TriumphAnt

(“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?)

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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.”

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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.