TriumphAnt

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.

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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.)

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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.