Ah, nothing says Christmas quite like… recalling a horrific sequence from the television mini-series “Band of Brothers”.

This year, at our department’s Christmas party, our Director presented no fewer than 16 (!!) “Ovation Awards of Excellence”, which meant that a variation of the phrase “above and beyond the call of duty” was rendered pretty well 16 separate times. Each winner had to come up to the front of the room, receive his / her plaque and handshake, then wait at the front of the room until all 16 citations had been read. Finally, as the award winners collectively returned to their seats, the guy manning the sound system lit up the theme for “Band of Brothers”. In my newly-thickening “I’m not going to let that pass” skin, (see last entry: Starbucks), I got up quietly, walked over to the music table and said with a question mark, “The theme for ‘Band of Brothers’?”

“Yep,” he said. “I was looking for something that conveys the idea of teamwork… and reward.”

I haven’t yet fully developed my “Ca ne passerait pas” curmudgeon philosophy to the point where I deploy the natural sequel: “Well let me just tell you what I think about that!” So I simply asked the guy working the music at the Christmas party, “For Christmas?” (I knew him; had he been a stranger, I wouldn’t even have asked that.) He just smiled.

For me, of course, hearing the theme doesn’t quite work that way. Instead, it brings back a flood of some of the show’s most affecting images and, for “Band of Brothers” that pretty well defaults to “grim”.

One of the most prominent – in my memory – is part of a sequence set in the Ardennes, appropriately in December 1944, during what history has come to record as The Battle of the Bulge. A unit of front-line US soldiers is under a vicious German artillery barrage. One soldier, caught in the open, is crawling frantically toward a foxhole in which two of his fellow GIs have already taken cover. As he gets to within a few yards of it, the foxhole itself takes an enormous direct hit. The crawling soldier is showered by the dirt and snow of the explosion. A few seconds later, he crawls the last few feet to the edge of the crater. We see his face, washed by a few feathery wisps of smoke, as he peers over its rim. It’s all we really need to see.

“Band of Brothers” is a true story. This sequence portrays something that actually happened during the Battle of the Bulge and is a part of Stephen Ambrose’s book of the same name (“Band of Brothers”, that is). It’s a most graphic production, filmed with the same harsh brutality as “Saving Private Ryan”. Which is not a coincidence; the producer of “Band of Brothers” was the star of “Saving Private Ryan” – Tom Hanks. The Ardennes episode is one of the entire series’ most brutal and the shelling sequence one of the most searing among many memorable images.

Now in fairness, there aren’t a lot of followers of military history in our unit; no doubt even fewer would recognize the theme for “Band of Brothers”. And it is a soul-stirring musical theme, even without the visual affiliation. But I have the feeling I might well be the only person at our office festive gathering this year who was moved to give a passing thought to the Nazis’ 1944 Ardennes offensive.

Maybe for next year’s Ovation Awards of Excellence, they’ll award a Purple Heart instead of a framed certificate. After all, it’s quite pretty and probably not too many people will make the original connection to its marking a soldier who has been wounded in combat. But even if someone does – well, have you ever been to a Ministerial Event planning meeting?

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While we’re (loosely) on the subject: Memo to the headline writers at the Ottawa Citizen. Twice in your Saturday December 17 issue, you used precisely the same phrase. In one story, about the previous day’s somewhat larger-than-usual snowfall, the headline was: “A terrible beauty arrives”. (Apparently, the “terrible” part was intended to be descriptive of the fact that some 54 city buses slewed off the roads, forcing passengers to have to walk for varying distances either to another bus, or all the way to where they were going if they just threw their hands up in the air and gave up on the buses entirely. The “beauty” part, I assume, was in the artful and appropriately seasonal blending of the red-and-white OC Transpo buses with the pristine white of the various snowbanks into which they had embedded themselves all over the national capital region.)

Then, just a few sections later, in a story about insects being used as the basis for patterns in fabric featured in a new exhibit at the Textile Museum of Canada in Toronto, the Citizen headlined, “Going buggy: terrible beauty at textile museum”. Apparently, the “terrible” part in this story was the simple fact of using symmetrically arranged bugs as the basis for what, as accompanying photos showed, are actually some pretty stunning designs.

Well, here’s the thing, Citizen. I have a title among the hundreds of military books on my shelves. It’s “A Terrible Beauty: the Art of Canada at War”. It is, as its title suggests, a collection of material from Canada’s National Museums that reflect the experience of Canadian soldiers, sailors, airmen, doctors and nurses on foreign fields, foreign seas and in foreign airspace. But not just pictures. The book includes poetry and diary entries as well, from both World War I and World War II. (The title is sourced to a line in a poem by WB Yeats, “Easter 1916”: “All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.”)

Also in the book are items from some pretty iconic names in Canadian arts and letters: Lawren Harris, Earle Birney, FH Varley, AY Jackson, Jack Shadbolt, Alex Colville. (Trust me on this one: if I’ve heard of them, they’re among Canada’s arts legends.)

And some of the images are genuinely terrible. Colville has two simple sketches he drew of bodies that he saw when Canadian soldiers entered the Belsen concentration camp. And I have yet to see the war-weary soldier’s famous “thousand yard stare” captured as perfectly – in any medium – as it is in Charles Comfort’s painting of a Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry soldier, “Sergeant PJ Ford”.

Others are quite breathtaking in their beauty, perhaps surprising in light of their subject. Lawren Harris’s painting, for example, of Sherman tanks boiling across a valley floor, “Tank Advance 1944”, meshes their camouflage foliage with the dust thrown up by their speed to create an image that evokes hounds in hot pursuit of their quarry.

My point, Ottawa Citizen? “Terrible beauty” is taken. A winter snowstorm is not it; neither are bugs presented on fabric as if choreographed by Busby Berkeley. So find another metaphor.

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But back to our office Christmas party for a moment. For some reason that has yet to be made clear to me, we had to sit through the third consecutive annual display by one of our colleagues that is about as far removed from Christmas as is the Battle of the Bulge. When she breaks out of her government communications shell, she attaches bells to her hips and styles herself as a belly dancer named “Aziza” (Queen of the palindromic belly dancers, one presumes).

Let me qualify what I am about to say by noting that I harbour considerable respect for anyone who takes part in any form of pastime that combines an obvious enjoyment of what he or she does with the added benefit of exercise. And I am hardly in a position to be critical when it comes to exercise. But I don’t fling myself in front of a crowd of a couple hundred of my work colleagues when I do my exercise, either.

“Aziza” is probably a very pleasant person. But unfortunately, she just is not winning the war on one of the twin fronts of exercise and enjoyment. Certainly it is very obvious that she enjoys what she is doing. A lot, in fact. But the plain and simple fact of the matter is that… well, let’s just say she really, really, really puts the “belly” in “belly dancing”.

In previous years, she’s at least had a medium-sized dance floor to work with, which enables her to move about without endangering anyone else in the room. For this year’s party, however, the organizers obviously had acted on the experience of previous years where the “end of formal proceedings / please stay for some dancing” invitation created a dust cloud in the rush for the exit that took a good couple hours to settle.

Cancelling the dance floor, however, reduced Aziza to standing on a chair. And yes, whatever you’re trying to picture insofar as an image of an overlarge belly dancer shaking everything between her ankles and her shoulders is indeed what stung our eyes on this snowy afternoon. It didn’t take Aziza long, though, to realize that the chair was just too limiting and so she embarked on a “work the room” routine that reduced a great many of her colleagues to doing almost anything to avoid eye contact. (“Oh please, please, PLEASE don’t come over to my table! Oh my, that’s a lovely glass of water. Hmm… isn’t it amazing how long ice will last in a liquid that’s been on the table for at least an hour? Well-starched table linens, too! Please PLEASE go past this table…”)

A couple times, it turned into almost a strip club sort of atmosphere, as the zaftig Aziza waggled her hips past one or another of several of her cringing co-workers, all of whom were no doubt lamenting the Mint’s termination of the dollar bill in favour of the loonie coin.

(Or… uh… that is to say, that at least is what I have been given to understand reflects an occasional event that takes place in a strip club… * cough *)

Wait a minute… now that I think of it, maybe the whole theme of this year’s Christmas party was meant to be The Battle of the Bulge!

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Something I overheard very recently in a large department store. A husband was talking to his wife, a young staff person at the store who clearly had just given him a list of things to go shop for while she worked out the remainder of her shift. I picked up the conversation obviously just as they were finishing up.

She: “Got it all?”
He: “Yes I’ve got it all.”
She: “Need a list?”
He: “No I don’t need a list.”
(pause)
He: “I’m also going to pick up a router.”
(She) [gasped]: “What do you need to buy an expensive thing like a router for?!!”
He: “It’s only about $25. It’s so that Jeffrey can get on the Internet.”
She (and me to myself): “Oh, that kind of router.”

(I refer you back a couple posts ago to the lyrics of Bob Dylan’s “The Times, They are a-Changing”.)

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That time of year… and so to all Baby Ducklings I just want to say Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. (Please translate as required if your “mas” celebrates Someone other than Christ and your personal year actually begins on the calendar at someplace far removed from January 1. Most of the country will be celebrating something in the next couple weeks. I know I will, and I plan to enjoy myself. I sincerely hope that you do, too.)

Mike

I was rabbiting about looking for something else to say to augment this most recent addition to Baby Duck, but in light of the recent exchange of pleasantries between the Conservatives and the entire world – or that ever-shrinking part of it that gives a damn about the Canadian election – over a Liberal staffer’s charge that families couldn’t be trusted with the Conservatives’ promised $100 per month for daycare cash because they’d spend it all on “popcorn and beer”, the level of discourse has abruptly begun its retreat from the relatively civil tone of the early campaign.

So while it’s still topical…

(I never promised to stay away from election chat entirely… did I? So permit me a minor rant.)

Early in the second week of this month, you may recall that the Conservatives unveiled their plan for daycare, followed a day later by the Liberals doing exactly the same thing. (By this I mean unveiling their plan, that is, not unveiling the exact same plan.) There followed several days of commentary in which everyone from the media talking heads to the ordinary Joe or Jill in the street (interviewed, often as not, in a daycare centre) had something to say – and usually something reasonably intelligent to say – about the merits of one plan vs the other.

And lo, I say unto thee, a miracle occurred. A number of pundits suddenly seemed to wake up to the fact that people were actually engaging one another in a debate about an issue. “What,” they asked, “is going on here? There’s no name-calling. There’s no dirt. There’s no news conference hastily called for the purpose of attacking an opponent for (a) acting like a Nazi; (b) trashing viewers of a Toronto multi-cultural channel; (c) insulting a riding’s entire Ukrainian community. There’s actually debate happening here!”

But then something else happened. As the media pointed out that the election conversation had taken a decided turn towards the meaningful, the media tone seemed to change to, “Well, that’s not news.”

And as swiftly as they noticed it was happening, the media turned back to waiting for the politicians to start slinging mud and dirt because, “Dammit, that’s what we like to report on.”

I read a bunch of articles and editorials, watched a bunch of TV news stories and heard a bunch of radio rants that seemed to sail off on a decidedly Eliza (Audrey Hepburn's that is) Doolittle – “Just you wait, ‘enry ‘iggins, just you wait!” – tack. In fact, they seemed to be saying to their readers / listeners / viewers, “Don’t worry, the Parties have all promised that immediately after Christmas, they’re going to roll out their attack ads, and viciously respond to the same when it is rolled out by the other guy.” In other words, don’t touch that dial folks!

After all, what kind of audience-grabbing soundbites are,

-- “Martin suggested it's up to voters to decide which vision they prefer, highlighting the fact that Harper opposes government-funded day care.” (London Free Press), or

-- “Mr. Martin said Tuesday his Liberals would make government-subsidized childcare a permanent social program, suggesting that his approach is a basic policy difference with the Conservatives, but one based on principles.” (Globe and Mail), or

-- “[The Prime Minister] said Harper’s plan wasn’t truly costed out because it doesn’t provide operating funds for day-care centres. ‘There’s going to be no early learning, no regulation, no insistence on high quality, so it’s simply an empty box. That’s not a child-care plan. What it really is maybe a kind of baby bonus, but that’s it.’” (Toronto Star) or, on another issue,

-- “‘It's kind of strange to go around preaching that you believe greenhouse gases should be reduced as a number 1 priority and then you preside over a 25 per cent increase in greenhouse gas emissions,’ Conservative Leader Stephen Harper said while campaigning in Saint John, N.B.” (CBC.ca news)

My God, they’re actually back-and-forthing on the merits of respective policies and promises, instead of insulting each other’s hairstyles!! We can’t have that!

(The image that comes to my mind is the old often-repeated cartoon scene where the main character is bracketed by a little devil sitting on one shoulder and a little angel on the other, both vying for the hero’s attention as he or she agonizes over what way to tilt in response to a clear moral choice. Do I let the cute little bird drown in the pot of water and then enjoy the soup, or do I rescue it?)

Sadly it seems to me that many in the media, having pointed out the absence so far of evidence of what they had all agreed a month ago was going to be one of the ugliest campaigns in Canadian political history, actually have now taken to goading the issue-focused campaigners into getting back over to the seamy stride of the street pronto.

As one medium seems to note hopefully, if not downright wistfully, in a recent article on its website, “CTV's Ottawa bureau chief Robert Fife said he expects the mudslinging attack ads to be unleashed after the holiday season ends. ‘What's surprised me, at least in the first week of the campaign, is that we've had a discussion of ideas and there hasn't been a campaign at this point about character assassination,’ Fife said, appearing on CTV Newsnet. ‘But anybody you talk to in the camps will say just hang on here, wait until the real campaign starts after the new year.’”

“C’mon guys,” they seem to be bleating as the campaign continues to emphasize substantive exchanges, “let’s have some more of,”

-- “‘I heard and read Mr. Duceppe's remarks and I find there's a little Nazi-like tone to them,’ Mr. Lapierre told reporters.” (Globe and Mail); or

-- “Translation, according to the Liberals? Mr. Harper doesn't love Canada. Some Liberal party members then went to their Blackberries to send out that message. For the rest of the day, it became a ‘who-loves-Canada-more’ match as both the Tory Leader and Liberal Leader Paul Martin professed their undying love for this country.” (Globe and Mail)

The annoyingly hypocritical follow-up, of course, is that if the Parties really do switch over to getting down and dirty after Christmas, these selfsame, self-proclaimed media protectors of all that is good and decent will hit the printed page / airwaves will breast-beating laments wondering whatever happened to the good old days when election campaigns focused on the issues?!!

Well, not that anyone’s polled me but if I were to be given the choice, I’d respond loudly and clearly to the Party war-roomers, keep up the good work! Keep telling me why I should support your people and your platform, not why you believe your opponents will make supper out of a stewed blend of babies and kittens. After all, we can watch abuse every day of the week during Question Period when the House gets back in session after the election.

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As Offspring so thoughtfully reminded me recently, in just two more years I’ll be able to order from the Seniors’ menu at our neighbourhood Perkins Family Restaurant.

And I’m beginning to wonder, as the world swirls around me, if I’m starting to turn into a bit of a curmudgeon – “Old Fart” is how it was proposed recently by someone else in the family who is not Offspring. (We are a candid group, we are.)

What triggered this thought most recently was yet another head-bangingly frustrating experience at the coffee store everyone likes to criticize – Starbucks. My goal on this early afternoon was incredibly simple in the home of more choice than a Punjabi election ballot – I was feeling Picardesque, and all I wanted was, “Tea, Earl Grey, hot”.

(A digression. I know Star Trek fans will instantly recognize the allusion, For those for whom “Trek” still means “Boers”, the Captain of television’s post-James T Kirk Enterprise was Captain Jean-Luc Picard. And his favourite post-, if not mid-crisis calming diversion is to stand by a food replicator and order himself exactly what I wanted this day from Starbucks. Starbucks, it will be recalled from previous rants, seems to feel that “Small”, “Medium” and “Large” are beneath them. So its sizes are called… oh well, whatever the hell they are. For purposes of this jotting, the Starbucks name for its sizes is irrelevant.)

What I noticed, as I stood waiting for the person in front of me to finish delivering his order for something that sounded like the formula for one of the early atomic test explosions at Los Alamos, was that on their enormous wall menu, beside “tea”, they had one price for their small, then a 50-cent increase for their medium, followed by the puzzling revelation that their large was precisely the same price as their medium.

So here’s what makes me think I’m becoming a bit of a curmudgeon. I decided on the spot that I was just not going to let that pass. When the fellow in front of me had finally finished redefining nuclear fission in a coffee cup, I stepped forward, announced I was going to request a cup of tea, but before I did, I added, would the charming young barrista behind the counter first answer a question? “No problem,” she said. So I asked her, why is there a 50-cent price vault between the small and medium tea, but a large can be had for the same price as a medium?

The amount of water and, of course, a minuscule extra cost for the few extra micrograms of waxed cardboard in the larger cups are the only variables in a Starbucks tea order. They use the same size of tea bag for all three sizes. So I was fully expecting to hear a carefully rehearsed message about how the amount of energy required to heat the water does not change very much at all between the two largest sizes, but actually needs a significant thermal kick to make the anything-bigger-than-small jump required in order to satisfy the needs of the overly thirsty or caffeine-deprived customers who want to go for more gusto. But instead, without missing a beat, she replied, “Actually, they’re all the same price.”

Brought up short, I looked again at the board to check that my bifocals hadn’t caused a visual glitch, causing me to misinterpret the price line for the triad of choices listed next to the three-letter menu item, “tea”. But no -- $1.55 for a small, and $2.05 for the next two larger sizes. “So, um...” I pressed on, “Are they all… $1.55 or all $2.05?”

“$1.55,” she said quite firmly.

And this is the other reason I think I’m becoming a bit of a curmudgeon. For half a second (no more, I assure you) I wanted to grab her by her festive green Starbucks apron, yank her halfway across the counter and scream into her oh-so-young and oh-so-confident face, “THEN WHY IN HELL ARE THERE TWO DIFFERENT PRICES LISTED FOR THE THREE DIFFERENT SIZES??!!!!”

But what I said, instead, was, “Oh that’s great. I’ll have a [Starbucks word for ‘medium’]”.

“And that’s all for today?”

[Oh my Lord, no, my dear. Have a seat. I want to talk to you at length about the apparent inability of more and more businesses these days to operate in the same space-time continuum where sits a rational human being’s understanding of simple common sense. Along the way, we’ll explore pretension and the all-too-frequent clash between a customer’s need for fundamental information when pitted against a medium – in this case your enormous, painted, wall menu – which fails to satisfy even that uncommonly simple requirement. I expect you and I will be chatting – well, me ranting, you listening is perhaps a more accurate description of the conversational exchange I have in mind – for the better part of the next two hours.]

“Uh… yes, that’s all for today. Thank you.”

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Overheard at a recent weekend brunch was this masterpiece of a business plan spilling over from an adjacent table:

“Yeah, I think I’m going to quit my job and open up one of those… oh you know, one of those whaddyamacallit places…”

Based on a foray into self-employment a few years back, I discovered that I’m hardly the model of a successful entrepreneur, but it does seem to me that a critical hallmark of a successful marketing plan would be at least to know what kind of business you are setting out to succeed at. Memo to the unknown would-be job quitter: I would really discourage you from embarking on Step 1 until you’ve got a better handle on Step 2 and all the others that follow. (Of course, “Shauvon’s Whaddyamacallits” is exactly the sort of storefront sign that would probably find a welcome and a clientele in Ottawa’s Glebe, a painfully trendy zone of little specialty boutiques and a glut of coffee shops staffed with barristas selling $6.00 mochaccinoppélattebrûlissimos.)

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Icy sidewalks: Bring ‘em on!

In a recent burst of common sense – yes, unusual for me (I’ll save everyone else the trouble of rejoining), I recently bought a full set of snow tires for the car and, within a couple days of that purchase, a pair of these things:

These are incredible winter urban footwear! On a recent Ottawa morning, our city woke up to one of those freezing rain mornings where absolutely everything was glazed over in a layer of ice. In previous years, I had always resigned myself to the likelihood of having my feet shoot out from under me at least once or twice a winter in exactly this sort of weather. There is, for example, an especially evil parking lot beside a church close to home that I have to cross on my morning commute to the bus stop. It’s cleaned pretty regularly, but it is never sanded or salted. And it has been an annual event – sometimes two or three times annually – and last year four! – for me to have my feet shoot out from under me and for me to land firmly on my butt in that lot.

Now why, you might perfectly reasonably ask, do I persist in walking across this Parking Lot of the Damned? The short answer is that it is so positioned that it lies squarely between where I am and where I want to be. Not crossing it would require my travelling its perimeter. And in the winter, going around it one direction takes me on a longer path of precisely the same slickly polished pavement surface and, the other way, through snow whose depth only increases as the winter goes on. (There’s also a case to be made for “I’m stupid” but since this is my blog, I have chosen to discount that line of reasoning.)

Last year, I bought a pair of Icer’s ** for my Dad on the recommendation of a friend (whose intelligence is beyond question – she’s a regular Baby Duck reader). After trying them out, Dad told me there was nothing better for navigating glare ice or plow-flattened snow. So this year, I got a pair for myself and this past week was their debut underneath my winter boots.

(** For the record, no they don’t belong to some guy named “Icer” and although I was really, really disappointed to see a business that sells products with the high quality reputation that normally attends the Lee Valley catalogue take such a cavalier approach to apostrophes, I was also surprised to discover that “Icer’s” is precisely how the name is permanently embossed on the underside of each sole… but I digress.)

Now I have read that one reason the Roman Army was so successful was due in part to the sandals worn by their Legions. Enormously durable, the combination of hobnailed soles and Roman roads gave the Legions of the Caesars mobility unmatched by their more barbaric and often barefoot opponents. “Caligae”, as they were known, proved to have such staying power that, even today, they have spawned a modern replica:

(I have no idea where you’d wear something like this. Officially, they’re sandals, but I suspect that most tropical hotels would have some difficulty with a tourist in hobnailed footwear grinding across their terrazzo-tiled mezzanine en route to the pool.)

But with Icer’s on my feet as I step out onto the ice, I have a sense of how those Roman conquerors must have felt (minus, of course, the weight of armour, the vocabulary entirely in Latin, the prospect of going into battle against hordes of barbaric foreigners each of whose most passionate wish is to skewer you on the end of his sword, and the knowledge that supper tonight is once again going to be a bowl of mashed chick peas in olive oil with a half cup of vinegary wine to drink, but otherwise exactly the same feeling, I’m sure of it.) It’s like wearing little army tanks of pedestrian invincibility. Don’t mess with me, parking lot. I’m ready for you this year.

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If you hear a crow making a sound like it’s being throttled, look up.

Twice in recent weeks, I’ve heard that sound coming from a crow and, in both cases, was rewarded with precisely the same scene.

I have no idea why it is, but a strangled (and loud!) sound coming from a crow seems to mean, “C’mon crow buddies, I’ve got a falcon cornered and I need help!”

The first time was a couple weeks ago when I was out hanging up some outdoor Christmas lights. I heard the sound and looked up just as an arrow-like blur flashed by not too far overhead. Abruptly, the blur became distinct as an absolutely gorgeous peregrine falcon flared its wings and tail and landed on a nearby maple tree branch. With no leaves to screen it, it was fully in view – and not only to me. In a few seconds, a trio of crows had swung down and landed, each in a different one of three other nearby trees. They proceeded to set up a racket of loud and frantically repeated calls that I’m pretty sure were not, “Hey baby, d’you come here often?”

I was actually quite surprised. Because where a crow has a beak, a mature falcon has a meat-ripping hook and where a crow has feet, the falcon is possessed of talons that look as if they could embed themselves in steel. To me a crow – or even three crows – hardly seems possessed of enough of an arsenal to take on a falcon. The falcon sat for a couple minutes until it obviously felt it had had enough – perhaps of just the noise. Then it rocketed off to another more distant tree, the crows in hot pursuit.

On a more recent early morning walk to work, I was passing a fence-enclosed yard when from a branch on a tree just on the other side of the fence, I heard that same loud strangled cry coming from a crow. This time, I stopped, but not because I remembered my previous encounter with the sound. Rather, it sounded so pained and so close, I thought was about to come upon a scene of a crow being throttled by a squirrel or something. As I looked up to try to see just where the sound was coming from, once again I caught the flash of a streak of feathers travelling blindlingly fast in a perfectly straight flight path towards a nearby tree.

It was the falcon – or a different one. But a majestic hawk it was, and the circumstances were precisely the same. This time, he planted himself on a branch directly over my head, according me an absolutely wonderful view of his speckled breast feathers and his yellow beak. He didn’t look the least bit perturbed as a hornet’s nest of no fewer than 10 or 15 crows swirled around the tree, angrily calling either each other, or howling for even more reinforcements. But even with those odds tilted that far to their favour, none was foolish enough to try even a passing tangle with the falcon’s array of avian offensive weapons.

After a few seconds, he tore off in another perfectly straight line as the crows displayed all the organization of a flock of keystone cops, dipping, swirling, nearly colliding with one another. I saw where the falcon landed some distance away, but it was clear that probably not one of the crows had managed to successfully track him, no doubt because avoiding the other members of their gang required all their in-flight attention. By the time they got their aerial bearings, the falcon was already resting on a new perch about a hundred yards away from where the crows circled in a loud and angry search.

In hindsight, I'm now thinking that strangled crow sound might well be that bird’s equivalent of a loud, “Damn it! He got away again!”

Either that, or a falcon just killing himself laughing.

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And finally, I have often proclaimed that I do love the Internet, but every once in a while it gives me a moment to pause and ponder a display of its near Twilight Zone-esque bit of reasoning.

Recently, I embarked on a Google dictionary search for the meaning of the word “estop”, which I have occasionally encountered in crossword puzzles. Google replied that there is no such word in English. (Now I know there is, and frankly, this non-reply from Google’s “define” feature surprised me.) However, added Google, if I were willing to check out this online Russian dictionary of International Trade Law, I will find the word. So, I clicked on the suggested link, and sure enough. In the online Russian Dictionary of English – Russian trade terminology, this:
“лишать права возражения, лишать сторону права ссылаться на какие-либо факты”
means “estop”. So what the heck? In for a penny, in for a pound. Capturing that very text, I went next to Alta Vista’s Babelfish, the online language translator, pitched that unpromising jumble into the open window and gave it a “Russian to English” request. Out came this: “to deprive the rights of objection, to deprive the side of the right to refer to any facts”.

With the Internet, all things are possible. Sometimes you just have to travel West to catch up to the sunrise. So to quote Peter Trueman when he was the first-ever news anchor on the newly-launched Global TV late news program:“That may not be news, but it sure is reality.”

Whine o’ the week:

A couple days ago, I called a 1-888 number to order a replacement bunch of cheques on one of my bank accounts. It was about 10 pm. After some ten minutes of following instructions and entering the appropriate responses (following each with the inevitable octothorpical “pound key”), I was directed to proceed to the point at which my final order would be confirmed. Only then did I receive a recording advising me that “Our hours are [whatever they had decided was 'regular office hours']. Please call back then.”

The next day, when I did call back, I let the hapless actual person with whom I connected know exactly what I thought of an organization that elects to go the automated ordering route, but then chooses to shut you out when you call outside “normal” hours (is there such a concept any more in this era of 24-7 everything?) and only telling you of this fact after you’ve spent ten minutes processing your order. He had the honesty to inform me I was not the first person to make this complaint, but was not possessed of the authority to make the change himself.

When we reached the point where he wanted to know how many cheques I wanted, I asked him what their pricing structure is. “You can get 50 free; a second 50 will cost you $30, plus shipping.”

You tell me, please. Can a hundred copies of an item possibly cost $30 more to print and ship? (Hint: The correct answer is ‘no’, until you begin talking about an object with a serious technical complexity or a significant weight, a combination cellphone and locomotive, say.)

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Never say never, as someone infinitely wiser than I once intoned. (And no, I don’t mean the Cubby Broccoli estate.)

If anyone has been reading this blog long enough to recall my rant a long time ago when I recounted a family sojourn to a movie at one of the great, garish, gaudy and noisy Cineplexes on the same night as Opening Night for the (then) latest Harry Potter movie, you will also recall that I swore up, down, left, right and nine ways from Sunday that being anywhere near a Cineplex on the night a new Harry Potter movie opened was something I would do in future only after I had persuaded myself it would be an improvement over my alternate proposed diversion – sitting down at a wooden table and systematically driving large and rusty carpenter’s nails through my hand with a croquet mallet.

(Hello… Guinness? Is a 125-word long sentence cause for any interest on your part? No, OK… but you say it is cause for apologizing to anyone forced to read it? Oh, I see. OK… sorry everybody. But I digress.)

On a recent, otherwise perfectly sane Friday evening, we were entertaining a friend of my daughter’s who was staying over because her parents were out of town for the weekend. In appreciation, her mother had thoughtfully swung by a local Cineplex and purchased, in advance, tickets to the very first night’s showing of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the most recent screen treatment of author JK Rowling’s bank account. It took some persuading, but my infinitely wiser spouse suggested an entirely novel approach to the scenario – “Why not just decide you’re going to enjoy yourself?”

All day Friday, I listened with growing fear to the day’s news reports of full-house attendance at the matinee showings, plus the news that the day’s advance ticket sales had broken all records for the advance ticket sales for the previous record holder – the final episode of the Star Wars sextaga. And all day long, visions of near-maniacal hordes of Potterphiles – most of them former 10-year old girls who became ardent Potter fans from the moment the first book appeared, and who now likely were all 20-year old co-eds dressed up in skimpy little Hogwarts schoolgirl uniforms fitting considerably more tightly for the passage of the intervening years since their wearers had attended the very first Harry Potter movie… (Hmmmm. Suddenly it occurred to me that maybe my wife’s advice was going to be not so hard to realize after all.)

Unfortunately, because I was going to be chauffeuring, I couldn’t fall back on my preferred anaesthetic of a couple glasses of a really fine Cabernet Sauvignon… or a couple glasses of 20-year old Taylor-Fladgate tawny port… or a couple glasses of the Isle of Skye’s Talisker single malt with a smokiness so powerful you would swear someone has perfected the art of grilling scotch… or a couple glasses of Maker’s Mark single-barrel bourbon… (or of course the aforementioned nails malleted through my hand)

But as it turned out (was it not ever thus?), the actual experience was all the more anti-climactic for its having borne no resemblance whatsoever to my panicky imaginings. Oh there were many, many Potter fans present, to be sure. But they were incredibly well-behaved and although the line of eager fans waiting to get into the theatre was indeed festooned with Hogwarts scarves and the occasional wizard hat, it was also festooned with a sea of mp3 players and even laptop computers on which, amazingly, at least one group of fans over whose shoulders I snatched a peek were engrossed in watching one of the previous Potter movies.

In fact, the worst thing that happened to me that whole evening came when I was hauling a flimsy cardboard sheet hilariously misnamed a “tray” onto which the helpful snack counter clerk had placed the two-and-a-half gallons of Coke back to our seats (the result of my ill-considered shoulder-shrugging acquiescence to the chirped, “For only 65 cents more, you can Super-Size it!”). Unfortunately, one of the lids had been affixed only loosely to the barrel-sized cup. Coupled with the complete non-stability offered by the so-called tray, I had a shirtfront covered in Coke by the time I got back to my seat.

And the movie? It was everything a complete onscreen entertainment experience should be. The comfort level of already knowing the principals meant that you could be catapulted into the plot almost immediately without having to sit through first-time “establishing scenes” that line up who is who and where each fits into the Hogwarts hierarchy. As a result, there was much more emphasis given to the more human elements of the characters this time round, with a not-so-subtle emphasis on relationships, the value of good friends and the ability of a really good friendship to overcome the occasional bump in the road.

Oh there was some moralizing – for example, we must believe that in a fair fight, good will pretty well always triumph over evil. (SPOILER ALERT / SKIP THIS PARENTHESIS IF YOU DON’T WANT A PARTIAL PLOT REVELATION: Actually, make that “real good”, because at least one of the characters on the “good” guys’ side gets killed in this outing.)

Other moralizing was connected to the aforementioned value of good friendships. But none of it was used like a club to bash you over the head. There is a lovely moment near the end of this movie where the films’ three best friends are standing together on a Hogwarts’ balcony at end of term. As they stand watching the bustle of departing friends, new friends and various and sundry students for their (I assume) summer break, with arms locked together, it is given to Hermione to speak what it probably on all their minds: “It’s not going to be the same ever again, is it?”

No, luv, alas. It isn’t. And even if what is to come is better in some ways, they – and we – are compelled to come to terms with the simple fact that we must always move on from countless times and places in our lives that we no doubt wish we could hold onto forever.

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“I can’t go back there any more; you know my key won’t fit the door.”

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Which leads me to board a similar train of nostalgic thought related to another couple of recent movie viewing experiences. Not so very long ago, a friend of mine leant me yet another superb Martin Scorcese rockumentary. “No Direction Home” is an in-depth three-hour-long look at the early career of Bob Dylan. Dylan fans will revel in it; those new to Dylan will be mesmerized at the discovery of just how much power, if not outright divinity, was imparted to him by his legions of protest-driven fans.

I count myself somewhere between the two categories. (Between “fan” and “new”, that is.) I’m nowhere near – yet – being among those who have deified the man but certainly one of my most heavily-played albums while I was in university was his “Highway 61 Revisited”. In my case, it was because I really liked the poetry in “Desolation Row”, a song I still find myself ear-worming from time to time. But the album also unleashed what is now pretty well acknowledged to be Dylan’s anthem, “Like a Rolling Stone”. (With the title song, Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited” is generally acknowledged by music critics to be “not his best but certainly his most influential”. But I digress.)

What really surprised me was the discovery that before I got interested in seriously listening to music, there was a time when people – whole auditoria full of people – were absolutely passionate about the music they listened to, and its meaning.

The Dylan film, for example, makes much of July 25, 1965, the day at the Newport Folk Festival when he strode onto the stage with an electric guitar and a back-up band to shatter his legions of folk fans for whom he was never supposed to be more than a voice, a message and an acoustic guitar. Depending on whose version of events you believe, any number from “not that many” to “half the audience” became exceedingly angry. Pete Seeger claims in the film that he was prepared to take an axe to the cables linking the microphones to the sound system, thus achieving what might well have been folk music's first-ever case of going ballistic. Here’s a brief, but pretty graphic summary of the effect Dylan had on the crowd that evening.

In the Scorcese film, we are also taken to a follow-up concert in England, where fans are heard screaming things like “Judas!!” and “Where’s Woody Guthrie, Bob??” while Dylan takes a couple seconds to tell them, “C’mon, this is still protest music” before cutting loose with his newly-electronicized sound.

The movie also shows the power given to some musicians at the time. Dylan appears at the same Washington march where Martin Luther King delivered his “I have a dream” speech, and Pete Seeger, Joan Baez and Woody Guthrie are shown giving concerts where, clearly, it was important that their message be heard, regardless of apparently minuscule audiences in some cases.

But Dylan is accorded the last laugh by Scorcese. Despite his apparent onstage determination to take his music in his own direction, it is also obvious that the angry audience response has clearly jarred him. In a later concert, once more in England when he steps to the stage one last time before entering an eight-year long concert absence, amid yet another round of audience boos at the appearance of his electric guitar and his band, Dylan turns to his back-up musicians and can be heard clearly saying, “OK, play it f-**-king LOUD!”

Here endeth Part 1 of the introduction

Part 2: In 1970, a group of (then) pretty darned well-known musicians boarded a CN train in Toronto after playing a concert at the Canadian National Exhibition. They included The Grateful Dead, The Band, Janis Joplin, blues legend Buddy Guy, Ian and Sylvia Tyson, among others. The trip, which stretched into a five-day rail journey west with a series of four or five mega rock concerts at each major stop, was the subject of a whole bunch of film that someone shot, but which promptly vanished into an archive somewhere until it was only recently discovered a couple years ago. Someone then had the wisdom to string it all together into a movie and “Festival Express” – the name given to the week-long rolling party – is the result.

To some, it will be fascinating just because it has some new footage of dead people, including just a barn-burner of a finale by Janis entitled “Tell Mama”. To others, will fascinate because it has captured, as did Woodstock, the spirit of a generation that really did get pissed off at “the PIGS!” who wouldn’t let them get into a concert free, and who called absolutely everyone “Man”.

And to others – like me, I discovered – it generated a strong but wistful sense of nostalgia for a time and state of mind I can’t (or more accurately shouldn’t) go to again – because I’m a responsible adult and getting so drunk that you can’t even see straight is just not something I could get away with (nor would I want to). There’s a scene, for example, where the event’s organizers actually bring the train to a stop somewhere in Saskatchewan because (a) its passengers have drunk its bar car utterly dry; and (b) the conductor knows that the station is right beside a liquor store. After passing the hat and collecting over $800, the musicians then proceed to deplete the store of a large chunk of its inventory, including a huge promotional bottle of Canadian Club.

The next scene is probably a couple hours later in the bar car and Rick Danko, one of the members of The Band, is regaling the car with a slurred blues tune, “Ain’t no more cane”. Sitting right beside him, equally blasted, is Janis Joplin and one can only imagine that the entire car by this time is well and truly converted into an equally drunken state and is either in the bleary-eyed audience or trying (badly) to be part of the chorus. The musicians on this cut are identified on the movie’s official website* only as “Rick Danko and Janis etc”.

I know I certainly wound up at many a university party as an “etc”. Once, back before a glass bottle was considered a possible terrorist weapon and barred from concerts, I had armed myself with a 26-ounce bottle of Alberta vodka. Not wanting to carry two bottles (one of mix), I had simply dumped an entire envelope of Tang crystals into the clear liquid, leaving myself with a single bottle of the world’s most potent screwdrivers. The concert in question was a Canadian band carnival, with the finale going to Crowbar. Crowbar was fronted by an enormous bear of a man named Kelly Jay, and he accented his stage image with a huge fur hat. This night, he was in party form. Feeding off the audience response, the vast majority of us no doubt oiled by lubrications as creative – if not more so – as my own un-watered screwdrivers, Jay eventually climbed atop a huge stageside speaker tower to lead a loudly drunken sing-along version of Crowbar’s single biggest hit, “Oh, What a Feeling”. I know I got back to the residence, hoarse to the point of laryngitis, after that show. But I’ll be darned if I can recall just how.

* Click “Enter site / USA and Canada” and make sure you’re speakers are on.

So partly because I am enveloped by this light fog of nostalgia, and partly as a message to the coming tidal bore (pun intended) of election coverage, I think I’ll leave the last word this time around to Mr Dylan:

The Times, They Are a-Changin’

Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won't come again
And don't speak too soon
For the wheel's still in spin
And there's no tellin' who
That it's namin'.
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There's a battle outside
And it is ragin'.
It'll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don't criticize
What you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin'.
Please get out of the new one
If you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'.

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is
Rapidly fadin'.
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin'.

I have some free advice for all three Opposition parties. (No, no, don’t thank me.) Ordinarily, I would not presume to think that any advice I have to offer them would be useful but, in the past few days they have shown themselves to be so completely stupid that what I’m about to say will seem like sheer genius compared to what they’ve been doing.

So – here’s the sheer genius.

First, for all of you – Conservatives, NDP, Bloc: The Liberals’ two messages from now until voting day will be: 1. (After the Opposition-fired non-confidence motion is held – whenever “after” should ever happen to be): “We are appalled that the [insert Opposition Party name here] voted against an agenda of progressive and innovative programs that would enhance the quality of life for all Canadians. Shocked and dismayed are we!” and 2. (In the wake of Gomery): “We have really, really, REALLY learned our lesson. Re-elect us.”

And here are your counter-messages. First, to 1. – 1.a “We didn’t vote against the few positive measures you introduced in your 'economic update' on November 14th. As we have made it completely clear, we believe you had lost the moral authority to govern. So we combined resources and voted you out of office the first chance [actually the hundredth, or thereabouts, chance but we can’t travel too far on that gas] we had to vote you out of office.” PERIOD. (Oh, and 1.b: “All of your ‘progressive and innovative programs’, especially tax cuts, you stole from us anyway. So Canadians will lose none of them by electing us.”)

And to 2. “With the exception of a few token rolled heads, you are almost entirely the same team that ran the country when the whole sponsorship scandal was happening. And not only that, the man who, at the time, was the number 2 politician in the country, the number 1 federal politician in Quebec, and the Minister of Finance, today as Prime Minister claims he knew absolutely nothing about the Quebec-based scandal and now expects to be returned to govern because, he says, ‘We have learned our lesson’. Well we don’t believe a bit of it! Vote for us.”

How hard was that? You’re welcome.

STOP THE DAMNED SKATING AROUND WHO’S “OFFICIALLY” GOING TO BE TAGGED WITH PULLING THE PLUG! IF YOU GENUINELY BELIEVE THE GOVERNMENT HAS LOST ITS MANDATE, ITS “MORAL AUTHORITY”, THEN VOTE THEM OUT OF OFFICE. THAT’S HOW PARLIAMENT WAS DESIGNED. YOU’RE THE OPPOSITION; SO OPPOSE ALREADY!

Unfortunately, none of that helps me decide where I’m going to mark my “X” when next I stand in a general election booth, because the only thing that the recent political shenanigans dominating the Ottawa news in the past few months has done for me is to make it very, very easy to decide who I’m NOT going to vote for.

The Liberals: no way. And oddly enough, it’s for the weakest of all the “Nope, not voting for you” reasons that are on my list. I am simply sick and tired of their collectively radiating an aura of arrogance that manifests itself as a belief that they rule by divine right of kings. Every once in a while, that boat need to be rocked and I think it’s damn well time to tip it right over.

The Conservatives: no way. At first, I waffled for a bit, thinking “Give ‘em a chance”, when they floundered about looking for (a) a platform; and (b) a leader. But here they are a good couple years along and so far they’ve found neither. Plus they still carry way too many chains connecting them to the really dangerous Reform / Alliance Party. For me, the clincher came in the wake of the recent announcement by Jack Layton that he and his party would not support a motion hinged to any expression of confidence in the Liberal government. In the very next breath, there was Conservative “leader” Stephen Harper announcing that he sure as hell wasn’t going to make that motion, because he didn’t trust the NDP after they failed to support the Conservative motion of non-confidence last time around.

(Uh… Stephen: 1. The NDP last time never pre-announced either support or non-support. So it’s not like they stabbed you in the back. 2. You’re the guy who has been jumping up and down on the soapbox for the past several months shrieking that you will defeat this government at the first available opportunity. Well HERE IT IS, YOU DAMNED STUPID FOOL!)

(Or more PC-ly, and as the Globe and Mail pointed out in an editorial the morning after the Layton announcement, Harper is, after all, the leader of the “Official Opposition”. If indeed he lacks confidence in this government, the role of seizing the opportunity to defeat it is more correctly his than anybody else’s.

To me, Harper has shown himself to be not so much a political party leader as he is the kid in the department store line-up who’s been absolutely a-quiver for the better part of an hour with the anticipation of actually getting to see Santa Claus. Then comes the moment: “HO! HO! HO!... Next!” at which point he pees his pants and runs screaming from the store.

(Stephen Harper: you ARE the weakest link. Goodbye.)

My secret advice for getting you elected: Get yourselves a new leader and throw the rednecks out of your party.

The NDP: no way. In the past few months, Jack Layton proved himself to be every bit the grubby little backroom dealmaker he so publicly condemns in the parties who actually do have the power. When he finally did topple lamely off the fence, it was to announce that it was the Liberals’ failure to “make a commitment to [i.e. adopt NDP policy for] health care in Canada” that lost them his party’s support. Well Jack, plainly you missed the memo, because health care in Canada is a bus with 13 or so steering wheels. For you to honestly believe that you could negotiate the Liberals into adopting major new health care policies without holding a dozen or so federal / provincial / territorial conferences on the subject makes it all too clear you really have no understanding about how politics works (or admittedly, more often doesn’t work) in this country. Back to Toronto with you, Jack. Obviously you’d still got your head there and the rest of country now knows that a party that sells its soul at every available opportunity really has no soul left, does it?

My secret advice for getting you elected: You’re never going to run the country. But you have – as apparently has been long forgotten by your current members – a track record of being a very effective conscience of not only the House, but also the country. (Hint: read everything Stephen Lewis ever wrote and said.) Return to that spotlight. That’s where we need you most and, coincidentally, it’s where you sing the best.

The Bloc: moot point. They don’t run candidates in my riding or anywhere else outside Quebec, for that matter. (But for the record: no way.)

My secret advice for getting you elected: Here’s a novel thought. You’ve won unbelievable federal concessions on federal programs as they are delivered in Quebec. Never has the time been riper for a party that is willing to make a national platform out of “Putting Provinces First”. Think of it: health care and education are this election’s two biggest priorities, and they’re both provincial responsibilities. Were you to run candidates everywhere in the country on the strength of a promise to apply your Quebec-rump energies to benefit every other province in Canada, I can guarantee you we’d be looking at Prime Minister Gilles Duceppe the morning after the vote. You don’t even have to change your name. You’re the BQ and you’re going to honour your roots. (Besides, the New Democratic Party is neither, so running a campaign that doesn’t necessarily reflect your name is not even unique in Canada.)

All of which still doesn’t leave me much, does it? At least I live in an urban riding large enough that there will inevitably be one or two independents plus most of the wingnut parties represented on our slate of candidates come voting day. Family Law? Green? Marxist-Leninist? Decisions, decisions.

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Wow! Does this take me back!

(From the Montreal Gazette, November 5):

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Quebec seizes yellow margarine
Raids turn up 72 tubs. Inspectors descend on four Wal-Marts in Quebec City area
Kevin Dougherty

Agriculture Department inspectors swooped down on four Wal-Mart stores in the Quebec City area yesterday and seized 72 plastic tubs of yellow Becel margarine with an estimated street value of $179.28. The margarine is butter yellow, which makes it illegal for sale in Quebec.
…
Andre Menard, spokesperson for acting agriculture minister Laurent Lessard, said 44 of the contraband margarine containers were seized at the Levis Wal-Mart, across the river from the capital.
…
"This is serious," Arseneau chided reporters who found the situation humorous.
…
The company denied yesterday it is using backdoor tactics to flood the Quebec market with illegal margarine.
…
Menard noted the PQ considered lifting the ban in 1997, when they were in power, then backed off. Quebec's powerful farmers' union - the Union des producteurs agricoles - is a strong defender of the ban. Yesterday, Menard said Quebec has no intention of lowering its guard and allowing yellow margarine to infiltrate Quebec grocery stores. "There is nothing (like lifting the ban) on the radar," he said. "Period."

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I recall my Mom, back about 1964, coming home from the Steinberg’s grocery store that was close to the St Hubert, Quebec RCAF base where we lived. Among her groceries were one-pound blocks of what looked like pure lard. But inside the foil wrapper, there was always a little card to which was adhered a quarter-sized button of an unnaturally orange food dye.

She would leave the brick outside the refrigerator for a couple hours or so to soften it and then initiate an operation that involved bursting open the button of colouring, and smushing it up with the lard-coloured substance to produce a more or less uniformly and faintly yellowish-orange coloured spread.

For us, it was a huge technological leap forward when pre-softened white margarine came in a reinforced plastic bag with the button of colouring on the inside. Then, as though engaging in some weirdly tactile ritual of therapy aimed at relieving sexual tension, we would begin by squeezing the bag with thumbs on the colour button to burst it, after which a solid few minutes of kneading the bag would be required to spread the colour evenly throughout the bag of margarine.

That has been – since time immemorial – the idiotic business of purchasing margarine in the province of Quebec.

As the Gazette article above makes it clear, the Quebec government believes – and had believed ever since that first prototypical batch of artificial toast grease was produced – that every last one of its citizens is so abominably stupid, he or she will see a label that spells out the word “m-a-r-g-a-r-i-n-e” and, merely because it is yellow, mistake it for butter. The province’s dairy industry, they reasoned, was therefore in imminent danger of collapse because a tidal wave of grocery shoppers would mistakenly lob “M-A-R-G-A-R-I-N-E” labelled packages into their carts, having completely overlooked the butter blocks nearby. It was time, they concluded, for a protective government to take control.

And so desperately protective are they of this belief in the consumeristic illiteracy of its populace that they have never changed the white-margarine-only-in-this-province law.

Which leads to news stories (above, QED) filled with stupefyingly dumb phrases like “contraband margarine containers”, “margarine with an estimated street value of…”, and the ultimate terrorist threat implied in: “lowering its guard and allowing yellow margarine to infiltrate Quebec grocery stores”.

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Surveys “r” Us reports

Every ten years or so, Statistics Canada puts out a massive survey on the state of literacy in Canada. This year, the report shows that, essentially, not much has changed in the decade since the last survey was published in 1994.

But what really made me wonder was this sentence in a CanWest News Service article about the results: “Some groups fared worse than others in terms of reading comprehension. The survey found immigrants and aboriginal people – particularly those whose first language isn’t English or French – have some of the poorest literacy skills in the country.”

So… let me see if I understand this correctly. A survey form printed in one or both of Canada’s two official languages makes its way into the hands of people who speak neither, and Statistics Canada concludes they are illiterate because they can’t read it?

That approach to the Scientific Method reminds me of the old Cold War joke about a Soviet scientist performing a rather cruel experiment with a grasshopper. He begins by positioning himself behind the hapless bug and yelling at it suddenly to make it jump. The scientist dutifully notes the length of the jump. Next, he removes a leg from the grasshopper and repeats the exercise. Not surprisingly, the startled bug’s jump is not nearly as far. The scientist repeats the experiment with the leg count reduced by one each time. And even with only one leg, the grasshopper still manages an admittedly pathetic change in position when the scientist yells. Finally, the last leg is removed. Despite repeated shouts, the grasshopper doesn’t budge. The next morning, the scientist’s report is dispatched to Moscow for publication in the Soviet science journals. His conclusion? “Grasshopper with no legs is deaf”.

StatsCan’s result: “Person who can’t speak English or French is illiterate.”

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And finally… Headscratching Days Have Arrived at Red Lobster

I just saw a commercial for Red Lobster restaurants on TV. They are in the throes of an annual shellfish pigout called “Endless Shrimp”. The tag line was, “But you’d better hurry, because Endless Shrimp ends soon.”

Memo to Red Lobster: if it does, then it isn’t. See what I’m saying?

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Sha-ZAM! It’s a Gomer-y Pile!

So I guess I should say a word* about yesterday’s (as at this writing) media earthquake from Ottawa (which registered a 7 on the retch-ter scale) – the release of Part 1 of the Gomery Report, a.k.a. “Adscam”, a.k.a. “$%@#!%#&$ MERDE!” if you’re Jean Chretien, and a.k.a. a doorway labelled “I know – I’ll run as an independent!”, if you’re Alphonso Gagliano, now barred for life from holding membership in the Liberal Party. (Cheer up consigliere, in a different world you’d actually have been handed an outcome that was negative! But I digress.)

* FYI, “disgusted” is that word. You don’t wanna ask me for adjectives.

Gomery Part 1 is, of course, the colossal finger-pointing synthesis of all the evidence collected over the past several months in what is known colloquially as the sponsorship scandal. Part 2, due in February 2006, is supposed to be: “In Part 1, we identified the problems; now here’s what you need to do to fix them.”

But there’s already a firestorm of response over Part 1. No surprise at all that it is erupting from those – including former Prime Minister Jean Chretien – on whom Justice Gomery stuck the label, “Responsible”. Chretien’s response is a tad peculiar. As nearly as I can parse his counter-argument, it seems to boil down to “Waaaal, you know… dat guy Gom’ry, he di’nt call enough of my frien’s to say nice t’ings about me. So I’m gonna sue!” Good luck, sir. Bring lots of balls to your hearing.

Golf ones I mean.

And for some unknown reason, Gomery used the words “Prime Minister Martin” and “exonerated” in the same sentence, so there will be no bonus points awarded for guessing what the Liberal media lines were from the moment the first media microphone was thrust into the first Grit face following the November 1 tabling of the Gomery report.

For the big zip that it’s worth, you can count me among those who just cannot accept that the man who was Finance Minister under Jean Chretien, and effectively the country’s number 2 politician – in fact the federal government’s number 1 man in Quebec while all this was happening – knew nothing about a program that scurrilously moved tens of millions of dollars around among Liberal-friendly advertising agencies, buffered by kickbacks all along its sordid, looping trail with apparently no bookkeeping whatsoever, under the laughably unrealized goal of “national unity”. I believe that Paul Martin just covered his tracks more effectively. Or, by virtue of his being Prime Minister at the moment, he has now come into the resources to cover his tracks retroactively and thoroughly enough to teflon his way out from amid the latest barrages of flung dung.

(Didn’t know “teflon” was a verb, did’ja? I teflon; you teflon… works for me.) But like Tony “The Great Leslie” Curtis in the classic pie fight sequence in “The Great Race”, Martin is only dodging the first wave of pies. Sooner or later, a pan just chock full of bumbleberry is going to come out of Stage Right and catch him right in the old platitude generator.

Quickies: 1. As I said recently in an e-mail message to a friend – To Jack Layton (who began railing loudly and angrily about Liberal corruption within minutes of the release of Gomery 1 but, when asked if he was prepared to back up his righteous indignation by supporting a vote of non-confidence in the government, demurred with a toe-digging, “Well, we haven’t really talked about that”): Jack, why bother even lacing up your blades if you have no intention of going for a skate? For the record, I don’t buy for a minute that oft-repeated NDP ass-saver, “Canadians don’t want a winter election.” Voting for most people is a five-minute detour on the way home from work one evening.

Actually, what Canadians don’t want is to be forced to sit through what is going to be quite possibly the ugliest campaign in our history. If it were up to me, I’d announce the dates, give each party a ten-day window to post its policies on a single universally-accessible Elections Canada website, with hard paper copies distributed across the land during that same ten-day window, then hold the vote. No polls; no televised debates. And for damned sure, no “Party pundits panel” on the CBC, which always and inevitably descend into mutual insult sessions that contribute nothing to the process except a ringing confirmation of the juvenile lack of respect they have for each other and Canadians in general.

2. To Stephen Harper, whose right-hand man Peter MacKay recently said, “We’ll let you know what we’re going to do when we’ve seen the first poll results of Canadian opinions.”: You do realize that, quaint as it might seem, Canadians still consider (admittedly, less and less with each passing month) that our Members of Parliament are our leaders. If you want to rule by plebiscite, find a country where that is the official form of government. But if you want to lead in Canada, give us a reason to follow you beyond building a campaign platform based on, “I’ll follow the advice of most of you. Just give me that chance. By the way, the Liberals are corrupt.”

3. To Gilles Duceppe: Gilles, it’s not always about giving Quebec a raw deal. Sometimes, it’s about realizing Brian Mulroney’s perfectly coined mission statement for cabinet ministers, “Ya dance with them that brung ya.” But look in the mirror. You’re a separatist, for God’s sake! If you really find being a “Canadian” so damned onerous, then stop sucking up what is provided at the public trough, because it’s been stocked by the very nation from which you so clearly have said you want to split! Separate already! See how far you can walk in thin paper shoes.

Oh – but you take with you precisely what “Quebec” was on June 30, 1867. After that, it was part of Canada. So you might want to start negotiating with the northern Cree right now because (a) they don’t wanna go (i.e., they’ve already served notice that they’ll want to “separate” from Quebec so as to remain in Canada), and (b) James Bay and Manicouagan – home to all those Hydro Quebec power generating stations – are on their land. And no, you don’t get the Vandoos. They might well be a unique, wholly French-speaking regiment, but they’re in the Canadian Army. And they left a lot of worthy, so terribly young men behind in the soil of Europe while fighting under the red ensign to defeat Naziism. The red ensign, Gilles – that’s the flag with the Union Jack in its corner. So you can’t have them. While you’re at it, leave your MP’s pension in the cloakroom and your passport with the border guard sitting in the car on the Portage Bridge (don’t worry, we’ll build a permanent crossing point real soon) before you go. There’s a good lad.

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As Hurricane Wilma tracked across Florida – somewhat weaker than the “HURRICANE OF THE CENTURY!!!!” it was originally billed to be, CBC viewers got to witness the network’s efforts to make it seem a much bigger disaster than it actually was. When the coverage cut to “our meteorological specialist on the scene”, she actually pointed to some palm fronds that were lying on the ground at her feet. “As you can see,” she over-seriously intoned, “whole palm leaves were blown from the trees, and awnings were buffeted on this nearby condominium” (points to nearby condo with an apparently intact awning, but which at least provided a visual definition of the “awning” concept for people who never heard the word before.)

“Oh the humanity!!”

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There are a couple of Diet Pepsi commercials in which a middle-aged businessman is asked if there’s anything from his youth he’d like to relive. In one, he considers recapturing his “Flock of Seagulls” hair style; in another, his too-tight jeans. At the end, he simply concludes, “On second thought, I’ll just stick to my Diet Pepsi.”

In the same spirit, once in a while something will tweak my “If I only knew then what I know now…” musing and, most recently, it has been an occasional regret that I wasn’t a fan of The Band when they were in their heyday. A few years ago, I bought a VHS cassette – and later a DVD – of “The Last Waltz”, the Martin Scorcese film of their official farewell concert. It makes a frequent appearance on my DVD player. Not that I’ve seen a lot of rockumentaries, but this is definitely my favourite, made so in large measure by the rich roster of performers, and Scorcese’s outstanding camera work around the stage.

And I also just bought their “A Musical History” package that includes five CDs and a DVD of some of their early stage appearances. And even when they’re just hacking around in a basement jam session, there’s a gritty folksiness to their music and such an apparently easygoing cohesion to their playing that a Band concert about 30-odd years ago would really have been a truly memorable musical experience. (One of their most often-cited links is the fact that they backed Bob Dylan on his 1966 tour, but that was an erratic collaboration at best and it is their enormous archive of sans-Dylan material that shines brightest.)

I suppose better a late-comer than a never-having-found-outter, but oh, to have been in the Winterland Theatre in San Francisco during the 1976 US Thanksgiving weekend! And sitting here, from the viewpoint of late 2005, the imagining is made more wistful by the fact that two of the group’s founding members have since died – bassist and singer Rick Danko in 1999, and pianist, drummer and lead singer Richard Manuel in 1986.

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On the euphemism watch, here’s a new one for “I really don’t have a clue (but I’m not going to let that stop me from talking!)”.

Recently, I was watching a panel of journalistic talking heads jabber away about something or other, when one of the reporters was asked by the interviewer to provide some particular background to the subject at hand.

The reporter started with a few words, and then paused and inserted, “But I wouldn’t quote me on this…”

As the old adage goes, “Better to keep your mouth closed and have everyone think you’re an idiot, than to open it and remove all doubt.”

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Cheers!

October 18, 2005

I had been trying to decide what I want “Baby Duck” to be before re-launching it after a “summer” hiatus in which it has been idle far beyond the parameters allowed by its “summer” break qualifier. Its unofficial sub-title is, of course, “A Great Canadian Whine”, but in its first year and a bit, Baby Duck has been more than just whining. It’s been a diary; it’s been a rant – often about the hopelessly trivial; it’s been wildly inconsistent. But mostly it’s been fun.

So rather than wait for something to come to mind that is profound enough to serve as a reason for booting myself back into the blogosphere, I’ve decided that, since it’s never really been profound, why try to start now?

Add to this the fact that I’m in a group of a very small number of e-mailers who regularly – daily in fact – oh, hell, some days hourly – flip interesting links back and forth with suitable comments, and so for all intents and purposes I’ve been blogging all summer. So why stop now?

So I’m going to take the advice of that great contemporary philosopher, Willie Nelson. If you’ve heard this story, it likely was some form of these few elements: Willie used to own his own golf course, and he used to say that he liked it because it wasn’t rule-bound. He could wear whatever he wanted, drink whatever he wanted and really just do whatever he felt like to get him through the round with the greatest possible enjoyment. “Now you take this hole,” he said one day to his golfing companion. “Par is whatever the heck I say it is. This one is a par 23 and yesterday I birdied the sucker!” (Think I’m making this up? Google “Willie Nelson, par”.)

So Baby Duck is going to keep on being whatever the heck I say it is. And right now I say it’s been too long without an update.

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How I spent my summer vacation:

“Oh, when I look back now
That summer seemed to last forever
And if I had the choice
Yeah - I'd always wanna be there
Those were the best days of my life.”

(Bryan Adams, “Summer of ‘69”)

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I read a lot and a lot of what I read was cheesy, schlocky summer reading stuff, mostly because I tend to reserve weightier leisure reading for weightier times of year. But not all.

One of the highlights for me was a gem of a book entitled “Wellington’s Smallest Victory”. It’s a true story about a model builder who set out to model one of the defining moments of the Battle of Waterloo in such painstaking accuracy that he even researched the uniform buttons of the various units involved – a staggering undertaking when you consider that his model was somewhat more than what you might think when you think of the word “model”. Consider this brief description: “VISITORS to the National Army Museum in London cannot fail to be impressed by the enormous, beautifully detailed diorama on display there. In front of you unfold some four hundred square feet of miniature farmland (the scale is 9 feet to the mile). Peopling that landscape are some 75,000 tin-lead soldiers, each one 10 mm high and hand-painted with absolute regimental accuracy.”

The model’s creator, a topographical specialist named Lieutenant William Siborne, was determined that his model would be a precise mirror of a particular time during that monumental battle – right down to recreating the crops planted on the fields of Waterloo over which the British, French and Prussian soldiers would fight that Sunday in June 1815.

After visiting and mapping the battleground itself, he wrote hundreds of letters to participants and eventually designed a model that accurately reflected the moment he chose to depict. But his problems began when he sent his design off to the English commander that day, the Duke of Wellington, for approval. Wellington after Waterloo swiftly rose to stand barely a step or two below “God” on England’s hierarchical ladder of veneration. And Siborne’s model placed Blucher’s 40,000 Prussians on the field much closer to the heart of the battle at that moment than where Wellington had ever said they were. The result was a model that showed a turning-point moment that was no longer solely owned by Wellington, and consequentially accorded the Prussians a much larger role in helping to defeat the French.

Welcome to politics in the early 19th century. The resulting post-Waterloo battle over its model portrayal between the Duke and the modeler eventually led to the removal of the 40,000 (!) Prussian figures, and turned a precisely accurate representation of the battle into a model of political expediency, leaving the Duke’s claim to the victory unshared and his image untarnished. (That’s if you don’t count the unbelievable pettiness and pique that attended his demands for “correction”. One wonders where that miniature 40,000-strong Prussian army is today. What a find that would be to carry into the “Antiques Road Show”!)

I also read bushels of blogs, endless e-mails, googols of Google and watched a lot of really good movies.

When the summer began, the family went to see a movie called Howl’s Moving Castle, the most recent release from Japan’s Studio Ghibli and their animator who walks with the angels, Hayao Miyazaki. While there, we saw a pre-movie ad for a DVD-by-mail service called zip.ca. Tried it out and haven’t looked back since. They do have the most recent mainstream studio releases, most with scorch marks still on the disks as the result of the speed with which they left the big screens and made the transit to home release. But zip.ca also has an unbelievable library of festival winners, foreign films, and old stuff you just can’t find in the Blockbusters of the world any more. Their mailbox return is a PO box in Ottawa and their turnaround time is phenomenal. We often experience the cycle of return-a-movie-and-get-a-new-movie in three days flat. By mail!

In the course of my blog-reading, I have come to the conclusion that the world’s conservative bloggers – generally lumped as “right wing” – include in their numbers some of the ugliest and most vicious writers I have ever read. Oh there are one or two exceptions, but they are distant and sidelined voices in a wilderness densely occupied by the shrill made-up-“facts” voices of some very, very unpleasant people. These are people who consider Bill O’Reilly and Robert Novak to be newsmen, Ann Coulter to be a fair and balanced writer and George W Bush to be a leader for the ages. I have come to know them by their writing; I don’t want them as friends. I certainly don’t want their Canadian counterparts running my country. Prior to writing this paragraph, I revisited a bunch of them long since deleted from my bookmarked list. They’re still swimming in bile.

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Things I bought that I like a lot: three metal die-cast aircraft models that now sit on my slowly growing aviation-themed shelf at work: a WWI Fokker Dr-I triplane painted in the blinding red colours of Baron Manfred von Richtofen, The Red Baron; a WWII Chance-Vought F4U Corsair, painted in US Navy colours, but no one’s perfect; and a Franklin Mint model of a CF-104 Starfighter, painted in red-and-white demonstration colours, with Canadian Armed Forces markings. The trio effectively doubles my growing die-cast air force, which had already consisted of a Spitfire, a Lockheed P-38 Lightning and a Messerschmitt Me-109.

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One of the best times I had this summer:

Actually, there were two. While offspring was spending a month at a summer camp, my wife and I shared a fantastic few days in Niagara-on-the-Lake. We took in two Shaw Festival plays and copious amounts of very good wine (not during the plays), and toured Fort George in the dark on a fascinating Ghost Walk that, frankly, surprised me by not being tricked out as might be expected but, instead, was a detailed and often very sad look at life and death in what was once a distant frontier outpost of European-settled Canada. We also enjoyed what might very well be one of the best restaurant meals I’ve ever had, at the Peller Estates vineyard dining room where they feature a menu item called the Chef’s Tasting Dinner. Each of some six courses was accompanied by its own wine and, thanks to an incredibly well-informed waiter, the meal was a seminar on how certain wine types work with various types of food.

I also experienced the eye (and palate)-opening reality that the shape of the glass has a direct impact on your perception of the wine. (I can just hear the “Oh c’mon!”’s from here.) But we tasted a full-bodied red in a big-bowled, large glass and then the same red in a narrow, much smaller glass. Likewise a lighter, fruitier Reisling. And if I hadn’t watched both glasses being poured from the same bottle, I would have sworn that each was completely different from what was poured into the differently shaped glass.

The second highlight? On August 28th, a group of senior citizens got together and rolled into Ottawa to present a concert. The Rolling Stones' “Bigger Bang” show was an unbelievably good time! The gang played a pile of their hits, beginning with their now-traditional concert opener, “Start Me Up” (they knew what the audience came to hear) and introduced a number of songs from their new album (A Bigger Bang – hence the tour name). It is somewhat unsettling to be standing on a solid concrete floor high up in a stadium seating section and feel the entire structure moving in time to the music. But when 48,000 fans stomp along to the music, concrete’s gonna bounce!

On the downside, a performance like this makes it a whole lot harder to try to convince teenagers that drugs and smoking are bad for you when you see the energy that Keith Richards can still summon after a lifetime of abusing both. At least until you see him in close-up. Then you realize that he probably could sub quite effectively as a warning in place of those blackened lungs and ruined gums whose images now adorn cigarette packets in this country.

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So off we go. The Government of Canada is back in session and there’s already a growing collection of evidence that there will be grist for more than a few tirades. My actual job puts enough of the world’s media in front of my face each day that there’ll undoubtedly continue to be a gold mine of nuggets of the curious, the bland, the profound, the trivial and the idiotic.

Baby Duck is whatever the heck I say it is! And I say that right now, it’s still (approximately) a weekly update and I only missed my last deadline by a day or so.

Assuming you live on Venus.

Vast ideas and half-vast ideas.

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You’re never too old to learn something new… like English is a pretty stupid language. (Except for all the others.)

At work, we recently received an internal department-wide memo congratulating us for, among other things, our work on programs by which Canadian workers "re-skill" themselves.

When I read that, my first thought was, Oh hell, our resident bafflegabbers have managed to painfully enverbiate another word that has no business being a verb.

So I checked with an actual book on a shelf not too far from my desk – The Canadian Oxford Dictionary – and the shocker? I discovered that it allows the verb "re-skill".

The follow-up shocker? The same dictionary doesn't allow "skill" as a verb.

Which of course makes me wonder how someone can re-skill when apparently you can't skill, but if Oxford Canada sayeth it, then be so it must, he Yoda-ed. (For the record, they also allow "couth" as an antonym backformed from "uncouth", so maybe in a future edition they'll allow us to "skill" as an after-the-fact construct from "re-skill".)

Oxford’s permission notwithstanding, “re-skill” made me cringe and I was still grumbling about it at the dinner table that evening when I got home. It took my daughter about a half a second after I’d finished to slap me right back in my place. That was the gap in time between when I finished my little rant, and she said, “So what? People can be retarded with ever having been tarded.”

I may just turn Baby Duck over to her.

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Brought up short.

Here’s a quote I read recently in a blog about contemporary politics:

“Christ's goal was clear and simple: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ He gathered his followers behind that straightforward statement. Because this teaching was simple, crisp, clear, and understandable, enabling the broad masses to stand behind it, it in the end conquered the world.” (Source: a speech entitled “Knowledge and Propaganda” to Party officials in Berlin on January 9, 1928. The Party was, of course, the National Socialist Party of Germany. The speaker was Josef Goebbels.)

In the discussion group where I read a pile of comments about this speech, was this quick rejoinder: “Uh, how scary is it that Goebbels understands Christ better than Bush does?”

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Of course, just to keep things in balance, farther along the discussion thread was this quote (JG = Goebbels) and follow-up:

“No one can say that your propaganda is too crude or low or brutal, or that it is not decent enough, for those are not the relevant criteria. Its purpose is not to be decent, or gentle, or weak, or modest; it is to be successful.” (JG)

“Pretty well sums it up right there. OK folks, this way to the dark side...”

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I was going to make some snide remarks here about yet another recent memo we all received at work whose purpose is to bring us into the picture about the still nebulous process by which a new department – Service Canada – will be carved off our present Human Resources and Skills Development Canada, which itself was carved off the former Human Resources Development Canada… (It’s like working inside a matryoshka -- one of those Russian nesting dolls where the hollowed-out carved figurines stack up inside each other.)

As an aside, we have also been told that, in a bit of magic that would cause Houdini to gape awestruck, the eventual reduction from 14,000 employees to 2,500 will be accomplished with no jobs lost. In the words of bureaucraville, they will be driftnetted into a process called a “realignment of resources”. I haven’t been employed in Government long, but I have been around at least long enough to discover that Canadian public servants tend to run for cover when we hear the phrase “realignment”. It has been known to mean, for example, that oh sure, you’ll still have your job, but your workstation’ll just be in Flin Flon, Manitoba.

None of which is relevant to the point that got my attention in this most recent memorandum.

Which was this. Given that it contains phrasing like, “This policy exercise has been engaging employees across branches in a truly horizontal collaboration.” and, “Additionally, and equally important, the realignment gives us opportunities to demonstrate leadership and provide synergy to the policy agenda through reaching out and engaging provinces and key stakeholders.” this stuff doesn’t need an agent of satire. It’s a self-starter.

(Our 2005 crop of summer students has recently begun arriving. I believe I’ll make one feel welcome. “Excuse me, miss, would you care to engage in a truly horizontal collaboration?” *SLAP!* “Hey! I was just quoting the Deputy Minister!”)

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I’m still trying to decide whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing that Cineplex Odeon has just bought out Famous Players for $500 million.

In the short term, I can see already usurious popcorn prices going up even more until they manage to discharge that little mortgage, but on the other hand I can also see people saying “Pfffft! To hell with your whole shtik!” and staying home in droves if the only choice offered by the promise of a night at the cinema becomes, “This movie: take it or leave it”. After all, it doesn’t take too many nights at Silver City and coming home with a wallet lightened by $25 a person for movie and snack to make buying a home theatre look like a really smart purchase.

Even more off-path wander (I’ll be back in a few lines, really. Well c’mon, lots of people can give you topics that begin at the beginning and end at the end with no diversion. Only Baby Duck gives you a product from someone who doesn’t just do cryptic crossword puzzles, I actually live them in my writing! Try to guess what the original subject was after you’ve come 30 seconds into a typical rant’s re-directions.):

But let’s get back to my digression. (Can you do that?) Recently, I was chatting with a group of friends in a conversation prompted by Alanis Morrisette’s “Jagged Little Pill redux” album being available exclusively at Starbuck’s for a couple months. (It was only the earliness of the hour during my last visit to the Ringling Brothers of coffee houses that kept me from asking how they’d appreciate having Venti-double-half-caff-toil-and-trouble coffee sold at the nearest Music World.) Anyway, as a group we pretty well concluded that North America seems ultimately headed for exactly two retail streams: 1. “THE STORE”, a retail complex roughly the size of Magrathea…

(Point of order, Mr Blogger. Not everyone has read or seen “A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. Oh… sorry: Googlegooglegoogle: “Magrathea: The ancient planet of Magrathea was one of the wealthiest in the galaxy due to its extraordinary trade. Its inhabitants built customised planets to order. These were fabulously expensive, so during the great galactic stock market crash they went into hibernation. Magrathea was slowly forgotten, and many believed the stories about the people who made planets were mere legend. The inhabitants of Magrathea were woken by a special order from some pan-dimensional beings, whose first custom-made planet had been destroyed. Shortly afterwards, Zaphod Beeblebrox arrived on the planet in search of fabulous wealth and some answers to some questions he didn't know he wanted to ask. This resulted in a large new crater being formed on Magrathea's otherwise unexciting surface due to the sudden impact of a large Sperm Whale.”)

Uh, and no I am not going to explain how it was that a “large Sperm Whale” made a “sudden impact” on the surface of Magrathea. Read the trilogy – all five parts of it.

and 2: a web of tiny boutiques whose merchandise is so exclusive and so prohibitively expensive, a buyer will actually be compelled to shop in separate stores for a left and a right shoe.

Where was I? Oh yes…

So, as the result of the recent theatre chain purchase you now have, with the exception of a few independent repertory movie houses in cities big enough to support them, a nation-wide movie-house business in the hands of a man (Gerry Schwartz) married to a woman (Heather Reisman) with a nation-wide bookselling business (Chapters Indigo), which pretty well governs the vast majority of material that is sold to the Canadian reading and candle-buying public. That kind of wipes out any ground at all between the two alternatives offered up in the old promo, “You liked the book, now see the movie!”

It also means that with an ever-shrinking list of exceptions (restaurants, bars, live theatre, sports arenas) for Canadians a night out is starting to look like My Dinner with Gerry and Heather. And if they don’t like it, you’re not going to see it or read it.

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Lord, no wonder the Conservatives are having such a hard time getting anyone to support them. During a recent reading of a number of conservative blogs, I read over and over again that the “MSM” (a new buzz-cronym meaning the “mainstream media”) only ever deals in witchhunts where the Conservatives are concerned, and never in the “meat” of where they stand.

So I decided maybe it behooves me to take a look at where they stand.

Well, here’s just one point of a 22-point list of founding principles, this one about health care (because it’s been in the news fairly recently):

• A belief that all Canadians should have reasonable access to quality health care regardless of their ability to pay;

Sheesh! It’s like they groped through a thesaurus and decided to entrench the word that carried the least possible meaning. (Hey, we can’t be accused of diverting from our policy when our policy is defined in such broad strokes, right?) I mean… pick a word. What does it tell us that that the Conservatives will do better? Well, first of all, they won’t actually _do_ anything. But oh my, how they will believe! And they believe “that all Canadians should have reasonable access to quality health care regardless of their ability to pay.”

What does “reasonable” mean? “Access”, “quality”? Who the heck knows?

(All 22 points are available in all their equally gelatinous solidity at a website carefully watched over by the benign countenance of Mr Harper: http://www.conservative.ca/EN/founding_principles/ )

Why don’t they just save their flacks the trouble and attenuate that load of weasel snot to its fundamental: “We promise that our government will be whatever the hell we say it is”?

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The Government of Canada / OCTranspo “EcoPass” (Why not leave the car at home and take the bus to work?) beat goes on.

Baby Ducklings might recall that, an entry or two ago, I whined long and bitterly about the fact that the 19-page contractual agreement required to get into this program, all in exchange for saving about six and a half dollars a month on a $63 bus pass, was so cumbersomely worded it would make a real estate lawyer weep. Well, it appears I’m not the only one who had problems with it. Turns out even the people who decided to wade into the sea of bafflegabbery have set off alarms.

Here’s a brief note from an all-employee e-mail that arrived recently:

“It has been brought to our attention that the Compensation and Benefits Section has received some OC Transpo’s ECOPASS enrolment forms that were not completely filled out. To ensure that ECOPASS’s are issued and returned to you on time, it is very important that all mandatory fields of the form are completed and that a return work address label accompanies the form. The Compensation and Benefits Section cannot process the information until all the information is provided.

Should you require assistance in completing the form or require further information concerning the Transit Pass Program, please contact the FAS Business Centre.”

(“FAS” is our resident acronymically correct abbreviation for Financial Administrative Services. Ironically, they’re usually quite SLO.)

But for some reason, the thought of upsetting the “Compensation and Benefits Section” causes me to shudder ominously. I see a black-uniformed Otto Preminger “Stalag 17” Kommandante Von Scherbach type, complete with monocle, rocking back and forth on his mirror-bright riding-booted heels as I sweat bullets trying in vain to figure out where on the contract I had missed out in such a way as to trigger his visit to my cubicle. Through razor thin lips, he would hiss, “Und zo… you maybe haff relatives on whom you vould like to continue to spend some uff ze money ve pay you… vell zen, Englisch-schpeaking SCHWEINHUND! Ve must haff your papers, und ve must haff zem NOW!”

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This isn’t Ebert and Roeper, but I do have to put in a plug for a new movie we (the family) just saw – and a broad note of approval for the whole genre from which it springs.

It’s possible that the name Hayao Miyazaki may be completely alien to you, but as the father of someone for whom anime – the uniquely Japanese form of animated film – has been a passion for probably half of her life so far, I have come to know the stunning work of Mr Miyazaki through several films. We started watching them because they seemed a natural extension of my daughter’s fan-following of the Pokémon and Sailor Moon television cartoons and, later, Inuyasha. But they are to Miyazaki what Kraft Blue Cheese dressing is to unpasteurized English Stilton.

The day we rented “My Neighbor Totoro” on the advice of a Japanese friend was the day we discovered Mr Miyazaki. Since then, we have either bought or rented, or seen theatrically, “Kiki’s Delivery Service”, “Castle in the Sky”, “Princess Mononoke”, “The Cat Returns”; and we are awaiting the arrival of borrowings of “Nausicaa”, and “Porco Rosso” from another friend. I’m name-dropping profusely here as an encouragement to Google any of those titles in order to give you (a) an introduction to his work, and (b) the opportunity to read some of the most glowing movie reviews you’ll ever read. People, it seems, almost universally love the works of Miyazaki. Here in North America, he exploded into prominence when his 2001 film, “Spirited Away” won the 2003 Oscar for Best Animated Film (I’m not sure why the time lag – I suspect dubbing it into English made it a late entry into the American competition). And of course we own that one on DVD, too.

His most recent work is another feature-length film with jaw-dropping visuals and a stunningly imaginative plot that seems to owe as much to some pretty powerful hallucinogens as it does to its claimed inspiration – a novel by Diana Wynne-Jones from which the film also draws its title: “Howl’s Moving Castle”.

The reason I have loved Japanese horror / monster / fantasy movies going all the way back to the cheesy “Godzilla” series is, in part, because of the completely pragmatic approach the Japanese take to bizarre and unexpected events.

In an American movie, the emergence of a glowing green blob from beneath the sea inevitably requires half the movie to find some scientists to try to figure out what it is. But the Japanese approach always seems inevitably to be: “Oh a monster – good or bad?” Or “Oh, a powerful spell – good or bad?” Bad. OK, seek out / pray for a good one to fight it. Monsters fight / Good sorcerer fights bad sorcerer / Good magic wrestles with bad.

That sounds overly simplistic, but it’s not. When you begin with the acceptance of forces of good and evil in the world, and their occasionally coming into conflict, your storytelling takes on the aspect of a quest. (You need look no further than “Lord of the Rings” to see a masterful employment of exactly this plot device.)

Miyazaki’s movies are usually variations on the theme as well. In “Howl’s Moving Castle” (this isn’t a spoiler, because it sets up in the first few minutes), a young woman named Sophie finds herself in a predicament as the result of an encounter with a dark sorceress that consequently sends Sophie out into the world to try to find a way to overcome what has happened to her.

See the darned movie. It’s completely – with one exception – breathtaking. The exception is the fact that one of the movie’s quirkier characters has been voice-dubbed by Billy Crystal in the English version. And Billy Crystal is just way too recognizable a voice to fit into a story that wanders so far from a typical Disney or Pixar animated movie. That being said – Lauren Bacall also voices a key character and she is perfect. So who am I to criticize the use of famous voices to broaden its appeal to North American audiences?

(But my wife also expressed thumbs-down to the same nagging Billy Crystal vocal intrusion into an otherwise perfectly wonderful movie. So it’s not just me, he said defensively.)

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So for this entry, over and – with a couple of groans – out.

A Baby Duckling and good friend has recently re-located just about as far west of Ottawa as it is possible to be and still be bound by Canadian laws – to Victoria BC. In addition to regular exchanges of e-mail, to keep in touch I make a point of dropping in on his new employer’s website from time to time and reading the most recent edition of the corporate newsletter. I felt it necessary to provide that background just to let you know that it was there I found this recent bit of humour. Because there is no way I am going to be held accountable for anything more than passing this along:

(Oh, and there really is a US Olympic alpine skier named, credibility-stretchingly, Picabo Street. Google her if you don’t believe me.)

“The famous Olympic skier Picabo (pronounced peek-a-boo) Street is not just an athlete… she is now a nurse currently working at the Intensive Care Unit of a large metropolitan hospital. However, she is not permitted to answer the hospital telephones because it caused too much confusion whenever she picked up the receiver and said, ‘Picabo, ICU’”.

(I – pass along a thank you to Ms England, svp)

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Finally…

I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

But when I saw this headline recently in The Globe and Mail’s online version: “Son shoots bear that killed his father”, what immediately flashed to mind was that old joke about the bear who walks into a bar with one of his legs all bandaged up and says, “I’m lookin’ for the man that shot my paw.”

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