be alive and well and refacing defaced billboards in Ottawa.
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Oh GAWD!
For the record, almost none of the people I know are Julia Roberts fans. In fact, I suspect a few of them harbour deep suspicions that her present oral appearance owes much to the belief that, when she was a child, her parents avoided babysitting costs through the simple expedient of wetting her lips and sticking her to the wall. Sadly, the recent news of the names that she has chosen for her newborn twins will do nothing to augment any slight softening of opinion that Julia-dislikers might have felt in sympathy with her having had to deliver twins in the first place. “A boy named Phinnaeus Walter Moder and a girl named Hazel Patricia Moder…”
Do parents like this even give the remotest consideration to what they’re imposing on their children for the rest of their lives? “Hazel” at least is somewhat manageable, but sadly the only two populist references for that name are the old Shirley Booth TV show of the same name, and the equally old, but execrable, 1966 Tommy Roe song, “Hooray for Hazel”:
(CHORUS)
“Hooray for Hazel, she put me down
Hooray for Hazel, she made me her clown
Hooray for Hazel, she's up to her tricks
Hooray for Hazel, she's gettin' her kicks…”
But Phinnaeus. Phinnaeus?!! Never mind the fact that she almost ran the vowel line on “Wheel of Fortune” to find this name, she has forever saddled this poor guy with the necessity of (a) spelling, and (b) pronouncing his first name: FIN-ee-us? Fin-AY-us? And if anyone should ever remake the movie of Jules Verne’s global travel tale in an effort to redress the hideous wrong that the Jackie Chan version did to the story, you’re going to have a whole bunch of people thinking she named her son after Phineas “Around the World in 80 Days” Fogg!
Or… and I ain’ a-gonna touch this one with a four-foot tamping rod:
(From the internet site http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~lwh/drugs/chap02.htm )
“One of the most bizarre cases of accidental brain injury is that of Phinnaeus P. Gage, a railroad worker (See Bloom et al 1985 for a detailed account). In the Fall of 1848, Gage and his crew were blasting rock. The procedure involved drilling a hole in the rock, then stuffing the hole with alternate layers of packing material and black powder. The packing material was tamped into place with a long steel rod. In a moment of carelessness, Gage apparently tried to tamp the powder layer, and a spark ignited the powder. The resulting explosion transformed the tamping rod into a four-foot projectile which entered Gage's left cheek, passed through the top of his head, and landed several feet away (Fig 2.2).”
(Figure 2.2, for the information of the really curious, is a line drawing showing just how much of the unfortunate Mr Gage’s frontal lobe was ruined by the tamping rod’s rather abrupt passage through it.)
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On the subject of the Internet (Didn’t know we were on the subject of the internet, did you?) my daughter recently gave me cause to discover a simple (for her, but truly astonishing for me) demonstration of just how far the world of information sharing has come in the not-so-many… really-not-so-many-at-all… dammit… years that have passed since I was in high school.
It was a Sunday afternoon and she had finally settled into accepting that the time between that in which she was living at the moment and the time when her completed homework assignment was due had now been reduced to a matter of hours, not days. Opening her backpack to extract the tool she needed – her copy of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” – she found to her horror that she’d left it at school on Friday afternoon. Her assignment, unfortunately, demanded that her commentary be buttressed by several quoted citations from the book, so simply relying on her memory of the story was not going to help her in this case.
The Ottawa Public Library branch closest to us was no help – it is closed on Sunday. (It says something about the flexibility in her thinking that this suggestion came first from her, not me. In the late 1960s, this combination of circumstances would have toasted me, although I might have telephone-canvassed a few classmates to ask if any of them had brought a copy of the book home.)
But this is late 2004 and, as you might suspect given the lead sentence to this item, the Internet provided not just quotes from “Animal Farm”, but the entire danged novel, and at one site it was followed – chapter by chapter – by interpretive notes on the entire danged novel!
After extracting a firm commitment from my daughter that she both understood and would not countenance plagiarism (although she told me the “pop-up” ads associated with this site were not so moral – they were almost all for places selling pre-written term papers), I left her in the happy (and relieved!) state of having a minimized version of the work itself ready to hand as she composed her short essay in another window.
I am not so cynical as to not be completely amazed by this discovery. But I suppose I shouldn’t be. Several months ago, I did find a complete online version of one of my favourite early-teenaged-years books – Booth Tarkington’s “Penrod”. And I have read of Project Gutenberg, whose goal is simply “to encourage the creation and distribution of e-Books”. But it’s breathtaking to see it beginning to work.
At last count, Project Gutenberg had some 13,000 titles available, and included 36 languages in its catalogue ( http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/ ). If you check it out, you’ll note the helpful provision of a weekly Top 100 list, if you are stuck about where to start browsing their virtual library.
(So what is the contemporary version of, “I’m sorry, Miss, but the dog ate my homework.”? No bonus groaner points for working “byte” into your answer.)
- 0 -
And speaking of my daughter… she recently came home with a homework assignment that I confess brought me up rather short. (And yes, it really did prompt a burst of “Well in my day…” recollecting, which I think must be a neurally resident psychological program that is automatically triggered when the grey hair count on your head reaches a certain pre-set number.)
At school, her class is now in the midst of a series of sessions devoted to “The Birds and the Bees” and her homework assignment was to complete a questionnaire based on describing – the process, how easily it was accomplished, and how she was made to feel about it – going to the drugstore and purchasing a condom.
When I cocked my eyebrow while reading the questionnaire, my wife informed me that she had been talking to my daughter earlier about the assignment, and learned that the class session itself had involved learning the proper technique for actually… ahem… installing one of the devices on a banana.
My daughter is, so far, just one year into that phase of her life in which the suffix “teen” is appended to her age. And she is already learning, in (to me) cringe-inducing detail, the stuff of life way beyond the particulars of stamens and pistils and pollination that I was dutifully memorizing when I was her age.
In fact, now that I think of it, I recall being about 16 or 17 when our profoundly embarrassed gym teacher in the Perth and District Collegiate Institute, a no-necked bulldog of a man named Dick Salt, had to tell us about the differences in the “plumbing systems” – and that was the term he used – of males and females.
And it was only much later that I learned officially the particulars of employing the plumbing for purposes of procreation. (Unofficially, of course, a wild mixture of several good friends’ rumoured lore and Playboy’s airbrushed imagery secretly studied in the murky corners of the magazine rack at the smoke shop next to the Perth Restaurant had given me a vague sense of what went where. But confirmation and elucidation, in the form of high school Biology lessons, only came when I was in my late teens.)
- 0 -
And finally, ‘tis the season to be PC to the point of idiocy. My work-related bank branch is located right next to the main floor elevator foyer of the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). Recently, while waiting in the cash machine line, I noticed a large easel-mounted sign advertising a general invitation to join them and “Celebrate the Season”.
So far, so good. Then I noticed the randomly added large “seasonal” garnishes around the face of sign – a gold-coloured menorah topped by a Star of David (for Judaism), a gold-coloured crescent and star symbol (for Islam) and… a Christmas tree with red lights on it… an angel… a few boxes with bows on them… some holly.
No cross though. No overt symbol of He who put the “Christ” in Christmas and whose birth ostensibly launched the “season” people celebrate in a few weeks. God forbid it should be acknowledged. (And I hasten to add I harbour no grudge over the inclusion of the symbols of Judaism and Islam, but I do have a problem with the exclusion of the principal symbol of Christianity when the other two symbols are there... especially in a promotional item for a Christmas event!)
CIDA, for heaven’s sake!
(From their website: “The purpose of Canada's Official Development Assistance is to support sustainable development in developing countries in order to reduce poverty and to contribute to a more secure, equitable and prosperous world.”)
OK guys, so if it really is an “equitable… world” you’re going for, how about either adding the cross, or losing the menorah and crescent, OK?
And have a festive Mithraic Lord’s Day.
Wednesday, November 17, 2004
Googlegooglegoogle…
“Define ‘Luddite’”
“Luddite: ‘one of the 19th century English workmen who destroyed labour-saving machinery that they thought would cause unemployment’.”
OK, That’s probably way too strong.
“Luddite: ‘a person opposed in principle to technological change’.”
Hmmm… Even “opposed” is a bit over the top. (Hey, I’m a blogger, dammit! How “opposed” to technological change can I be?)
But a recent conversation with a co-commuter has left me thinking that if “technological change” and I are not “opposed” in our relationship, we certainly are not cordial and, in truth, are probably barely on speaking terms at best. As we were waiting for the bus to appear (the co-commuter and I; not “technological change” and I), she mentioned an item that, coincidentally, I had also read in the previous day’s newspaper – this one:
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OTTAWA -- Enterprising salesmen think they've found the next big thing in school fundraising -- the bank machine.
The $1.25 service fee is an irritant for ATM users, but the revenue can also help cash-strapped principals pay for school activities. Independently operated bank machines in schools have already taken off in the United States, and they've started popping up in Canadian schools.
At Esquimalt High School just outside Victoria, the parent advisory council splits the service fees with the local operator of the bank machine, and invests the revenue back into the school. In Brandon, Man., the student council at Crocus Plains High School asked for the ATM and it gets to decide how to spend the school's portion of the service fees.
"It's been a really nifty addition to our school," said Crocus Plains principal Barry Gooden.
Salesmen keen to expand automated-teller machines beyond convenience stores and bars and into high schools are trying out this pitch on school officials.
"It is a good way to create revenue, especially if you have a really large school district," said Jeff Stewart. Earlier this fall, the sales associate for Cashline AMB Inc. in the Lower Mainland offered a deal to the Surrey school board to pilot test Cashline machines in the high schools. (Vancouver Sun, November 15)
- - - - - - - - - -
It took a mere sentence or two of shared reaction to discover that we both clearly were wondering the same thing: Why in hell do schools need ATMs? After all, how much cash does a typical school student need to hit up the vending machines a couple times a week, even daily, or, at most, the cafeteria for lunch? (And as an aside, should we be concerned about the education level of our school principals when the best they can produce in the way of expostulation is that the machine is a “really nifty addition to our school”?)
Anyway, from there, we took to musing (both of us, I should add, are parents – in my case of an offspring just launched into teenager-hood) about the recent breathtaking advances in cellphone technology and ended with a headscratching series of questions about just how many functions do you need built into a device that began life as a portable telephone and is presently a fraction of the size of what used to be a 50-cent chocolate bar. Here for example, is a list of “features” from a model of cellphone randomly found online (take a deep breath if you’re reading this out loud):
“Built-in Digital Camera - Shoot digital pictures with the built-in VGA camera (640x480 pixels) with auto-focus lens and zoom capability. Instantly capture pictures with your choice of high, medium, or low resolution; Sprint PCS Picture MailSM Capable - With Sprint PCS Picture Mail, you can take a picture anytime and send it to family and friends instantly while on the enhanced Sprint Nationwide PCS Network. You can attach a 10-second voice message and text message to your picture. Easily save your pictures on your Sprint PCS® Phone or store them online; Picture Enhancement Options - Personalize your pictures with a fun frame (five to choose from), use digital zoom, take up to eight multiple shots, or use the self-timer; Sprint PCS Ready LinkSM Capable - Now you can enjoy the convenience of quick, walkie-talkie style communication at the touch of a button with one or several Sprint PCS Ready LinkSM users anywhere you go on the most complete, all-digital, wireless network in the nation; SMS Text Messaging Capable - Send, receive, and reply to text messages instantly with an SMS-capable Sprint PCS Phone across the room or across the country while on the enhanced Sprint Nationwide PCS Network; Vibrant Full-Color Screen - Vivid 1.8" main and 1" external color sub LCD; both are TFT and support 65k colors; Customizable Photo Caller ID - Know who's calling you by linking downloaded images and photos to the contacts in your internal phone book; Built-in Speakerphone - Hands-free operation of your phone, open or closed, is made easy with the built-in speakerphone; Voice-Activated Dialing - Say the name of the person you want to call and the number is dialed automatically without using the keypad; Enhanced Ring Tones - Personalize your Sprint PCS Phone with eight festive melody ringers in 32-chord polyphonic sound; Two Internal Phone Books - Store up to 300 entries, each storing seven numbers for a total of 500 numbers and up to 300 email and Web addresses. Separate Sprint PCS Ready Link Phone Book provides easy access to 200 personal contacts and 200 company-provided contacts; Personal Alarm - Features an alarm clock that alerts you one time or daily. Just set the alarm—it's that simple; Multiple Languages - Supports English and limited Spanish text prompts; 2.5mm Universal Jack - Accommodates most standard headsets for hands-free operation; E911 Emergency Location Capable - Features an embedded Global Positioning System (GPS) chip necessary for utilizing the E911 emergency location services, where available; TTY Compatible - Compatible with select TTY devices.”
This is a phone, fergawdssake!
Leaving aside the fact that I’ve only ever know a “TTY device” as a teletype machine, some of that stuff honestly creeps me out:
-- “Know who's calling you by linking downloaded images and photos to the contacts in your internal phone book” Didn’t we used to come to know who was calling us by picking up the receiver and saying, “Hello”?;
-- “Eight festive melody ringers in 32-chord polyphonic sound” Oh yes, doesn’t it just do wonders for your appreciation of classical music to walk along a busy urban sidewalk and, from the pocket of one of the nameless strangers passing you by, hear Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” reduced to a couple dozen cheerless chirping electronic tones? (OK, hands up. How many among us have ever got halfway up off our chairs to answer the microwave? Only a few. OK, well how many among us have walked halfway to our “festive melody ringer” device only to discover that the “ringing” had been part of the soundtrack on the TV show we were watching at the time? Yep. A whole lot more. Thought so.)
There was a time when, as a Society, we collectively determined a need and used creativity to identify a process or invent a device to fill it. Now, it seems to me, more often we pitch devices into production and ideas into implementation first, and only then set about to justify the decision. Technology is going berserk. We have cameras in cellphones simply because we can put cameras in cellphones, not because Society woke up one morning and began clamouring for a device that would enable us to photograph our clogged nasal passages while phoning the boss. (“See? I told you I was sick!”) Our cellphone buttons are the size of a flea’s rec room carpet because we can make them that small, not because someone asked for an array of buttons so minuscule that they’re completely covered by your thumbprint, thus pretty well guaranteeing you’ll screw up at least once every time you dial a call. (And yes, I know “dial” as a verb is soon to lapse into the lore of “How did placing a phone call ever get to be called ‘dialling’, Daddy?”, but that’s a rant for another day.)
It won’t surprise me to hear one day soon that the latest plastic surgery wave has generated waiting lists months long for a procedure to have one of your finger tips whittled down to pencil-point sharpness because frankly, the only thing limiting the further reduction of cellphone button dimensions is the diameter of the typical human digit. When we can beat that, we’ll be inundated with cellphones that pack all of the above features into a finished package about a quarter the size of a Ty-Phoo teabag.
But I digress.
Once Technology does these things – because it can – it is up to Sales to convince us we need them.
Go back and re-read that list of cellphone features a few paragraphs back. Does anyone honestly think this device was manufactured in response to surveys and focus groups whose participants agreed that they wanted all these features in their telephones?
And yet here we sit. The device exists. Did we ask for it? (Nope.) Do we need it? (Damned straight, if Sales has done its job right.)
Some other things we apparently need? (Everything in the following few quotes comes from websites breathlessly pitching their unquestioned value to us as consumers.):
– “The LG Refrigerator with built-in LCD TV is a sight to behold.” Yep – a refrigerator with a built-in TV, because the online promotional material tells us that the American family is spending more and more time in the kitchen. The website, after cheerily extolling at length the specifications and quality of their built-in LCD television, adds as an afterthought, “LG didn't overlook the refrigerator either.”
– A mechanical “waistband stretcher [that] can add up to 5 inches to the waist of your jeans, shorts, pants or skirts.” (Actually, I already have one of those. I call it a stomach.)
– A “rechargeable insect vacuum [that] lets you quickly capture insects from a safe distance without having direct contact or leaving marks and scuffs on walls. Bug Catcher draws flies, spiders, bees, etc. into its transparent 17" nozzle and into a disposable, sealed cartridge. Each cartridge is lined with a non-toxic gel (harmless to humans and pets) that quickly kills insects and then slides out for easy disposal.” (I’m still trying to decide if this one plays on fears of killer bees, or a simple dislike of cleaning fly-swatted bugs off the wall.)
And if you want a genuine limited edition 1994 election ballot from South Africa, when Nelson Mandela first appeared as a candidate, you can buy one of those too.
With no shame whatsoever, Hedonics.com, a site that offers a whole lot of crap like this, pitches it to you with the slogan, “Stuff you never knew you needed but now you can't live without!!!”
Well I beg – no wait, I DEMAND! – to differ.
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And finally, Wednesday this week was the long awaited “Collect strike pay” day – and damned good timing too, because Wednesday this week was also “Your regular paycheque has finally had your three strike days deducted” day. True to form, the mighty PSAC had sent out a notice by e-mail telling us the event was arranged for the lobby of our building – date and time: 11am – period.
What they hadn’t bothered to tell us about was the chaos that would take place as people mobbed the half dozen scattered tables they had set up until, by about 11:15, they posted a hand-lettered sign on the wall behind each table indicating what line you should be in if you were in such-and-such a local, and your last name starts with such-and-such a letter. They had also omitted to tell us to bring our reduced paycheque stub as confirmation we were entitled to strike pay. (Fortunately, I had mine with me. Not because I knew I would need it, but only because I carry a small shoulder bag that, were I a woman, would be called a purse. And it was tucked in there by force of habit.)
Finally, they actually had the gall to wait until we were all standing in line until they circulated an information bulletin among the dozens of us waiting. It said, in part, “CEIU 70702 and 70708 [70708 is my local] do not have an executive. Jacques Archambault has approached the banks holding the funds of these locals and will arrange to have the cheques distributed as soon as possible. Please do not call him this week. Thank you for walking the line.”
Gnrrr… gnrrr… gnrrr… (That’s supposed to be the sound of wheels spinning uselessly.) But it was not a total loss. We did receive cheques to cover the PSAC portion of the strike pay – half what is due to the strikers. Just not the local’s half, because they couldn’t get their act together to be able to distribute cheques on the day they have known for weeks would be the day on which they needed to have the cheques in hand.
What “[These locals] do not have an executive” has to do with anything is beyond me. Every organization I’ve ever belonged to has operated under the rule that signing authorities remain in force until subsequent signing authorities are appointed. So you’re trying to tell me no one presently has access to the union local’s bank account or can sign cheques drawn on that account? Right.
But “do not call him this week” is abundantly clear. It means, “We know you’re likely to be a little ticked at our hopeless disorganization, and the fact you’re only getting half what you were expecting to get, so we’re not going to answer the phones for a few days in the hope that most of you will cool down.”
And in a totally unplanned (I swear!) coincidence, literally at the moment I was snarlingly banging this final thought out on my keyboard, I was abruptly aware that my CD player was happily (Adverb overload! Adverb overload! We’re losing containment! Captain, this sentence is about to blow! Eject the warped core!) conveying The Band’s “King Harvest” into the adjacent ether:
“I work for the union,
'Cause she's so good to me;
And I'm bound to come out on top,
That's where she said I should be.
I will hear every word the boss may say,
For he's the one who hands me down my pay.
Looks like this time I'm gonna get to stay,
I'm a union man, now, all the way.
The smell of the leaves,
From the magnolia trees in the meadow...
King Harvest has surely come.
Dry summer, then comes fall,
Which I depend on most of all.
Hey, rainmaker, can you hear the call?
Please let these crops grow tall.
Long enough I've been up on Skid Row;
And it's plain to see, I've nothing to show.
I'm glad to pay those union dues,
Just don't judge me by my shoes.”
“Define ‘Luddite’”
“Luddite: ‘one of the 19th century English workmen who destroyed labour-saving machinery that they thought would cause unemployment’.”
OK, That’s probably way too strong.
“Luddite: ‘a person opposed in principle to technological change’.”
Hmmm… Even “opposed” is a bit over the top. (Hey, I’m a blogger, dammit! How “opposed” to technological change can I be?)
But a recent conversation with a co-commuter has left me thinking that if “technological change” and I are not “opposed” in our relationship, we certainly are not cordial and, in truth, are probably barely on speaking terms at best. As we were waiting for the bus to appear (the co-commuter and I; not “technological change” and I), she mentioned an item that, coincidentally, I had also read in the previous day’s newspaper – this one:
- - - - - - - - - -
OTTAWA -- Enterprising salesmen think they've found the next big thing in school fundraising -- the bank machine.
The $1.25 service fee is an irritant for ATM users, but the revenue can also help cash-strapped principals pay for school activities. Independently operated bank machines in schools have already taken off in the United States, and they've started popping up in Canadian schools.
At Esquimalt High School just outside Victoria, the parent advisory council splits the service fees with the local operator of the bank machine, and invests the revenue back into the school. In Brandon, Man., the student council at Crocus Plains High School asked for the ATM and it gets to decide how to spend the school's portion of the service fees.
"It's been a really nifty addition to our school," said Crocus Plains principal Barry Gooden.
Salesmen keen to expand automated-teller machines beyond convenience stores and bars and into high schools are trying out this pitch on school officials.
"It is a good way to create revenue, especially if you have a really large school district," said Jeff Stewart. Earlier this fall, the sales associate for Cashline AMB Inc. in the Lower Mainland offered a deal to the Surrey school board to pilot test Cashline machines in the high schools. (Vancouver Sun, November 15)
- - - - - - - - - -
It took a mere sentence or two of shared reaction to discover that we both clearly were wondering the same thing: Why in hell do schools need ATMs? After all, how much cash does a typical school student need to hit up the vending machines a couple times a week, even daily, or, at most, the cafeteria for lunch? (And as an aside, should we be concerned about the education level of our school principals when the best they can produce in the way of expostulation is that the machine is a “really nifty addition to our school”?)
Anyway, from there, we took to musing (both of us, I should add, are parents – in my case of an offspring just launched into teenager-hood) about the recent breathtaking advances in cellphone technology and ended with a headscratching series of questions about just how many functions do you need built into a device that began life as a portable telephone and is presently a fraction of the size of what used to be a 50-cent chocolate bar. Here for example, is a list of “features” from a model of cellphone randomly found online (take a deep breath if you’re reading this out loud):
“Built-in Digital Camera - Shoot digital pictures with the built-in VGA camera (640x480 pixels) with auto-focus lens and zoom capability. Instantly capture pictures with your choice of high, medium, or low resolution; Sprint PCS Picture MailSM Capable - With Sprint PCS Picture Mail, you can take a picture anytime and send it to family and friends instantly while on the enhanced Sprint Nationwide PCS Network. You can attach a 10-second voice message and text message to your picture. Easily save your pictures on your Sprint PCS® Phone or store them online; Picture Enhancement Options - Personalize your pictures with a fun frame (five to choose from), use digital zoom, take up to eight multiple shots, or use the self-timer; Sprint PCS Ready LinkSM Capable - Now you can enjoy the convenience of quick, walkie-talkie style communication at the touch of a button with one or several Sprint PCS Ready LinkSM users anywhere you go on the most complete, all-digital, wireless network in the nation; SMS Text Messaging Capable - Send, receive, and reply to text messages instantly with an SMS-capable Sprint PCS Phone across the room or across the country while on the enhanced Sprint Nationwide PCS Network; Vibrant Full-Color Screen - Vivid 1.8" main and 1" external color sub LCD; both are TFT and support 65k colors; Customizable Photo Caller ID - Know who's calling you by linking downloaded images and photos to the contacts in your internal phone book; Built-in Speakerphone - Hands-free operation of your phone, open or closed, is made easy with the built-in speakerphone; Voice-Activated Dialing - Say the name of the person you want to call and the number is dialed automatically without using the keypad; Enhanced Ring Tones - Personalize your Sprint PCS Phone with eight festive melody ringers in 32-chord polyphonic sound; Two Internal Phone Books - Store up to 300 entries, each storing seven numbers for a total of 500 numbers and up to 300 email and Web addresses. Separate Sprint PCS Ready Link Phone Book provides easy access to 200 personal contacts and 200 company-provided contacts; Personal Alarm - Features an alarm clock that alerts you one time or daily. Just set the alarm—it's that simple; Multiple Languages - Supports English and limited Spanish text prompts; 2.5mm Universal Jack - Accommodates most standard headsets for hands-free operation; E911 Emergency Location Capable - Features an embedded Global Positioning System (GPS) chip necessary for utilizing the E911 emergency location services, where available; TTY Compatible - Compatible with select TTY devices.”
This is a phone, fergawdssake!
Leaving aside the fact that I’ve only ever know a “TTY device” as a teletype machine, some of that stuff honestly creeps me out:
-- “Know who's calling you by linking downloaded images and photos to the contacts in your internal phone book” Didn’t we used to come to know who was calling us by picking up the receiver and saying, “Hello”?;
-- “Eight festive melody ringers in 32-chord polyphonic sound” Oh yes, doesn’t it just do wonders for your appreciation of classical music to walk along a busy urban sidewalk and, from the pocket of one of the nameless strangers passing you by, hear Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” reduced to a couple dozen cheerless chirping electronic tones? (OK, hands up. How many among us have ever got halfway up off our chairs to answer the microwave? Only a few. OK, well how many among us have walked halfway to our “festive melody ringer” device only to discover that the “ringing” had been part of the soundtrack on the TV show we were watching at the time? Yep. A whole lot more. Thought so.)
There was a time when, as a Society, we collectively determined a need and used creativity to identify a process or invent a device to fill it. Now, it seems to me, more often we pitch devices into production and ideas into implementation first, and only then set about to justify the decision. Technology is going berserk. We have cameras in cellphones simply because we can put cameras in cellphones, not because Society woke up one morning and began clamouring for a device that would enable us to photograph our clogged nasal passages while phoning the boss. (“See? I told you I was sick!”) Our cellphone buttons are the size of a flea’s rec room carpet because we can make them that small, not because someone asked for an array of buttons so minuscule that they’re completely covered by your thumbprint, thus pretty well guaranteeing you’ll screw up at least once every time you dial a call. (And yes, I know “dial” as a verb is soon to lapse into the lore of “How did placing a phone call ever get to be called ‘dialling’, Daddy?”, but that’s a rant for another day.)
It won’t surprise me to hear one day soon that the latest plastic surgery wave has generated waiting lists months long for a procedure to have one of your finger tips whittled down to pencil-point sharpness because frankly, the only thing limiting the further reduction of cellphone button dimensions is the diameter of the typical human digit. When we can beat that, we’ll be inundated with cellphones that pack all of the above features into a finished package about a quarter the size of a Ty-Phoo teabag.
But I digress.
Once Technology does these things – because it can – it is up to Sales to convince us we need them.
Go back and re-read that list of cellphone features a few paragraphs back. Does anyone honestly think this device was manufactured in response to surveys and focus groups whose participants agreed that they wanted all these features in their telephones?
And yet here we sit. The device exists. Did we ask for it? (Nope.) Do we need it? (Damned straight, if Sales has done its job right.)
Some other things we apparently need? (Everything in the following few quotes comes from websites breathlessly pitching their unquestioned value to us as consumers.):
– “The LG Refrigerator with built-in LCD TV is a sight to behold.” Yep – a refrigerator with a built-in TV, because the online promotional material tells us that the American family is spending more and more time in the kitchen. The website, after cheerily extolling at length the specifications and quality of their built-in LCD television, adds as an afterthought, “LG didn't overlook the refrigerator either.”
– A mechanical “waistband stretcher [that] can add up to 5 inches to the waist of your jeans, shorts, pants or skirts.” (Actually, I already have one of those. I call it a stomach.)
– A “rechargeable insect vacuum [that] lets you quickly capture insects from a safe distance without having direct contact or leaving marks and scuffs on walls. Bug Catcher draws flies, spiders, bees, etc. into its transparent 17" nozzle and into a disposable, sealed cartridge. Each cartridge is lined with a non-toxic gel (harmless to humans and pets) that quickly kills insects and then slides out for easy disposal.” (I’m still trying to decide if this one plays on fears of killer bees, or a simple dislike of cleaning fly-swatted bugs off the wall.)
And if you want a genuine limited edition 1994 election ballot from South Africa, when Nelson Mandela first appeared as a candidate, you can buy one of those too.
With no shame whatsoever, Hedonics.com, a site that offers a whole lot of crap like this, pitches it to you with the slogan, “Stuff you never knew you needed but now you can't live without!!!”
Well I beg – no wait, I DEMAND! – to differ.
- 0 -
And finally, Wednesday this week was the long awaited “Collect strike pay” day – and damned good timing too, because Wednesday this week was also “Your regular paycheque has finally had your three strike days deducted” day. True to form, the mighty PSAC had sent out a notice by e-mail telling us the event was arranged for the lobby of our building – date and time: 11am – period.
What they hadn’t bothered to tell us about was the chaos that would take place as people mobbed the half dozen scattered tables they had set up until, by about 11:15, they posted a hand-lettered sign on the wall behind each table indicating what line you should be in if you were in such-and-such a local, and your last name starts with such-and-such a letter. They had also omitted to tell us to bring our reduced paycheque stub as confirmation we were entitled to strike pay. (Fortunately, I had mine with me. Not because I knew I would need it, but only because I carry a small shoulder bag that, were I a woman, would be called a purse. And it was tucked in there by force of habit.)
Finally, they actually had the gall to wait until we were all standing in line until they circulated an information bulletin among the dozens of us waiting. It said, in part, “CEIU 70702 and 70708 [70708 is my local] do not have an executive. Jacques Archambault has approached the banks holding the funds of these locals and will arrange to have the cheques distributed as soon as possible. Please do not call him this week. Thank you for walking the line.”
Gnrrr… gnrrr… gnrrr… (That’s supposed to be the sound of wheels spinning uselessly.) But it was not a total loss. We did receive cheques to cover the PSAC portion of the strike pay – half what is due to the strikers. Just not the local’s half, because they couldn’t get their act together to be able to distribute cheques on the day they have known for weeks would be the day on which they needed to have the cheques in hand.
What “[These locals] do not have an executive” has to do with anything is beyond me. Every organization I’ve ever belonged to has operated under the rule that signing authorities remain in force until subsequent signing authorities are appointed. So you’re trying to tell me no one presently has access to the union local’s bank account or can sign cheques drawn on that account? Right.
But “do not call him this week” is abundantly clear. It means, “We know you’re likely to be a little ticked at our hopeless disorganization, and the fact you’re only getting half what you were expecting to get, so we’re not going to answer the phones for a few days in the hope that most of you will cool down.”
And in a totally unplanned (I swear!) coincidence, literally at the moment I was snarlingly banging this final thought out on my keyboard, I was abruptly aware that my CD player was happily (Adverb overload! Adverb overload! We’re losing containment! Captain, this sentence is about to blow! Eject the warped core!) conveying The Band’s “King Harvest” into the adjacent ether:
“I work for the union,
'Cause she's so good to me;
And I'm bound to come out on top,
That's where she said I should be.
I will hear every word the boss may say,
For he's the one who hands me down my pay.
Looks like this time I'm gonna get to stay,
I'm a union man, now, all the way.
The smell of the leaves,
From the magnolia trees in the meadow...
King Harvest has surely come.
Dry summer, then comes fall,
Which I depend on most of all.
Hey, rainmaker, can you hear the call?
Please let these crops grow tall.
Long enough I've been up on Skid Row;
And it's plain to see, I've nothing to show.
I'm glad to pay those union dues,
Just don't judge me by my shoes.”
Wednesday, November 10, 2004
RIP Mr Arafat…
But c’mon everybody, ‘fess up, because it can’t be just me, surely. (“Yes it can, and don’t call me Shirley.”)
Every new story I heard or read about the endlessly drawn-out but inevitable passing of Yasser Arafat brought to mind (i) the never-say-die sequence in Peter Sellers’ “The Party”. As Indian actor Hrundi V Bakshi, he plays a movie scene in which he’s a pseudo “Gunga Din” bugler and just plain refuses to die, eventually attracting the sustained rifle fire of his own troops in an effort to shut down the ever more pathetic bleats from his bugle.
Or (ii) (so sue me) – even more often, I recalled:
“Monty Python and the Holy Grail: Scene 2
‘Bring out your dead!'
[thud]
[clang]
CART MASTER:
Bring out your dead!
[clang]
Bring out your dead!
[clang]
Bring out your dead!
[clang]
Bring out your dead!
[clang]
Bring out your dead!
[cough cough...]
[clang]
[...cough cough]
Bring out your dead!
[clang]
Bring out your dead!
[clang]
Bring out your dead! Ninepence.
[clang]
Bring out your dead!
[clang]
Bring out your dead!
[clang]
Bring out...
[clang]
...your dead!
[clang]
Bring out your dead!
CUSTOMER:
Here's one.
CART MASTER:
Ninepence.
DEAD PERSON:
I'm not dead!
CART MASTER:
What?
CUSTOMER:
Nothing. Here's your ninepence.
DEAD PERSON:
I'm not dead!
CART MASTER:
'Ere. He says he's not dead!
CUSTOMER:
Yes, he is.
DEAD PERSON:
I'm not!
CART MASTER:
He isn't?
CUSTOMER:
Well, he will be soon. He's very ill.
DEAD PERSON:
I'm getting better!
CUSTOMER:
No, you're not. You'll be stone dead in a moment.
CART MASTER:
Oh, I can't take him like that. It's against regulations.
DEAD PERSON:
I don't want to go on the cart!
CUSTOMER:
Oh, don't be such a baby.
CART MASTER:
I can't take him.
DEAD PERSON:
I feel fine!
CUSTOMER:
Well, do us a favour.
CART MASTER:
I can't.
CUSTOMER:
Well, can you hang around a couple of minutes? He won't be long.
CART MASTER:
No, I've got to go to the Robinsons'. They've lost nine today.
CUSTOMER:
Well, when's your next round?
CART MASTER:
Thursday.
DEAD PERSON:
I think I'll go for a walk.
CUSTOMER:
You're not fooling anyone, you know. Look. Isn't there something you can do?
DEAD PERSON: [singing]
I feel happy. I feel happy.
[whonk!]
CUSTOMER:
Ah, thanks very much.
CART MASTER:
Not at all. See you on Thursday.
CUSTOMER:
Right. All right.”
But in all seriousness, I think it’s wholly appropriate tonight to quote William Holden who, in an early scene in The Bridge on the River Kwai, after having just buried Corporal Herbert Thompson, another victim of the Japanese prison camp’s many diseases, suspended his sarcasm just long enough to say: “For the greater glory of... (pause) What did he die for?... I don't mock the grave or the man. May he rest in peace. He found little enough of it while he was alive.”
But c’mon everybody, ‘fess up, because it can’t be just me, surely. (“Yes it can, and don’t call me Shirley.”)
Every new story I heard or read about the endlessly drawn-out but inevitable passing of Yasser Arafat brought to mind (i) the never-say-die sequence in Peter Sellers’ “The Party”. As Indian actor Hrundi V Bakshi, he plays a movie scene in which he’s a pseudo “Gunga Din” bugler and just plain refuses to die, eventually attracting the sustained rifle fire of his own troops in an effort to shut down the ever more pathetic bleats from his bugle.
Or (ii) (so sue me) – even more often, I recalled:
“Monty Python and the Holy Grail: Scene 2
‘Bring out your dead!'
[thud]
[clang]
CART MASTER:
Bring out your dead!
[clang]
Bring out your dead!
[clang]
Bring out your dead!
[clang]
Bring out your dead!
[clang]
Bring out your dead!
[cough cough...]
[clang]
[...cough cough]
Bring out your dead!
[clang]
Bring out your dead!
[clang]
Bring out your dead! Ninepence.
[clang]
Bring out your dead!
[clang]
Bring out your dead!
[clang]
Bring out...
[clang]
...your dead!
[clang]
Bring out your dead!
CUSTOMER:
Here's one.
CART MASTER:
Ninepence.
DEAD PERSON:
I'm not dead!
CART MASTER:
What?
CUSTOMER:
Nothing. Here's your ninepence.
DEAD PERSON:
I'm not dead!
CART MASTER:
'Ere. He says he's not dead!
CUSTOMER:
Yes, he is.
DEAD PERSON:
I'm not!
CART MASTER:
He isn't?
CUSTOMER:
Well, he will be soon. He's very ill.
DEAD PERSON:
I'm getting better!
CUSTOMER:
No, you're not. You'll be stone dead in a moment.
CART MASTER:
Oh, I can't take him like that. It's against regulations.
DEAD PERSON:
I don't want to go on the cart!
CUSTOMER:
Oh, don't be such a baby.
CART MASTER:
I can't take him.
DEAD PERSON:
I feel fine!
CUSTOMER:
Well, do us a favour.
CART MASTER:
I can't.
CUSTOMER:
Well, can you hang around a couple of minutes? He won't be long.
CART MASTER:
No, I've got to go to the Robinsons'. They've lost nine today.
CUSTOMER:
Well, when's your next round?
CART MASTER:
Thursday.
DEAD PERSON:
I think I'll go for a walk.
CUSTOMER:
You're not fooling anyone, you know. Look. Isn't there something you can do?
DEAD PERSON: [singing]
I feel happy. I feel happy.
[whonk!]
CUSTOMER:
Ah, thanks very much.
CART MASTER:
Not at all. See you on Thursday.
CUSTOMER:
Right. All right.”
But in all seriousness, I think it’s wholly appropriate tonight to quote William Holden who, in an early scene in The Bridge on the River Kwai, after having just buried Corporal Herbert Thompson, another victim of the Japanese prison camp’s many diseases, suspended his sarcasm just long enough to say: “For the greater glory of... (pause) What did he die for?... I don't mock the grave or the man. May he rest in peace. He found little enough of it while he was alive.”
Monday, November 08, 2004
At home, we’re finally down to the finishing touches on a renovation project that began seriously about a year ago with one too many repetitions of, “Gawd, I hate the linoleum in this room!”
“This room” is an enormous family room with a picture window that looks southward over a large backyard. The linoleum has been, for years, an ever more greying surface that might once have been moderately, even attractively tinted. But we’ve only ever known it as “yuck”.
(Its yuck factor was enhanced many years ago by several deep scratches added when a dozen brave men and true from the Ottawa Fire Department dragged what felt to me – when I eventually had to move it out to the curb – like a five-ton ice cream freezer up from the basement after I had inadvertently hacked open its ammonia line in an effort to salvage its motor, promptly filling the house with fumes that were toxic enough to cause paint to blister. The justifiable “Oh you idiot!” response was magnified at the time by the presence in our house of one who was then fairly recently born, and whose infant lungs required more unflavoured oxygen than could be biologically extracted from the ammonia-rich air I had caused to circulate through our home. Hence the “Help!” call to our fire department, who were absolutely everything you want in a fire department: prompt, overwhelmingly resource-backed with four trucks, a Chief’s car, probably 30 men – all wearing breathing apparatus – and sufficiently muscled that wrestling the massive olfactory offender from basement to backyard took them all of five minutes… but I digress.)
Finally, about a year ago, we decided the linoleum had to be replaced. After a lot of “maybe this / maybe that” consideration, we settled on a hardwood surface for most of the floor, and ceramic tile for the floors in the adjacent spaces – a hallway, a closet, a two-piece bathroom and a laundry room.
The hardwood, we did ourselves. That proved to be (home handypersons take note) a valuable lesson in spending a few extra dollars in favour of convenience – in this case the convenience of a compressor-driven nailer, rather than the manual hammer-blow driven nailer that likely would have given me irreversible wrist and elbow damage, given the googol or so of nails (actually staples) I eventually drove through the tongue-and-groove of the new ¾-inch thick planks.
For the ceramic tile, we had also attended a do-it-yourself seminar on installing it and had come away thinking we probably could do it ourselves. But in the end, because it involved a lot of “fiddly bits”, including circular cuts required to accommodate a toilet, and the drain pipe under a laundry tub, we decided to have professional installers do it.
After finding a tile we liked at a price we liked a lot, we contracted with the tile seller to have the installation done by them. That’s when we learned what they do – and what they don’t do. What they do – literally – is install. Period.
What they don’t do is any of the pre-installation prep work. So we, over an especially energetic couple of weekends and about ten evenings, did all of the following on the floors of the spaces slated for tile: tore up the linoleum and the underlying layer of quarter-inch plywood; pulled out or pounded down thousands, and I do mean thousands, of staples that remained behind when the wood underlay was pried up; removed a toilet, sink pedestal, clothes washer and dryer, laundry tub, and quarter-round baseboard moulding all around the rooms in question; and we cut and nailed down maple “shoes” to hold new rails and railings for the stairs at the entrance going down into our basement.
And that was just to get ready for the tile installers. I felt like one of those characters in a Cecil B de Mille movie who enter a room in advance of the returning conqueror, strewing rose petals about in the hero’s path. “Enter, Your Esteemed Grandeloquence! Your pathway is prepared!”
Turned out to be a marvelous little guy named Nino who has been a tiler since the age of 8, when he was apprenticed to his grandfather. (Another home handyperson Rule of Thumb: If you’re going to hire someone to do tile, stone, brick, concrete, in fact any form of masonry, make sure he or she has a family name that ends in a vowel. You can’t go wrong.) Over the course of two days of highly professional work, he regaled us with stories of just how many times he had been called into someone’s home to repair the damage that would-be do-it-yourselfers had caused, in some cases more than doubling their costs.
Which recalls another digression… (Bear with me, it’s hilarious.) During the toilet and laundry tub removal, we also had to shut off the water supply to the entire house because I discovered that, apparently, it never entered even the wildest imaginings of the original builder that someone might actually some day want to replace the laundry tub. After one of the more thorough walk and crawlabouts of my basement and crawlspace that I can recall, I discovered that there was no independent shut off for the water feeding the faucets attached to the laundry tub. They are split off the pipes that feed water to the washing machine. And while the washing machine lines have faucets that shut down just fine, the lines splitting off to the laundry tub were installed with no such option.
None.
The toilet has its own water supply shut-off. As does the bathroom sink. As do similar fixtures upstairs in our kitchen (No, we don’t have a toilet in our kitchen! Wait for the end of the sentence…) and full bathroom. (Oh.)
But the absence of separate shut-off valves for the laundry tub’s faucets left me with a dilemma. Once the house water was shut off, I thought I would have no problem whatsoever hacking the laundry tub away from its connections. But of course, that still meant I had to close off those severed connections before re-enabling the flow of water through the house, if I didn’t want water gushing from the open pipes when I turned the water back on.
My first thought was that perhaps I could simply re-connect the faucet and leave it hanging off the wall over a sinkless space while the flooring was laid down. But unfortunately, removing the tub required the destruction of the faucet’s fittings, because it had clearly been installed with an eye to permanence – its joints welded or soldered – and it was not going to give up its perch without a struggle. The struggle, however, once I unlimbered the serious artillery – a pipe cutter and a hacksaw – was very short lived. The faucet lost.
But for me it was a Pyrrhic victory because I found out that I cannot solder worth a damn. Or so I thought. It turns out that soldering just has some very specific rules beyond the simple “Make it hotter than the fires of Hell” that I thought was the only requirement.
After a couple tries at capping the pipes’ open ends with a soldered copper cap, only to be rewarded with a tiny jet of spray when I re-started the water flow, I called a friend who told me the pipe being soldered had to be bone dry – inside and out – at the point where solder was being applied. And because one of them ended ultimately at the hot water tank, I was faced with the prospect of 40 odd gallons of hot water slowly trickling, drop by relentless drop, out the end of the pipe (a plumber would call it “siphoning”), even with the house water off. At that rate, the pipe would by “bone dry” in about 30 years.
Unless…
And here’s a fantastic plumber’s trick. Because the trickle is, literally, a drop by slow drop process, the solution is to jam something into the pipe, something with sufficient absorptive capacity to capture and hold the trickle while you solder, and because you’re putting a cap on the pipe using a method that is a permanent seal, obviously your pipe-stuffer is not going to be removable when you’re done. So it also has to be water-degradable and capable of swiftly breaking down inside the sealed pipe so as not to interfere with the water’s flowing to other outlets in the system (like our upstairs – where our kitchen and bathroom are located). Sound familiar? Yep – you stuff bread into the pipe.
My plumber advisor also told me (and this is the hilarious part – no, I haven’t forgotten that several-paragraphs-ago promise) of an episode where he had been replacing a hot water tank in a tony home in one of Ottawa’s wealthier communities. In response to his request for “some bread”, the homeowners produced a thick slice of a lavishly nutritious whole-grain brown seed bread that probably commanded a good $5 a loaf at a nearby gourmet bakery. They no doubt assumed he was simply feeling peckish. He didn’t hurt their feelings by actually letting them watch his successful use of the bulky slab as a pipe-drying accessory, but he did get a call about 24 hours later that not one of the home’s faucets was working.
When he returned to the house to investigate, he discovered that faucets throughout the house were equipped with aerator heads, and every single aerator head had become completely jammed with the whole grains and small seeds that were released into the water feeding system when the full-bodied bread dissolved.
Needless to say, I used Wonder Enriched White Bread. Just my luck it’ll atrophy into something like cement.
But it turns out that my repair has been so far successful. (Knock on the W-O-O-D keys.) When I re-enabled the flow at the main valve, water flowed only where it is supposed to and only when we turn on a tap or pull a flush lever down. (And this entry has taken a little longer than usual to find its way into the blog because it’s a lot more difficult to keyboard when your fingers are all crossed.)
So take that, Bob Vila!
- 0 -
Crossing my mind (a short trip at the best of times)
After seeing yet another preview for an upcoming movie (“Polar Express”) produced entirely using computer animation, I wonder how much of a future remains for “movie stuntman / stuntwoman” as a career.
Granted, a lot of the movies by Dreamworks, Pixar, Disney and their brethren still feature character voices provided by actual flesh-and-blood actors, but obviously the computer-generated stunts hardly need the gymnastics or the car-flipping capabilities of highly-skilled stuntmen and women any more.
Even in movies that are largely live action (Spiderman and its son, Spiderman II, come to mind) all the stunts which require motion beyond a simple walk across the street are called forward from a hard drive instead of being staged – as they were until recently – as carefully choreographed products of the USA (United Stuntmen’s Association / United Stuntwomen’s Association).
So kids… maybe you oughta be asking your guidance counselor for contacts in a thrilling field like chartered accountancy (or given the current corporate climate, forensic accounting).
- 0 -
And finally, from the “You can’t win” pile. In the wake of the US election, left-leaning chocoholics who might be looking for solace among the wares of Lindt, Toblerone, Godiva and their like recently woke up to discover that the world price of cocoa is now soaring because its principal supplier, the Ivory Coast, is presently (at this writing, that is) in the throes of a major shooting battle.
On one point of the gunfire triangle is the current government, who accidentally killed several French peacekeepers in a recent attack aimed at rebel forces. On another point of the triangle are the armed rebels and, on the third point of the triangle, French military regulars sent in by the Government of France, who promptly destroyed the Ivorian Air Force (two old Russian Sukhoi-25 jet fighters and a trio of MiL-24 “Hind” Russian combat helicopters).
Unfortunately, like the hapless policeman called to quell a vicious domestic argument, the French now find themselves under attack by forces of both the “mind your own business” Ivorian government and the “mind your own business” rebels, the latter who for good measure are also now going after the homes, businesses, property and life ‘n’ limb of any French civilians still living unsheltered in the country.
Given the uncertainty of cocoa moving around the country for a while to places like… oh, say the “departure” dock at Abidjan, it’s now going through the commodity market roof.
Sigh.
Maybe a glass of Cabernet-Sauvignon instead…
Just wait ‘til 2008!!
Dammit.
“This room” is an enormous family room with a picture window that looks southward over a large backyard. The linoleum has been, for years, an ever more greying surface that might once have been moderately, even attractively tinted. But we’ve only ever known it as “yuck”.
(Its yuck factor was enhanced many years ago by several deep scratches added when a dozen brave men and true from the Ottawa Fire Department dragged what felt to me – when I eventually had to move it out to the curb – like a five-ton ice cream freezer up from the basement after I had inadvertently hacked open its ammonia line in an effort to salvage its motor, promptly filling the house with fumes that were toxic enough to cause paint to blister. The justifiable “Oh you idiot!” response was magnified at the time by the presence in our house of one who was then fairly recently born, and whose infant lungs required more unflavoured oxygen than could be biologically extracted from the ammonia-rich air I had caused to circulate through our home. Hence the “Help!” call to our fire department, who were absolutely everything you want in a fire department: prompt, overwhelmingly resource-backed with four trucks, a Chief’s car, probably 30 men – all wearing breathing apparatus – and sufficiently muscled that wrestling the massive olfactory offender from basement to backyard took them all of five minutes… but I digress.)
Finally, about a year ago, we decided the linoleum had to be replaced. After a lot of “maybe this / maybe that” consideration, we settled on a hardwood surface for most of the floor, and ceramic tile for the floors in the adjacent spaces – a hallway, a closet, a two-piece bathroom and a laundry room.
The hardwood, we did ourselves. That proved to be (home handypersons take note) a valuable lesson in spending a few extra dollars in favour of convenience – in this case the convenience of a compressor-driven nailer, rather than the manual hammer-blow driven nailer that likely would have given me irreversible wrist and elbow damage, given the googol or so of nails (actually staples) I eventually drove through the tongue-and-groove of the new ¾-inch thick planks.
For the ceramic tile, we had also attended a do-it-yourself seminar on installing it and had come away thinking we probably could do it ourselves. But in the end, because it involved a lot of “fiddly bits”, including circular cuts required to accommodate a toilet, and the drain pipe under a laundry tub, we decided to have professional installers do it.
After finding a tile we liked at a price we liked a lot, we contracted with the tile seller to have the installation done by them. That’s when we learned what they do – and what they don’t do. What they do – literally – is install. Period.
What they don’t do is any of the pre-installation prep work. So we, over an especially energetic couple of weekends and about ten evenings, did all of the following on the floors of the spaces slated for tile: tore up the linoleum and the underlying layer of quarter-inch plywood; pulled out or pounded down thousands, and I do mean thousands, of staples that remained behind when the wood underlay was pried up; removed a toilet, sink pedestal, clothes washer and dryer, laundry tub, and quarter-round baseboard moulding all around the rooms in question; and we cut and nailed down maple “shoes” to hold new rails and railings for the stairs at the entrance going down into our basement.
And that was just to get ready for the tile installers. I felt like one of those characters in a Cecil B de Mille movie who enter a room in advance of the returning conqueror, strewing rose petals about in the hero’s path. “Enter, Your Esteemed Grandeloquence! Your pathway is prepared!”
Turned out to be a marvelous little guy named Nino who has been a tiler since the age of 8, when he was apprenticed to his grandfather. (Another home handyperson Rule of Thumb: If you’re going to hire someone to do tile, stone, brick, concrete, in fact any form of masonry, make sure he or she has a family name that ends in a vowel. You can’t go wrong.) Over the course of two days of highly professional work, he regaled us with stories of just how many times he had been called into someone’s home to repair the damage that would-be do-it-yourselfers had caused, in some cases more than doubling their costs.
Which recalls another digression… (Bear with me, it’s hilarious.) During the toilet and laundry tub removal, we also had to shut off the water supply to the entire house because I discovered that, apparently, it never entered even the wildest imaginings of the original builder that someone might actually some day want to replace the laundry tub. After one of the more thorough walk and crawlabouts of my basement and crawlspace that I can recall, I discovered that there was no independent shut off for the water feeding the faucets attached to the laundry tub. They are split off the pipes that feed water to the washing machine. And while the washing machine lines have faucets that shut down just fine, the lines splitting off to the laundry tub were installed with no such option.
None.
The toilet has its own water supply shut-off. As does the bathroom sink. As do similar fixtures upstairs in our kitchen (No, we don’t have a toilet in our kitchen! Wait for the end of the sentence…) and full bathroom. (Oh.)
But the absence of separate shut-off valves for the laundry tub’s faucets left me with a dilemma. Once the house water was shut off, I thought I would have no problem whatsoever hacking the laundry tub away from its connections. But of course, that still meant I had to close off those severed connections before re-enabling the flow of water through the house, if I didn’t want water gushing from the open pipes when I turned the water back on.
My first thought was that perhaps I could simply re-connect the faucet and leave it hanging off the wall over a sinkless space while the flooring was laid down. But unfortunately, removing the tub required the destruction of the faucet’s fittings, because it had clearly been installed with an eye to permanence – its joints welded or soldered – and it was not going to give up its perch without a struggle. The struggle, however, once I unlimbered the serious artillery – a pipe cutter and a hacksaw – was very short lived. The faucet lost.
But for me it was a Pyrrhic victory because I found out that I cannot solder worth a damn. Or so I thought. It turns out that soldering just has some very specific rules beyond the simple “Make it hotter than the fires of Hell” that I thought was the only requirement.
After a couple tries at capping the pipes’ open ends with a soldered copper cap, only to be rewarded with a tiny jet of spray when I re-started the water flow, I called a friend who told me the pipe being soldered had to be bone dry – inside and out – at the point where solder was being applied. And because one of them ended ultimately at the hot water tank, I was faced with the prospect of 40 odd gallons of hot water slowly trickling, drop by relentless drop, out the end of the pipe (a plumber would call it “siphoning”), even with the house water off. At that rate, the pipe would by “bone dry” in about 30 years.
Unless…
And here’s a fantastic plumber’s trick. Because the trickle is, literally, a drop by slow drop process, the solution is to jam something into the pipe, something with sufficient absorptive capacity to capture and hold the trickle while you solder, and because you’re putting a cap on the pipe using a method that is a permanent seal, obviously your pipe-stuffer is not going to be removable when you’re done. So it also has to be water-degradable and capable of swiftly breaking down inside the sealed pipe so as not to interfere with the water’s flowing to other outlets in the system (like our upstairs – where our kitchen and bathroom are located). Sound familiar? Yep – you stuff bread into the pipe.
My plumber advisor also told me (and this is the hilarious part – no, I haven’t forgotten that several-paragraphs-ago promise) of an episode where he had been replacing a hot water tank in a tony home in one of Ottawa’s wealthier communities. In response to his request for “some bread”, the homeowners produced a thick slice of a lavishly nutritious whole-grain brown seed bread that probably commanded a good $5 a loaf at a nearby gourmet bakery. They no doubt assumed he was simply feeling peckish. He didn’t hurt their feelings by actually letting them watch his successful use of the bulky slab as a pipe-drying accessory, but he did get a call about 24 hours later that not one of the home’s faucets was working.
When he returned to the house to investigate, he discovered that faucets throughout the house were equipped with aerator heads, and every single aerator head had become completely jammed with the whole grains and small seeds that were released into the water feeding system when the full-bodied bread dissolved.
Needless to say, I used Wonder Enriched White Bread. Just my luck it’ll atrophy into something like cement.
But it turns out that my repair has been so far successful. (Knock on the W-O-O-D keys.) When I re-enabled the flow at the main valve, water flowed only where it is supposed to and only when we turn on a tap or pull a flush lever down. (And this entry has taken a little longer than usual to find its way into the blog because it’s a lot more difficult to keyboard when your fingers are all crossed.)
So take that, Bob Vila!
- 0 -
Crossing my mind (a short trip at the best of times)
After seeing yet another preview for an upcoming movie (“Polar Express”) produced entirely using computer animation, I wonder how much of a future remains for “movie stuntman / stuntwoman” as a career.
Granted, a lot of the movies by Dreamworks, Pixar, Disney and their brethren still feature character voices provided by actual flesh-and-blood actors, but obviously the computer-generated stunts hardly need the gymnastics or the car-flipping capabilities of highly-skilled stuntmen and women any more.
Even in movies that are largely live action (Spiderman and its son, Spiderman II, come to mind) all the stunts which require motion beyond a simple walk across the street are called forward from a hard drive instead of being staged – as they were until recently – as carefully choreographed products of the USA (United Stuntmen’s Association / United Stuntwomen’s Association).
So kids… maybe you oughta be asking your guidance counselor for contacts in a thrilling field like chartered accountancy (or given the current corporate climate, forensic accounting).
- 0 -
And finally, from the “You can’t win” pile. In the wake of the US election, left-leaning chocoholics who might be looking for solace among the wares of Lindt, Toblerone, Godiva and their like recently woke up to discover that the world price of cocoa is now soaring because its principal supplier, the Ivory Coast, is presently (at this writing, that is) in the throes of a major shooting battle.
On one point of the gunfire triangle is the current government, who accidentally killed several French peacekeepers in a recent attack aimed at rebel forces. On another point of the triangle are the armed rebels and, on the third point of the triangle, French military regulars sent in by the Government of France, who promptly destroyed the Ivorian Air Force (two old Russian Sukhoi-25 jet fighters and a trio of MiL-24 “Hind” Russian combat helicopters).
Unfortunately, like the hapless policeman called to quell a vicious domestic argument, the French now find themselves under attack by forces of both the “mind your own business” Ivorian government and the “mind your own business” rebels, the latter who for good measure are also now going after the homes, businesses, property and life ‘n’ limb of any French civilians still living unsheltered in the country.
Given the uncertainty of cocoa moving around the country for a while to places like… oh, say the “departure” dock at Abidjan, it’s now going through the commodity market roof.
Sigh.
Maybe a glass of Cabernet-Sauvignon instead…
Just wait ‘til 2008!!
Dammit.
Friday, October 29, 2004
I’m not sure what’s happening here. Either I’ve missed a simile while growing up, or this actually represents an old simile updated for the new millennium.
Recently, there was a huge kerfuffle over Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams’ storming out of federal / provincial talks on “equalization”. In separate news conferences held to explain their positions, both the Newfoundland Premier and Prime Minister Paul Martin were standing up at their microphones whining about how each had been trying to contact the other unsuccessfully. Thing is, the microphones were placed back-to-back and just a few metres apart, which yielded the uniquely Canadian spectacle of two people almost within touching distance, each loudly protesting the other’s unwillingness to communicate with him.
But it was the analogy used in one article that I thought interesting: “It spoke volumes about the surreal nature of this federation that neither man considered walking up to his negotiating partner to tell him to stop acting like a big girl's blouse and get back to the table.” (National Post, October 27)
So is this an updated about-time-we-gave-the-other-gender-equal-time version about the badly overused comparative image of two manly men comparing their whatzits? And if so, just how the heck does “a big girl’s blouse” normally “act”, anyway? Anyone?
- 0 -
New dribblings from my ironically-named Department of Irony:
The cancellation of two recent information-related projects at work has given me cause and pause to wonder. There was a general information session entitled “Knowing Our Business” that was to have been held in our plain-languagely named Learning Centre. A couple days ago, the easel-borne sign promoting the event was diagonally draped with an enormous, red-lettered banner, “CANCELLED / ANNULÉ”.
And recently in a mid-morning e-mail, we all dutifully received a message advising us that it is time to complete our annual Learning Plan, essentially a statement of hope (a) that we will consider broadening our skill sets beyond those used in our day-to-day jobs, for which the department provides some funding for course registration, and (b) that our supervisors will approve our choices.
By early afternoon of the same day, a follow-up message advised one and all that the Learning Plan has been cancelled.
(So, today's lesson is: well, I guess... people who are caught learning anything, especially if it involves Knowing Our Business, will be shot.)
- 0 -
Mail, we got mail!
I was thrilled to hear from a couple correspondents following up my not-too-long ago whine about missing the point on the need for flu shots. As one regular reader noted, there’s a time lag between the incubation period of any disease, and the point where you actually display enough symptoms to realize you’re sick. The problem, of course, is you’re contagious during both periods. And as Tonstant Weader* argued, “I don't like the idea of passing on the virus to the very old or very young during the incubation period, when I don't know for sure that I'm going down with something, and am spreading germs all over the public transport system. I'll recover reasonably quickly, but there's the chance that others could be damaged or finished off by complications of flu.”
Tonstant Weader* also pointed out that while we might well be more modern in our methods of travel today than we were in 1918-9, we still travel much more numerously and faster than ever before in hermetically sealed tubes that recycle rather than vent our germ-laden exhalations.
But the zinger, I thought, was, “I think that someone should be making the point that if the Bush Administration can't protect its citizens from a relatively common virus, how in the blazes does it expect to shield them from terrorist-linked biological warfare? Someone did suggest yesterday that the mad goal of vaccinating the U.S. population against smallpox, and the costly business of building up a stockpile of the vaccine, meant that the flu vaccine had had to be outsourced. Anything in the nature of chickens coming home to roost pleases me.”
*...and why 'Tonstant Weader'? Well, it’s a gentle tribute to a lavishly well-read correspondent with a wit that often reminds me of a staple at the Algonquin Round Table (More information: http://www.npg.si.edu/exh/caricatures/table.htm ), whose self-generated pen-name was “Constant Reader”, but who once noted, in a review of the latest treacly offering from AA Milne: "And it is that word 'hummy', my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader Fwowed Up" - Dorothy Parker, 20 October 1928
Meanwhile, a second message from a regular reader added a new section to my growing list of examples of “irony”: “I thought it was pretty slimy (but what else is new?) of… Dubya to announce his intention to get flu shots from Canada, only about a week after he had explained why he outlawed the practice of Americans buying medication from Canada, by saying he wasn't sure Canadian drugs were safe… Most drugs Americans buy from Canada ARE MADE IN THE US. He thinks terrorists hang around Canadian pharmacies, contaminating the drugs… [and] all these people lining up for shots have stood there for days in the cold and rain.”
- 0 -
So, is it too soon to be musing about a “Bush legacy”, as in “former” President George Bush and “What hath he wrought”?
In light of the seeds being sown by Secretary of State Colin Powell, perhaps not. How about leaving his successor President just what he needs – a brand new world hotspot? Here is a somewhat astonishing bit of “diplomacy” that was recently articulated by the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff while on a mission to Beijing (as reported in China’s “People’s Daily” online):
"During his recent visit to China, Powell explicitly said the United States would unswervingly pursue the 'one China' policy and is in opposition to any attempts for 'Taiwan independence,'" said Zhang. "We also noticed Powell told Hong Kong-based Phoenix Television 'Taiwan is not independent. It does not enjoy sovereignty as a nation.'"
The article goes to outline why it might seem somewhat confusing to the mainland China government why they are still uncertain, despite the above apparent clarification, where the US stands on the really big China question: Is or is not Taiwan independent?:
“According to the communiqués signed on Aug. 17, 1982, the United States will reduce and eventually halt arms sales to Taiwan. In addition, its arms sales to Taiwan shall be limited to only defensive weapons.”
Overlooking the fact that, so far as we can tell, a shell leaving the muzzle of a cannon still seems unable to “know” in any meaningful sense whether it was fired for “offensive” or “defensive” purposes, the US’s China policy seems to change almost with the tides, or more appropriately perhaps – like the People’s… daily.
So here’s my prediction:
Once President Kerry has finally been able to define and enact an exit strategy from Iraq (How hard can it be?: “My predecessor was horribly wrong. We’re sorry and we’re outta here. Byeeeee!”), China will consider – correctly – that the US military is too weakened to embark on yet another mission of global police-forcing and will launch a massive naval and troop “exercise” in an area that the rest of the world will collectively consider to be “alarmingly close” to Taiwan. The “exercise” will culminate with an abrupt swing over to the Island, and before you can say “Zhang’s your uncle,” there will be half a million stalwarts of the People’s Glorious Army of the Revolution (I believe the Red Chinese Army calls that a “platoon”) ashore on Taiwan.
The Chinese government will claim (also correctly, if Mr Powell’s widely reprinted assertion is to be believed) that they are merely extending their sea-borne exercise to a land-based component on their own territory and fully intend to leave “in due time”, once the exercise is declared to be over.
And because there’s no oil under Taiwan, President Kerry will hem and haw, but in the end will merely express great regret and open negotiations with the Chinese (which oughta be a project on a par with the still-ongoing treaty talks aimed at bringing the Korean War – that’s the one where they actually stopped shooting at each other in 1953 – to a mutually-agreed armistice), aimed at righting the wrong just perpetrated on the free people of Taiwan.
Oh sure, there’ll be a nothing gesture from the Chinese offering compensation – graciously allowing the Taiwanese, for example, to go on happily pirating and re-selling badly copied movies and music from the West.
But the US will eventually decide that pursuing the recovery of what it will lose when Taiwan is suddenly home to the People’s Army just isn’t worth it.
And President Kerry can kiss the Taiwanese expatriates’ vote good-bye in 2008.
Meanwhile, the Dalai Lama will be watching with great interest. After all, it’s not going to take too much liquid Correc-Type to overwrite “our sympathy lies with the formerly free people of Taiwan” and make it “our sympathy lies with the formerly free people of Tibet” as the Chinese solidify their presence there, too.
So save your Taiwanese stamps. I predict they’re en route to becoming major collector’s items. Remember, you heard it here first. (Unless of course you’ve read “Wilson’s Ghost” by Robert MacNamara, in which case you heard it a couple years ago. Oh, and Tom Clancy’s “Executive Orders”… and Dale Brown’s “Battle Born” … oh, and come to think of it, “Heaven Lake” by John Dalton, which sets itself in the maelstrom of a US / China conflict over Taiwan, “Formosa Betrayed” by George Kerr… “Taiwan: Nation State or Province?” by John Franklin Copper… Actually, now that I think of it, everybody on the whole damned planet except the Bush White House has read about the diplomatic eggshells on which one has to tiptoe in dealing with the topic of Formosa / Taiwan with the creators of the Iron Rice Bowl.)
As Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau put it, after returning from a visit there himself a couple decades ago, he found his hosts “friendly but teeming”. And the US is in no position to mess with a nation “teeming” with anyone right now.
- 0 -
And finally, your government at work:
Q: Doesn’t this statement from the Globe and Mail’s October 29th online edition just cry out, “Enough talk! It’s time to do something about it!”?
[ Social Services Minister Ken Dryden’s spokesperson Linda Kristal ] “said the meeting is part of a series of meetings between federal and provincial social service and social development ministers and its goal is to begin working immediately on action to improve child care. ‘He's looking for an agreement with all of his partners to work on this national initiative. They want to establish that they are going to work on a more long-term vision.’ ”
A. No.
Recently, there was a huge kerfuffle over Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams’ storming out of federal / provincial talks on “equalization”. In separate news conferences held to explain their positions, both the Newfoundland Premier and Prime Minister Paul Martin were standing up at their microphones whining about how each had been trying to contact the other unsuccessfully. Thing is, the microphones were placed back-to-back and just a few metres apart, which yielded the uniquely Canadian spectacle of two people almost within touching distance, each loudly protesting the other’s unwillingness to communicate with him.
But it was the analogy used in one article that I thought interesting: “It spoke volumes about the surreal nature of this federation that neither man considered walking up to his negotiating partner to tell him to stop acting like a big girl's blouse and get back to the table.” (National Post, October 27)
So is this an updated about-time-we-gave-the-other-gender-equal-time version about the badly overused comparative image of two manly men comparing their whatzits? And if so, just how the heck does “a big girl’s blouse” normally “act”, anyway? Anyone?
- 0 -
New dribblings from my ironically-named Department of Irony:
The cancellation of two recent information-related projects at work has given me cause and pause to wonder. There was a general information session entitled “Knowing Our Business” that was to have been held in our plain-languagely named Learning Centre. A couple days ago, the easel-borne sign promoting the event was diagonally draped with an enormous, red-lettered banner, “CANCELLED / ANNULÉ”.
And recently in a mid-morning e-mail, we all dutifully received a message advising us that it is time to complete our annual Learning Plan, essentially a statement of hope (a) that we will consider broadening our skill sets beyond those used in our day-to-day jobs, for which the department provides some funding for course registration, and (b) that our supervisors will approve our choices.
By early afternoon of the same day, a follow-up message advised one and all that the Learning Plan has been cancelled.
(So, today's lesson is: well, I guess... people who are caught learning anything, especially if it involves Knowing Our Business, will be shot.)
- 0 -
Mail, we got mail!
I was thrilled to hear from a couple correspondents following up my not-too-long ago whine about missing the point on the need for flu shots. As one regular reader noted, there’s a time lag between the incubation period of any disease, and the point where you actually display enough symptoms to realize you’re sick. The problem, of course, is you’re contagious during both periods. And as Tonstant Weader* argued, “I don't like the idea of passing on the virus to the very old or very young during the incubation period, when I don't know for sure that I'm going down with something, and am spreading germs all over the public transport system. I'll recover reasonably quickly, but there's the chance that others could be damaged or finished off by complications of flu.”
Tonstant Weader* also pointed out that while we might well be more modern in our methods of travel today than we were in 1918-9, we still travel much more numerously and faster than ever before in hermetically sealed tubes that recycle rather than vent our germ-laden exhalations.
But the zinger, I thought, was, “I think that someone should be making the point that if the Bush Administration can't protect its citizens from a relatively common virus, how in the blazes does it expect to shield them from terrorist-linked biological warfare? Someone did suggest yesterday that the mad goal of vaccinating the U.S. population against smallpox, and the costly business of building up a stockpile of the vaccine, meant that the flu vaccine had had to be outsourced. Anything in the nature of chickens coming home to roost pleases me.”
*...and why 'Tonstant Weader'? Well, it’s a gentle tribute to a lavishly well-read correspondent with a wit that often reminds me of a staple at the Algonquin Round Table (More information: http://www.npg.si.edu/exh/caricatures/table.htm ), whose self-generated pen-name was “Constant Reader”, but who once noted, in a review of the latest treacly offering from AA Milne: "And it is that word 'hummy', my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader Fwowed Up" - Dorothy Parker, 20 October 1928
Meanwhile, a second message from a regular reader added a new section to my growing list of examples of “irony”: “I thought it was pretty slimy (but what else is new?) of… Dubya to announce his intention to get flu shots from Canada, only about a week after he had explained why he outlawed the practice of Americans buying medication from Canada, by saying he wasn't sure Canadian drugs were safe… Most drugs Americans buy from Canada ARE MADE IN THE US. He thinks terrorists hang around Canadian pharmacies, contaminating the drugs… [and] all these people lining up for shots have stood there for days in the cold and rain.”
- 0 -
So, is it too soon to be musing about a “Bush legacy”, as in “former” President George Bush and “What hath he wrought”?
In light of the seeds being sown by Secretary of State Colin Powell, perhaps not. How about leaving his successor President just what he needs – a brand new world hotspot? Here is a somewhat astonishing bit of “diplomacy” that was recently articulated by the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff while on a mission to Beijing (as reported in China’s “People’s Daily” online):
"During his recent visit to China, Powell explicitly said the United States would unswervingly pursue the 'one China' policy and is in opposition to any attempts for 'Taiwan independence,'" said Zhang. "We also noticed Powell told Hong Kong-based Phoenix Television 'Taiwan is not independent. It does not enjoy sovereignty as a nation.'"
The article goes to outline why it might seem somewhat confusing to the mainland China government why they are still uncertain, despite the above apparent clarification, where the US stands on the really big China question: Is or is not Taiwan independent?:
“According to the communiqués signed on Aug. 17, 1982, the United States will reduce and eventually halt arms sales to Taiwan. In addition, its arms sales to Taiwan shall be limited to only defensive weapons.”
Overlooking the fact that, so far as we can tell, a shell leaving the muzzle of a cannon still seems unable to “know” in any meaningful sense whether it was fired for “offensive” or “defensive” purposes, the US’s China policy seems to change almost with the tides, or more appropriately perhaps – like the People’s… daily.
So here’s my prediction:
Once President Kerry has finally been able to define and enact an exit strategy from Iraq (How hard can it be?: “My predecessor was horribly wrong. We’re sorry and we’re outta here. Byeeeee!”), China will consider – correctly – that the US military is too weakened to embark on yet another mission of global police-forcing and will launch a massive naval and troop “exercise” in an area that the rest of the world will collectively consider to be “alarmingly close” to Taiwan. The “exercise” will culminate with an abrupt swing over to the Island, and before you can say “Zhang’s your uncle,” there will be half a million stalwarts of the People’s Glorious Army of the Revolution (I believe the Red Chinese Army calls that a “platoon”) ashore on Taiwan.
The Chinese government will claim (also correctly, if Mr Powell’s widely reprinted assertion is to be believed) that they are merely extending their sea-borne exercise to a land-based component on their own territory and fully intend to leave “in due time”, once the exercise is declared to be over.
And because there’s no oil under Taiwan, President Kerry will hem and haw, but in the end will merely express great regret and open negotiations with the Chinese (which oughta be a project on a par with the still-ongoing treaty talks aimed at bringing the Korean War – that’s the one where they actually stopped shooting at each other in 1953 – to a mutually-agreed armistice), aimed at righting the wrong just perpetrated on the free people of Taiwan.
Oh sure, there’ll be a nothing gesture from the Chinese offering compensation – graciously allowing the Taiwanese, for example, to go on happily pirating and re-selling badly copied movies and music from the West.
But the US will eventually decide that pursuing the recovery of what it will lose when Taiwan is suddenly home to the People’s Army just isn’t worth it.
And President Kerry can kiss the Taiwanese expatriates’ vote good-bye in 2008.
Meanwhile, the Dalai Lama will be watching with great interest. After all, it’s not going to take too much liquid Correc-Type to overwrite “our sympathy lies with the formerly free people of Taiwan” and make it “our sympathy lies with the formerly free people of Tibet” as the Chinese solidify their presence there, too.
So save your Taiwanese stamps. I predict they’re en route to becoming major collector’s items. Remember, you heard it here first. (Unless of course you’ve read “Wilson’s Ghost” by Robert MacNamara, in which case you heard it a couple years ago. Oh, and Tom Clancy’s “Executive Orders”… and Dale Brown’s “Battle Born” … oh, and come to think of it, “Heaven Lake” by John Dalton, which sets itself in the maelstrom of a US / China conflict over Taiwan, “Formosa Betrayed” by George Kerr… “Taiwan: Nation State or Province?” by John Franklin Copper… Actually, now that I think of it, everybody on the whole damned planet except the Bush White House has read about the diplomatic eggshells on which one has to tiptoe in dealing with the topic of Formosa / Taiwan with the creators of the Iron Rice Bowl.)
As Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau put it, after returning from a visit there himself a couple decades ago, he found his hosts “friendly but teeming”. And the US is in no position to mess with a nation “teeming” with anyone right now.
- 0 -
And finally, your government at work:
Q: Doesn’t this statement from the Globe and Mail’s October 29th online edition just cry out, “Enough talk! It’s time to do something about it!”?
[ Social Services Minister Ken Dryden’s spokesperson Linda Kristal ] “said the meeting is part of a series of meetings between federal and provincial social service and social development ministers and its goal is to begin working immediately on action to improve child care. ‘He's looking for an agreement with all of his partners to work on this national initiative. They want to establish that they are going to work on a more long-term vision.’ ”
A. No.
Wednesday, October 20, 2004
“If you’re lost and you look, and you will find me, Time after time.” (Cyndi Lauper)
A recent Ottawa-local television newscast carried an item announcing that City Council is “poised” to buy a new system called “Smartbus” for our public transit system. It will link OCTranspo’s fleet of buses to a Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) tracking system for a start-up cost of about $5.2 million. (To be shared with the federal and provincial governments – but not equally; the City’s responsible for $3 million of it.)
Advocates say the system will help reduce operating and maintenance costs, but in practical terms its purpose is to ensure that the city’s buses more closely adhere to their schedules, thus reducing the amount of time that a passenger has to wait at a bus stop.
Well, here’s what I think about that. OCTranspo has a pool of about 1450 drivers. If the City of Ottawa were to budget an annual cost of, oh let’s be generous and say $25* per driver, then OCTranspo could lay out $36,250 every year for the next 143 years (assuming the fleet doesn’t significantly enlarge in that time), and for the same price as it would take to launch the GPS system, buy each and every driver a brand new $%#$@#!!!! wristwatch for each and every one of those 143 years!
Alternatively, we could elect a City Council made up entirely of retired WWII Italian fascists who, given Mussolini’s enormous success at making the trains run on time, could surely apply those same administrative abilities to OC Transpo. (And hey! I hereby nominate his granddaughter to head up the program – http://www.db-decision.de/Interviews/Italien/Mussolini.htm )
Either option would be far less costly than the stupidity of spending over $5 million (!) to link a city bus fleet to a satellite just to keep the drivers on schedule.
* In fact, you don’t even need to spend $36,000+ a year. I buy very nice watches for $9.99 at a kiosk at a local shopping mall. Each comes with a one-year warranty and a replacement battery. Assuming I can find the battery when the one that came with the watch wears out, I get at least a full year, usually longer, out of my $9.99 watch. When the replacement battery dies, I throw the watch away and go buy another watch. Using a similar supplier, OCTranspo could keep its drivers in watches for the next three centuries for the same total “Smartbus” start-up cost that this City Council plans to buy into.
- 0 -
Am I missing something in all the news coverage about the growing panic in the US over the number of available shots of flu vaccine?
I’m sure I remember reading somewhere that yes, the “flu” carries the possible risk of becoming a serious illness – possibly fatally so – but only for some highly susceptible seniors, infants, and some people for whom current serious medical treatments (on the order of chemotherapy) have so reduced their bodies’ natural immunity that even a strong breeze might be harmful to them.
Here, for example, is a note from UVIG (the UK Vaccination Industry Group), citing a report from the Blair government’s Department of Health’s Chief Medical Office (and one might think if anyone harboured an agenda aimed at pushing as many flu shots onto as many of the public as possible, it’d be a Vaccination Industry Group. But not in this case):
“According to the influenza immunisation program 2004/2005, influenza vaccination should be offered to: (1) All those aged 65 and over; (2) All those aged over 6 months in the following clinical ‘at-risk’ groups: Chronic respiratory disease, including asthma; Chronic heart disease; Chronic renal disease; Diabetes mellitus; Immunosuppression due to disease or treatment; (3) Those living in long-stay residential and nursing homes or other long-stay facilities; (4) Healthcare workers in the NHS are being encouraged to take up vaccination, especially those employees directly involved in patient care.”
The growing hysteria in recent media stories, however, seems to me to be suggesting that we’re on the cusp of a continent-wide epidemic that will kill tens of thousands if something isn’t done now to rebuild the US store of flu doses. We’ve already had George Bush spouting about how he assumes “our good friends in Canada” will help by sending our “surplus” stores of flu vaccine south. (Gee, doesn’t it seem like only yesterday that we were lumped in with the French “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” and other global whores for al-Qaeda for failing to send the requisite platoon of soldiers to enable our being counted among the “Coalition of the Willing” – those nations who were actively supporting the US and British invasion of Iraq?)
And of course Canada is in these stories wearing our usual hat – our political one. And of course, our politicians in their turn have immediately leapt to the microphones to announce that only when Canada’s needs have been fully met will we ever consider releasing any “surplus” to our “US friends.” (And of course, that’s only so long as they don’t re-target a large number of their nuclear warhead-equipped missiles and then “ask” us again.)
But even more fundamentally, when did the “flu” become such a threat that people are lining up for hours – days even – in order to get their shots? So far during my life, I’ve had the flu several times in several of its incarnations if I recall correctly. And while I remember it was never too much fun, I also recall that it only ever knocked me down enough to call in sick for a couple days at a time. Certainly it never got to the point where I felt I needed a flu shot the next year.
And yet looking at the people featured in current TV news coverage, I see hundreds of young, healthy, indeed apparently robust young and middle-aged adults, waiting in long lines and answering with a panicky edge in their voices when a reporter asks if they’re worried they might not get their flu shot right away.
So somebody tell me please, what do they know that I don’t know?
"In 1918-9 the world suffered a major influenza pandemic in which in one year at least 25 million people died world-wide, including around 228,000 people in Britain. Most experts believe that it is not a question of whether there will be another severe influenza pandemic but when." (Again from the UK government)
Well OK, but in 1918-9 the world was also at the very beginning of its long recovery from circumstances where vast tracts of continental Europe and western Asia had been blasted to atoms in four previous years of warfare, not to mention the staggering debilitation imposed on countries who lost among the annihilated flower of their manhood countless doctors, medical students and young men of science (RIP John McCrae) – exactly the people who would be called on first were the threat of a major pandemic to arise.
Add to this the lax hygiene attending an unprecedented intercontinental relocation in crowded troopships of hundreds of thousands of soldiers both healthy and wounded returning home to dozens of nations, hundreds of cities, and thousands of small towns. And add to this the fact that many of them carried in their weakened bodies the germs and infections picked up in hospitals and aid centres whose focus on sterilization was somewhat lower in priority than the simple need to stop the bleeding. It’s hardly surprising that the last great influenza pandemic erupted in such fertile conditions for a disease to grow and spread uncontrollably.
I just don’t see it in 2004, certainly not on a continent so medicine- and doctor-rich as North America.
Even with our present shortage of flu jabs.
- 0 -
Finally, here’s another in my ongoing series of things I find amusingly perplexing at work. Just recently, we all received a cheery e-mail from our ADM (Assistant Deputy Minister) about this year’s version of the Workplace Charitable Campaign that’s held every year in conjunction with the country-wide United Way appeal. And I was struck by this part of it:
“It is a pleasure to inform you that the canvassing blitz for the Charitable Campaign within the Communications Branch is completed. We have collected $29,837.20 and our target is $34,120.00. If you have not been canvassed, please communicate with Jane Doe at xxx-xxxx and it will be a pleasure for her to help you help us. Since we do not want to contribute towards a target but rather contribute towards helping people, we will pursue our efforts to collect the remaining $4,282.80.”
In other words, “We missed our target…”
“But we don’t care about targets, do we? We care about helping people. So let’s all get together and help people…”
“…by reaching our target.”
(Or who knows? Maybe I’m somewhat handicapped by my blind insistence on reading what’s actually written there.)
Government of Canada Communications: Do like we say, not like we do.
A recent Ottawa-local television newscast carried an item announcing that City Council is “poised” to buy a new system called “Smartbus” for our public transit system. It will link OCTranspo’s fleet of buses to a Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) tracking system for a start-up cost of about $5.2 million. (To be shared with the federal and provincial governments – but not equally; the City’s responsible for $3 million of it.)
Advocates say the system will help reduce operating and maintenance costs, but in practical terms its purpose is to ensure that the city’s buses more closely adhere to their schedules, thus reducing the amount of time that a passenger has to wait at a bus stop.
Well, here’s what I think about that. OCTranspo has a pool of about 1450 drivers. If the City of Ottawa were to budget an annual cost of, oh let’s be generous and say $25* per driver, then OCTranspo could lay out $36,250 every year for the next 143 years (assuming the fleet doesn’t significantly enlarge in that time), and for the same price as it would take to launch the GPS system, buy each and every driver a brand new $%#$@#!!!! wristwatch for each and every one of those 143 years!
Alternatively, we could elect a City Council made up entirely of retired WWII Italian fascists who, given Mussolini’s enormous success at making the trains run on time, could surely apply those same administrative abilities to OC Transpo. (And hey! I hereby nominate his granddaughter to head up the program – http://www.db-decision.de/Interviews/Italien/Mussolini.htm )
Either option would be far less costly than the stupidity of spending over $5 million (!) to link a city bus fleet to a satellite just to keep the drivers on schedule.
* In fact, you don’t even need to spend $36,000+ a year. I buy very nice watches for $9.99 at a kiosk at a local shopping mall. Each comes with a one-year warranty and a replacement battery. Assuming I can find the battery when the one that came with the watch wears out, I get at least a full year, usually longer, out of my $9.99 watch. When the replacement battery dies, I throw the watch away and go buy another watch. Using a similar supplier, OCTranspo could keep its drivers in watches for the next three centuries for the same total “Smartbus” start-up cost that this City Council plans to buy into.
- 0 -
Am I missing something in all the news coverage about the growing panic in the US over the number of available shots of flu vaccine?
I’m sure I remember reading somewhere that yes, the “flu” carries the possible risk of becoming a serious illness – possibly fatally so – but only for some highly susceptible seniors, infants, and some people for whom current serious medical treatments (on the order of chemotherapy) have so reduced their bodies’ natural immunity that even a strong breeze might be harmful to them.
Here, for example, is a note from UVIG (the UK Vaccination Industry Group), citing a report from the Blair government’s Department of Health’s Chief Medical Office (and one might think if anyone harboured an agenda aimed at pushing as many flu shots onto as many of the public as possible, it’d be a Vaccination Industry Group. But not in this case):
“According to the influenza immunisation program 2004/2005, influenza vaccination should be offered to: (1) All those aged 65 and over; (2) All those aged over 6 months in the following clinical ‘at-risk’ groups: Chronic respiratory disease, including asthma; Chronic heart disease; Chronic renal disease; Diabetes mellitus; Immunosuppression due to disease or treatment; (3) Those living in long-stay residential and nursing homes or other long-stay facilities; (4) Healthcare workers in the NHS are being encouraged to take up vaccination, especially those employees directly involved in patient care.”
The growing hysteria in recent media stories, however, seems to me to be suggesting that we’re on the cusp of a continent-wide epidemic that will kill tens of thousands if something isn’t done now to rebuild the US store of flu doses. We’ve already had George Bush spouting about how he assumes “our good friends in Canada” will help by sending our “surplus” stores of flu vaccine south. (Gee, doesn’t it seem like only yesterday that we were lumped in with the French “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” and other global whores for al-Qaeda for failing to send the requisite platoon of soldiers to enable our being counted among the “Coalition of the Willing” – those nations who were actively supporting the US and British invasion of Iraq?)
And of course Canada is in these stories wearing our usual hat – our political one. And of course, our politicians in their turn have immediately leapt to the microphones to announce that only when Canada’s needs have been fully met will we ever consider releasing any “surplus” to our “US friends.” (And of course, that’s only so long as they don’t re-target a large number of their nuclear warhead-equipped missiles and then “ask” us again.)
But even more fundamentally, when did the “flu” become such a threat that people are lining up for hours – days even – in order to get their shots? So far during my life, I’ve had the flu several times in several of its incarnations if I recall correctly. And while I remember it was never too much fun, I also recall that it only ever knocked me down enough to call in sick for a couple days at a time. Certainly it never got to the point where I felt I needed a flu shot the next year.
And yet looking at the people featured in current TV news coverage, I see hundreds of young, healthy, indeed apparently robust young and middle-aged adults, waiting in long lines and answering with a panicky edge in their voices when a reporter asks if they’re worried they might not get their flu shot right away.
So somebody tell me please, what do they know that I don’t know?
"In 1918-9 the world suffered a major influenza pandemic in which in one year at least 25 million people died world-wide, including around 228,000 people in Britain. Most experts believe that it is not a question of whether there will be another severe influenza pandemic but when." (Again from the UK government)
Well OK, but in 1918-9 the world was also at the very beginning of its long recovery from circumstances where vast tracts of continental Europe and western Asia had been blasted to atoms in four previous years of warfare, not to mention the staggering debilitation imposed on countries who lost among the annihilated flower of their manhood countless doctors, medical students and young men of science (RIP John McCrae) – exactly the people who would be called on first were the threat of a major pandemic to arise.
Add to this the lax hygiene attending an unprecedented intercontinental relocation in crowded troopships of hundreds of thousands of soldiers both healthy and wounded returning home to dozens of nations, hundreds of cities, and thousands of small towns. And add to this the fact that many of them carried in their weakened bodies the germs and infections picked up in hospitals and aid centres whose focus on sterilization was somewhat lower in priority than the simple need to stop the bleeding. It’s hardly surprising that the last great influenza pandemic erupted in such fertile conditions for a disease to grow and spread uncontrollably.
I just don’t see it in 2004, certainly not on a continent so medicine- and doctor-rich as North America.
Even with our present shortage of flu jabs.
- 0 -
Finally, here’s another in my ongoing series of things I find amusingly perplexing at work. Just recently, we all received a cheery e-mail from our ADM (Assistant Deputy Minister) about this year’s version of the Workplace Charitable Campaign that’s held every year in conjunction with the country-wide United Way appeal. And I was struck by this part of it:
“It is a pleasure to inform you that the canvassing blitz for the Charitable Campaign within the Communications Branch is completed. We have collected $29,837.20 and our target is $34,120.00. If you have not been canvassed, please communicate with Jane Doe at xxx-xxxx and it will be a pleasure for her to help you help us. Since we do not want to contribute towards a target but rather contribute towards helping people, we will pursue our efforts to collect the remaining $4,282.80.”
In other words, “We missed our target…”
“But we don’t care about targets, do we? We care about helping people. So let’s all get together and help people…”
“…by reaching our target.”
(Or who knows? Maybe I’m somewhat handicapped by my blind insistence on reading what’s actually written there.)
Government of Canada Communications: Do like we say, not like we do.
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