The hazards of mispunctuation:
Here’s a Google news headline that appeared on Tuesday December 21: “ABC News Attack on US-Iraqi Base Leaves 22 Dead”
It was a story uploaded from ABC News. The absence of a colon, or anything else – a hyphen or dash – to separate the source from the headline leaves an unusual, to say the least, result. It suggests someone in the embedded press pool finally snapped after being excluded once too often from the daily “Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People” military briefing.
= = = = = = = = = =
The hazards of misaligning a subjunctive clause (no relation to Santa):
Here’s a random comment culled from a Christmas-related blog discussion:
“Over the years there has been an added secular overlay of Christmas, which is OK. I like the tree (decorated mine last night with my five month old daughter!)…”
Does Children’s Aid know about this guy?!!!
= = = = = = = = = =
“And to Tiny Tim, who lived and got well again…”
Most mornings, when I get on my bus, there are no seats and people are already standing halfway along the centre aisle. One recent morning was no exception. And when it is one of those winter mornings – as it was this day – where you don’t know what to wear because freezing ice pellets are falling as you leave your house and you’ve heard a forecast for every form of precipitation up to a plague of locusts, you and everyone else leave the house sporting every kind of foul weather gear imaginable, usually in combination (a parka with a rain shell overlay, for example).
The result is a tremendous bulking up of a commuter’s personal space requirements to sometimes double the dimensions you ordinarily need. Add the accoutrements like dripping umbrellas and backpacks and a typical standee section of a city bus becomes a veritable forest of swollen, humid fabric.
Under such circumstances, even if one wants to, one can’t always pay meticulous attention to each and every footfall.
And on this morning, about six people after me climbing into the bus, a hapless boarder triggered a piercing shriek from an older woman sitting on the “Privileged Seating” (pregnant Moms-to-be; mobility-impaired people, the very elderly, blind people with seeing eye dogs, and the like). It was loud enough to draw the immediate attention of everyone within earshot (which, given her vocal volume, was pretty well the entire busload of passengers). And we all turned just in time to see someone, who had tromped on her foot while boarding, launch into an effusive stream of apology.
The woman, bending forward in obvious pain, pulled her foot back from the narrow aisle, and re-positioned her crutch.
Along with everyone else on board, I felt considerable sympathy for both her and the tromping offender. But the presence of a crutch notwithstanding, I also wonder about the wisdom of parking oneself on that particular privileged seat, right beside where passengers stream aboard, passengers whose glasses instantly fog up and, even if spectacle-less, have only a restricted downward view because of bulky coats, dripping umbrellas, and soaked backpacks slung at angles that inconvenience absolutely as many people as is humanly possible.
(I realize that smacks of "It's your own damned fault!" But that's not my intention. I'm thinking of a tone more like, "Safety begins at home.")
= = = = = = = = = =
And file this under: "Oh sorry… you meant Songsheet # 1!"
Recently we at work all received a cheery e-mailed message from our Directors who made it clear it was not going to be yet another of those yadda-yadda “Here’s what we’ve done over the past year and here are the challenges we anticipate in the future” generic seasonal senior management congratulations, to wit:
“It is the time of the year when we all get e-mails reminding us about the work we did during the year that is ending and the challenges we face ahead in the upcoming year. This e-mail will not do that. Instead, it is a call to celebrate our success as a team.”
That being said, not (and I am not making this up) 30 seconds later, a second all-employee message landed from _their_ boss, our Minister, who began,
“Over the past year, we have worked together to build a department and faced the challenges of meeting the needs of employers and workers in the context of a constantly changing world of work. We can be proud of the fact that millions of Canadians have enjoyed better access to our programs and services. The coming year will bring its share of challenges.”
I expect the New Year in the lofty boardrooms upstairs will include a Minister / Directors roundtable whose theme will be “The concept of a chorus”.
= = = = = = = = = =
Star Trek fans: The hour is come!
If we could just persuade US President George Dubya Bush and his cabinet to wear red shirts the next time any of them take a jaunt abroad… (“Uh… Mr President, we seem to have lost SecDef Rumsfeld. He was here a second ago and then,… well then he just sort of vanished!” “What do you mean ‘just sort of’ vanished’?!” “Well sir, one minute he was walking along in your wake at that respectful three-pace distance you demand. Then the next second, a streak of light appeared from the sky. It ended at the SecDef’s head. He went all shimmery, turned into a brilliant glowing silhouette… all wavy-like, and then disappeared, leaving behind that bit of white dust on the ground there.” “Well, could he have been transported into an alternate dimension?” “Possibly, sir, do you want us to ask Spock to do a full spectrum analysis of the immediate vicinity and see if there are any anomalies or unusual energy readings… or maybe try to reconstitute that powder to see if we can make him better again?” “What are you asking me for? Dammit, I’m a President not a doctor… Oh alright, go ahead… No wait! On second thought, Naaaaaaaah.”)
- - - - - - - - - -
Here’s the item that triggered that bit of mental meandering:
(From the CBC website / Dec 21)
“University offers course in 'Star Trek'
DECATUR, ILL. - A university in Decatur, Ill., is offering a course in Star Trek, the long-running series of television shows and movies.
Called The Multidisciplinary Worlds of Star Trek, the full-credit course will be taught at Millikin University by Dr. Michael O'Conner during the school's winter break.
"This class will boldly go where no one has gone before, as we explore the lore, politics, philosophy, groundbreaking multiculturalism and historical contexts of the popular science fiction series and phenomenon known as Star Trek," the school's course calendar boasts.
…
The homework assignments for students in O'Conner's course will be to watch selected episodes from the various shows.
He plans to use them as a bellwether for discussing changes in American society.
In the original series, for example, female crewmembers wore skimpy skirts as uniforms. By contrast, the Voyager series debuted in 1995 with a female starship captain played by Kate Mulgrew.
Another topic for class discussion will be the "prime directive," the rule dictating that Starfleet officers must not interfere in the development of alien cultures.
O'Conner will bring up Kirk's constant violations of the prime directive, in addition to relating the concept to current U.S. foreign policy.”
- - - - - - - - - -
Gratuitous editorial comment: I confess I _love_ the idea that violating the United Federation of Planets’ “Prime Directive” has a potential application to present US foreign policy.
= = = = = = = = = =
“And leave me to keep Christmas in my own way…”
For the past few days in the massive table-packed trough called a “food court” at the vast Place du Portage office complex in Hull, Quebec where I work, there’s been a roving accordionist wandering among the tablefuls of masticators. His purpose, one presumes, is to instil the true spirit of buying into the hearts of we would-be customers. However, our consuming focus in this setting, if my priority is anything by which to judge, is oriented more towards food than to the acquisition of still more commercial goods.
Recently, as I sat doing a bit of consuming of my own (Thai salad rolls and chicken soup), he happened to pass by, playing as he strolled. And it took a few seconds for me to register the seasonal number he had chosen to grace us with.
My thinking is that he is perhaps a recent arrival to the country, and somewhat computer literate. And maybe a well-intentioned buddy made a few suggestions meant to help him find accordion music online relevant to meaningful Christmas sentiment here in Canada. “Hey, Giuseppe,” offered his helpful friend, “I was looking in an English language Bible in the Pescara Public Library, and I found the Christmas story. Just Google ‘Glory Hallelujah’. You can’t miss.”
So on this day, true to that spirit, from his accordion came the strains of that ever-popular French Canadian Christmas classic, The Battle Hymn of the Republic.
Altogether now:
“He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.
He has loose’d the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword
His truth is marching on!
Fa la la la la… la la… la… laaaaaaaaaa.”
= = = = = = = = = =
"My dear... the children... Christmas..."
Overheard while Christmas shopping among the kitchen gadgets in The Bay at St Laurent. Two young-ish women were browsing. One held up a corkscrew for the other to view, and asked, “What about this?” The second replied, “Perfect!” And as they wandered off towards the cash to pay, “I’m not surprised she wore out her last corkscrew.”
Meoooow Pfft! Pfft!
= = = = = = = = = =
And finally, in 1999 (December 23), the UK newspaper, The Guardian, quoted the following as its “Best festive cheer scene”, a judgement with which, neither before nor since, have I found any reason to argue:
“Scrooge After being visited by The Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future, Scrooge (Alistair Sim) awakes joyfully on Christmas morning. His effusive behaviour startles Mrs Dilber (Kathleen Harrison), his housekeeper, who runs from the room screaming. He catches up with her on the stairs.
‘I'm not mad’, exclaims a jubilant Scrooge, putting something into her hand.
‘A guinea. Whatever for?’
‘I'll give you one guess.’
‘To keep me mouth shut?’
He laughs, starting with a chuckle that grows to uncontrolled gales of laughter. Finally, he breaks off in embarrassment.
‘No, no, no. It's for a Christmas present.’
‘A Christmas present. For me?’
‘Of course for you. A merry, merry, merry Christmas Mrs. Dilber. How much do I pay you?’
‘Two shillings a week.’
‘It's forthwith raised to ten.’
‘Are you sure you don't want to see a doctor?’
‘A doctor? Certainly not, nor the undertaker. Now, off you go and enjoy yourself.’
Mrs Dilber hurries away, a grin plastered from ear to ear.
‘Bob's yer uncle! Merry Christmas Mr. Scrooge, in keeping with the situation.’”
(My daughter loves that last expression; because she really does have an Uncle Bob.)
= = = = = = = = = =
Political Correctness be hanged! Merry Christmas to y’all, too! And a Happy New Year!
Thursday, December 23, 2004
Thursday, December 16, 2004
Follow-ups and mail
With reference to a recent update where I ventured a suggestion that Julia Roberts had perhaps intended to associate her male newborn twin (Phinnaeus) with the hero of “Around the World in Eighty Days”, friend and “Tonstant Weader” pointed out to me that Verne’s 115,200-minute circumnavigator was actually named Phileas and not, as I had said, Phineas.
Let’s see: Google “Phineas Fogg”: 5,090 hits, including an early one just begging to be further explored: Rear Admiral Phineas Fogg-Bottom;
Google “Phileas Fogg”: 88,400 hits
I sit corrected. (And thank you, TW).
All of which of course makes Julia’s selection of “Phinnaeus” as Hazel’s twin even more perplexing, with no populist link whatsoever except for the wave of imitators now lying in maternity wards all across the length and breadth of Fayetteville, Arkansas, presently delivering new Phinnaeusses (Phinnaei?) into the world. All will be duly sent forward about two decades’ hence to seek their fame and fortune but, alas, will find only offers of therapy when they fail to cope with the outright laughter that greets their cheery, “Hey y’all, my name’s Phinnaeus. What’s yours?” in the world beyond their gravelled driveways.
- - - - - -
And in my previous note about the collective noun used to name a group of strip club owners, I had proposed borrowing from the geese, “gaggle”, with a strong emphasis on the first syllable. Well, I think friend Ian has me beat with a recent message in which he suggested, “the collective noun appropriate to strip club owners is a ’pornucopia’.”
Perfect, that.
2. CIDA and Christmas Update
Recalling a recent rail of mine about the absence of a Christian cross from a Christmas advertisement that included the symbols of Judaism and Islam, I went an extra step and politely conveyed that concern to the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). Just recently, I received this most satisfying and equally polite response:
“Thank you for your note expressing your view about the poster announcing the Holiday Season Reception for CIDA employees.
We appreciate your concern about the fact that Christmas was not represented by a cross on the poster.
We are pleased to inform you that the poster was modified, in response to your e-mail, and a cross was added to the design on Tuesday, December 7.
We thank you for bringing this matter to our attention and we wish you a very merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.”
Well right back atcha, CIDA!
- 0 -
Did this headline and sub-headline even need an article after it? (From The Globe and Mail online edition December 15.)
Headline: “Trendy party-goers quaff date-rape drug”
Sub-headline: “Upside: No hangover and no calories. Downside: 'You can pass out and die' ”
Oooooo-kay. But I do find it interesting that a new synonym for “unimaginably stupid” appears to be “trendy”.
- 0 -
And even more from the home mailbox.
Here is the sum total of a message I received recently, printed on a thin postcard from the Columbia School of Journalism, home of CJR (The Columbia Journalism Review, a really fine bi-monthly* review of the process of news coverage, especially its abuses):
“WE ARE SORRY THAT YOU HAVE DECIDED NOT TO CONTINUE YOUR SUBSCRIPTION TO COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW MAGAZINE. BECAUSE LABELS ARE PRINTED IN ADVANCE, ONE OR MORE COPIES MAY HAVE BEEN MAILED. ANY ISSUES YOU HAVE RECEIVED ARE YOURS TO KEEP. CUSTOMER SERVICE.”
There’s a bit of a story here. I really enjoy reading the CJR and, last Spring, sent them an International Money Order (IMO) for a two-year subscription. After receiving one issue, the very next piece of mail I got was a demand for payment, or my subscription – I was told – would be cancelled. (Since they could only have got my address from the same letter that included my payment in full, I ignored it.) On and off over the past year, I have received, I think, a grand total of about three issues (of what should have been six), plus an equal number of demands for payment.
So I sent them a letter recently telling them thanks but no thanks and suggesting they might want to clean up their mailing / subscriber list handling procedures. Which earned me the above postcard.
I actually had a thoroughly good laugh over this, because “Customer Service” is obviously the dregs of an entire marketing team. In fact, in the bowels of the Columbia University Administration Building, there probably is a whole roomful of “Customer Service” people who are exactly like Douglas Adams’s telephone sanitizers and PR consultants, and who were assigned to the University’s customer service staff simply because Humankind doesn’t yet have the technology to bundle them all up and shoot them off, en masse, one-way into deep space.
I can just imagine the long discussions over what to say to subscribers whose frustration finally triggers cancellation: “Let’s see… Oh I know, let’s appeal to the environmentalist in them – are you a tree hugger? Well we’ve already massacred a hectare of old growth spruce just to print the mailing labels only for you, yes YOU! And just to be on the safe side, let’s also be altruistic: Hey, if we managed to accidentally send you an issue, then you may be surprised to hear that even though the present US administration views objective news analysis on par with a toxic nerve agent released into a city’s water supply, we are not, in fact, going to send Homelands Security Forces up your way to beat you about the head and shoulders until you excavate it from your pile of Inbox paper and return it to us. What’s that you say? YOU’VE ALREADY READ IT??!!!” (*** whack *** whack *** whack ***)
* I can’t remember how many times I’ve had the “Does ‘bi-(time)’ mean twice every (time) or every second (time)?” discussion. I swear it’s what led the English to invent the word “fortnightly” simply to avoid any confusion that “bi-weekly” could possibly mean “every second week”. But according to most dictionaries, that’s exactly what it means. A bi-weekly event, most assert, means twice per month.
Clarity wasn’t helped at all when the US loudly celebrated its “Bicentennial” in 1976 at the 200-year mark (no doubt at parties crowded with 50-year old bicentenarians).
And should you want to get all etymological about it, the confusion is only magnified. After all, doesn’t the “bi” prefix customarily mean “half” or “halve”, as in “bisect” and “bifurcate”? And of course having access to many dictionaries (reflecting the old saying: “A man with one watch always knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure.”) doesn’t help at all, because definitions of “bi” can be found identifying it BOTH as “a prefix meaning two” and “a prefix meaning ‘twice in’ ”. (If you want to drive people crazy, take the view that by defining a process of equal division, “bi” really means you are creating twice the original number of things you started with and thus, the prefix means to double something, rather than halve it.)
I’ve also worked where it was a rule to use “biannual” when you meant “every six months” – which some people contend should vanish entirely and be replaced with the unambiguous “semi-annual” – and “biennial” when you meant every second year.
So to remove all doubt, CJR is actually published every second month, which I guess means I shouldn’t have used “bi-monthly” because by my own logic (?) that means semi-monthly or… fortnightly.
But I digress. Big time.
- 0 -
And my nomination for this week’s Painfully Worded Award comes from my very own Government of Canada department’s Employee Update (and I quote):
“Private room now available for new mothers
Female employees who have recently came back from maternity leave may occasionally need private space at work in order to continue to provide their baby with their milk.”
Eesh! So I guess “nurse” now joins the list of words that “have recently came” to be politically incorrect?
- 0 -
The wisdom of the woodcutter
Often in children’s stories and Old World folk tales, a small but significant part will be played by a wise woodcutter whose sage and timely advice re-directs the hero or heroine back onto the path from which he or she had strayed, thus avoiding a fall under the spell of a geriatric crone or becoming lunch for a hungry wolf.
All I can say is that such a character could not possibly have been inspired by the tree cutters who work for the City of Ottawa.
On a recent walk into work, I happened to pass an enormous boom truck from which a City of Ottawa tree cutter had just emerged. (These big orange trucks, often pulling a wood-chipper trailer whose howling grinders reduce some pretty large tree branches to mulch in mere seconds, are staples on Ottawa’s streets. They are adorned with the company’s name, Asplundh, an especially ugly word that always looks to me like the sound you’d expect a large, flat rock to make when you drop it into a pond from about ten feet up, but I digress.) At the same time a co-commuter named Brian had just come down his driveway and, before we headed off to the bus stop, he stopped to chat with the worker.
The tree cutter had arrived to “thin” a tree on property belonging to one of Brian’s neighbours. It is an enormous old tree and its branches were still heavily laden with last week’s snowfall. Apparently some of them were at considerable risk of snapping off and falling onto the street – or worse, onto a passing pedestrian’s skull. Brian pointed to a massive tree on his own property, also close to the street, and asked the cutter if he would perform the same surgery on his tree.
“Did you phone it in?” asked the worker. “No,” replied Brian. “You gotta phone it in,” persisted the worker. “So’s I get a job sheet that tells me I gotta do the work.” Then, looking back at the tree whose “thinning” was on today’s job sheet, he determined the time was right to launch into his own sage and timely advice.
“Yep, y’know, you really gotta look after a tree. You can’t just plant it and forget it. I mean, well… it’s like a tree is like your girlfriend, or your wife. She goes off to the beauty parlour… what? Once a month or so? Spends about $50 on herself? Looks after herself? Well a tree is the same way. You gotta look after it.”
At this point, Brian patted his pocket and announced, “Whoops, forgot my bus pass,” and speedily headed right back up his driveway towards his front door. I also managed to grab the cue and said, “OK, well thanks for taking care of our trees,” to the City tree cutter and urban arboreal philosopher before heading off to the bus stop, from which point I pondered the miracle of how trees ever managed to grow at all for all those hundreds of thousands of years before City of Ottawa tree cutters came along to hack off and mulch countless numbers of their branches.
“No problem,” he had replied to my parting thanks.
Maybe. Maybe not.
- 0 -
Finally – a winter snapshot
It is early morning and I am on my way to work. It is overcast and a light snow is falling. I am walking across a large space of white. It’s a parking lot (I live in an urban landscape and, in it, there are many) but on this morning I am the first one to cross it. The previous night’s snowfall has only added about four inches of new snow, and it’s still that fluffy consistency that barely slows each step of what I call my “tank boots” – heavy lace-up Sorels with a thick hardened sole and deep tread that puts a well-insulated barrier between my feet and the weather on even the coldest days and in which I feel I can tramp anywhere.
I reach the mid-point of the parking lot and, for a few brief seconds, experience a throwback to a childhood memory of open country winter hikes that I took as a young boy scout. It’s a sensation that combines the intellectual knowledge that you are walking – because your feet are doing that walking thing – with a distinct mental disconnect from the process, because you have absolutely no reference points immediately close to hand to indicate you are moving forward at your usual pace. I’m walking – I think – but for a few seconds, I don’t seem to be getting anywhere at all. Just me, churning along on my minuscule patch of the face of the globe.
Then suddenly I’m at the edge of the parking lot. And I do what kids do – I stop, turn around and look back at the trail I’ve made. It’s straight, but not perfectly straight. The path reveals that my feet, like my mind, obviously meandered occasionally and carried me just slightly off course. And maybe the minor physical deviations occurred at the same time as the mental ones.
That momentary disengagement from all the typical sensations of walking is something utterly unique to winter. Even stumbling ahead in the pitch black of a dark night doesn’t compare, because your steps then are infinitely more cautious. On a pristine white winter surface, your steps are solid and certain, perhaps even a little more vigorous than usual as your brain drives you toward a place where it can recover the points of reference it needs in order to know “normal” again.
But for a few fleeting seconds, rather than moving ahead, I am on God’s treadmill – spatially stationary, and pushing the entire planet Earth behind me with each step.
With reference to a recent update where I ventured a suggestion that Julia Roberts had perhaps intended to associate her male newborn twin (Phinnaeus) with the hero of “Around the World in Eighty Days”, friend and “Tonstant Weader” pointed out to me that Verne’s 115,200-minute circumnavigator was actually named Phileas and not, as I had said, Phineas.
Let’s see: Google “Phineas Fogg”: 5,090 hits, including an early one just begging to be further explored: Rear Admiral Phineas Fogg-Bottom;
Google “Phileas Fogg”: 88,400 hits
I sit corrected. (And thank you, TW).
All of which of course makes Julia’s selection of “Phinnaeus” as Hazel’s twin even more perplexing, with no populist link whatsoever except for the wave of imitators now lying in maternity wards all across the length and breadth of Fayetteville, Arkansas, presently delivering new Phinnaeusses (Phinnaei?) into the world. All will be duly sent forward about two decades’ hence to seek their fame and fortune but, alas, will find only offers of therapy when they fail to cope with the outright laughter that greets their cheery, “Hey y’all, my name’s Phinnaeus. What’s yours?” in the world beyond their gravelled driveways.
- - - - - -
And in my previous note about the collective noun used to name a group of strip club owners, I had proposed borrowing from the geese, “gaggle”, with a strong emphasis on the first syllable. Well, I think friend Ian has me beat with a recent message in which he suggested, “the collective noun appropriate to strip club owners is a ’pornucopia’.”
Perfect, that.
2. CIDA and Christmas Update
Recalling a recent rail of mine about the absence of a Christian cross from a Christmas advertisement that included the symbols of Judaism and Islam, I went an extra step and politely conveyed that concern to the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). Just recently, I received this most satisfying and equally polite response:
“Thank you for your note expressing your view about the poster announcing the Holiday Season Reception for CIDA employees.
We appreciate your concern about the fact that Christmas was not represented by a cross on the poster.
We are pleased to inform you that the poster was modified, in response to your e-mail, and a cross was added to the design on Tuesday, December 7.
We thank you for bringing this matter to our attention and we wish you a very merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.”
Well right back atcha, CIDA!
- 0 -
Did this headline and sub-headline even need an article after it? (From The Globe and Mail online edition December 15.)
Headline: “Trendy party-goers quaff date-rape drug”
Sub-headline: “Upside: No hangover and no calories. Downside: 'You can pass out and die' ”
Oooooo-kay. But I do find it interesting that a new synonym for “unimaginably stupid” appears to be “trendy”.
- 0 -
And even more from the home mailbox.
Here is the sum total of a message I received recently, printed on a thin postcard from the Columbia School of Journalism, home of CJR (The Columbia Journalism Review, a really fine bi-monthly* review of the process of news coverage, especially its abuses):
“WE ARE SORRY THAT YOU HAVE DECIDED NOT TO CONTINUE YOUR SUBSCRIPTION TO COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW MAGAZINE. BECAUSE LABELS ARE PRINTED IN ADVANCE, ONE OR MORE COPIES MAY HAVE BEEN MAILED. ANY ISSUES YOU HAVE RECEIVED ARE YOURS TO KEEP. CUSTOMER SERVICE.”
There’s a bit of a story here. I really enjoy reading the CJR and, last Spring, sent them an International Money Order (IMO) for a two-year subscription. After receiving one issue, the very next piece of mail I got was a demand for payment, or my subscription – I was told – would be cancelled. (Since they could only have got my address from the same letter that included my payment in full, I ignored it.) On and off over the past year, I have received, I think, a grand total of about three issues (of what should have been six), plus an equal number of demands for payment.
So I sent them a letter recently telling them thanks but no thanks and suggesting they might want to clean up their mailing / subscriber list handling procedures. Which earned me the above postcard.
I actually had a thoroughly good laugh over this, because “Customer Service” is obviously the dregs of an entire marketing team. In fact, in the bowels of the Columbia University Administration Building, there probably is a whole roomful of “Customer Service” people who are exactly like Douglas Adams’s telephone sanitizers and PR consultants, and who were assigned to the University’s customer service staff simply because Humankind doesn’t yet have the technology to bundle them all up and shoot them off, en masse, one-way into deep space.
I can just imagine the long discussions over what to say to subscribers whose frustration finally triggers cancellation: “Let’s see… Oh I know, let’s appeal to the environmentalist in them – are you a tree hugger? Well we’ve already massacred a hectare of old growth spruce just to print the mailing labels only for you, yes YOU! And just to be on the safe side, let’s also be altruistic: Hey, if we managed to accidentally send you an issue, then you may be surprised to hear that even though the present US administration views objective news analysis on par with a toxic nerve agent released into a city’s water supply, we are not, in fact, going to send Homelands Security Forces up your way to beat you about the head and shoulders until you excavate it from your pile of Inbox paper and return it to us. What’s that you say? YOU’VE ALREADY READ IT??!!!” (*** whack *** whack *** whack ***)
* I can’t remember how many times I’ve had the “Does ‘bi-(time)’ mean twice every (time) or every second (time)?” discussion. I swear it’s what led the English to invent the word “fortnightly” simply to avoid any confusion that “bi-weekly” could possibly mean “every second week”. But according to most dictionaries, that’s exactly what it means. A bi-weekly event, most assert, means twice per month.
Clarity wasn’t helped at all when the US loudly celebrated its “Bicentennial” in 1976 at the 200-year mark (no doubt at parties crowded with 50-year old bicentenarians).
And should you want to get all etymological about it, the confusion is only magnified. After all, doesn’t the “bi” prefix customarily mean “half” or “halve”, as in “bisect” and “bifurcate”? And of course having access to many dictionaries (reflecting the old saying: “A man with one watch always knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure.”) doesn’t help at all, because definitions of “bi” can be found identifying it BOTH as “a prefix meaning two” and “a prefix meaning ‘twice in’ ”. (If you want to drive people crazy, take the view that by defining a process of equal division, “bi” really means you are creating twice the original number of things you started with and thus, the prefix means to double something, rather than halve it.)
I’ve also worked where it was a rule to use “biannual” when you meant “every six months” – which some people contend should vanish entirely and be replaced with the unambiguous “semi-annual” – and “biennial” when you meant every second year.
So to remove all doubt, CJR is actually published every second month, which I guess means I shouldn’t have used “bi-monthly” because by my own logic (?) that means semi-monthly or… fortnightly.
But I digress. Big time.
- 0 -
And my nomination for this week’s Painfully Worded Award comes from my very own Government of Canada department’s Employee Update (and I quote):
“Private room now available for new mothers
Female employees who have recently came back from maternity leave may occasionally need private space at work in order to continue to provide their baby with their milk.”
Eesh! So I guess “nurse” now joins the list of words that “have recently came” to be politically incorrect?
- 0 -
The wisdom of the woodcutter
Often in children’s stories and Old World folk tales, a small but significant part will be played by a wise woodcutter whose sage and timely advice re-directs the hero or heroine back onto the path from which he or she had strayed, thus avoiding a fall under the spell of a geriatric crone or becoming lunch for a hungry wolf.
All I can say is that such a character could not possibly have been inspired by the tree cutters who work for the City of Ottawa.
On a recent walk into work, I happened to pass an enormous boom truck from which a City of Ottawa tree cutter had just emerged. (These big orange trucks, often pulling a wood-chipper trailer whose howling grinders reduce some pretty large tree branches to mulch in mere seconds, are staples on Ottawa’s streets. They are adorned with the company’s name, Asplundh, an especially ugly word that always looks to me like the sound you’d expect a large, flat rock to make when you drop it into a pond from about ten feet up, but I digress.) At the same time a co-commuter named Brian had just come down his driveway and, before we headed off to the bus stop, he stopped to chat with the worker.
The tree cutter had arrived to “thin” a tree on property belonging to one of Brian’s neighbours. It is an enormous old tree and its branches were still heavily laden with last week’s snowfall. Apparently some of them were at considerable risk of snapping off and falling onto the street – or worse, onto a passing pedestrian’s skull. Brian pointed to a massive tree on his own property, also close to the street, and asked the cutter if he would perform the same surgery on his tree.
“Did you phone it in?” asked the worker. “No,” replied Brian. “You gotta phone it in,” persisted the worker. “So’s I get a job sheet that tells me I gotta do the work.” Then, looking back at the tree whose “thinning” was on today’s job sheet, he determined the time was right to launch into his own sage and timely advice.
“Yep, y’know, you really gotta look after a tree. You can’t just plant it and forget it. I mean, well… it’s like a tree is like your girlfriend, or your wife. She goes off to the beauty parlour… what? Once a month or so? Spends about $50 on herself? Looks after herself? Well a tree is the same way. You gotta look after it.”
At this point, Brian patted his pocket and announced, “Whoops, forgot my bus pass,” and speedily headed right back up his driveway towards his front door. I also managed to grab the cue and said, “OK, well thanks for taking care of our trees,” to the City tree cutter and urban arboreal philosopher before heading off to the bus stop, from which point I pondered the miracle of how trees ever managed to grow at all for all those hundreds of thousands of years before City of Ottawa tree cutters came along to hack off and mulch countless numbers of their branches.
“No problem,” he had replied to my parting thanks.
Maybe. Maybe not.
- 0 -
Finally – a winter snapshot
It is early morning and I am on my way to work. It is overcast and a light snow is falling. I am walking across a large space of white. It’s a parking lot (I live in an urban landscape and, in it, there are many) but on this morning I am the first one to cross it. The previous night’s snowfall has only added about four inches of new snow, and it’s still that fluffy consistency that barely slows each step of what I call my “tank boots” – heavy lace-up Sorels with a thick hardened sole and deep tread that puts a well-insulated barrier between my feet and the weather on even the coldest days and in which I feel I can tramp anywhere.
I reach the mid-point of the parking lot and, for a few brief seconds, experience a throwback to a childhood memory of open country winter hikes that I took as a young boy scout. It’s a sensation that combines the intellectual knowledge that you are walking – because your feet are doing that walking thing – with a distinct mental disconnect from the process, because you have absolutely no reference points immediately close to hand to indicate you are moving forward at your usual pace. I’m walking – I think – but for a few seconds, I don’t seem to be getting anywhere at all. Just me, churning along on my minuscule patch of the face of the globe.
Then suddenly I’m at the edge of the parking lot. And I do what kids do – I stop, turn around and look back at the trail I’ve made. It’s straight, but not perfectly straight. The path reveals that my feet, like my mind, obviously meandered occasionally and carried me just slightly off course. And maybe the minor physical deviations occurred at the same time as the mental ones.
That momentary disengagement from all the typical sensations of walking is something utterly unique to winter. Even stumbling ahead in the pitch black of a dark night doesn’t compare, because your steps then are infinitely more cautious. On a pristine white winter surface, your steps are solid and certain, perhaps even a little more vigorous than usual as your brain drives you toward a place where it can recover the points of reference it needs in order to know “normal” again.
But for a few fleeting seconds, rather than moving ahead, I am on God’s treadmill – spatially stationary, and pushing the entire planet Earth behind me with each step.
Friday, December 10, 2004
I’m here to tell you today that indeed it is possible for a red-blooded, near-geriatric member of the male gender to exclaim, loudly, “If I have to spend another minute with these damned exotic dancers, I’m going to SCREAM!”
Let me explain (Grab a coffee, or maybe a stiff… sorry, make that a strong drink; It’s a long story.):
In Canada, “exotic dancer” is a euphemism for “stripper”.
And in Canada, several years ago some bright-eyed bureaucrat actually appears to have listened to a strip club owner, or perhaps a whole group of them (I wonder what collective noun you would use to classify a group of strip club owners… “Gaggle” would be perfect. Emphasis on the first syllable. Unfortunately, it’s already taken by the geese, but I digress.) who complained they were suffering from a shortage of native-born young women willing to work in their clubs as “exotic dancers”. They (the gaggle, that is) petitioned the government and argued that they therefore should be permitted to import foreign young women to fill this “labour shortage”.
And the overseeing Canadian government department (that’d be the department tasked with “skills development” and is responsible for approving temporary foreign workers to fill government-certified labour shortages) agreed and thus approved a blanket exemption for these women. In other words, now if you were a foreigner applying for temporary work in Canada as a stripper, because of the officially sanctioned “labour shortage” you didn’t have to submit yourself to the regular admissions process, which can take up to four years for all those useless non-shortage professions like doctor, architect, engineer, university professor… etc.
So now shift gears.
Part two of the story occurs in the Canadian government department tasked with approving people who wish to immigrate into Canada. It turns out that their Minister issued a “special minister’s visa” to a would-be foreign stripper and it further happens that this young lady – from Romania – worked in the campaign office to help get this Minister elected in the most recent Canadian election.
Sniff, sniff, went the reporters. (That’s the “sniff” of smelling something rotten, not crying.) And there’s nothing the Canadian media love more than a scandal that marries an alleged abuse of a privileged office with sex. (Wait, in that previous sentence – come to think of it – delete the word “Canadian”.)
And at this point, because my business card says I am a “media analyst” (or at least it would, if I actually had a business card), Parts 1 and 2 of this story combine, and were catapulted onto my desk as part of my job. In short order, I was “analyzing” news stories filled with references to things like supposedly professional elected opposition Members of Parliament accusing the government of “pimping for the sex trade” in Canada; happily using electronic news soundbite-assured terms like “strippergate” and “peelergate” (Thanks a lot for “…gate”, Mr Nixon!)
And among all the dreck, I would scan an occasionally heartbreaking plea from someone to the government that, in its sudden interest in the “sex trade”, please not to lose sight of the fact that girls as young as 12 are frequently kidnapped in third world countries, often to wind up in places like the back rooms of many of these clubs – and even in Canada, according to one especially disturbing police citation referenced in one of the articles I read.
But even more (for me) headshaking is the government’s rationale for approving stripper (whoops, “exotic dancer”) as a legitimate labour shortage category. It seems that in fact there are lots of Canadian young women willing to – literally – dance exotically. But the reason there is a shortage is because there are widely rumoured acts that dancers occasionally are required to perform in the remote and shadowy recesses of these strip clubs that Canadian dancers won’t do – but that foreigners, so desperate are they to get out of their often horridly abusive environments at home, will agree to do.
For some reason, the huge majority of such women last year were Romanian emigrées. (Insert “Pole” joke here. And yes, jokes about assigning them to the Toronto suburban location of “Peel Region” have also already been done. “Blanket exemption”? Best not even to go there.)
And officials in the ever-accommodating Canadian government of the day, rather than recoiling in shock at what they were being asked to sanction as a legitimate “skills shortage” – in fact some of whom were rumoured to have been dispatched to the… uh… well, the… uh… ladies’ “job sites” to assess the nature of the exotic dancer “skills” in question – said, “OK, you’ve made your case. Classification approved. Keep on havin’ fun, girls!”
In fact, here’s the whole story as it appeared in The Washington Post’s Foreign Desk, of all places, on December 5. In three brief lead paragraphs are the story’s key facts and all of its essential to-get-you-to-watch imagery. (Heck, I don’t even know why I bothered writing out my long-winded explanation.):
= = = = =
“TORONTO -- Coiled around a brass pole on a barroom stage, clad only in towering stiletto heels, a 31-year-old Romanian woman named Veronica is helping to fill what has suddenly become Canada's most talked-about shortage: a scarcity of strippers.
A government program to import hundreds of ‘exotic dancers,’ which was already controversial, took center stage recently when Canada's immigration minister, Judy Sgro, was found to have given preferential visa treatment to a nude dancer who did volunteer work in her re-election campaign for Parliament.
Critics say the program turns Canada into a pimp, while local employers assert it serves a legitimate business, and dancers from struggling countries say it's a way to better their lives.”
= = = = =
Thus is Canada positioned on the world’s stage these days.
Even acknowledging the understandable titillation factor of images of “exotic dancers” on the suppertime news every night (which should remove all doubts about what gender dominates news production executive suites), the print coverage makes for pretty depressing reading for the most part.
Not “depressing” so much because of the tone of the coverage, which frequently plays the story for its humour, but rather because the Opposition members in our House of Commons know all too well that the aforementioned sex-and-scandal loving media would sooner yield up their left ventricles than one single sentence of something they have deemed a “good story!”. Together, they effectively have brought the rest of government business to a screeching halt for a solid two weeks (at last count) with their equally screeching demands that the Minister of Immigration resign while the case goes before our newly minted and shiny “independent” Ethics Commissioner for review and, quite possibly, a finding that this Minister damned well should resign.
So far, my energetically volunteering to go out into the community to conduct further research (Putting the “feel” in “field trip”… keeping abreast of the topic, as it were… the story after all has legs… Man, if I had a nipple for every stripper story I’ve read in the past couple weeks – Boom badda BING! Kissssh!) has fallen on unsympathetic ears. And I guess it’s pretty obvious why!
Some weeks I really love my job. But occasionally, I go home at the end of a day of keyboarding long reports about ick like this and really wash my hands a lot. Guess what the past week has been? (No fair checking the claw marks in the few remaining slivers of Ivory in our bathroom soap dish at home.)
- 0 -
And in our “Maybe we should actually have hired someone a couple years ago…” file,
Recently I noticed that the Government of Canada public jobs site has advertised – with a closing date of December 14th 2004 – for a: Submarine Safety Planning Validation and Verification Engineer (Location: Victoria, BC / Salary: $66,156 to $78,868 per annum. A little deeper into the ad, they ask for, apparently without the faintest hint of irony, “Acceptable experience in Ship Safety Management procedure and in developing Safety Cases (preference will be given to those candidates with experience in Canadian Submarine Material Management and Certification process.)” As part of the job description, they add, “Performs aggregate risk analysis on all defects, deviations and concessions and recommends areas of system concern.”
I guess that adding “Acceptable experience – or its equivalent – preferred in the use of a fire extinguisher, because you’re going to need it!” and offering a return PO Box in Chicoutimi (HMCS Chicoutimi is the fire-damaged Canadian submarine presently languishing in Scotland) would have been a little too over-the-top – or whatever the submariners’ version of trench warfare’s “over-the-top” is. “In-your-tubes”? “Up your scope?”
- 0 -
Here’s a typo laff (and yes, it’s a cheap one – but excusable perhaps because, after all, the transcribers in all likelihood are Republicans)
From The Washington Post’s White House Briefing column, December 3:
“The first transcript of Bush's remarks at the Pageant of Peace came over with this phrase: ‘We think of the patient hope of men and women across the centuries who listened to the words of the profits and lived in joyful expectation.’ Nineteen minutes later, a new version went out with this note: ‘*CORRECTION: PROFITS has been changed to PROPHETS.’ ”
Echoes of “God and singers dressed in style.” (My child, at about age 3, in the full throes of mondegreening “God and sinners reconciled” from “Hark the Herald Angels Sing”. In our house, ever since, we’ve never sung it any differently.)
- 0 -
And finally, I just put a CD of music from “The Lord of the Rings” on, and for the first time in my life in my computer’s CD drive. Usually I put it on my not-too-far-adjacent CD player, but it’s late and I wanted to use the headset and my headset’s wires don’t need nearly the stretch to connect to the computer as they do to reach the CD player. And what popped up was not the music I was expecting, but rather a lovely little onscreen image showing the film’s main characters and Arwen’s lips, accompanied by a background vocal by eerie songstress Enya, and a cheery little balloon labelled “For bonus features, click HERE!”. So I clicked “HERE!” and was promptly told by my computer that it doesn’t have what it needs to read that part of the disk.
My system is old by computer standards, paleolithic even. It’s still being driven in fact by Windows ’98. Most software, even now, still has all its elements written to be read by Windows ’98, but every once in a while I get something like this. It’s like receiving a visitor from the future urging me to get with the program.
And there was no option to bypass the images and simply hear the music on the CD! Gnrrrrgh! So I tried it again; got the same result. Sigh. It’s late; I just wanted to hear the gorgeous and gentle “Many Partings”.
Damn the new millennium’s multi-media convergence anyway!
Ah to heck with it. Put on the quietly dark CD “Road to Hell”, by Chris Rea instead.
…
“I come home from work.
I see my little girl;
She's crying on the floor.
She's been watching that TV.
This ain't late no, this ain't even dinnertime;
To show them things on that screen…
What's wrong with you?
You must be evil!
Oh I know why you do it;
You're just looking for sensation;
You got a hold of something.
You tell us that it's news.
You don't have to show that stuff.
Can't you show us some respect?
You can tell us we don't need to see it.
We don't need those cheap effects.
You must be evil!
You must be evil!
I wish you were here.
You don't have to show that stuff;
You ain't fooling no-one.
You made my little girl cry.
I wish you were here.
We all know why you do it.
Sometimes you even slow it down.
You're giving out some bad ideas here.
I can't believe that you don't realise
You must be evil!”
…
Goodnight Moon.
Let me explain (Grab a coffee, or maybe a stiff… sorry, make that a strong drink; It’s a long story.):
In Canada, “exotic dancer” is a euphemism for “stripper”.
And in Canada, several years ago some bright-eyed bureaucrat actually appears to have listened to a strip club owner, or perhaps a whole group of them (I wonder what collective noun you would use to classify a group of strip club owners… “Gaggle” would be perfect. Emphasis on the first syllable. Unfortunately, it’s already taken by the geese, but I digress.) who complained they were suffering from a shortage of native-born young women willing to work in their clubs as “exotic dancers”. They (the gaggle, that is) petitioned the government and argued that they therefore should be permitted to import foreign young women to fill this “labour shortage”.
And the overseeing Canadian government department (that’d be the department tasked with “skills development” and is responsible for approving temporary foreign workers to fill government-certified labour shortages) agreed and thus approved a blanket exemption for these women. In other words, now if you were a foreigner applying for temporary work in Canada as a stripper, because of the officially sanctioned “labour shortage” you didn’t have to submit yourself to the regular admissions process, which can take up to four years for all those useless non-shortage professions like doctor, architect, engineer, university professor… etc.
So now shift gears.
Part two of the story occurs in the Canadian government department tasked with approving people who wish to immigrate into Canada. It turns out that their Minister issued a “special minister’s visa” to a would-be foreign stripper and it further happens that this young lady – from Romania – worked in the campaign office to help get this Minister elected in the most recent Canadian election.
Sniff, sniff, went the reporters. (That’s the “sniff” of smelling something rotten, not crying.) And there’s nothing the Canadian media love more than a scandal that marries an alleged abuse of a privileged office with sex. (Wait, in that previous sentence – come to think of it – delete the word “Canadian”.)
And at this point, because my business card says I am a “media analyst” (or at least it would, if I actually had a business card), Parts 1 and 2 of this story combine, and were catapulted onto my desk as part of my job. In short order, I was “analyzing” news stories filled with references to things like supposedly professional elected opposition Members of Parliament accusing the government of “pimping for the sex trade” in Canada; happily using electronic news soundbite-assured terms like “strippergate” and “peelergate” (Thanks a lot for “…gate”, Mr Nixon!)
And among all the dreck, I would scan an occasionally heartbreaking plea from someone to the government that, in its sudden interest in the “sex trade”, please not to lose sight of the fact that girls as young as 12 are frequently kidnapped in third world countries, often to wind up in places like the back rooms of many of these clubs – and even in Canada, according to one especially disturbing police citation referenced in one of the articles I read.
But even more (for me) headshaking is the government’s rationale for approving stripper (whoops, “exotic dancer”) as a legitimate labour shortage category. It seems that in fact there are lots of Canadian young women willing to – literally – dance exotically. But the reason there is a shortage is because there are widely rumoured acts that dancers occasionally are required to perform in the remote and shadowy recesses of these strip clubs that Canadian dancers won’t do – but that foreigners, so desperate are they to get out of their often horridly abusive environments at home, will agree to do.
For some reason, the huge majority of such women last year were Romanian emigrées. (Insert “Pole” joke here. And yes, jokes about assigning them to the Toronto suburban location of “Peel Region” have also already been done. “Blanket exemption”? Best not even to go there.)
And officials in the ever-accommodating Canadian government of the day, rather than recoiling in shock at what they were being asked to sanction as a legitimate “skills shortage” – in fact some of whom were rumoured to have been dispatched to the… uh… well, the… uh… ladies’ “job sites” to assess the nature of the exotic dancer “skills” in question – said, “OK, you’ve made your case. Classification approved. Keep on havin’ fun, girls!”
In fact, here’s the whole story as it appeared in The Washington Post’s Foreign Desk, of all places, on December 5. In three brief lead paragraphs are the story’s key facts and all of its essential to-get-you-to-watch imagery. (Heck, I don’t even know why I bothered writing out my long-winded explanation.):
= = = = =
“TORONTO -- Coiled around a brass pole on a barroom stage, clad only in towering stiletto heels, a 31-year-old Romanian woman named Veronica is helping to fill what has suddenly become Canada's most talked-about shortage: a scarcity of strippers.
A government program to import hundreds of ‘exotic dancers,’ which was already controversial, took center stage recently when Canada's immigration minister, Judy Sgro, was found to have given preferential visa treatment to a nude dancer who did volunteer work in her re-election campaign for Parliament.
Critics say the program turns Canada into a pimp, while local employers assert it serves a legitimate business, and dancers from struggling countries say it's a way to better their lives.”
= = = = =
Thus is Canada positioned on the world’s stage these days.
Even acknowledging the understandable titillation factor of images of “exotic dancers” on the suppertime news every night (which should remove all doubts about what gender dominates news production executive suites), the print coverage makes for pretty depressing reading for the most part.
Not “depressing” so much because of the tone of the coverage, which frequently plays the story for its humour, but rather because the Opposition members in our House of Commons know all too well that the aforementioned sex-and-scandal loving media would sooner yield up their left ventricles than one single sentence of something they have deemed a “good story!”. Together, they effectively have brought the rest of government business to a screeching halt for a solid two weeks (at last count) with their equally screeching demands that the Minister of Immigration resign while the case goes before our newly minted and shiny “independent” Ethics Commissioner for review and, quite possibly, a finding that this Minister damned well should resign.
So far, my energetically volunteering to go out into the community to conduct further research (Putting the “feel” in “field trip”… keeping abreast of the topic, as it were… the story after all has legs… Man, if I had a nipple for every stripper story I’ve read in the past couple weeks – Boom badda BING! Kissssh!) has fallen on unsympathetic ears. And I guess it’s pretty obvious why!
Some weeks I really love my job. But occasionally, I go home at the end of a day of keyboarding long reports about ick like this and really wash my hands a lot. Guess what the past week has been? (No fair checking the claw marks in the few remaining slivers of Ivory in our bathroom soap dish at home.)
- 0 -
And in our “Maybe we should actually have hired someone a couple years ago…” file,
Recently I noticed that the Government of Canada public jobs site has advertised – with a closing date of December 14th 2004 – for a: Submarine Safety Planning Validation and Verification Engineer (Location: Victoria, BC / Salary: $66,156 to $78,868 per annum. A little deeper into the ad, they ask for, apparently without the faintest hint of irony, “Acceptable experience in Ship Safety Management procedure and in developing Safety Cases (preference will be given to those candidates with experience in Canadian Submarine Material Management and Certification process.)” As part of the job description, they add, “Performs aggregate risk analysis on all defects, deviations and concessions and recommends areas of system concern.”
I guess that adding “Acceptable experience – or its equivalent – preferred in the use of a fire extinguisher, because you’re going to need it!” and offering a return PO Box in Chicoutimi (HMCS Chicoutimi is the fire-damaged Canadian submarine presently languishing in Scotland) would have been a little too over-the-top – or whatever the submariners’ version of trench warfare’s “over-the-top” is. “In-your-tubes”? “Up your scope?”
- 0 -
Here’s a typo laff (and yes, it’s a cheap one – but excusable perhaps because, after all, the transcribers in all likelihood are Republicans)
From The Washington Post’s White House Briefing column, December 3:
“The first transcript of Bush's remarks at the Pageant of Peace came over with this phrase: ‘We think of the patient hope of men and women across the centuries who listened to the words of the profits and lived in joyful expectation.’ Nineteen minutes later, a new version went out with this note: ‘*CORRECTION: PROFITS has been changed to PROPHETS.’ ”
Echoes of “God and singers dressed in style.” (My child, at about age 3, in the full throes of mondegreening “God and sinners reconciled” from “Hark the Herald Angels Sing”. In our house, ever since, we’ve never sung it any differently.)
- 0 -
And finally, I just put a CD of music from “The Lord of the Rings” on, and for the first time in my life in my computer’s CD drive. Usually I put it on my not-too-far-adjacent CD player, but it’s late and I wanted to use the headset and my headset’s wires don’t need nearly the stretch to connect to the computer as they do to reach the CD player. And what popped up was not the music I was expecting, but rather a lovely little onscreen image showing the film’s main characters and Arwen’s lips, accompanied by a background vocal by eerie songstress Enya, and a cheery little balloon labelled “For bonus features, click HERE!”. So I clicked “HERE!” and was promptly told by my computer that it doesn’t have what it needs to read that part of the disk.
My system is old by computer standards, paleolithic even. It’s still being driven in fact by Windows ’98. Most software, even now, still has all its elements written to be read by Windows ’98, but every once in a while I get something like this. It’s like receiving a visitor from the future urging me to get with the program.
And there was no option to bypass the images and simply hear the music on the CD! Gnrrrrgh! So I tried it again; got the same result. Sigh. It’s late; I just wanted to hear the gorgeous and gentle “Many Partings”.
Damn the new millennium’s multi-media convergence anyway!
Ah to heck with it. Put on the quietly dark CD “Road to Hell”, by Chris Rea instead.
…
“I come home from work.
I see my little girl;
She's crying on the floor.
She's been watching that TV.
This ain't late no, this ain't even dinnertime;
To show them things on that screen…
What's wrong with you?
You must be evil!
Oh I know why you do it;
You're just looking for sensation;
You got a hold of something.
You tell us that it's news.
You don't have to show that stuff.
Can't you show us some respect?
You can tell us we don't need to see it.
We don't need those cheap effects.
You must be evil!
You must be evil!
I wish you were here.
You don't have to show that stuff;
You ain't fooling no-one.
You made my little girl cry.
I wish you were here.
We all know why you do it.
Sometimes you even slow it down.
You're giving out some bad ideas here.
I can't believe that you don't realise
You must be evil!”
…
Goodnight Moon.
Wednesday, December 01, 2004
Sleep tight tonight; your billboard erasers are awake.
Recently, on the day that His Royal Bushness was scheduled to arrive in Ottawa for his whirlwind visit, in the process setting a new record for the least number of host nation citizens actually seen by a head of state on a visit to a foreign country, I happened to notice a vandalized billboard posted along my to-work commute. It was an ad for Telus mobile phones and its caption made reference to something like, “Solve your long distance blues”. An energetic protester, working with nothing more than a can of black spray paint and a modicum of imagination, had streaked out “long distance” and overwritten “DISSIDENT”. For good measure, he (or she) had also sprayed “Bush go home!” into the part of the photo that was the phone’s viewer window.
The very next morning, Telus had a brand new ad up on the billboard, and the blues-based dissident’s message was forever gone. That sort of suggested to me that Winston Smith (of George Orwell’s “1984”), part of whose job involved re-writing the past for the Ministry of Truth – if memory is not playing tricks on me – must be alive and well and refacing defaced billboards in Ottawa.
- 0 -
Oh GAWD!
For the record, almost none of the people I know are Julia Roberts fans. In fact, I suspect a few of them harbour deep suspicions that her present oral appearance owes much to the belief that, when she was a child, her parents avoided babysitting costs through the simple expedient of wetting her lips and sticking her to the wall. Sadly, the recent news of the names that she has chosen for her newborn twins will do nothing to augment any slight softening of opinion that Julia-dislikers might have felt in sympathy with her having had to deliver twins in the first place. “A boy named Phinnaeus Walter Moder and a girl named Hazel Patricia Moder…”
Do parents like this even give the remotest consideration to what they’re imposing on their children for the rest of their lives? “Hazel” at least is somewhat manageable, but sadly the only two populist references for that name are the old Shirley Booth TV show of the same name, and the equally old, but execrable, 1966 Tommy Roe song, “Hooray for Hazel”:
(CHORUS)
“Hooray for Hazel, she put me down
Hooray for Hazel, she made me her clown
Hooray for Hazel, she's up to her tricks
Hooray for Hazel, she's gettin' her kicks…”
But Phinnaeus. Phinnaeus?!! Never mind the fact that she almost ran the vowel line on “Wheel of Fortune” to find this name, she has forever saddled this poor guy with the necessity of (a) spelling, and (b) pronouncing his first name: FIN-ee-us? Fin-AY-us? And if anyone should ever remake the movie of Jules Verne’s global travel tale in an effort to redress the hideous wrong that the Jackie Chan version did to the story, you’re going to have a whole bunch of people thinking she named her son after Phineas “Around the World in 80 Days” Fogg!
Or… and I ain’ a-gonna touch this one with a four-foot tamping rod:
(From the internet site http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~lwh/drugs/chap02.htm )
“One of the most bizarre cases of accidental brain injury is that of Phinnaeus P. Gage, a railroad worker (See Bloom et al 1985 for a detailed account). In the Fall of 1848, Gage and his crew were blasting rock. The procedure involved drilling a hole in the rock, then stuffing the hole with alternate layers of packing material and black powder. The packing material was tamped into place with a long steel rod. In a moment of carelessness, Gage apparently tried to tamp the powder layer, and a spark ignited the powder. The resulting explosion transformed the tamping rod into a four-foot projectile which entered Gage's left cheek, passed through the top of his head, and landed several feet away (Fig 2.2).”
(Figure 2.2, for the information of the really curious, is a line drawing showing just how much of the unfortunate Mr Gage’s frontal lobe was ruined by the tamping rod’s rather abrupt passage through it.)
- 0 -
On the subject of the Internet (Didn’t know we were on the subject of the internet, did you?) my daughter recently gave me cause to discover a simple (for her, but truly astonishing for me) demonstration of just how far the world of information sharing has come in the not-so-many… really-not-so-many-at-all… dammit… years that have passed since I was in high school.
It was a Sunday afternoon and she had finally settled into accepting that the time between that in which she was living at the moment and the time when her completed homework assignment was due had now been reduced to a matter of hours, not days. Opening her backpack to extract the tool she needed – her copy of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” – she found to her horror that she’d left it at school on Friday afternoon. Her assignment, unfortunately, demanded that her commentary be buttressed by several quoted citations from the book, so simply relying on her memory of the story was not going to help her in this case.
The Ottawa Public Library branch closest to us was no help – it is closed on Sunday. (It says something about the flexibility in her thinking that this suggestion came first from her, not me. In the late 1960s, this combination of circumstances would have toasted me, although I might have telephone-canvassed a few classmates to ask if any of them had brought a copy of the book home.)
But this is late 2004 and, as you might suspect given the lead sentence to this item, the Internet provided not just quotes from “Animal Farm”, but the entire danged novel, and at one site it was followed – chapter by chapter – by interpretive notes on the entire danged novel!
After extracting a firm commitment from my daughter that she both understood and would not countenance plagiarism (although she told me the “pop-up” ads associated with this site were not so moral – they were almost all for places selling pre-written term papers), I left her in the happy (and relieved!) state of having a minimized version of the work itself ready to hand as she composed her short essay in another window.
I am not so cynical as to not be completely amazed by this discovery. But I suppose I shouldn’t be. Several months ago, I did find a complete online version of one of my favourite early-teenaged-years books – Booth Tarkington’s “Penrod”. And I have read of Project Gutenberg, whose goal is simply “to encourage the creation and distribution of e-Books”. But it’s breathtaking to see it beginning to work.
At last count, Project Gutenberg had some 13,000 titles available, and included 36 languages in its catalogue ( http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/ ). If you check it out, you’ll note the helpful provision of a weekly Top 100 list, if you are stuck about where to start browsing their virtual library.
(So what is the contemporary version of, “I’m sorry, Miss, but the dog ate my homework.”? No bonus groaner points for working “byte” into your answer.)
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And speaking of my daughter… she recently came home with a homework assignment that I confess brought me up rather short. (And yes, it really did prompt a burst of “Well in my day…” recollecting, which I think must be a neurally resident psychological program that is automatically triggered when the grey hair count on your head reaches a certain pre-set number.)
At school, her class is now in the midst of a series of sessions devoted to “The Birds and the Bees” and her homework assignment was to complete a questionnaire based on describing – the process, how easily it was accomplished, and how she was made to feel about it – going to the drugstore and purchasing a condom.
When I cocked my eyebrow while reading the questionnaire, my wife informed me that she had been talking to my daughter earlier about the assignment, and learned that the class session itself had involved learning the proper technique for actually… ahem… installing one of the devices on a banana.
My daughter is, so far, just one year into that phase of her life in which the suffix “teen” is appended to her age. And she is already learning, in (to me) cringe-inducing detail, the stuff of life way beyond the particulars of stamens and pistils and pollination that I was dutifully memorizing when I was her age.
In fact, now that I think of it, I recall being about 16 or 17 when our profoundly embarrassed gym teacher in the Perth and District Collegiate Institute, a no-necked bulldog of a man named Dick Salt, had to tell us about the differences in the “plumbing systems” – and that was the term he used – of males and females.
And it was only much later that I learned officially the particulars of employing the plumbing for purposes of procreation. (Unofficially, of course, a wild mixture of several good friends’ rumoured lore and Playboy’s airbrushed imagery secretly studied in the murky corners of the magazine rack at the smoke shop next to the Perth Restaurant had given me a vague sense of what went where. But confirmation and elucidation, in the form of high school Biology lessons, only came when I was in my late teens.)
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And finally, ‘tis the season to be PC to the point of idiocy. My work-related bank branch is located right next to the main floor elevator foyer of the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). Recently, while waiting in the cash machine line, I noticed a large easel-mounted sign advertising a general invitation to join them and “Celebrate the Season”.
So far, so good. Then I noticed the randomly added large “seasonal” garnishes around the face of sign – a gold-coloured menorah topped by a Star of David (for Judaism), a gold-coloured crescent and star symbol (for Islam) and… a Christmas tree with red lights on it… an angel… a few boxes with bows on them… some holly.
No cross though. No overt symbol of He who put the “Christ” in Christmas and whose birth ostensibly launched the “season” people celebrate in a few weeks. God forbid it should be acknowledged. (And I hasten to add I harbour no grudge over the inclusion of the symbols of Judaism and Islam, but I do have a problem with the exclusion of the principal symbol of Christianity when the other two symbols are there... especially in a promotional item for a Christmas event!)
CIDA, for heaven’s sake!
(From their website: “The purpose of Canada's Official Development Assistance is to support sustainable development in developing countries in order to reduce poverty and to contribute to a more secure, equitable and prosperous world.”)
OK guys, so if it really is an “equitable… world” you’re going for, how about either adding the cross, or losing the menorah and crescent, OK?
And have a festive Mithraic Lord’s Day.
Recently, on the day that His Royal Bushness was scheduled to arrive in Ottawa for his whirlwind visit, in the process setting a new record for the least number of host nation citizens actually seen by a head of state on a visit to a foreign country, I happened to notice a vandalized billboard posted along my to-work commute. It was an ad for Telus mobile phones and its caption made reference to something like, “Solve your long distance blues”. An energetic protester, working with nothing more than a can of black spray paint and a modicum of imagination, had streaked out “long distance” and overwritten “DISSIDENT”. For good measure, he (or she) had also sprayed “Bush go home!” into the part of the photo that was the phone’s viewer window.
The very next morning, Telus had a brand new ad up on the billboard, and the blues-based dissident’s message was forever gone. That sort of suggested to me that Winston Smith (of George Orwell’s “1984”), part of whose job involved re-writing the past for the Ministry of Truth – if memory is not playing tricks on me – must be alive and well and refacing defaced billboards in Ottawa.
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Oh GAWD!
For the record, almost none of the people I know are Julia Roberts fans. In fact, I suspect a few of them harbour deep suspicions that her present oral appearance owes much to the belief that, when she was a child, her parents avoided babysitting costs through the simple expedient of wetting her lips and sticking her to the wall. Sadly, the recent news of the names that she has chosen for her newborn twins will do nothing to augment any slight softening of opinion that Julia-dislikers might have felt in sympathy with her having had to deliver twins in the first place. “A boy named Phinnaeus Walter Moder and a girl named Hazel Patricia Moder…”
Do parents like this even give the remotest consideration to what they’re imposing on their children for the rest of their lives? “Hazel” at least is somewhat manageable, but sadly the only two populist references for that name are the old Shirley Booth TV show of the same name, and the equally old, but execrable, 1966 Tommy Roe song, “Hooray for Hazel”:
(CHORUS)
“Hooray for Hazel, she put me down
Hooray for Hazel, she made me her clown
Hooray for Hazel, she's up to her tricks
Hooray for Hazel, she's gettin' her kicks…”
But Phinnaeus. Phinnaeus?!! Never mind the fact that she almost ran the vowel line on “Wheel of Fortune” to find this name, she has forever saddled this poor guy with the necessity of (a) spelling, and (b) pronouncing his first name: FIN-ee-us? Fin-AY-us? And if anyone should ever remake the movie of Jules Verne’s global travel tale in an effort to redress the hideous wrong that the Jackie Chan version did to the story, you’re going to have a whole bunch of people thinking she named her son after Phineas “Around the World in 80 Days” Fogg!
Or… and I ain’ a-gonna touch this one with a four-foot tamping rod:
(From the internet site http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~lwh/drugs/chap02.htm )
“One of the most bizarre cases of accidental brain injury is that of Phinnaeus P. Gage, a railroad worker (See Bloom et al 1985 for a detailed account). In the Fall of 1848, Gage and his crew were blasting rock. The procedure involved drilling a hole in the rock, then stuffing the hole with alternate layers of packing material and black powder. The packing material was tamped into place with a long steel rod. In a moment of carelessness, Gage apparently tried to tamp the powder layer, and a spark ignited the powder. The resulting explosion transformed the tamping rod into a four-foot projectile which entered Gage's left cheek, passed through the top of his head, and landed several feet away (Fig 2.2).”
(Figure 2.2, for the information of the really curious, is a line drawing showing just how much of the unfortunate Mr Gage’s frontal lobe was ruined by the tamping rod’s rather abrupt passage through it.)
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On the subject of the Internet (Didn’t know we were on the subject of the internet, did you?) my daughter recently gave me cause to discover a simple (for her, but truly astonishing for me) demonstration of just how far the world of information sharing has come in the not-so-many… really-not-so-many-at-all… dammit… years that have passed since I was in high school.
It was a Sunday afternoon and she had finally settled into accepting that the time between that in which she was living at the moment and the time when her completed homework assignment was due had now been reduced to a matter of hours, not days. Opening her backpack to extract the tool she needed – her copy of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” – she found to her horror that she’d left it at school on Friday afternoon. Her assignment, unfortunately, demanded that her commentary be buttressed by several quoted citations from the book, so simply relying on her memory of the story was not going to help her in this case.
The Ottawa Public Library branch closest to us was no help – it is closed on Sunday. (It says something about the flexibility in her thinking that this suggestion came first from her, not me. In the late 1960s, this combination of circumstances would have toasted me, although I might have telephone-canvassed a few classmates to ask if any of them had brought a copy of the book home.)
But this is late 2004 and, as you might suspect given the lead sentence to this item, the Internet provided not just quotes from “Animal Farm”, but the entire danged novel, and at one site it was followed – chapter by chapter – by interpretive notes on the entire danged novel!
After extracting a firm commitment from my daughter that she both understood and would not countenance plagiarism (although she told me the “pop-up” ads associated with this site were not so moral – they were almost all for places selling pre-written term papers), I left her in the happy (and relieved!) state of having a minimized version of the work itself ready to hand as she composed her short essay in another window.
I am not so cynical as to not be completely amazed by this discovery. But I suppose I shouldn’t be. Several months ago, I did find a complete online version of one of my favourite early-teenaged-years books – Booth Tarkington’s “Penrod”. And I have read of Project Gutenberg, whose goal is simply “to encourage the creation and distribution of e-Books”. But it’s breathtaking to see it beginning to work.
At last count, Project Gutenberg had some 13,000 titles available, and included 36 languages in its catalogue ( http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/ ). If you check it out, you’ll note the helpful provision of a weekly Top 100 list, if you are stuck about where to start browsing their virtual library.
(So what is the contemporary version of, “I’m sorry, Miss, but the dog ate my homework.”? No bonus groaner points for working “byte” into your answer.)
- 0 -
And speaking of my daughter… she recently came home with a homework assignment that I confess brought me up rather short. (And yes, it really did prompt a burst of “Well in my day…” recollecting, which I think must be a neurally resident psychological program that is automatically triggered when the grey hair count on your head reaches a certain pre-set number.)
At school, her class is now in the midst of a series of sessions devoted to “The Birds and the Bees” and her homework assignment was to complete a questionnaire based on describing – the process, how easily it was accomplished, and how she was made to feel about it – going to the drugstore and purchasing a condom.
When I cocked my eyebrow while reading the questionnaire, my wife informed me that she had been talking to my daughter earlier about the assignment, and learned that the class session itself had involved learning the proper technique for actually… ahem… installing one of the devices on a banana.
My daughter is, so far, just one year into that phase of her life in which the suffix “teen” is appended to her age. And she is already learning, in (to me) cringe-inducing detail, the stuff of life way beyond the particulars of stamens and pistils and pollination that I was dutifully memorizing when I was her age.
In fact, now that I think of it, I recall being about 16 or 17 when our profoundly embarrassed gym teacher in the Perth and District Collegiate Institute, a no-necked bulldog of a man named Dick Salt, had to tell us about the differences in the “plumbing systems” – and that was the term he used – of males and females.
And it was only much later that I learned officially the particulars of employing the plumbing for purposes of procreation. (Unofficially, of course, a wild mixture of several good friends’ rumoured lore and Playboy’s airbrushed imagery secretly studied in the murky corners of the magazine rack at the smoke shop next to the Perth Restaurant had given me a vague sense of what went where. But confirmation and elucidation, in the form of high school Biology lessons, only came when I was in my late teens.)
- 0 -
And finally, ‘tis the season to be PC to the point of idiocy. My work-related bank branch is located right next to the main floor elevator foyer of the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). Recently, while waiting in the cash machine line, I noticed a large easel-mounted sign advertising a general invitation to join them and “Celebrate the Season”.
So far, so good. Then I noticed the randomly added large “seasonal” garnishes around the face of sign – a gold-coloured menorah topped by a Star of David (for Judaism), a gold-coloured crescent and star symbol (for Islam) and… a Christmas tree with red lights on it… an angel… a few boxes with bows on them… some holly.
No cross though. No overt symbol of He who put the “Christ” in Christmas and whose birth ostensibly launched the “season” people celebrate in a few weeks. God forbid it should be acknowledged. (And I hasten to add I harbour no grudge over the inclusion of the symbols of Judaism and Islam, but I do have a problem with the exclusion of the principal symbol of Christianity when the other two symbols are there... especially in a promotional item for a Christmas event!)
CIDA, for heaven’s sake!
(From their website: “The purpose of Canada's Official Development Assistance is to support sustainable development in developing countries in order to reduce poverty and to contribute to a more secure, equitable and prosperous world.”)
OK guys, so if it really is an “equitable… world” you’re going for, how about either adding the cross, or losing the menorah and crescent, OK?
And have a festive Mithraic Lord’s Day.
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