Almost from the first line of her first pre-arrival e-mailed messages to us (“Dear my host family…”), Hikana had said she hoped we would allow her to prepare one of her cooking specialties in our kitchen.
Despite its name – nikujaga – and the fact that Hikana had already alerted us that this was a standard meal in Japanese homes, the ingredients were also pretty standard North American fare: very thinly sliced beef, potatoes, carrots, onions, and just two mysteries: what was the “seasoning” she mentioned in her recipe (more about that below), and what on earth was something she wrote for us on her brief list of ingredients: “konjak”?
When I pointed out the word, she said it aloud and what she said was “cognac”. So now I’m thinking, better and better. A traditional Japanese recipe probably refined by her Cordon Bleu-trained father to appeal to an even wider palate – people who like strong drink. She drew a square and, pointing to it, she said, “Not this konjak.” (Aha! I concluded. That lets out the hallmark square bottle of Cointreau. No problem.)
Then, when I asked her about the “seasoning”, she scooted back to her room and emerged with a small bottle of dark brown fluid. When I smelled it, I realized she had come all the way from Japan with her own bottle of soy sauce. But as it turned out, once we tasted the finished product, we realized that this was a uniquely sweetened soy that imparted a fabulous flavour to the broth base that shouted to the world that, though soy sauce it may well have been born, it has matured into soy sauce – plus. (I don’t doubt that by adding a touch of demerara sugar to any of the naturally brewed soy sauces one can buy at a major grocery store here, we can manage an approximate facsimile. But it has a unique sweetness that I doubt we could ever precisely duplicate. I’m hoping one of Ottawa’s Asian food specialty shops sells the real thing.)
On the recipe she had painstakingly worked out for us, Hikana had put “konjak” in brackets and, with a little work on the translator, we discovered that she meant it was “optional”. (Her recipe is a memento all in itself. It is festooned with little drawings that show, for example, the carrot chopped into little pieces of carrot. Even the drawn pile of little pieces she showed in the pot grows larger in each successive drawing as new bunches of chopped vegetables are added.)
We didn’t actually have cognac in the house, but we did want this recipe to be perfect so I was prepared to head out and buy a bottle if she said cognac or nothing. But first, I pulled a small bottle of Southern Comfort – a US “fifth”; a Canadian “mickey” – out of our cupboard and asked her to take a whiff, in order to determine whether any fortified liquor would suffice.
She looked at the bottle in great confusion, so I tapped it and said “cognac… similar”. Then I opened it and let her smell the stuff that gave Janis Joplin her dulcet tones. But that only produced, if possible, an expression of even greater confusion. I returned to her drawing and tapped the square… “Not a square bottle?”
She shook the bottle as if expecting its contents to morph into something else, then looked at me and said, “Japan konjak is… food, not drink.” She set the recipe down and mimed an action that looked like taffy pulling. The confused look was still there, but now it was on my face. Back to the translator. She entered a few keystrokes and tried out her English reading of what appeared on its screen. “S… Sreds?” Then she handed it to me, and I read the word, “threads”.
Threads of cognac?
Alright, to heck with the translator; it was time to unlimber the heavy artillery – Google.
So I said, “two minutes”, and off I went to my own computer.
At being asked to search “konjak”, Google was marvelous. The very first hit yielded a drawing-rich explanation that told me that konjak, in fact, begins life as a flour made by drying and grinding a plant called “devil’s tongue” – which one site rather unhelpfully called a “noxious invasive weed” and which another site called “foul-smelling”. The flour is then mixed with a little water and the resulting “konjak” paste can be purchased in two forms – either as a block (the square that Hikana had drawn) or as… yep, strings… Threads!
So off I went to do some shopping. Ottawa has a reasonably large Asian community, nowhere close in size to Toronto or Vancouver. Ours is a real polyglot that began as largely Chinese, but which was vastly augmented by surges of post-Vietnam War boat people. So almost every store in our “Chinatown” advertises not one unique nationality, but often countless variations like, “Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean and Asian Grocery”. There are some places that are not much bigger than a Canadian home’s vestibule, but which have a seemingly endless scope of product: “Chinese, Indian, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, Asian and Canadian market”. In fact, it often seems that the smaller the store, the larger its diversity.
I waded into the first one I saw whose advertised Asian service repertoire included “Japanese”. To my utter amazement, immediately inside the door on the floor by the cash register was a large cardboard box with a hand-lettered sign, “konyakku”. The box was chock-a-block with plastic-sealed packets of white… threads!... swimming in a clear liquid I assumed to be water. On closer examination, I realized, good heavens, “konjak” is a fine white – an almost translucent white – noodle!
I bought six bags. (Hikana had not indicated how much she wanted, and I wanted to cover off every possible option from a small side dish to a platter full of the stuff onto which she might be planning to ladle the nikujaga.)
Just to make sure, on my way back to the car, I stopped in at a store in a different part of town that I already knew sold exclusively Japanese products. It’s a little more upscale and a lot more sedate than the market bustle of our Chinatown’s stores. It caters not so much to the Japanese members of our Asian community, but to round-eyes like me who are looking for the precise ingredients to fill out a Japanese recipe, or the utensils / accessories with which to prepare and serve it.
The helpful staff was able to confirm for me that konjak is, indeed, nothing more than either a small brick (ita-konjak) or a fine noodle (ito-konjak). And they had both. Hoo hah, I was already ahead of the game in knowing that I wanted the noodle version. But… oh no! They had it in two colours! One was the same white I had already purchased, but the other was a sort of dark olive / seaweed green. And Hikana had not specified a colour. So I asked what the difference was. And in one of those wonderful Kodak moments that I am sure marks successful diplomatic relations throughout history, they both looked at me, then at the bags on their shelves, then back at me as though waiting for some further elaboration on what was obviously a trick question, before the older of the two finally looked me square in the eye and answered, “the colour”.
(Thanks again to Google, I have since discovered that the darker state is its natural colour and the white product has simply undergone an extra refining process to produce the more visually pleasing pristine white. So in other words, “colour” just about says it all as a description of the difference.)
Hikana, as it happened, was delighted by the white konjak I brought home.
To make a long story short, nikujaga is a one-pot stew, but it sits in a deliciously light broth, rather than the gravy we are accustomed to think of when we think of “stew”.
Its beef should be sliced to a thinness the deli-counter calls “shaved beef”. The presence of a generous amount of potato in the recipe means it needs no side dish like rice or pasta. We followed it with instant miso soup, something else Hikana had brought with her from Japan. In fact, the sheer variety of native foodstuffs she has produced since her arrival leads me to believe that the student travelers must have managed to avoid airport drug sniffing dogs because the wall of aromas wafting from her luggage would likely have caused a coronary in an unsuspecting passing German Shepherd.
There’s nothing more than that magnificent sweetened soy as a seasoning, and the konjak did add a very subtle tang in counterpoint to the broth’s sweetness. The simplicity of these seasonings also serves to enhance the subtle differences in the other ingredients, turning the lowly potato, carrot and onion into gourmet foods.
I’m not sure how many helpings I had – several, certainly. Hikana was tempering her delight at seeing how much we enjoyed her cooking with what seemed to be some quiet alarm. After supper, she confessed that she had promised her English teachers a sample the next day, something she was far too polite to have accommodated by reserving a serving before presenting her dish to us. But even without knowing that, we did leave more than enough to enable her to take a very large serving into class the following morning.
All’s well that… etc.
So, does anyone have any ideas on what to do with five leftover bags of “foul-smelling” “noxious weed”? Going once… going twice…
Tuesday, August 31, 2004
Monday, August 30, 2004
There’s a TV commercial that is quite popular at the moment. It’s for fruit-flavoured Chiclets gum. In it, two highly-charged Japanese schoolgirls, their school uniforms being worn in end-of-day casual mode with ties loosened, are in a karaoke bar vigorously singing (in Japanese) the old KC and the Sunshine Band disco classic, “That’s the Way (Uh huh; uh huh) I Like It.” In the lower left corner, a translator is bravely trying to keep up and provide the viewers with a “translation” of the lyrics the girls are belting out. But his lines are more like, “Oh yes… something, something… it is very good… um… Uh huh, uh huh…”
I laugh every time I see that commercial, but this entry is not about my deep-seated psychological problems. Rather, I’m citing it here because what follows are four messages I have so far received from our guest’s parents back in Kameoka City, Japan, and because the hapless translator in the gum commercial represents exactly how I felt as I read them… about two bars behind and struggling gamely along on probably an entirely different path.
Disclaimer: The correspondence below is most emphatically NOT reproduced in order to mock. I can only imagine what I would wind up sending by way of reply were I to attempt to correspond in Japanese, the internet’s Babelfish translator notwithstanding. So please adopt – as I did – an attitude of gentle amusement, combined with a genuine admiration for the effort, as you read the e-mailed lines repeated here. As I mentioned above, they were sent either by, or on behalf of Hikana’s parents and in English, exactly as they appear here, from a point on the Earth half its circumference, 13 hours of time zones and a universe away. (A couple days after she arrived, Hikana first spoke to her mother by phone and then passed along a message to us verbally – that neither of her parents can figure out how to effect the necessary internet connection to send or receive e-mail. But someone’s been helping them out, because four messages have since landed.)
1.
Nice to meet you, we're her father and mother. Thank you for having ahomestay accepted.Hikana was looking forward to this homestay very from before.Please tell her various things of Canada in large numbers.
I need your help well for two weeks.
2.
t becomes hikana caring.
As for? Kyoto, only it is raining about whether or not Canada is cool compared with?
Japan about whether or not it makes fine.
The school goes, being pleasant and breaks the house from September 1st.
Don't hang inconvenience not to think as the family.
Careful so as not to eat too much and to injure a stomach
At the what time time is the telephone to be good if being?
All and relation well
Good-by
(By the time we received the second message, Hikana had been with us for a couple days. She had already phoned home once and told us her parents did not know how to use her computer. So it came as a complete surprise to discover that someone in fact had been able to open her e-mail.)
As an aside, we asked Hikana what she does to get to school and home, and how long her school day is. The reply was simply boggling. She gets up every weekday morning at 5:30 am and travels two hours by train to a completely different city to attend high school. (The time and distance is comparable to what it would take were we to pack our own offspring off from Ottawa to Montreal by train every day – to attend high school!) Most days, she has extracurricular activities like lacrosse, or one club or another, and typically gets back home at 9:30 pm, after another two hours on the train. Only then does she have her dinner.
3.
Hello
The first e-mail reaches and is to be affected.
The e-mail came after returning from the work or became pleasant.
Of the neighborhood to be great it is moved.
Meat well, it made (a single Japanese character appeared here) or a lot of meat to like?hikana ate about what of?
Canada was delicious.
It takes a photograph to the full.
This time, it calls.
Re: “Canada was delicious.”: I’m sorry, but I can’t make myself think outside any box bigger than – This sounds just like something Godzilla would say.
Re: “It takes a photograph to the full.”: I had earlier asked if they can receive photos by e-mail. This is clearly a reply in the affirmative.
And re: “This time, it calls.”: In my second reply to Hikana’s parents, I included our “snailmail” (regular mailing) address and telephone number. Coupled with the fact that they asked in message 2 what time is good to call, this simply seems like a misplaced pronoun (“it” for “we”) to tell me they will call her next time. (Which, as it turns out, they did. And Hikana told us her Mom actually cried at the sound of her voice.)
4.
Hello and it always becomes caring.Does it make hikama fine?? Homework is left about summer vacation's, too, being an end and taiga and,hikana breaks a house from doing studying OK of the school and September 1stof use of Japanese and thank you in all of the family
A “taiga” is a forest, specifically – according to one online dictionary – a “moist subarctic coniferous forest that begins where the tundra ends and is dominated by spruces and firs”. The dictionary’s misused modifier clause notwithstanding, this sure sounds Canadian to me! What it’s doing in _this_ message mystifies me, but it somehow lends an almost poetic air to the entire missive.
I’m thinking of sending some Frederick Windsor (“The Space-Child’s Mother Goose”) by way of reply:
“Probable-Possible, my black hen,
She lays eggs in the Relative When.
She doesn’t lay eggs in the Positive Now
Because she’s unable to Postulate How.”
That oughta just do wonders for international relations!
(But are we having fun? You bet!)
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Next: I say potato; you say jagaimo – Adventures in eating
I laugh every time I see that commercial, but this entry is not about my deep-seated psychological problems. Rather, I’m citing it here because what follows are four messages I have so far received from our guest’s parents back in Kameoka City, Japan, and because the hapless translator in the gum commercial represents exactly how I felt as I read them… about two bars behind and struggling gamely along on probably an entirely different path.
Disclaimer: The correspondence below is most emphatically NOT reproduced in order to mock. I can only imagine what I would wind up sending by way of reply were I to attempt to correspond in Japanese, the internet’s Babelfish translator notwithstanding. So please adopt – as I did – an attitude of gentle amusement, combined with a genuine admiration for the effort, as you read the e-mailed lines repeated here. As I mentioned above, they were sent either by, or on behalf of Hikana’s parents and in English, exactly as they appear here, from a point on the Earth half its circumference, 13 hours of time zones and a universe away. (A couple days after she arrived, Hikana first spoke to her mother by phone and then passed along a message to us verbally – that neither of her parents can figure out how to effect the necessary internet connection to send or receive e-mail. But someone’s been helping them out, because four messages have since landed.)
1.
Nice to meet you, we're her father and mother. Thank you for having ahomestay accepted.Hikana was looking forward to this homestay very from before.Please tell her various things of Canada in large numbers.
I need your help well for two weeks.
2.
t becomes hikana caring.
As for? Kyoto, only it is raining about whether or not Canada is cool compared with?
Japan about whether or not it makes fine.
The school goes, being pleasant and breaks the house from September 1st.
Don't hang inconvenience not to think as the family.
Careful so as not to eat too much and to injure a stomach
At the what time time is the telephone to be good if being?
All and relation well
Good-by
(By the time we received the second message, Hikana had been with us for a couple days. She had already phoned home once and told us her parents did not know how to use her computer. So it came as a complete surprise to discover that someone in fact had been able to open her e-mail.)
As an aside, we asked Hikana what she does to get to school and home, and how long her school day is. The reply was simply boggling. She gets up every weekday morning at 5:30 am and travels two hours by train to a completely different city to attend high school. (The time and distance is comparable to what it would take were we to pack our own offspring off from Ottawa to Montreal by train every day – to attend high school!) Most days, she has extracurricular activities like lacrosse, or one club or another, and typically gets back home at 9:30 pm, after another two hours on the train. Only then does she have her dinner.
3.
Hello
The first e-mail reaches and is to be affected.
The e-mail came after returning from the work or became pleasant.
Of the neighborhood to be great it is moved.
Meat well, it made (a single Japanese character appeared here) or a lot of meat to like?hikana ate about what of?
Canada was delicious.
It takes a photograph to the full.
This time, it calls.
Re: “Canada was delicious.”: I’m sorry, but I can’t make myself think outside any box bigger than – This sounds just like something Godzilla would say.
Re: “It takes a photograph to the full.”: I had earlier asked if they can receive photos by e-mail. This is clearly a reply in the affirmative.
And re: “This time, it calls.”: In my second reply to Hikana’s parents, I included our “snailmail” (regular mailing) address and telephone number. Coupled with the fact that they asked in message 2 what time is good to call, this simply seems like a misplaced pronoun (“it” for “we”) to tell me they will call her next time. (Which, as it turns out, they did. And Hikana told us her Mom actually cried at the sound of her voice.)
4.
Hello and it always becomes caring.Does it make hikama fine?? Homework is left about summer vacation's, too, being an end and taiga and,hikana breaks a house from doing studying OK of the school and September 1stof use of Japanese and thank you in all of the family
A “taiga” is a forest, specifically – according to one online dictionary – a “moist subarctic coniferous forest that begins where the tundra ends and is dominated by spruces and firs”. The dictionary’s misused modifier clause notwithstanding, this sure sounds Canadian to me! What it’s doing in _this_ message mystifies me, but it somehow lends an almost poetic air to the entire missive.
I’m thinking of sending some Frederick Windsor (“The Space-Child’s Mother Goose”) by way of reply:
“Probable-Possible, my black hen,
She lays eggs in the Relative When.
She doesn’t lay eggs in the Positive Now
Because she’s unable to Postulate How.”
That oughta just do wonders for international relations!
(But are we having fun? You bet!)
- 0 -
Next: I say potato; you say jagaimo – Adventures in eating
Thursday, August 26, 2004
Our cultural exchange experience, or
An Occident waiting to happen
Part 1: Getting to know you
As I mentioned, we are playing host for a couple weeks to Hikana, a young woman from Japan who is in Ottawa as part of an 80-person contingent from her high school. The program that brought her here is English as a Second Language (ESL), a program given a very high priority on her school’s curriculum. I discovered this when I did some online reading about the school and its programs. The school, in fact, has been officially designated a Super English Language (SEL) High School by a multi-named Japanese government ministry that even outdoes the Canadian government’s bureaucratic penchant for oddly combined responsibilities: the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology.
She and her schoolmates arrived by bus… (Oh alright. They flew from Kyoto to Toronto with a five-hour layover in Detroit – a.k.a. the seventh circle of Dante’s hell, I believe. Then they were bussed from Toronto to Ottawa. And no, I don’t know why an airplane capable of winging non-stop from Kyoto to Detroit was incapable of managing a follow-up flight from Detroit to Ottawa. It’s probably something to do with US Homelands Security post 9-11. “Here you go, Mr Pilot. Under our new rules, y’all are allowed only 40 gallons of aviation fuel. Make the most of it.” But I digress.)
At 1:30 am – that’s 90 minutes past midnight – VERY early Saturday morning – my wife, daughter and I were milling around with about 125 other host family members in a parking lot in a school so far out in suburban Ottawa that it probably qualifies for remote access hardship allowances for its teachers. We were naturally quite happily blathering away as only those who have been fortifying ourselves for the past three hours with stay-awake jolts of caffeine can blather.
This school and its parking lot are entirely surrounded by townhomes and I could only imagine what irate residents must have wondered as they glanced out their windows into the night to see a sea of people waving signs festooned with very foreign and very long words (our guests’ names, of course). Were it I, I might have concluded that Local Whatever of the International Brotherhood of High School Caretakers (Night Shift Division) was staging a wildcat strike at AY Jackson High School. Oh, and I probably would have called the police – if only to come and quell the noise.
The noise volume, however, actually rose even further when, at about 1:30 am (2:30 pm the following day in Kyoto – where these kids’ jet-lagged metabolisms were still happily ticking) two enormous highway buses rumbled into the parking lot and swiftly disgorged their travel-whacked, but no less chatty for it, cargoes.
Hikana, our young guest finally located her hastily scrawled name on our sign and cheerily introduced herself with a warm smile, a polite bow and a handshake. Japan obviously is also the source of world-renowned engineering in travel devices, because Hikana was towing an industrial-strength steel suitcase on wheels that weighed a hundred and fifty pounds if it weighed an ounce. She’d obviously read her prep sheet about the North American technique of greeting by handshake just as carefully as we’d read our prep sheet about the Japanese technique of bowing at roughly every third syllable. Neither of which, it turns out, is always true. Or is at least tempered somewhat when carried on at a time of day that one either (a) is normally sound asleep (us); or (b) is still locked into the shape of a seat after having been in that position for probably 30 consecutive hours all told (her).
As we drove into Ottawa along a six-lane highway devoid of all vehicles except those few others with bleary-eyed hosts and travel-wired young Japanese travellers, I happily rabbited on, complete with pointing, about where she’d have been able to see several major Ottawa landmarks if only it were daylight.
We had been communicating by e-mail before her arrival and her messages left me with no doubt whatsoever that her English was excellent. In fact, based on the e-mails, I had the pre-arrival impression that for her, the trip was probably more of a reward than a linguistic necessity. As the next day would reveal, however, her written English had been given heavy support from a completely wonderful piece of technology – more on that follows. Her spoken English (while infinitely beyond my spoken Japanese – I was still trying to figure a way to work my only phrase – “Tora Tora Tora” – into our conversation) clearly would require situations that allowed for much more concentration than that which could be found in a highway-driven car at 2 am when one’s foreign passenger is in the back seat.
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The aforementioned “completely wonderful piece of technology”, as we discovered the next afternoon (she slept right through the morning), is a thin, pocket-sized device that looks like a miniature laptop computer – which is exactly what it is. The keyboard had exactly 36 characters I recognized – our alphabet and the numbers 0 to 9, as well as a couple dozen others that conveyed no meaning whatsoever, because they were labelled in Japanese characters.
But this device is an amazing tool and, in Hikana’s skilled hands, has quickly enabled her to convey to us concepts like, for example, “I have jet-lag syndrome” when I joked about her dozing off at her study desk. Conversely, while I couldn’t read the translations, my entering a simple English word like “professional” would yield a half-screen of Japanese variations on the word, from which she almost always has been able to deduce the approximate context in which I’d used the English word.
So we can communicate, but we do try to minimize reliance on the device. For the simple reason that she is here for a very short time to make the most of an opportunity to learn English, not to practice the use of an electronic translator.
And besides, as good as it is, it’s only as good as the information the user feeds in. (Remember the old acronym “GIGO” – "Garbage In / Garbage Out”?) For example, very early after her arrival, I found myself trying to explain the difference between movie "dubbing" and movie "subtitling". In this case, even after my miming speaking vs writing, including a beautifully sensitive rendering (if I do say so myself) solely by hand gestures in the air, of the pivotal battle scene in “Godzilla vs the Smog Monster”, it was still apparent that I had not fully conveyed the difference between the written “subtitle” and the spoken “dub”. So I enlisted the support of her electronic translator. At one point, she nodded vigorously as she read one of my fumble-fingered keystrokings, and began tugging on her arm hair so as to raise her skin. I was completely baffled until, on a closer examination of the device's screen, I discovered I had entered "dubbin" instead of "dubbing".
I don't think I was completely successful in undoing the impression she will now be taking home -- that Canadians package all their foreign movies in leather preservative.
(The interpretation does give an interesting turn to the term "skin flick", though.)
Sidebar note: I have since learned (Disclaimer: I’ve been wrong before; I’ll be wrong again; I may be wrong now.) that written Japanese (Nihongo) uses one of two character sets. In Hiragana (which translates literally as “ordinary syllabic script”), 48 Japanese characters / syllables convey exactly what its name suggests – ordinary writing. (It is also employed to illustrate pronunciation, because each character has its own sound.)
The other, Katakana, is also 48 characters long, and consists of characters borrowed long ago from the Chinese. Katakana also has an extended list of sounds made up of the original 48 in different combinations. Katakana is used to assemble the sounds required to give the Japanese a word for foreign-sourced words. To take just one example, the English word “hotel” is rendered in sounds that the Japanese pronounce as “hoteru”. So suddenly the apparently mangled “Engrish” in which we in the West find so much humour makes a great deal more sense. (And yes, at least one Japanese CD pirate has produced – and advertised online – a disk of the greatest hits of “Eric Crapton”, but I digress.)
Writing is done using a whacking great list of up to 10,000 Chinese characters (“kanji”) approved for use in written Japanese. Compare the age at which Canadian kids are expected to know our alphabet – what? 3? – with the expectation that Japanese children should have learned at least 2- 3,000 characters in the kanji set by the time they graduate high school.
And I don’t even want to think of Japanese secretarial school, whose top graduates probably have achieved a modest typing speed measured in words per hour! When those people talk of a desktop keyboard, they mean a keyboard that completely covers the top of your desk! (Boom badda bing.) Seriously, there’s a great website, complete with illustrated examples, if your interest should go beyond my meagre – and no doubt misunderstood (by me, not you) – efforts to explain: www.omniglot.com/writing/japanese_language.htm .
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Finally, here’s an Olympic update: At this writing, Canada is in the midst of another national handwringing crisis because one of our Olympic athletes has committed the almost unpardonable crime of failing to fulfill a nation’s hopes. Perdita Felicien, a sprint hurdler, was designated before the Games by adoring media and her fans as sure to win her event. When her principal competition (American Gail Devers) re-aggravated a muscle injury and failed to finish her qualifying heat, Felicien’s coach confidently predicted that only an “act of God” could deny Felicien the gold medal now.
God, it turns out, accepted the dare, said, “Oh, OK,” and made Ms Felicien lift her leading foot just a hair’s breadth below what she needed to clear the first hurdle. The resulting collision wiped out the hurdle, Ms Felicien’s medal hopes and, almost incidentally, Irina Shevchenko, a competing runner in the next lane, representing Russia.
Well coach, when you get back home, I heartily suggest you hike off to your local public library and borrow a book by Walter Lord entitled “A Night to Remember”. It’s about the Titanic and includes a reference to the (probably apocryphal) quote attributed most often to White Star President Bruce Ismay: “Even God Himself could not sink this ship.”
Don’t mess with God, people. Whatever name and incarnation you might ascribe to Him / Her / It / Them, one of the cardinal lessons that always seems to come down from On High is the lesson of humility.
Of course, that hasn’t changed Canadian sports officials’ policy of immediately responding by looking for someone else to blame for the calamity. In one especially creative account, a learned observer noted that the replay showed Ms Felicien’s “explosion” from the blocks at the starting gun was weaker than her best, and showed her already in second last place as the runners just began to hit their strides. Faced with ground to make up even before the first hurdle, Ms Felicien, he surmised, elected to “crowd” the barrier, but miscalculated. So in this case, it’s not really her fault. It’s all those other runners who sprang off their blocks as though… well, as though the race were for Olympic gold.
Ms Felicien clearly felt she had to apologize to the entire country immediately after picking her understandably devastated self off the track and walking morosely into the footlights and the footnotes of Canadian Olympic history.
My wife, reading about this the next morning, said she really should have apologized to Russia!
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Next: But for one little touch of the space bar, “man’s laughter” would be “manslaughter” – Adventures in correspondence.
An Occident waiting to happen
Part 1: Getting to know you
As I mentioned, we are playing host for a couple weeks to Hikana, a young woman from Japan who is in Ottawa as part of an 80-person contingent from her high school. The program that brought her here is English as a Second Language (ESL), a program given a very high priority on her school’s curriculum. I discovered this when I did some online reading about the school and its programs. The school, in fact, has been officially designated a Super English Language (SEL) High School by a multi-named Japanese government ministry that even outdoes the Canadian government’s bureaucratic penchant for oddly combined responsibilities: the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology.
She and her schoolmates arrived by bus… (Oh alright. They flew from Kyoto to Toronto with a five-hour layover in Detroit – a.k.a. the seventh circle of Dante’s hell, I believe. Then they were bussed from Toronto to Ottawa. And no, I don’t know why an airplane capable of winging non-stop from Kyoto to Detroit was incapable of managing a follow-up flight from Detroit to Ottawa. It’s probably something to do with US Homelands Security post 9-11. “Here you go, Mr Pilot. Under our new rules, y’all are allowed only 40 gallons of aviation fuel. Make the most of it.” But I digress.)
At 1:30 am – that’s 90 minutes past midnight – VERY early Saturday morning – my wife, daughter and I were milling around with about 125 other host family members in a parking lot in a school so far out in suburban Ottawa that it probably qualifies for remote access hardship allowances for its teachers. We were naturally quite happily blathering away as only those who have been fortifying ourselves for the past three hours with stay-awake jolts of caffeine can blather.
This school and its parking lot are entirely surrounded by townhomes and I could only imagine what irate residents must have wondered as they glanced out their windows into the night to see a sea of people waving signs festooned with very foreign and very long words (our guests’ names, of course). Were it I, I might have concluded that Local Whatever of the International Brotherhood of High School Caretakers (Night Shift Division) was staging a wildcat strike at AY Jackson High School. Oh, and I probably would have called the police – if only to come and quell the noise.
The noise volume, however, actually rose even further when, at about 1:30 am (2:30 pm the following day in Kyoto – where these kids’ jet-lagged metabolisms were still happily ticking) two enormous highway buses rumbled into the parking lot and swiftly disgorged their travel-whacked, but no less chatty for it, cargoes.
Hikana, our young guest finally located her hastily scrawled name on our sign and cheerily introduced herself with a warm smile, a polite bow and a handshake. Japan obviously is also the source of world-renowned engineering in travel devices, because Hikana was towing an industrial-strength steel suitcase on wheels that weighed a hundred and fifty pounds if it weighed an ounce. She’d obviously read her prep sheet about the North American technique of greeting by handshake just as carefully as we’d read our prep sheet about the Japanese technique of bowing at roughly every third syllable. Neither of which, it turns out, is always true. Or is at least tempered somewhat when carried on at a time of day that one either (a) is normally sound asleep (us); or (b) is still locked into the shape of a seat after having been in that position for probably 30 consecutive hours all told (her).
As we drove into Ottawa along a six-lane highway devoid of all vehicles except those few others with bleary-eyed hosts and travel-wired young Japanese travellers, I happily rabbited on, complete with pointing, about where she’d have been able to see several major Ottawa landmarks if only it were daylight.
We had been communicating by e-mail before her arrival and her messages left me with no doubt whatsoever that her English was excellent. In fact, based on the e-mails, I had the pre-arrival impression that for her, the trip was probably more of a reward than a linguistic necessity. As the next day would reveal, however, her written English had been given heavy support from a completely wonderful piece of technology – more on that follows. Her spoken English (while infinitely beyond my spoken Japanese – I was still trying to figure a way to work my only phrase – “Tora Tora Tora” – into our conversation) clearly would require situations that allowed for much more concentration than that which could be found in a highway-driven car at 2 am when one’s foreign passenger is in the back seat.
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The aforementioned “completely wonderful piece of technology”, as we discovered the next afternoon (she slept right through the morning), is a thin, pocket-sized device that looks like a miniature laptop computer – which is exactly what it is. The keyboard had exactly 36 characters I recognized – our alphabet and the numbers 0 to 9, as well as a couple dozen others that conveyed no meaning whatsoever, because they were labelled in Japanese characters.
But this device is an amazing tool and, in Hikana’s skilled hands, has quickly enabled her to convey to us concepts like, for example, “I have jet-lag syndrome” when I joked about her dozing off at her study desk. Conversely, while I couldn’t read the translations, my entering a simple English word like “professional” would yield a half-screen of Japanese variations on the word, from which she almost always has been able to deduce the approximate context in which I’d used the English word.
So we can communicate, but we do try to minimize reliance on the device. For the simple reason that she is here for a very short time to make the most of an opportunity to learn English, not to practice the use of an electronic translator.
And besides, as good as it is, it’s only as good as the information the user feeds in. (Remember the old acronym “GIGO” – "Garbage In / Garbage Out”?) For example, very early after her arrival, I found myself trying to explain the difference between movie "dubbing" and movie "subtitling". In this case, even after my miming speaking vs writing, including a beautifully sensitive rendering (if I do say so myself) solely by hand gestures in the air, of the pivotal battle scene in “Godzilla vs the Smog Monster”, it was still apparent that I had not fully conveyed the difference between the written “subtitle” and the spoken “dub”. So I enlisted the support of her electronic translator. At one point, she nodded vigorously as she read one of my fumble-fingered keystrokings, and began tugging on her arm hair so as to raise her skin. I was completely baffled until, on a closer examination of the device's screen, I discovered I had entered "dubbin" instead of "dubbing".
I don't think I was completely successful in undoing the impression she will now be taking home -- that Canadians package all their foreign movies in leather preservative.
(The interpretation does give an interesting turn to the term "skin flick", though.)
Sidebar note: I have since learned (Disclaimer: I’ve been wrong before; I’ll be wrong again; I may be wrong now.) that written Japanese (Nihongo) uses one of two character sets. In Hiragana (which translates literally as “ordinary syllabic script”), 48 Japanese characters / syllables convey exactly what its name suggests – ordinary writing. (It is also employed to illustrate pronunciation, because each character has its own sound.)
The other, Katakana, is also 48 characters long, and consists of characters borrowed long ago from the Chinese. Katakana also has an extended list of sounds made up of the original 48 in different combinations. Katakana is used to assemble the sounds required to give the Japanese a word for foreign-sourced words. To take just one example, the English word “hotel” is rendered in sounds that the Japanese pronounce as “hoteru”. So suddenly the apparently mangled “Engrish” in which we in the West find so much humour makes a great deal more sense. (And yes, at least one Japanese CD pirate has produced – and advertised online – a disk of the greatest hits of “Eric Crapton”, but I digress.)
Writing is done using a whacking great list of up to 10,000 Chinese characters (“kanji”) approved for use in written Japanese. Compare the age at which Canadian kids are expected to know our alphabet – what? 3? – with the expectation that Japanese children should have learned at least 2- 3,000 characters in the kanji set by the time they graduate high school.
And I don’t even want to think of Japanese secretarial school, whose top graduates probably have achieved a modest typing speed measured in words per hour! When those people talk of a desktop keyboard, they mean a keyboard that completely covers the top of your desk! (Boom badda bing.) Seriously, there’s a great website, complete with illustrated examples, if your interest should go beyond my meagre – and no doubt misunderstood (by me, not you) – efforts to explain: www.omniglot.com/writing/japanese_language.htm .
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Finally, here’s an Olympic update: At this writing, Canada is in the midst of another national handwringing crisis because one of our Olympic athletes has committed the almost unpardonable crime of failing to fulfill a nation’s hopes. Perdita Felicien, a sprint hurdler, was designated before the Games by adoring media and her fans as sure to win her event. When her principal competition (American Gail Devers) re-aggravated a muscle injury and failed to finish her qualifying heat, Felicien’s coach confidently predicted that only an “act of God” could deny Felicien the gold medal now.
God, it turns out, accepted the dare, said, “Oh, OK,” and made Ms Felicien lift her leading foot just a hair’s breadth below what she needed to clear the first hurdle. The resulting collision wiped out the hurdle, Ms Felicien’s medal hopes and, almost incidentally, Irina Shevchenko, a competing runner in the next lane, representing Russia.
Well coach, when you get back home, I heartily suggest you hike off to your local public library and borrow a book by Walter Lord entitled “A Night to Remember”. It’s about the Titanic and includes a reference to the (probably apocryphal) quote attributed most often to White Star President Bruce Ismay: “Even God Himself could not sink this ship.”
Don’t mess with God, people. Whatever name and incarnation you might ascribe to Him / Her / It / Them, one of the cardinal lessons that always seems to come down from On High is the lesson of humility.
Of course, that hasn’t changed Canadian sports officials’ policy of immediately responding by looking for someone else to blame for the calamity. In one especially creative account, a learned observer noted that the replay showed Ms Felicien’s “explosion” from the blocks at the starting gun was weaker than her best, and showed her already in second last place as the runners just began to hit their strides. Faced with ground to make up even before the first hurdle, Ms Felicien, he surmised, elected to “crowd” the barrier, but miscalculated. So in this case, it’s not really her fault. It’s all those other runners who sprang off their blocks as though… well, as though the race were for Olympic gold.
Ms Felicien clearly felt she had to apologize to the entire country immediately after picking her understandably devastated self off the track and walking morosely into the footlights and the footnotes of Canadian Olympic history.
My wife, reading about this the next morning, said she really should have apologized to Russia!
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Next: But for one little touch of the space bar, “man’s laughter” would be “manslaughter” – Adventures in correspondence.
Tuesday, August 24, 2004
(“Nothing?? We’re NOT doing nothing!”)
The Canadian Medical Association recently held its 2004 annual meeting and demanded that the federal government do something to offset a looming personnel shortage of just about everyone who practises one form or another of health care delivery in Canada. They even have a specific solution. Not surprisingly, it involves the expenditure of vast amounts of public money – a billion dollars for something called a national Health Human Resources Reinvestment Fund, which unfortunately acronyms out to something that sounds very much like a car trying to start on a cold winter’s morning: HHRRF. (The CMA really needs to become more media savvy. Just think of how much more coverage they’d get if they called their development program, oh… say, the “Widespread Enhancement and Augmentation of Resources to Enlarge and Grow Our Doctor Supply”, or “WEAREGODS”… but I digress.)
The response from the government’s Minister of Health was swift, decisive, and reflected the very best in media lines written by a corps of bureaucrats for whom the thesaurus is as Mr Terrific’s Power Pills:
“We are currently working on a pan-Canadian human health resources planning framework that will include a strategy to improve our knowledge about current workforce capacity and what we will need in the future.”
Working… on planning… a framework… that will have a strategy… to increase our knowledge. *Phew*
Sleep tight tonight; your public service is awake. (Personally, I think the government’s plan to address the ballooning healthcare needs of the ever-growing population of aging baby boomers is to bore us into early graves, thus removing us entirely from the loop of those needing care.)
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I was reading with a mixture of interest and distress about the heavy damage inflicted by Hurricane Charley on the offshore (Gulfside) Florida islands of Sanibel and Captiva, because that’s where we spent a delightful Spring break this year.
Sadly, the devastation – especially on Captiva – is enormous. This is not surprising. Hurricane Charley was blowing at force 4 when it hit land, on a track that was bulls-eye centred on Captiva. The highest point of land on the island is a mere nine feet above sea level. In Charley’s wake, besides the devastation, North Captiva, which was carved originally from Captiva by the “Great Hurricane of 1921”, has now itself been further subdivided into two islands as the result of Charley’s ramming a new permanent Gulf channel across its face. Hundreds of the resort’s hugely expensive homes have been completely destroyed and its arboreal population of introduced Australian pine – a tree that grows tall but spreads its roots wide, not deep – has been all but erased from the islands by Charley’s powerful winds.
But amid all the morose coverage of the destruction, I couldn’t help but chuckle at these “but the spellcheck says it’s OK” typos in one article in the Southwest Florida News-Press:
“Massive piles of trees are stacked like chord wood on the sides of the road.” (Ah… “chord wood”. That must be what Stradivarius used to fashion his renowned instruments.)
and
“Nearly every electric poll on San-Cap Road was destroyed.” (Uh huh. Now how will we vote on future hydro rate increases if we’ve lost the entire archive of past plebiscites?)
- 0 -
Update: those damned bus doors.
There must be a fly on my keyboard, a fly that has the ear of OCTranspo’s graffitists. That’s the only explanation I can fathom. Regular readers (both of you – you know who you are) might remember my not-so-long-ago rant about our new busses with the photoelectric beam that requires hand-waving or some form of the infamous “touch-and-then-stop-touching-the-door-at-an-arrow-indicated-point-thereon” command.
As it happens, recently I boarded one of those busses for my morning commute and, when it came time to exit I walked to the door and laughed out loud. The signs were still there, but they had been heavily augmented with clearly printed notations by someone with a ballpoint pen. “Wait for green light” now had quotes around the word “Wait”, and the direction was followed by “BE PATIENT!”, which the writer had double-underlined. But it was the hand-printed addition to the “Touch door at arrows” part of the sign that triggered my laugh. Someone had added, “and let go” after the words, “Touch doors”, and then, to thoroughly drive home the necessary instruction, had also emphatically enhanced the message by adding, after the official four-word direction: “Touch and then STOP TOUCHING!”
It was wonderful. It’s exactly this kind of anarchical thrust for literate simplicity in the face of bureaucratic bafflegabbery that may yet save the world for our law-smothered descendants. Thank you, whoever. May your infinitely mightier-than-the-sword pen never want for its most righteous ink.
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And finally, here are a couple of really good lines (Well, I thought they were “really good.” But as they say on the Internet, YMMV – Your Mileage May Vary.) The first is from golf television commentator Gary McCord, watching a Tiger Woods drive go horribly wayward during Sunday’s final round of the NEC: “That shot is so far right, Michael Moore’s going to make a documentary about it!”
The second is from the Globe and Mail, which actually ran an editorial on a Washington State black bear that had plundered a camp cooler of every last one of its 36 cans of locally-produced Rainier beer, while leaving another cooler full of the international Busch conglomerate’s beer untouched after trying just one can. Giving short shrift to the obvious “bear in the Busch” and Washington’s “Rainier” weather jokes, said the Globe, “(This) makes him, as the French would say, an ours of a different cooler.”
- 0 -
At home, we’ve just begun hosting a delightful exchange program student from Japan for the next couple weeks. The stories are already accumulating and this seems to be as good a place as any to get them down.
So watch this space.
The Canadian Medical Association recently held its 2004 annual meeting and demanded that the federal government do something to offset a looming personnel shortage of just about everyone who practises one form or another of health care delivery in Canada. They even have a specific solution. Not surprisingly, it involves the expenditure of vast amounts of public money – a billion dollars for something called a national Health Human Resources Reinvestment Fund, which unfortunately acronyms out to something that sounds very much like a car trying to start on a cold winter’s morning: HHRRF. (The CMA really needs to become more media savvy. Just think of how much more coverage they’d get if they called their development program, oh… say, the “Widespread Enhancement and Augmentation of Resources to Enlarge and Grow Our Doctor Supply”, or “WEAREGODS”… but I digress.)
The response from the government’s Minister of Health was swift, decisive, and reflected the very best in media lines written by a corps of bureaucrats for whom the thesaurus is as Mr Terrific’s Power Pills:
“We are currently working on a pan-Canadian human health resources planning framework that will include a strategy to improve our knowledge about current workforce capacity and what we will need in the future.”
Working… on planning… a framework… that will have a strategy… to increase our knowledge. *Phew*
Sleep tight tonight; your public service is awake. (Personally, I think the government’s plan to address the ballooning healthcare needs of the ever-growing population of aging baby boomers is to bore us into early graves, thus removing us entirely from the loop of those needing care.)
- 0 -
I was reading with a mixture of interest and distress about the heavy damage inflicted by Hurricane Charley on the offshore (Gulfside) Florida islands of Sanibel and Captiva, because that’s where we spent a delightful Spring break this year.
Sadly, the devastation – especially on Captiva – is enormous. This is not surprising. Hurricane Charley was blowing at force 4 when it hit land, on a track that was bulls-eye centred on Captiva. The highest point of land on the island is a mere nine feet above sea level. In Charley’s wake, besides the devastation, North Captiva, which was carved originally from Captiva by the “Great Hurricane of 1921”, has now itself been further subdivided into two islands as the result of Charley’s ramming a new permanent Gulf channel across its face. Hundreds of the resort’s hugely expensive homes have been completely destroyed and its arboreal population of introduced Australian pine – a tree that grows tall but spreads its roots wide, not deep – has been all but erased from the islands by Charley’s powerful winds.
But amid all the morose coverage of the destruction, I couldn’t help but chuckle at these “but the spellcheck says it’s OK” typos in one article in the Southwest Florida News-Press:
“Massive piles of trees are stacked like chord wood on the sides of the road.” (Ah… “chord wood”. That must be what Stradivarius used to fashion his renowned instruments.)
and
“Nearly every electric poll on San-Cap Road was destroyed.” (Uh huh. Now how will we vote on future hydro rate increases if we’ve lost the entire archive of past plebiscites?)
- 0 -
Update: those damned bus doors.
There must be a fly on my keyboard, a fly that has the ear of OCTranspo’s graffitists. That’s the only explanation I can fathom. Regular readers (both of you – you know who you are) might remember my not-so-long-ago rant about our new busses with the photoelectric beam that requires hand-waving or some form of the infamous “touch-and-then-stop-touching-the-door-at-an-arrow-indicated-point-thereon” command.
As it happens, recently I boarded one of those busses for my morning commute and, when it came time to exit I walked to the door and laughed out loud. The signs were still there, but they had been heavily augmented with clearly printed notations by someone with a ballpoint pen. “Wait for green light” now had quotes around the word “Wait”, and the direction was followed by “BE PATIENT!”, which the writer had double-underlined. But it was the hand-printed addition to the “Touch door at arrows” part of the sign that triggered my laugh. Someone had added, “and let go” after the words, “Touch doors”, and then, to thoroughly drive home the necessary instruction, had also emphatically enhanced the message by adding, after the official four-word direction: “Touch and then STOP TOUCHING!”
It was wonderful. It’s exactly this kind of anarchical thrust for literate simplicity in the face of bureaucratic bafflegabbery that may yet save the world for our law-smothered descendants. Thank you, whoever. May your infinitely mightier-than-the-sword pen never want for its most righteous ink.
- 0 -
And finally, here are a couple of really good lines (Well, I thought they were “really good.” But as they say on the Internet, YMMV – Your Mileage May Vary.) The first is from golf television commentator Gary McCord, watching a Tiger Woods drive go horribly wayward during Sunday’s final round of the NEC: “That shot is so far right, Michael Moore’s going to make a documentary about it!”
The second is from the Globe and Mail, which actually ran an editorial on a Washington State black bear that had plundered a camp cooler of every last one of its 36 cans of locally-produced Rainier beer, while leaving another cooler full of the international Busch conglomerate’s beer untouched after trying just one can. Giving short shrift to the obvious “bear in the Busch” and Washington’s “Rainier” weather jokes, said the Globe, “(This) makes him, as the French would say, an ours of a different cooler.”
- 0 -
At home, we’ve just begun hosting a delightful exchange program student from Japan for the next couple weeks. The stories are already accumulating and this seems to be as good a place as any to get them down.
So watch this space.
Thursday, August 12, 2004
Here’s Canadian golfer and 2003 Masters Champion Mike Weir in a recent Globe and Mail column he wrote describing his preparation for a very tough 2004 PGA Championship course. After he notes the enormous length of the course, and the fact that it will require a lot of attention to his “short game”, he suddenly realizes that he forgot to bring the club he considers most crucial to his short game:
“Naturally I was a little panicked when I went
to my golf bag for my practice round Monday
and realized my pitching wedge was in the back
of my truck in Utah, mixed in there with my
fly-fishing rods and hip waders.”
A quick phone call to his wife got the required club via courier to Mr Weir in time to be included in his 2004 PGA arsenal. But I found much amusement (and not a little serenity) in the discovery that one of my sports idols – despite having golfing abilities that are stratospherically beyond mine – can also be possessed of other traits remarkably similar to my own. (“Sweetie, do you know where my hat is?... Check your floppy disk storage shelf… Oh… of course. What was I thinking when I looked on the coathook?”)
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I did some googling of New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd recently after she appeared on The Daily Show to plug a newly-published collection of her Bush-related columns. And those who dislike her, it seems, dislike her with considerable intensity. But I was reminded of the old adage about being careful when you point the finger because three other fingers on your pointing hand always point right back at yourself, when I read a blistering attack on her that appeared in something called the Lufkin Daily News on May 30, 2003. In it, The Daily News announced they would no longer carry her columns, and did so in an editorial that contained the following pair of howlers:
“But unlike the Times, which has been engaged in a
torturous exercise of naval gazing and self-flagellation,
with its accustomed arrogance, since it was revealed
that one of its younger reporters had committed all sorts
of journalistic sins, we are doing something about it,
and fast.”
and
“Dowd violated one of the cardinal tents of the newspaper
business: Don't mislead your readers, because your
credibility is your only currency.”
I can’t help but see battleship-watchers screwing up their eyes against the blinding sunshine as they engage in “the torturous exercise of naval gazing” and papal campers purple with fury at discovering that an uninvited New York Times columnist has penetrated one their senior prelate’s wigwams.
As they say so eloquently on the internet, “Pot. Kettle. Black.”
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I had a long non-work related conversation recently with a colleague at work. (Slow day.) It began with a simple enough question – “Are you going to watch the Olympics?” The bare essence of my eventual reply was “No.” But getting there became a lengthy exercise that combined curmudgeonry, nostalgia, a lament for what’s been lost, and just plain idealism.
I was in my almost-mid 20s when Canada hosted the Summer Games in Montreal in 1976. At that time, the horror of the massive post-Games debt was still in the future and the country was awash in the pride of the event. In the run-up to the Games, I remember the CBC ran a multi-part television history of the modern Summer Olympics with moments I can still vividly recall to this day.
Each program took a single year’s Games or a single event throughout the life of the modern Games – the marathon, for example, and presented its highlights with the excitement and suspense of a tremendously crisp thriller. That’s when I first heard the names of Paavo Nurmi – the “Flying Finn” who eventually brought home nine gold and three silver medals as a middle and long distance runner in the 1920, 1924 and 1928 Games, and Abibi Bikela who, with his colleague Mamo Wolde, achieved the unprecedented outcome of three successive men’s gold medals (Bikela in 1960 and 1964, and Wolde in 1968) in the marathon, for Ethiopia of all countries.
I watched almost in tears as one marathon runner, in what Games I no longer recall, limped across the finish line in intense pain long after the race had ended, to a darkened, empty stadium, hobbling solely on the determination to record a finish in the event to which he had committed himself. (Well thank you Google. This humbling example is no longer anonymous to me, thanks to Barbara Taddeo, a middle school Special Education teacher from California who placed a personal diary of her Olympic travels to Sydney online. Given her vocation, it’s no wonder this example shines in her mind as well.)
“History. One of my favorite Olympic stories to share
with students is the story of John Stephen Akhwari
of Tanzania, a marathon runner in the 1968 Mexico City
Games. Akhwari injured his leg early in the race. He
finished the race in last place, entering the dark, almost
empty stadium more than an hour after the winner.
Akhwari said, ‘My country did not send me to Mexico
City to start the race. They sent me to finish the race.’
His actions exemplified an athlete who did not give up.”
It’d be so easy (and no doubt boring as hell) to lose myself and my vast audience in a recital of randomly recalled decathlon, gymnastic, swimming and you-name-it competitors -- men and women -- whose faces and achievements made that entire series so riveting to me. (And I’ll also skip the pathetic sidebar tale of my 16-year old libido-triggered crush on Czech gymnast Vera Caslavska in the summer of '68.)
But one simple observation sums up what, to me, makes those images so unique. The one – the only – corporate sponsorship that I recall turning up throughout most of the series is “Omega”. Because Omega made the massive clocks that showcased final times in the running events.
And thus was launched the curmudgeonly part of my reply to my colleague. In seeking to ensure that his Games would not lose money, the 1984 (Los Angeles) organizing Committee’s Chairman, Peter Ueberroth, essentially offered every patch of visible space more than four inches square for sale to the highest bidder. And the Games have never been the same. Now it’s a game of Coke vs. Pepsi, of Kodak vs Fuji, of Adidas vs Nike, of Speedo vs Janzen, and of, yes, Timex vs Omega. (And although they’ll never admit it, it’s also a game of Merck and Co vs Pfizer vs GlaxoSmithKline vs Bristol-Myers Squibb. This year, our meds are gonna beat yours.)
I also resent with a passion the admission of paid professional athletes into Olympic competition. And I know this is terribly un-Canadian. After all, we were hard-pressed ever to match the Soviet Red Army Olympic hockey team until we could place NHL stars on the ice against them. But c’mon. The 1992 US Olympic men’s basketball “dream team”, with a roster that included Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley, Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, made that Olympic sport a travesty in Barcelona when they took to the court against the amateur teams brought to the Games by countries where basketball players weren’t being paid annually in the millions. And they crushed them, going 8 – 0 en route to the medals podium with scores like 116 – 48 against Angola. Their average winning margin was 43 points. In the gold medal game against Croatia, they won by 32 points.
And Steffi Graf, Olympic gold, 1988 women’s singles tennis, the same year she won four successive major tournaments as a pro? To coin the current vernacular (or is this already outdated?): Puh-LEEEZE!
So no, I won’t watch the Games. OK, probably I will be just curious enough to sit through the highlight reel on the late-evening sports, unless it follows a review of Mike Weir’s performance at this year’s PGA, in which case I’ll go to bed and read the highlights the following morning. But “faster higher stronger”, in the face of a relentless emphasis on the medal-count tote board and the sea of logos, has become, for me, synonymous with “bullshit”.
If I were the Lord of the (Olympic) Rings, I would require something like this as the One Pledge to Bind Them All:
“Interreligious Peace Sports Festival (IPSF) Athletes' Pledge
1. We as athletes from all religions and cultures,
appreciate the gift of life and the physical bodies
we have been given by the Author of Life. It is out
of this appreciation and respect that we avoid
unhealthy behaviors.
2. We as athletes from all religions and cultures
will utilize our abilities to develop our heart, courage,
strength and perseverance. These personal victories
are part of our training to become young
ambassadors for peace.
3. We as athletes from all religions and cultures will
practice sportsmanship and teamwork and use this
training to help build harmony in our family, school,
workplace and community.
4. We as athletes from all religions and cultures pledge
to unite with the rules and the spirit of the Interreligious
Peace Sports Festival and in that, provide a model of
religious and cultural cooperation for athletes around
the world.”
The world really needs two Olympic Games. One for the likes of the Kenyan milers and marathoners who learned to run barefoot because they had no shoes and needed to run in order to make the trip from village to fresh water well and home to village again before the sun went down;
and for Pakistan’s and Afghanistan’s women swimmers, who have astonishingly managed to envelop themselves in a “high-neck, vest-style suit that leaves their arms uncovered but covers their legs down to the ankle” so as to not – officially – contravene the dictates of their faith (Unfortunately for the mullahs, this likely will have the effect of making the Pakistani and Afghani women swimmers way sexier than their much barer competition. It’s the Hitchcock principle of suspense, you see. A viewer is more profoundly affected by what the imagination suggests than by what is actually in view, but I digress.);
and for the Iraqi table tennis team who can now come to the Games and not have to fear returning home to torture by Uday and Qusai Hussein if they fail to win.
The other Games would be the forum for the paid powerhouses to strut their stuff. And for these Games, do away with the stupid drug tests. In fact, let’s use these Games to see just how completely a human body’s natural protein can be replaced with artificial chemical compounds. Paint yourself in McDonald’s red and yellow, shove a small personal waterproof rocket between your buttcheeks and swim naked if you want.
But it’s not going to happen, is it? So to the spoiled go the victories.
And I just can’t work myself up to the point where I honestly can say I care. (But to those who do care – enjoy yourselves.)
Finally, I commend to you a film about a Games, in fact, _the_ film about a Games. Leni Riefenstahl died recently, having lived out much of her century-long life vilified for putting the German Nazi Party into such a favourable light in her best-known film, “Triumph of the Will”.
But her second-best known film is “Olympia” and it is simply breathtaking. For the 1936 Summer Games in Berlin, Riefenstahl was given unprecedented access to the competition field. She built small railroads beside the track to enable her cameras to follow runners stride by stride. She placed cameras into pits directly beside the pole vault and high jump rails so that the photographed competitors appear to be flying. She shot divers with equal majesty as they soared from the towers and springboards into the outdoor pool. The 1936 Games are best remembered for Hitler’s invitation to the world, intending they should witness proof that Aryans deserve to be called the Master Race, and for a black American runner named Jesse Owens’ memorable RSVP to Hitler’s invitation.
“Olympia” beat out “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” as the Best Film of 1938 at that year’s International Film Festival in Venice. It tells the whole story of the 1936 Games, Owens included, because not even Josef Goebbels, the Nazi Minister of Propaganda, could produce the justification for keeping him out of the film. It does so with a worshipful style that makes gods and goddesses of the athletes, amateurs all.
It will knock your socks off.
“Naturally I was a little panicked when I went
to my golf bag for my practice round Monday
and realized my pitching wedge was in the back
of my truck in Utah, mixed in there with my
fly-fishing rods and hip waders.”
A quick phone call to his wife got the required club via courier to Mr Weir in time to be included in his 2004 PGA arsenal. But I found much amusement (and not a little serenity) in the discovery that one of my sports idols – despite having golfing abilities that are stratospherically beyond mine – can also be possessed of other traits remarkably similar to my own. (“Sweetie, do you know where my hat is?... Check your floppy disk storage shelf… Oh… of course. What was I thinking when I looked on the coathook?”)
- 0 -
I did some googling of New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd recently after she appeared on The Daily Show to plug a newly-published collection of her Bush-related columns. And those who dislike her, it seems, dislike her with considerable intensity. But I was reminded of the old adage about being careful when you point the finger because three other fingers on your pointing hand always point right back at yourself, when I read a blistering attack on her that appeared in something called the Lufkin Daily News on May 30, 2003. In it, The Daily News announced they would no longer carry her columns, and did so in an editorial that contained the following pair of howlers:
“But unlike the Times, which has been engaged in a
torturous exercise of naval gazing and self-flagellation,
with its accustomed arrogance, since it was revealed
that one of its younger reporters had committed all sorts
of journalistic sins, we are doing something about it,
and fast.”
and
“Dowd violated one of the cardinal tents of the newspaper
business: Don't mislead your readers, because your
credibility is your only currency.”
I can’t help but see battleship-watchers screwing up their eyes against the blinding sunshine as they engage in “the torturous exercise of naval gazing” and papal campers purple with fury at discovering that an uninvited New York Times columnist has penetrated one their senior prelate’s wigwams.
As they say so eloquently on the internet, “Pot. Kettle. Black.”
- 0 -
I had a long non-work related conversation recently with a colleague at work. (Slow day.) It began with a simple enough question – “Are you going to watch the Olympics?” The bare essence of my eventual reply was “No.” But getting there became a lengthy exercise that combined curmudgeonry, nostalgia, a lament for what’s been lost, and just plain idealism.
I was in my almost-mid 20s when Canada hosted the Summer Games in Montreal in 1976. At that time, the horror of the massive post-Games debt was still in the future and the country was awash in the pride of the event. In the run-up to the Games, I remember the CBC ran a multi-part television history of the modern Summer Olympics with moments I can still vividly recall to this day.
Each program took a single year’s Games or a single event throughout the life of the modern Games – the marathon, for example, and presented its highlights with the excitement and suspense of a tremendously crisp thriller. That’s when I first heard the names of Paavo Nurmi – the “Flying Finn” who eventually brought home nine gold and three silver medals as a middle and long distance runner in the 1920, 1924 and 1928 Games, and Abibi Bikela who, with his colleague Mamo Wolde, achieved the unprecedented outcome of three successive men’s gold medals (Bikela in 1960 and 1964, and Wolde in 1968) in the marathon, for Ethiopia of all countries.
I watched almost in tears as one marathon runner, in what Games I no longer recall, limped across the finish line in intense pain long after the race had ended, to a darkened, empty stadium, hobbling solely on the determination to record a finish in the event to which he had committed himself. (Well thank you Google. This humbling example is no longer anonymous to me, thanks to Barbara Taddeo, a middle school Special Education teacher from California who placed a personal diary of her Olympic travels to Sydney online. Given her vocation, it’s no wonder this example shines in her mind as well.)
“History. One of my favorite Olympic stories to share
with students is the story of John Stephen Akhwari
of Tanzania, a marathon runner in the 1968 Mexico City
Games. Akhwari injured his leg early in the race. He
finished the race in last place, entering the dark, almost
empty stadium more than an hour after the winner.
Akhwari said, ‘My country did not send me to Mexico
City to start the race. They sent me to finish the race.’
His actions exemplified an athlete who did not give up.”
It’d be so easy (and no doubt boring as hell) to lose myself and my vast audience in a recital of randomly recalled decathlon, gymnastic, swimming and you-name-it competitors -- men and women -- whose faces and achievements made that entire series so riveting to me. (And I’ll also skip the pathetic sidebar tale of my 16-year old libido-triggered crush on Czech gymnast Vera Caslavska in the summer of '68.)
But one simple observation sums up what, to me, makes those images so unique. The one – the only – corporate sponsorship that I recall turning up throughout most of the series is “Omega”. Because Omega made the massive clocks that showcased final times in the running events.
And thus was launched the curmudgeonly part of my reply to my colleague. In seeking to ensure that his Games would not lose money, the 1984 (Los Angeles) organizing Committee’s Chairman, Peter Ueberroth, essentially offered every patch of visible space more than four inches square for sale to the highest bidder. And the Games have never been the same. Now it’s a game of Coke vs. Pepsi, of Kodak vs Fuji, of Adidas vs Nike, of Speedo vs Janzen, and of, yes, Timex vs Omega. (And although they’ll never admit it, it’s also a game of Merck and Co vs Pfizer vs GlaxoSmithKline vs Bristol-Myers Squibb. This year, our meds are gonna beat yours.)
I also resent with a passion the admission of paid professional athletes into Olympic competition. And I know this is terribly un-Canadian. After all, we were hard-pressed ever to match the Soviet Red Army Olympic hockey team until we could place NHL stars on the ice against them. But c’mon. The 1992 US Olympic men’s basketball “dream team”, with a roster that included Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley, Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, made that Olympic sport a travesty in Barcelona when they took to the court against the amateur teams brought to the Games by countries where basketball players weren’t being paid annually in the millions. And they crushed them, going 8 – 0 en route to the medals podium with scores like 116 – 48 against Angola. Their average winning margin was 43 points. In the gold medal game against Croatia, they won by 32 points.
And Steffi Graf, Olympic gold, 1988 women’s singles tennis, the same year she won four successive major tournaments as a pro? To coin the current vernacular (or is this already outdated?): Puh-LEEEZE!
So no, I won’t watch the Games. OK, probably I will be just curious enough to sit through the highlight reel on the late-evening sports, unless it follows a review of Mike Weir’s performance at this year’s PGA, in which case I’ll go to bed and read the highlights the following morning. But “faster higher stronger”, in the face of a relentless emphasis on the medal-count tote board and the sea of logos, has become, for me, synonymous with “bullshit”.
If I were the Lord of the (Olympic) Rings, I would require something like this as the One Pledge to Bind Them All:
“Interreligious Peace Sports Festival (IPSF) Athletes' Pledge
1. We as athletes from all religions and cultures,
appreciate the gift of life and the physical bodies
we have been given by the Author of Life. It is out
of this appreciation and respect that we avoid
unhealthy behaviors.
2. We as athletes from all religions and cultures
will utilize our abilities to develop our heart, courage,
strength and perseverance. These personal victories
are part of our training to become young
ambassadors for peace.
3. We as athletes from all religions and cultures will
practice sportsmanship and teamwork and use this
training to help build harmony in our family, school,
workplace and community.
4. We as athletes from all religions and cultures pledge
to unite with the rules and the spirit of the Interreligious
Peace Sports Festival and in that, provide a model of
religious and cultural cooperation for athletes around
the world.”
The world really needs two Olympic Games. One for the likes of the Kenyan milers and marathoners who learned to run barefoot because they had no shoes and needed to run in order to make the trip from village to fresh water well and home to village again before the sun went down;
and for Pakistan’s and Afghanistan’s women swimmers, who have astonishingly managed to envelop themselves in a “high-neck, vest-style suit that leaves their arms uncovered but covers their legs down to the ankle” so as to not – officially – contravene the dictates of their faith (Unfortunately for the mullahs, this likely will have the effect of making the Pakistani and Afghani women swimmers way sexier than their much barer competition. It’s the Hitchcock principle of suspense, you see. A viewer is more profoundly affected by what the imagination suggests than by what is actually in view, but I digress.);
and for the Iraqi table tennis team who can now come to the Games and not have to fear returning home to torture by Uday and Qusai Hussein if they fail to win.
The other Games would be the forum for the paid powerhouses to strut their stuff. And for these Games, do away with the stupid drug tests. In fact, let’s use these Games to see just how completely a human body’s natural protein can be replaced with artificial chemical compounds. Paint yourself in McDonald’s red and yellow, shove a small personal waterproof rocket between your buttcheeks and swim naked if you want.
But it’s not going to happen, is it? So to the spoiled go the victories.
And I just can’t work myself up to the point where I honestly can say I care. (But to those who do care – enjoy yourselves.)
Finally, I commend to you a film about a Games, in fact, _the_ film about a Games. Leni Riefenstahl died recently, having lived out much of her century-long life vilified for putting the German Nazi Party into such a favourable light in her best-known film, “Triumph of the Will”.
But her second-best known film is “Olympia” and it is simply breathtaking. For the 1936 Summer Games in Berlin, Riefenstahl was given unprecedented access to the competition field. She built small railroads beside the track to enable her cameras to follow runners stride by stride. She placed cameras into pits directly beside the pole vault and high jump rails so that the photographed competitors appear to be flying. She shot divers with equal majesty as they soared from the towers and springboards into the outdoor pool. The 1936 Games are best remembered for Hitler’s invitation to the world, intending they should witness proof that Aryans deserve to be called the Master Race, and for a black American runner named Jesse Owens’ memorable RSVP to Hitler’s invitation.
“Olympia” beat out “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” as the Best Film of 1938 at that year’s International Film Festival in Venice. It tells the whole story of the 1936 Games, Owens included, because not even Josef Goebbels, the Nazi Minister of Propaganda, could produce the justification for keeping him out of the film. It does so with a worshipful style that makes gods and goddesses of the athletes, amateurs all.
It will knock your socks off.
Monday, August 09, 2004
Opening zinger: Earlier this evening, a Mazda Miata blew by me in a residential area travelling at about twice the allowable velocity. His licence plate: “MIATATUD”. My mental wrench from anger to applause almost dislocated my brain stem.
Here’s a headline and a few sentences from an August 9th story on the CBC website:
“Ontario SIU probes another Taser death: KINGSTON, ONT. - Ontario's police watchdog is investigating the death of a Kingston man who died hours after being shot with a Taser gun Sunday morning. The Special Investigations Unit has assigned two investigators to look into the death, said Rose Bliss, a spokesperson for the agency… Tasers emit a jolt of 50,000 volts that interrupts the body's electrical impulses, causing involuntary muscle seizures. Last year, Tasers were blamed in about 50 deaths in the United States. In Canada, six people have died from them, four this year.”
(I know I’m dating myself here, but when I hear “SIU”, I hear a reference not to any “Special Investigations Unit”, but rather I think of Hal Banks’s notorious Seafarers’ International Union. And I still earworm the chorus of the old satirical Canadian tune by the Brothers-in-Law, “We’re a mighty fine crew in the SIU when we all go out on strike.” But I, of course, digress.)
But what struck me as I read this is the thought that, had that story headline’s “Taser” been “mad cow”, nationwide – indeed worldwide – panic would have by now erupted. Even our first “probable” case (so far unfatal) of West Nile Virus made headlines around the globe recently.
After all, it took just one suspected case of mad cow disease (no deaths) early last year for the world to drop a ban on Canadian beef-buying that remains partially in effect in many countries – most notably the US – even today. And here we have four people already dead in Canada this year alone because of Tasers! Canadian police forces continue to defend their use vigorously, although a couple of inquiries have been promised. But in the same breath, police spokesmen speak ominously of their best alternative method of suppressing violent offenders – shooting them.
What makes four* confirmed Taser victims the cause of a vastly reduced profile of coverage than that which would be accorded four victims (God forbid, but should such an outcome hypothetically occur) of either of the other above causes of death?
Is it because Tasers are deployed by the police to neutralize people who are, at the moment of their use, customarily behaving in a manner that is anything but sociable? Are we thinking, “They’re probably better off dead… and even if they are not ‘better off’, then society surely is, with them removed”? Maybe the John Howard Society – whose Mission Statement is twelve precisely aligned words: “Effective, just and humane responses to the causes and consequences of crime” – should be asked what they think of all this.
*Update: CBC’s late night website on August 9th carried a note that a preliminary coroner’s report has eliminated the Taser’s 50,000 volts as a cause of death in this most recent case. So change “four” to “three”. Everything else stands.
- 0 -
Now here’s a concept. (Assuming you consider “Another Sure Sign the Apocalypse is Near!” to be a “concept”. I saw commercials for this on the weekend while watching some TV in an effort to slow time down before requiring my return to work after a week off. For obvious reasons, I chose FOX.) I thought – “No, this has to be a hoax.” But then I did some quick follow-up Googling. And no, it’s most definitely not a hoax. Coming, I’m afraid, to a television near you this Fall:
“GILLIGAN'S ISLAND: TBS will collaborate with the creators
of the original Gilligan's Island sitcom, Lloyd and Sherwood
Schwartz, to shift the concept to the reality genre. It will feature
a real-life skipper, first mate, millionaire couple, movie star,
Kansas farm girl and professor. And, like the original show,
they'll work together to try to get off the island. Episodes will be
modeled after some of the situations that occurred on the
original sitcom. The series is set to premiere in Fourth Quarter
2004.”
You’d’ve thought the networks would have learned their lesson from the collective political blast that was levelled at a similarly floated concept in 2003 to transplant a bunch of genuine Ozark in-breds to the Hills of Beverly to have a heapin’ helpin’ of their hospitality. I don’t believe the Real Beverly Hillbillies made it far beyond storyboarding. Something about perpetuating negative stereotypes of the fine residents of northern Arkansas. But the Real Gilligan’s Island is actually on the schedule. Line up, all ye who want to protest negative stereotypes of movie stars, millionaires and their wives, Kansas farm girls and professors… oh wait, maybe there’s nothing the show could do that would hurt those public images.
Stuff like this is, quite literally, self-satirizing. But boggle your mind for a moment and imagine (Be Very Afraid) if it works, just how swiftly other successful 60s sitcoms will be mined for introduction to the Reality TV genre. Picture, for example, yanking a bunch of former US prisoners of war who were held in Vietnam’s infamous “Hanoi Hilton” from their present lives as corporate CEOs or psychiatric patients, and plunking them down in a Stalag somewhere in Central Europe with a monocled Kommandante and a wacky overweight sergeant, and told that their goal is to escape. Yes, it’s the Hogan’s Heroes Reality Version! (And here’s the reality: the tower guards’ machine guns are loaded with live ammunition.)
Remember F-Troop? For the new millennium: place a bunch of Air Cav troopers in a stockade in the middle of Akwesasne. The Mohawk Warrior Society would probably be delighted to double for the TV show’s Hekawi. The Real Petticoat Junction, unfortunately, would have to be X-rated because hidden cameras would inevitably reveal that, after dark, Uncle Joe was up to… well, X-rated stuff with Billie-Jo, Bobbie-Jo and Betty-Jo. No damn wonder he’s “a-movin’ kinda slow”! As would the real “I Dream of Jeannie”… Sure it would! Take a healthy male astronaut, present him with a diaphonously draped “I’ll grant your every wish, Master” blonde, whose only anatomical failing is the absence of a navel, and just try NOT to be X-rated.
I could go on. But I suspect I’m already in royalty-earning country once these ideas creep (actually, slither is probably a more appropriate form of locomotion) into the network brainstormers’ boardrooms.
- 0 -
Here's a revisit to something I wrote a few weeks back in the throes of our national election campaign. First, I said that _my_ nationally televised all-candidates’ debate would include reps from all parties, even those traditionally labelled “fringe”. At the time I was thinking that someone like a Rhinoceros candidate might help inject a note of irreverence into what has degenerated into a media handlers-driven shoutfest. But then I moderated that line of reasoning after discovering that my riding (Ottawa South) had fielded no fewer than eight candidates, including one from a party that was running less than 20 candidates nationwide.
Now I’m even less convinced of the need for a wider field after reading some eminently sensible arguments put forward by Anthony Westell in the Globe and Mail on 28 July. In Mr Westell’s world, not even the Bloc Quebecois would have been there. Put simply, his debates would allow only those leaders of national parties, however remote their chances of winning might be.
And for those who point to Mr Duceppe’s great success against the “national” party leaders, Mr Westell has an answer ready.
Of course Gilles Duceppe “won” the debates, he argued. “With no national program to promote and defend, and no concern for the West, Ontario and the Atlantic provinces, he went into the debates with a considerable advantage over genuinely national leaders. Mr. Duceppe presented himself to Quebeckers as their defender against Ottawa and was relentless in attacking Mr. Martin for allegedly insulting Quebeckers.”
Mr Westell has no problem with a provincially broadcast debate featuring Bloc and other Quebec candidates on issues purely of relevance to Quebec voters. But on the national stage, he says, “The debates are supposed to be between leaders of national parties seeking a mandate to govern Canada.”
Makes sense to me.
(Of course, I suspect Mr. Westell’s real preference vis-à-vis the national shouting match laughably labelled a “debate” might be more clearly discernable in the brief biographical footnote he provided to the Globe and Mail, and with which he concludes his column: “Anthony Westell is a retired political reporter and columnist who remembers a time when there were no debates.”)
Wishful thinking Tony, I’m afraid.
- 0 -
And finally, here’s a sentence from a biography of Al Jolson that I am presently reading. It’s a direct quote from an article written by an entertainment reporter of the day and describes the introductory encounter between Jolson and a woman who subsequently became his first press agent. The meeting came after one of his huge early successes in New York’s Winter Garden Theater. (That’s a US “theatre”.) I have read and re-read this sentence about 50 times. And I’ll be darned if I can twist it into anything that makes even a shred of sense. So you try. (It’s the second of these two sentences.): “The dressing room was the scene of the informal production. Nellie had made a way from the stage door through ranks of chorus girls who greeted her with acclaim and flung after petitions to be exploited in airships.” (“Jolson: The Story of Al Jolson”, by Michael Freedland. My edition – Virgin Books 1995. The quote is on p.64)
It’s those last eight words… Best I can do is to insert a hyphen in “flung-after” and suggest that perhaps the chorus girls in question were looking for bookings on the trans-Atlantic airship voyages that were in vogue at the time. This, from a “History of Airships” online site: “The Germans offered trans-Atlantic flights on its luxurious hydrogen-filled Zeppelins until 35 people died in 1937 as the majestic Hindenburg erupted in flames while docking at Lakehurst, N.J.” The Hindenburg was equipped with, among other amenities, a lounge and a piano. So maybe they occasionally booked chorus girls. (Although given the nearness of enormous, thin-skinned bags filled with highly explosive gas, I strongly suspect that spiked heels and spark-inducing tap shoes were strictly verboten.)
Given no further clarification by the author, it will forever remain speculation on my part.
“Let me sing of Dixie’s charms; of cotton fields and mammy’s arms.
And if my song can make you homesick,
I’m happy.”
Here’s a headline and a few sentences from an August 9th story on the CBC website:
“Ontario SIU probes another Taser death: KINGSTON, ONT. - Ontario's police watchdog is investigating the death of a Kingston man who died hours after being shot with a Taser gun Sunday morning. The Special Investigations Unit has assigned two investigators to look into the death, said Rose Bliss, a spokesperson for the agency… Tasers emit a jolt of 50,000 volts that interrupts the body's electrical impulses, causing involuntary muscle seizures. Last year, Tasers were blamed in about 50 deaths in the United States. In Canada, six people have died from them, four this year.”
(I know I’m dating myself here, but when I hear “SIU”, I hear a reference not to any “Special Investigations Unit”, but rather I think of Hal Banks’s notorious Seafarers’ International Union. And I still earworm the chorus of the old satirical Canadian tune by the Brothers-in-Law, “We’re a mighty fine crew in the SIU when we all go out on strike.” But I, of course, digress.)
But what struck me as I read this is the thought that, had that story headline’s “Taser” been “mad cow”, nationwide – indeed worldwide – panic would have by now erupted. Even our first “probable” case (so far unfatal) of West Nile Virus made headlines around the globe recently.
After all, it took just one suspected case of mad cow disease (no deaths) early last year for the world to drop a ban on Canadian beef-buying that remains partially in effect in many countries – most notably the US – even today. And here we have four people already dead in Canada this year alone because of Tasers! Canadian police forces continue to defend their use vigorously, although a couple of inquiries have been promised. But in the same breath, police spokesmen speak ominously of their best alternative method of suppressing violent offenders – shooting them.
What makes four* confirmed Taser victims the cause of a vastly reduced profile of coverage than that which would be accorded four victims (God forbid, but should such an outcome hypothetically occur) of either of the other above causes of death?
Is it because Tasers are deployed by the police to neutralize people who are, at the moment of their use, customarily behaving in a manner that is anything but sociable? Are we thinking, “They’re probably better off dead… and even if they are not ‘better off’, then society surely is, with them removed”? Maybe the John Howard Society – whose Mission Statement is twelve precisely aligned words: “Effective, just and humane responses to the causes and consequences of crime” – should be asked what they think of all this.
*Update: CBC’s late night website on August 9th carried a note that a preliminary coroner’s report has eliminated the Taser’s 50,000 volts as a cause of death in this most recent case. So change “four” to “three”. Everything else stands.
- 0 -
Now here’s a concept. (Assuming you consider “Another Sure Sign the Apocalypse is Near!” to be a “concept”. I saw commercials for this on the weekend while watching some TV in an effort to slow time down before requiring my return to work after a week off. For obvious reasons, I chose FOX.) I thought – “No, this has to be a hoax.” But then I did some quick follow-up Googling. And no, it’s most definitely not a hoax. Coming, I’m afraid, to a television near you this Fall:
“GILLIGAN'S ISLAND: TBS will collaborate with the creators
of the original Gilligan's Island sitcom, Lloyd and Sherwood
Schwartz, to shift the concept to the reality genre. It will feature
a real-life skipper, first mate, millionaire couple, movie star,
Kansas farm girl and professor. And, like the original show,
they'll work together to try to get off the island. Episodes will be
modeled after some of the situations that occurred on the
original sitcom. The series is set to premiere in Fourth Quarter
2004.”
You’d’ve thought the networks would have learned their lesson from the collective political blast that was levelled at a similarly floated concept in 2003 to transplant a bunch of genuine Ozark in-breds to the Hills of Beverly to have a heapin’ helpin’ of their hospitality. I don’t believe the Real Beverly Hillbillies made it far beyond storyboarding. Something about perpetuating negative stereotypes of the fine residents of northern Arkansas. But the Real Gilligan’s Island is actually on the schedule. Line up, all ye who want to protest negative stereotypes of movie stars, millionaires and their wives, Kansas farm girls and professors… oh wait, maybe there’s nothing the show could do that would hurt those public images.
Stuff like this is, quite literally, self-satirizing. But boggle your mind for a moment and imagine (Be Very Afraid) if it works, just how swiftly other successful 60s sitcoms will be mined for introduction to the Reality TV genre. Picture, for example, yanking a bunch of former US prisoners of war who were held in Vietnam’s infamous “Hanoi Hilton” from their present lives as corporate CEOs or psychiatric patients, and plunking them down in a Stalag somewhere in Central Europe with a monocled Kommandante and a wacky overweight sergeant, and told that their goal is to escape. Yes, it’s the Hogan’s Heroes Reality Version! (And here’s the reality: the tower guards’ machine guns are loaded with live ammunition.)
Remember F-Troop? For the new millennium: place a bunch of Air Cav troopers in a stockade in the middle of Akwesasne. The Mohawk Warrior Society would probably be delighted to double for the TV show’s Hekawi. The Real Petticoat Junction, unfortunately, would have to be X-rated because hidden cameras would inevitably reveal that, after dark, Uncle Joe was up to… well, X-rated stuff with Billie-Jo, Bobbie-Jo and Betty-Jo. No damn wonder he’s “a-movin’ kinda slow”! As would the real “I Dream of Jeannie”… Sure it would! Take a healthy male astronaut, present him with a diaphonously draped “I’ll grant your every wish, Master” blonde, whose only anatomical failing is the absence of a navel, and just try NOT to be X-rated.
I could go on. But I suspect I’m already in royalty-earning country once these ideas creep (actually, slither is probably a more appropriate form of locomotion) into the network brainstormers’ boardrooms.
- 0 -
Here's a revisit to something I wrote a few weeks back in the throes of our national election campaign. First, I said that _my_ nationally televised all-candidates’ debate would include reps from all parties, even those traditionally labelled “fringe”. At the time I was thinking that someone like a Rhinoceros candidate might help inject a note of irreverence into what has degenerated into a media handlers-driven shoutfest. But then I moderated that line of reasoning after discovering that my riding (Ottawa South) had fielded no fewer than eight candidates, including one from a party that was running less than 20 candidates nationwide.
Now I’m even less convinced of the need for a wider field after reading some eminently sensible arguments put forward by Anthony Westell in the Globe and Mail on 28 July. In Mr Westell’s world, not even the Bloc Quebecois would have been there. Put simply, his debates would allow only those leaders of national parties, however remote their chances of winning might be.
And for those who point to Mr Duceppe’s great success against the “national” party leaders, Mr Westell has an answer ready.
Of course Gilles Duceppe “won” the debates, he argued. “With no national program to promote and defend, and no concern for the West, Ontario and the Atlantic provinces, he went into the debates with a considerable advantage over genuinely national leaders. Mr. Duceppe presented himself to Quebeckers as their defender against Ottawa and was relentless in attacking Mr. Martin for allegedly insulting Quebeckers.”
Mr Westell has no problem with a provincially broadcast debate featuring Bloc and other Quebec candidates on issues purely of relevance to Quebec voters. But on the national stage, he says, “The debates are supposed to be between leaders of national parties seeking a mandate to govern Canada.”
Makes sense to me.
(Of course, I suspect Mr. Westell’s real preference vis-à-vis the national shouting match laughably labelled a “debate” might be more clearly discernable in the brief biographical footnote he provided to the Globe and Mail, and with which he concludes his column: “Anthony Westell is a retired political reporter and columnist who remembers a time when there were no debates.”)
Wishful thinking Tony, I’m afraid.
- 0 -
And finally, here’s a sentence from a biography of Al Jolson that I am presently reading. It’s a direct quote from an article written by an entertainment reporter of the day and describes the introductory encounter between Jolson and a woman who subsequently became his first press agent. The meeting came after one of his huge early successes in New York’s Winter Garden Theater. (That’s a US “theatre”.) I have read and re-read this sentence about 50 times. And I’ll be darned if I can twist it into anything that makes even a shred of sense. So you try. (It’s the second of these two sentences.): “The dressing room was the scene of the informal production. Nellie had made a way from the stage door through ranks of chorus girls who greeted her with acclaim and flung after petitions to be exploited in airships.” (“Jolson: The Story of Al Jolson”, by Michael Freedland. My edition – Virgin Books 1995. The quote is on p.64)
It’s those last eight words… Best I can do is to insert a hyphen in “flung-after” and suggest that perhaps the chorus girls in question were looking for bookings on the trans-Atlantic airship voyages that were in vogue at the time. This, from a “History of Airships” online site: “The Germans offered trans-Atlantic flights on its luxurious hydrogen-filled Zeppelins until 35 people died in 1937 as the majestic Hindenburg erupted in flames while docking at Lakehurst, N.J.” The Hindenburg was equipped with, among other amenities, a lounge and a piano. So maybe they occasionally booked chorus girls. (Although given the nearness of enormous, thin-skinned bags filled with highly explosive gas, I strongly suspect that spiked heels and spark-inducing tap shoes were strictly verboten.)
Given no further clarification by the author, it will forever remain speculation on my part.
“Let me sing of Dixie’s charms; of cotton fields and mammy’s arms.
And if my song can make you homesick,
I’m happy.”
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