If this is Monday… where’s my darned cellphone?!
On a recent Monday, while sitting in the foyer of the studio where my offspring takes piano lessons, the office manager came out and asked if any of us in the room had discovered a cellphone on or under our chairs. Someone had just phoned and, in the trip from studio to home had apparently lost his cellphone. Our immediate response was to begin rummaging around under our derrières (strictly our own, mind you) but the upshot was that no cellphone was discovered.
A few minutes later, offspring and I were out the door and walking to our car when I heard the distinct chirp of an electronic ringtone. “Did you hear that,” I asked?
“No,” came the reply. Given that, in our family, I am the one whose hearing is generally accepted to be fading (unless of course the message is “Time for bed!” in which case offspring becomes instantly stone deaf, especially if in the middle of an e-mail chat about any of a dozen anime interests, but I digress), I wrote it off to an imagined noise, or having been caused by an electronic device owned by one of the music teachers who was vigorously brushing snow from her car not too far away.
But a second later, I heard it again and it seemed to be coming from a direction that suggested something was ringing somewhere other than the pocket of the teacher.
Retracing my steps, I saw a faint blue glow coming from just underneath a thin layer of freshly fallen snow. As I approached it, the tone sounded again and, voilà – the missing cellphone was found, in part due to the good sense of the owner who had the insight to call his own cellphone number and trigger the ringtone. (The blue glow was from the viewscreen window, which cast a moderately bright glow under the snow, an illumination bright enough to read by once I’d excavated it.)
After turning it in, offspring and I resumed our homeward travels.
Just one week later, same offspring was in same studio while I drove off to a nearby grocery store to grab a couple items that had fallen to the “restock” level in our refrigerator.
As I walked into the store, there in the snow -- an edge just visible -- was yet another cellphone, this one tucked into one of those belt-clip holsters. I picked it up, brushed it off and deposited it at the Customer Service desk on the way into the store. Hopefully, the owner would have a vague idea where he or she had dropped it and the device would soon be once more slung where it belonged.
Two Mondays; two wayward cellphones.
There’s a deeper meaning there, but I’m deathly afraid that Paris Hilton* somehow figures into it and so I won’t be exploring it any further.
* From just one version of the story that was carried by almost about every last e-medium on the face of the Earth, beginning Monday February 21: “How Paris Hilton's little black book led to lots of little black looks By David Usborne in New York 22 February 2005 Friends of Paris Hilton, the pampered hotel heiress and social flit-about, are less than amused that a hack-attack into her T-Mobile telephone has exposed their private numbers to the world. And the world has been ringing them up. While her pals are livid, Ms Hilton is mortified. Not only did the perpetrators access every phone number and e-mail address stored in her phone, they also siphoned off private musings she had tapped into it, including notes about her favourite airlines and hotels…”
= = = = = = = = = =
Hey! We had it first, dangnabbit!
In a recent column of updates on current White House story spinning, this reference appears:
“CPAC Watch: Today's agenda for the Conservative Political Action Conference…”
There was a Canadian Parliamentary Affairs Channel (CPAC) long before the Grand Old Party and its minions decided to have their political action conference.
In fact, a quick Google run of “CPAC” reveals we’re number 1 and 2 of 344,000 or so (at this writing) hits. Their CPAC is in third place, just in front of the Computerized Pollution Abatement Corporation, the Centre for Process Analytical Chemistry, and the Children’s Protection and Advocacy Coalition.
So there!
= = = = = = = = = =
“Things are sure gonna be different when we cane toads get the vote.”:
The following comes from a website on cane toads, subject of one hilarious documentary: ( http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0130529/ )
“Cane toads are toxic. The source of the toxins is a large gland on the back of the neck. It is only toxic if ingested or rubbed into eyes. The toxin exudes over the toad's skin, it does not spurt out. Use two plastic shopping bags, or something similar to pick up the toad. Turn the bags inside out, grab the toad, turn the bags the correct way round again, tie the bags tightly and you'll have safely bagged your toad. Disposing of the toad. We have all heard stories of how people in other places kill cane toads. The most humane method of disposing of toads is to place your double-bagged toad in the freezer overnight. Cane toads are coming. They are fat, ugly and poisonous. They don't belong in Australia and they will harm our pets and native wildlife, but please remember they are still living creatures and feel pain too.”
Um… folks. Regardless of whatever encouraging messages you might have received from the Australian Dental Association, I am reliably informed that freezing – that is, the “to death” variety – does involve pain.
- 0 -
“Mmmm. What smells so good, Mom?” “Well I found this roast I guess I’d forgotten we had in the freezer.”
Eeeeeeewwwwwwww!
= = = = = = = = = =
Media fun, or “I know the accent didn’t appear in the script I read on air, but I also know there’s one in the damned word!”
An Ottawa late night newsreader recently reported that city police were surprised to discover a “ca-SHAY” of weapons in a local home.
That leads me to wonder just what greeted the police as they bludgeoned open the door of the suspected arsenal…
We take you now to the front step of a nondescript townhouse in the chilly February pre-dawn darkness where a unit of about 18 Special Police Tactical Troopers, cunningly camouflaged against the snowy evening in their midnight blue jumpsuits, have just been given the command, “Go!”
A blistering smash is heard as one of the officers, wielding a concrete-encased tube of stainless steel with a bullet-shaped nose (the tube, that is, not the officer) has battered open the townhouse’s single safety-chained door with one mighty ram.
All 18 troopers rush in. Immediately, they fan out throughout the unit, upstairs, main floor, basement. The townhouse is vacant, as it takes the driving troops all of about a dozen seconds to discover. Then suddenly, inexplicably, they pause, tensing… but not quite understanding why. They have been trained to a razor-sharp reaction pattern that would have had them hurling sleeping occupants to the floor, kneeling on their spines and swiftly trussing their hands behind them, had there been anyone inside on whom to exercise their practice-sharpened tactics.
But nothing had prepared them for silence. Silence, and a certain, not-quite-comprehended… something. Something in the air. (Cue the Phil Collins song.)
The unit leader – having centred himself in the townhouse’s ground floor front room, is the first to break the silence, but not with a word. Rather, he carefully peels back the infrared goggles from his eyes, lifts his nose, and… sniffs. Twice.
“Yeah, I’m getting that too,” says an overeager-to-please rookie. Tonight is his first raid and he wants to make a mark that says to all and sundry – but especially to his superiors – that there’s nothing wrong with his radar – visual, aural, olfactory… it’s all tuned to “Extreme”. If he had antennae, they’d be vibrating so fast they’d be humming.
“What IS that?” asks the team leader.
From the hallway, a seasoned veteran replies, “I think it’s Arma-Lube, sir.”
The other members of the team, at least those who hear him, gasp. Arma-Lube. Gun aficionados the world over know it simply as “the classic high performance gun oil”. (Trust me; it says so on their website.) In fact, it’s so coveted, it’s become its own verb. (Like Ski-Doo. Even Arctic Cat owners go “Ski-dooing”.) And the elite among gun collectors, at least those in the know, no longer “oil” their weapons. Rather they turn to their spouses and say, “I’m just going downstairs to Arma-Lube my Glock, sweetie”, leaving wives all over the continental US seething with envy over the attention, care and… lubricating their husbands’ 9mms are about to receive.
As word flits quickly throughout all members of the tactical unit, they stand in silent awe as they realize they are in the presence of no ordinary weapons smuggler.
This is a man with cachet.
(And I’m sure that’s exactly what that newsreader meant.)
(Ian – I’ll save you the trouble. Of course, being Canadian, we all know that what he actually said was, “a cache, eh?”)
= = = = = = = = = =
“Dilbertian”
NOW I understand.
At my place of work (and don’t think I didn’t try about 16 different terms that qualified it in varying degrees of fulmination!), we just received a ponderous sheet of paper – a newly revised and innocently enough named “Approval Sheet”. It indicates how many levels of internal hierarchy must be traversed before a document can be considered to be signed off. Sounds simple enough, right?
Did you forget we are talking about the Government of Canada here? This is the ladder, from the bottom up:
Communications officer
Officer
Director / Program
Director General / Program
Director / Communications
Assistant Deputy Minister / Program
English language quality control
French language quality control
Ministerial services
Director / Media affairs and analysis
Director / Events and Planning
Director General / Corporate Communications
Director General / Strategic and Program Communications Directorate
Director General / Executive and Ministerial Services
Assistant Deputy Minister / Communications
Bureau of Cabinet and Parliamentary Affairs (usually just referred to as “BCPA” in about the same tone as ordinary Germans used to say “Gestapo”, but I digress)
Deputy Minister
Communications Director
Chief of Staff
Minister
At the moment, two of the senior rungs on this ladder are helpfully named “Vacant”.
Now, to be fair, not every document has to clear every one of those rungs. But every document does have to clear at least one of the rungs at a similarly titled position level. For example, at least one Director is going to have to sign off on it. And if it crosses involvement by more than one Directorate (a piece of public communications, for example, about a ministerial event), you can bet both directors not only expect, they will demand sign-off authority on it.
Recently the federal government in this country announced the creation of a new agency called “Service Canada”, intended to be a local office in or near your town where you can get any of a multiplicity of government services, for example, your passport, old age security, pension, etc. The media use the derisive “one-stop shop” to describe it. The government prefers “modernization of services”. Government workers tend to refer to it as, “Oh GREAT! Another %^$#@&ing re-org!” But I digress.
But as I looked weakly and bleakly over the roster of positions on our most recent “Approval Sheet”, I couldn’t help but wonder if ever there were a process just crying out for “Let’s do like we say”, it would be the creation of a “one-stop shop” to move a document everywhere it needs to go within the department, without anyone’s having to be the sole physical agent (the “docket-chaser”) of all its required travel.
“She’s supposed to have ‘trans-warp’.” – Ensign Sulu, speaking about the just-launched “USS Excelsior” in the movie “Star Trek III – Search for Spock”.
“Aye, and if my grandmother had wheels, she’d be a wagon.” – Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott, USS Enterprise, meaningfully responding to Ensign Sulu.
= = = = = = = = = =
Something I never knew before is that a corner of Auschwitz that was used for sorting anything seized from the prisoners that might have had even a shred of value was called “Canada”, apparently – and terribly – because it was a “place of abundance”.
So I live in a nation that at one time was viewed as the closest thing to heaven on earth that could be imagined by people living in the closest thing to hell on earth.
Maybe I won’t complain quite so much in future.
(Still, it is a bit jarring to read references like the caption on a photo of thousands of pieces of cutlery that “were left behind when the Nazis burned Canada to the ground”.)
= = = = = = = = = =
And finally… noted in passing.
In my neighbourhood is a store that sells a vast array of the sundries – useful and otherwise – required to make one’s wedding experience complete.
Recently, they set up a large billboard advertising their upcoming “Bridle Showcase”.
I’m thinking – typo, or a special event exclusively for those seeking a somewhat kinkier experience on their wedding night? (“A toast to the bride – Here’s to our queen for the day; may she enjoy her rein.”)
What’s even funnier is that not too far away down the road there is a saddlery and tack shop. Now I’m wondering if they’re owned by the same guy.
Happy New Month, all! See you in March.
Sunday, February 27, 2005
Tuesday, February 15, 2005
I am progressively festooning my tiny workspace with things connected to my early years as an Air Force brat. One of my cubicle shelves has three die-cast (metal) toy aircraft on it: a German Messerschmitt Me-109 (politically correct, no less. Despite its being decorated with fairly accurate fuselage markings, the manufacturers left the Luftwaffe’s swastika off its tail); an American Lockheed P-38 Lightning, painted in D-Day invasion stripes, and a British Supermarine Spitfire, whose fuselage roundels are completely missing the blue ring, resulting in a totally fictitious marking scheme that I guess I am free to name however I wish (the Royal Hogwarts Air Force, perhaps, recalling the previously unheralded contribution of the elite Wizards’ Wing to winning the Battle of Britain.) But it’s a toy and its underside is embossed “Made in China”, so my nitpickery is a desultory sigh at best.
Meanwhile, my desktop has a piston-engined-aircraft-day-by-day calendar, and I steadily clip my favourites and add them to my cubicle wall in a growing montage that now counts some 132 separate photos. My computer screen saver is a gorgeous fantasy painting (because the flight it depicts never occurred) of a CF-105 Avro Arrow and a CF-101 Voodoo climbing steeply in full-afterburner tandem into a beautiful blue sky.
Recently, a work colleague attached to a different program and with whom I’ve only ever had a “Hi” connection, was waiting by my desk when I showed up for work. As it turned out, he wasn’t waiting for me, but rather for a manager with a real office located directly beside my stall with whom he’d had an early morning meeting arranged.
When he saw me, he said he’d been admiring my models. So I chatted briefly with him about my interest and pointed out the montage, which he hadn’t yet seen. He looked closely at many of the aircraft, his fingers brushing lightly over the surface of a couple of them... “Lots of memories,” he said.
One episode he was prompted to recall was an entertaining but overly detailed (I thought) account of “losing one’s cookies” at the top of a loop while a passenger in a Spitfire converted to a two-seater for training purposes.
Then, touching a photo of a PBY Catalina Flying Boat, he proceeded to regale me with a story of his long ago days working for an ad agency on Montreal’s South Shore near the Cartierville airport. In one especially memorable recollection, he told me that the Catalina he personally recalled had often ferried him up to several remote areas in northern Quebec where the “runway” was always a lake, hence the necessity of travelling in a flying boat. But because it was a bare-bones conversion from its wartime configuration as a submarine hunter, his “passenger seat” was actually a mat on which he lay prone in the aircraft’s nose – the bomb aimer’s position.
One day, he and the pilot, just for fun, had actually loaded the bomb racks with 12 large fireplace-sized logs of just the right length to fit into the racks. En route, they passed quite low over a remote lake near their destination and noticed a small, almost fully submerged derelict rowboat. So being guys, they took the aircraft into a bomb run. In one mass release, they dropped all 12 of their log bombs at once. Despite their inexperience as bombardiers, they managed to connect with several of them, shattering the rowboat instantly into splinters.
He then told me that, a very few days later, he’d met the area’s parish priest in a local store and briefly engaged in a “How are you?” conversation with him. The parish priest said he was fine, healthwise, but was in somewhat more of an angry, disappointed mood emotionally, because someone had completely annihilated his favourite fishing platform – a rowboat anchored on a remote lake a few kilometres away. (Partially submerged, as it turned out, not because it was derelict at all, but rather because it had several days’ rain in it that the priest was going to have had to bail out before starting to fish.)
As he departed for his meeting, my story-telling colleague observed that he was not then, nor has he ever been, someone to observe the principle of confession in his faith.
A wonderfully sublime encounter that, all the more satisfying because partway through, he actually waved off a signal from the assistant to the manager with whom he had his appointed session that she was ready, and finished telling me his stories (the Catalina bomb run was just one of three) before joining the meeting.
= = = = = = = = = =
“Lucy, you got some ‘splainin’ to do.”:
From an online report about a trio of terrorist bombs that exploded recently in The Philippines:
“The first bomb struck outside a busy shopping mall in General Santos city, on the island of Mindanao. Police say the bomb was hidden inside a tricycle parked near the mall's entrance.”
Now when I was but a lad, before acquiring the balance to enable myself to abandon three wheels in favour of two, a “tricycle” was a vehicle that, even were it to be filled chock-a-block with gunpowder, couldn’t possibly have generated an explosion of sufficient magnitude to make the nightly news. I can’t believe I’m the only one who harbours the image of tricycle-as-toy and, had I been the editor of Voice of America.com, where this paragraph appeared, I would have asked the reporter for a parenthetical insert for clarification. Because my suspicion is that a Filipino tricycle is a Monty-Pythonesque something completely different.
Aha! (From http://www.everything2.com/):
“The Philippine tricycle serves much the same purpose as the Thai tuk tuk, and is a common form of public transportation in both rural and urban areas. It consists of a motorcycle and sidecar combination, with a canvas roof stretched over a framework of metal bars, welded to the sidecar. Like its larger cousin the jeepney, tricycles are usually decorated with shiny chrome and stainless steel, with various mirrors, colorful banners, and other decorations. Tricycles can usually seat three or four people, two in the sidecar, and one or two sitting behind the driver. In rural areas, it is not uncommon to find tricycles hauling five or six people, complete with vegetables, chickens and live pigs.”
That, tragically, makes a lot more sense. A vehicle capable of accommodating five or six people plus animals and food is certainly capable of being a vastly more destructive force than the pedal-driven velocipede I raced up and down our neighbourhood sidewalks.
= = = = = = = = = =
Escalator accident update:
“NAGOYA, Japan (14 February) -- Some 13 high school students were injured when they fell like dominos on an escalator at a local subway station after one of them stopped when his bag was caught between steps, police said. The high school student had his bag caught between steps on the escalator at Shiogamaguchi Station on the subway Tsurumai Line in Nagoya at about 8:20 a.m. on Sunday. When he tried to pull his bag free, he was hit by other students following him, resulting in 13 high school students falling, officers said.”
Hey, have I got an idea for you guys! (Although on closer reading, come to think of it, a “between steps” entrapment would not have been prevented by the kind of escalator skirt recently installed in our office building. It screens the step edges from the wall. So… never mind.)
= = = = = = = = = =
There is a bar (although “trough” might be a more apt generic) in Decatur, Georgia called Mulligan’s. A recent article about their menu on the Associated Press website included the following notes:
“The [‘Hamdog’], a specialty of Mulligan's, a suburban bar, is a hot dog wrapped by a beef patty that's deep fried, covered with chili, cheese and onions and served on a hoagie bun. Oh yeah, it's also topped with a fried egg and two fistfuls of fries.”
and
"The ‘Luther Burger’ [is] a bacon-cheeseburger served on a Krispy Kreme doughnut bun.”
The AP article begins with the headline “Southern food frustrates health officials”, and ends with a hotlink to the Morehouse School of Medicine, a “historically black” medical college in Atlanta College. Some stories are, indeed, their own best punchlines.
= = = = = = = = = =
And finally… OH PLEASE!!!!
Now that it appears we have really – (“We’re not kidding this time; we really, REALLY mean it!”) – reached the so-called “drop dead” date after which the National Hockey League’s 2004-2005 season is officially declared cancelled, can we at long last see a media euthanization of “There’s nothing new to report on the NHL front” coverage? I swear to God that some variation of that line has opened every single sportscast I have heard, and probably half the Canadian hourly newscasts, going as far back as last September when the season-that-wasn’t officially didn’t begin not to happen.
When I think of the vast array of genuine news stories that probably got bumped or short-changed for the massive media play this pathetic millionaires’ sandbox duel has been given, it is to cry.
So please, to everyone in the nation’s editorial meetings with even an iota of line-up decision authority, KNOCK IT OFF! Those of us who lost interest in the damned sport about the time Bobby Hull jumped ship to join the WHA would be oh-so-grateful.
…
Update – Oh hell!
“Tuesday, February 15, 2005 Updated at 11:56 AM EST Canadian Press: (NEW YORK) More NHL labour talks were expected Tuesday in the wake of major moves by both sides…”
Damn
Damn
Damn...
(trails off in a state of advanced ennui…)
Meanwhile, my desktop has a piston-engined-aircraft-day-by-day calendar, and I steadily clip my favourites and add them to my cubicle wall in a growing montage that now counts some 132 separate photos. My computer screen saver is a gorgeous fantasy painting (because the flight it depicts never occurred) of a CF-105 Avro Arrow and a CF-101 Voodoo climbing steeply in full-afterburner tandem into a beautiful blue sky.
Recently, a work colleague attached to a different program and with whom I’ve only ever had a “Hi” connection, was waiting by my desk when I showed up for work. As it turned out, he wasn’t waiting for me, but rather for a manager with a real office located directly beside my stall with whom he’d had an early morning meeting arranged.
When he saw me, he said he’d been admiring my models. So I chatted briefly with him about my interest and pointed out the montage, which he hadn’t yet seen. He looked closely at many of the aircraft, his fingers brushing lightly over the surface of a couple of them... “Lots of memories,” he said.
One episode he was prompted to recall was an entertaining but overly detailed (I thought) account of “losing one’s cookies” at the top of a loop while a passenger in a Spitfire converted to a two-seater for training purposes.
Then, touching a photo of a PBY Catalina Flying Boat, he proceeded to regale me with a story of his long ago days working for an ad agency on Montreal’s South Shore near the Cartierville airport. In one especially memorable recollection, he told me that the Catalina he personally recalled had often ferried him up to several remote areas in northern Quebec where the “runway” was always a lake, hence the necessity of travelling in a flying boat. But because it was a bare-bones conversion from its wartime configuration as a submarine hunter, his “passenger seat” was actually a mat on which he lay prone in the aircraft’s nose – the bomb aimer’s position.
One day, he and the pilot, just for fun, had actually loaded the bomb racks with 12 large fireplace-sized logs of just the right length to fit into the racks. En route, they passed quite low over a remote lake near their destination and noticed a small, almost fully submerged derelict rowboat. So being guys, they took the aircraft into a bomb run. In one mass release, they dropped all 12 of their log bombs at once. Despite their inexperience as bombardiers, they managed to connect with several of them, shattering the rowboat instantly into splinters.
He then told me that, a very few days later, he’d met the area’s parish priest in a local store and briefly engaged in a “How are you?” conversation with him. The parish priest said he was fine, healthwise, but was in somewhat more of an angry, disappointed mood emotionally, because someone had completely annihilated his favourite fishing platform – a rowboat anchored on a remote lake a few kilometres away. (Partially submerged, as it turned out, not because it was derelict at all, but rather because it had several days’ rain in it that the priest was going to have had to bail out before starting to fish.)
As he departed for his meeting, my story-telling colleague observed that he was not then, nor has he ever been, someone to observe the principle of confession in his faith.
A wonderfully sublime encounter that, all the more satisfying because partway through, he actually waved off a signal from the assistant to the manager with whom he had his appointed session that she was ready, and finished telling me his stories (the Catalina bomb run was just one of three) before joining the meeting.
= = = = = = = = = =
“Lucy, you got some ‘splainin’ to do.”:
From an online report about a trio of terrorist bombs that exploded recently in The Philippines:
“The first bomb struck outside a busy shopping mall in General Santos city, on the island of Mindanao. Police say the bomb was hidden inside a tricycle parked near the mall's entrance.”
Now when I was but a lad, before acquiring the balance to enable myself to abandon three wheels in favour of two, a “tricycle” was a vehicle that, even were it to be filled chock-a-block with gunpowder, couldn’t possibly have generated an explosion of sufficient magnitude to make the nightly news. I can’t believe I’m the only one who harbours the image of tricycle-as-toy and, had I been the editor of Voice of America.com, where this paragraph appeared, I would have asked the reporter for a parenthetical insert for clarification. Because my suspicion is that a Filipino tricycle is a Monty-Pythonesque something completely different.
Aha! (From http://www.everything2.com/):
“The Philippine tricycle serves much the same purpose as the Thai tuk tuk, and is a common form of public transportation in both rural and urban areas. It consists of a motorcycle and sidecar combination, with a canvas roof stretched over a framework of metal bars, welded to the sidecar. Like its larger cousin the jeepney, tricycles are usually decorated with shiny chrome and stainless steel, with various mirrors, colorful banners, and other decorations. Tricycles can usually seat three or four people, two in the sidecar, and one or two sitting behind the driver. In rural areas, it is not uncommon to find tricycles hauling five or six people, complete with vegetables, chickens and live pigs.”
That, tragically, makes a lot more sense. A vehicle capable of accommodating five or six people plus animals and food is certainly capable of being a vastly more destructive force than the pedal-driven velocipede I raced up and down our neighbourhood sidewalks.
= = = = = = = = = =
Escalator accident update:
“NAGOYA, Japan (14 February) -- Some 13 high school students were injured when they fell like dominos on an escalator at a local subway station after one of them stopped when his bag was caught between steps, police said. The high school student had his bag caught between steps on the escalator at Shiogamaguchi Station on the subway Tsurumai Line in Nagoya at about 8:20 a.m. on Sunday. When he tried to pull his bag free, he was hit by other students following him, resulting in 13 high school students falling, officers said.”
Hey, have I got an idea for you guys! (Although on closer reading, come to think of it, a “between steps” entrapment would not have been prevented by the kind of escalator skirt recently installed in our office building. It screens the step edges from the wall. So… never mind.)
= = = = = = = = = =
There is a bar (although “trough” might be a more apt generic) in Decatur, Georgia called Mulligan’s. A recent article about their menu on the Associated Press website included the following notes:
“The [‘Hamdog’], a specialty of Mulligan's, a suburban bar, is a hot dog wrapped by a beef patty that's deep fried, covered with chili, cheese and onions and served on a hoagie bun. Oh yeah, it's also topped with a fried egg and two fistfuls of fries.”
and
"The ‘Luther Burger’ [is] a bacon-cheeseburger served on a Krispy Kreme doughnut bun.”
The AP article begins with the headline “Southern food frustrates health officials”, and ends with a hotlink to the Morehouse School of Medicine, a “historically black” medical college in Atlanta College. Some stories are, indeed, their own best punchlines.
= = = = = = = = = =
And finally… OH PLEASE!!!!
Now that it appears we have really – (“We’re not kidding this time; we really, REALLY mean it!”) – reached the so-called “drop dead” date after which the National Hockey League’s 2004-2005 season is officially declared cancelled, can we at long last see a media euthanization of “There’s nothing new to report on the NHL front” coverage? I swear to God that some variation of that line has opened every single sportscast I have heard, and probably half the Canadian hourly newscasts, going as far back as last September when the season-that-wasn’t officially didn’t begin not to happen.
When I think of the vast array of genuine news stories that probably got bumped or short-changed for the massive media play this pathetic millionaires’ sandbox duel has been given, it is to cry.
So please, to everyone in the nation’s editorial meetings with even an iota of line-up decision authority, KNOCK IT OFF! Those of us who lost interest in the damned sport about the time Bobby Hull jumped ship to join the WHA would be oh-so-grateful.
…
Update – Oh hell!
“Tuesday, February 15, 2005 Updated at 11:56 AM EST Canadian Press: (NEW YORK) More NHL labour talks were expected Tuesday in the wake of major moves by both sides…”
Damn
Damn
Damn...
(trails off in a state of advanced ennui…)
Tuesday, February 08, 2005
Strike update!
The vote results were finally announced the last week of January and ballots ran three to one in favour of accepting the government’s latest offer, despite the Union management’s unanimous recommendation that it be rejected. Everybody, it seems, has a theory about why that happened, and the Union’s talking heads have said in several media interviews that they want to “consult” with the members in the weeks and months ahead to determine why such a gaping disconnect seems to exist between the management and the rank-and-file.
I have a few thoughts on that, and they relate to delivering some actual service – not an unreasonable expectation, I would have thought. And in fact for me personally, it’s a matter of a very few simple little things like oh, perhaps replying to e-mail when you tell someone that’s the “best way to get in touch with me”, returning phone calls left on your voicemail when you don’t answer your e-mail, issuing strike pay within weeks of the event, instead of months later, little things like that – in exchange for the whacking great amount of money that is stripped from our paycheques every two weeks for “Association dues”. But I’ll wait until I’m asked.
= = = = = = = = = =
Every once in a while I get caught completely by surprise by something I read in the news. Recently, it was an article announcing that German boxer Max Schmeling has just died. He was 99.
I’m embarrassed to admit that I didn’t realize he was still alive.
Many, many years ago, when I was but a young teenager [long before there was an Internet, back when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics kept the George Bushes of the world from “sharing democracy with the freedom loving peoples of (insert name of unwilling host country here)”… um… but I digress], one of the continent’s sports services ran a multi-bout fantasy boxing series on radio.
The premise was quite elegant and the result made for some really exciting radio. Using computers, they cast various aspects of a fighter’s standard boxing abilities into quantifiable form and created a computer-based statistical comparison that pitted the world’s greatest boxers in modern history “virtually” against one another, regardless of when the boxer had been in his prime.
They then employed scriptwriters to develop a “called” play-by-play scenario for the radio audience. It was a totally fictitious fight based on what was probably nothing more than a dozen or so-character coded printout from a computer indicating a likely statistical outcome of, for example, “Johnson: KO-5th”.
Some sports figures become such giants they transcend their sports. For example, even non-golfers recognize the name Tiger Woods. Likewise, it’s probably safe to assume that even in North America, where “football” is called “soccer”, the vast majority of people asked would correctly be able to place David Beckham into that sport, even if that knowledge is due to the popularity of the movie, “Bend it like Beckham”.
For this fantasy world boxing match, there were several such names: Joe Louis, Cassius Clay (later Mohammed Ali), Jack Dempsey and, to the point of this ramble, Max Schmeling.
Schmeling’s fight career accomplishments by themselves were not the reason for his boxing fame. It was, rather, a combination of sports and politics. In 1936, white German Max Schmeling beat the previously unbeaten black US boxer Joe Louis. Schmeling was a ten-to-one underdog on the betting line and, plainly and simply, was given no chance whatsoever in practical terms. The shocking result of their 1936 fight is still considered by many in the boxing world, indeed many in the larger world of sports in general, to be one of the greatest sports upsets in history.
And the times being what they were, the Nazi propagandists of the day swiftly turned the fight’s outcome into a cause célèbre on which to trumpet the obvious superiority of the “Master race”. (They hadn’t quite been able to accomplish the same result when black US sprinter Jesse Owens waxed several other members of that same “Master race” in competitions held during that year’s Olympic Games in Berlin. And not surprisingly, when Schmeling was soundly beaten by the “Brown Bomber” Louis in a 1938 rematch, the event did not get the same play in Germany.)
Probably nobody was quite so appalled at the propagandist use of his 1936 win as was Max Schmeling himself. He had a Jewish-American manager. The Nazis urged him to terminate that relationship. Schmeling refused. In fact, he hid a pair of Jewish boys in his apartment during the “Night of Broken Glass” (“Krystallnacht”) in 1938 when rampaging gangs of Nazi thugs smashed thousands of Jewish-owned homes and business storefronts to bits. Later, Schmeling was also rumoured to have used his fame and influence to discreetly help a number of his Jewish friends escape the regime.
He was drafted into the German armed forces as a paratrooper and one of the most famous period photographs of the boxer in military uniform shows him poised in the doorway of a Junkers JU-52 aircraft in the parachutist’s typical “Ready-Set-Go” position. His regiment took part in the Germans’ airborne invasion of Crete, shortly after which he himself was badly injured and underwent a long period of convalescence.
I honestly don’t recollect the outcome of that long-ago radio fantasy boxing series. For some reason, I think I recall Dempsey beating Clay (later, Mohammed Ali) in the final, but I concede memory uncertainty here. What I do remember is being introduced for the first time to Max Schmeling, a man who in his way was able to tell Adolf Hitler and Josef Goebbels to go to hell, and yet who lived to fight, literally, another day.
Post-war, he had the foresight to purchase the German distribution rights for Coca-Cola, which made him a rich man and, in one of those little ironies of life, eventually enabled him to quietly send support to the now-destitute Joe Louis, when post-fame life was nowhere nearly so kind to the American. Louis’ funeral in 1981 was paid for by his pre-war rival and lifelong friend, Max Schmeling.
In his later years, he apparently refused to capitalize on his fame, beyond enjoying the quiet and leisurely life it allowed him to live out. Schmeling in fact said in a 1975 interview that losing that 1938 rematch quite possibly saved his life. Had he won, the even more intense political use of the outcome might have seen him branded a contributor to the growth of the Nazi regime. Schmeling, no doubt fully aware of what happened to filmmaker Leni “Triumph of the Will” Reifenstahl after the war, said he might have wound up being tried as a war criminal had not his loss knocked him off the Nazis’ “A” list of propaganda tools.
The boxing world officially assigns the nickname “Gentleman” to “Gentleman Jim Corbett”, but it seems to me that Max Schmeling certainly was no less deserving of the title.
(Biographical facts courtesy of an official obituary in The Globe and Mail online, 4 February.)
= = = = = = = = = =
What if this catches on?
“Failing Sanyo orders employees to buy its products: Sanyo's business is failing, so they've ordered their employees to spend a minimum fraction of their salaries on Sanyo products. Executives have been asked to spend up to 2 million yen ($19,290), division chiefs 500,000 yen and other employees 200,000 yen on Sanyo products, which include televisions, refrigerators, mobile phones and insurance.”
Can you imagine the employee response were any “failing business” in North America to issue a directive to them to truss up the sagging corporate foundations by emptying their bank accounts in an effort to re-black the company’s bottom line? (Although one’s first instinct might be to think the response words would all be four letters long, I’m thinking more along the lines of “class action”. Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of law, and all that.)
And why stop at a “failing” business? “If you enjoy working here at McDonald’s, you’d better consider making our fine products the core ingredients of your lunchbreaks.”
“Haven’t you noticed your paycheque has a Ford logo printed on it? Lose the Corolla – or at least stop driving one to work – if you know what’s good for you as you meander down your career path.”
= = = = = = = = = =
Give it about a month and (in Canada, anyway) we’re all going to be completely sick of hearing the word “dithering” or any of its present / past / future tense variations. For some reason, the ranters and railers in the Opposition parties appear to have decided that it is the one single word that best describes all the problems they have with the government of Paul Martin. The Liberals were “dithering” over dispatching our Disaster Assistance Relief Team to Sri Lanka; they’re “dithering” on missile defence; “dithering” on implementing our environmental commitments to the Kyoto Accord; “dithering” on what role the feds are going to play in the massive Toronto waterfront re-development plan.
If this keeps up, the public is going to demand that daily newspapers yank Blondie from their comics page simply because one more appearance of Mr Dithers is going to trip the “going postal” switch on several readers whose family members warn are already just teetering on the soundbite-induced edge of insanity.
= = = = = = = = = =
And finally…
This is why we have stereotypes:
In a recent Associated Press story (February 3, to be exact. Dateline Prattville, Alabama) about a wild melée that erupted at an Alabama high school girls’ basketball game, we are told the brawl got so intense, riot police were called out, Tasers employed, charges laid and arrests made. One parent grasped at what must surely be a standard Alabama metaphor to describe the speed at which the outbreak exploded in size:
"Initially, there were 30, then it started spreading like cockroaches," said… parent, Joanne Heningburg.”
And not to be outdone, when interviewed about her perceptions of the event, this sweet young thing (how else to describe someone named “Cherish Cartee”?) obviously reached to the very depths of the worst deprivations she could imagine in order to convey the true sense of disaster to readers / listeners everywhere:
“'People were screaming and running,' Prattville cheerleader Cherish Cartee said. 'Girls lost their cell phones. Keys got lost. It's something I will never forget.'”
The horror! The horror!
The vote results were finally announced the last week of January and ballots ran three to one in favour of accepting the government’s latest offer, despite the Union management’s unanimous recommendation that it be rejected. Everybody, it seems, has a theory about why that happened, and the Union’s talking heads have said in several media interviews that they want to “consult” with the members in the weeks and months ahead to determine why such a gaping disconnect seems to exist between the management and the rank-and-file.
I have a few thoughts on that, and they relate to delivering some actual service – not an unreasonable expectation, I would have thought. And in fact for me personally, it’s a matter of a very few simple little things like oh, perhaps replying to e-mail when you tell someone that’s the “best way to get in touch with me”, returning phone calls left on your voicemail when you don’t answer your e-mail, issuing strike pay within weeks of the event, instead of months later, little things like that – in exchange for the whacking great amount of money that is stripped from our paycheques every two weeks for “Association dues”. But I’ll wait until I’m asked.
= = = = = = = = = =
Every once in a while I get caught completely by surprise by something I read in the news. Recently, it was an article announcing that German boxer Max Schmeling has just died. He was 99.
I’m embarrassed to admit that I didn’t realize he was still alive.
Many, many years ago, when I was but a young teenager [long before there was an Internet, back when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics kept the George Bushes of the world from “sharing democracy with the freedom loving peoples of (insert name of unwilling host country here)”… um… but I digress], one of the continent’s sports services ran a multi-bout fantasy boxing series on radio.
The premise was quite elegant and the result made for some really exciting radio. Using computers, they cast various aspects of a fighter’s standard boxing abilities into quantifiable form and created a computer-based statistical comparison that pitted the world’s greatest boxers in modern history “virtually” against one another, regardless of when the boxer had been in his prime.
They then employed scriptwriters to develop a “called” play-by-play scenario for the radio audience. It was a totally fictitious fight based on what was probably nothing more than a dozen or so-character coded printout from a computer indicating a likely statistical outcome of, for example, “Johnson: KO-5th”.
Some sports figures become such giants they transcend their sports. For example, even non-golfers recognize the name Tiger Woods. Likewise, it’s probably safe to assume that even in North America, where “football” is called “soccer”, the vast majority of people asked would correctly be able to place David Beckham into that sport, even if that knowledge is due to the popularity of the movie, “Bend it like Beckham”.
For this fantasy world boxing match, there were several such names: Joe Louis, Cassius Clay (later Mohammed Ali), Jack Dempsey and, to the point of this ramble, Max Schmeling.
Schmeling’s fight career accomplishments by themselves were not the reason for his boxing fame. It was, rather, a combination of sports and politics. In 1936, white German Max Schmeling beat the previously unbeaten black US boxer Joe Louis. Schmeling was a ten-to-one underdog on the betting line and, plainly and simply, was given no chance whatsoever in practical terms. The shocking result of their 1936 fight is still considered by many in the boxing world, indeed many in the larger world of sports in general, to be one of the greatest sports upsets in history.
And the times being what they were, the Nazi propagandists of the day swiftly turned the fight’s outcome into a cause célèbre on which to trumpet the obvious superiority of the “Master race”. (They hadn’t quite been able to accomplish the same result when black US sprinter Jesse Owens waxed several other members of that same “Master race” in competitions held during that year’s Olympic Games in Berlin. And not surprisingly, when Schmeling was soundly beaten by the “Brown Bomber” Louis in a 1938 rematch, the event did not get the same play in Germany.)
Probably nobody was quite so appalled at the propagandist use of his 1936 win as was Max Schmeling himself. He had a Jewish-American manager. The Nazis urged him to terminate that relationship. Schmeling refused. In fact, he hid a pair of Jewish boys in his apartment during the “Night of Broken Glass” (“Krystallnacht”) in 1938 when rampaging gangs of Nazi thugs smashed thousands of Jewish-owned homes and business storefronts to bits. Later, Schmeling was also rumoured to have used his fame and influence to discreetly help a number of his Jewish friends escape the regime.
He was drafted into the German armed forces as a paratrooper and one of the most famous period photographs of the boxer in military uniform shows him poised in the doorway of a Junkers JU-52 aircraft in the parachutist’s typical “Ready-Set-Go” position. His regiment took part in the Germans’ airborne invasion of Crete, shortly after which he himself was badly injured and underwent a long period of convalescence.
I honestly don’t recollect the outcome of that long-ago radio fantasy boxing series. For some reason, I think I recall Dempsey beating Clay (later, Mohammed Ali) in the final, but I concede memory uncertainty here. What I do remember is being introduced for the first time to Max Schmeling, a man who in his way was able to tell Adolf Hitler and Josef Goebbels to go to hell, and yet who lived to fight, literally, another day.
Post-war, he had the foresight to purchase the German distribution rights for Coca-Cola, which made him a rich man and, in one of those little ironies of life, eventually enabled him to quietly send support to the now-destitute Joe Louis, when post-fame life was nowhere nearly so kind to the American. Louis’ funeral in 1981 was paid for by his pre-war rival and lifelong friend, Max Schmeling.
In his later years, he apparently refused to capitalize on his fame, beyond enjoying the quiet and leisurely life it allowed him to live out. Schmeling in fact said in a 1975 interview that losing that 1938 rematch quite possibly saved his life. Had he won, the even more intense political use of the outcome might have seen him branded a contributor to the growth of the Nazi regime. Schmeling, no doubt fully aware of what happened to filmmaker Leni “Triumph of the Will” Reifenstahl after the war, said he might have wound up being tried as a war criminal had not his loss knocked him off the Nazis’ “A” list of propaganda tools.
The boxing world officially assigns the nickname “Gentleman” to “Gentleman Jim Corbett”, but it seems to me that Max Schmeling certainly was no less deserving of the title.
(Biographical facts courtesy of an official obituary in The Globe and Mail online, 4 February.)
= = = = = = = = = =
What if this catches on?
“Failing Sanyo orders employees to buy its products: Sanyo's business is failing, so they've ordered their employees to spend a minimum fraction of their salaries on Sanyo products. Executives have been asked to spend up to 2 million yen ($19,290), division chiefs 500,000 yen and other employees 200,000 yen on Sanyo products, which include televisions, refrigerators, mobile phones and insurance.”
Can you imagine the employee response were any “failing business” in North America to issue a directive to them to truss up the sagging corporate foundations by emptying their bank accounts in an effort to re-black the company’s bottom line? (Although one’s first instinct might be to think the response words would all be four letters long, I’m thinking more along the lines of “class action”. Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of law, and all that.)
And why stop at a “failing” business? “If you enjoy working here at McDonald’s, you’d better consider making our fine products the core ingredients of your lunchbreaks.”
“Haven’t you noticed your paycheque has a Ford logo printed on it? Lose the Corolla – or at least stop driving one to work – if you know what’s good for you as you meander down your career path.”
= = = = = = = = = =
Give it about a month and (in Canada, anyway) we’re all going to be completely sick of hearing the word “dithering” or any of its present / past / future tense variations. For some reason, the ranters and railers in the Opposition parties appear to have decided that it is the one single word that best describes all the problems they have with the government of Paul Martin. The Liberals were “dithering” over dispatching our Disaster Assistance Relief Team to Sri Lanka; they’re “dithering” on missile defence; “dithering” on implementing our environmental commitments to the Kyoto Accord; “dithering” on what role the feds are going to play in the massive Toronto waterfront re-development plan.
If this keeps up, the public is going to demand that daily newspapers yank Blondie from their comics page simply because one more appearance of Mr Dithers is going to trip the “going postal” switch on several readers whose family members warn are already just teetering on the soundbite-induced edge of insanity.
= = = = = = = = = =
And finally…
This is why we have stereotypes:
In a recent Associated Press story (February 3, to be exact. Dateline Prattville, Alabama) about a wild melée that erupted at an Alabama high school girls’ basketball game, we are told the brawl got so intense, riot police were called out, Tasers employed, charges laid and arrests made. One parent grasped at what must surely be a standard Alabama metaphor to describe the speed at which the outbreak exploded in size:
"Initially, there were 30, then it started spreading like cockroaches," said… parent, Joanne Heningburg.”
And not to be outdone, when interviewed about her perceptions of the event, this sweet young thing (how else to describe someone named “Cherish Cartee”?) obviously reached to the very depths of the worst deprivations she could imagine in order to convey the true sense of disaster to readers / listeners everywhere:
“'People were screaming and running,' Prattville cheerleader Cherish Cartee said. 'Girls lost their cell phones. Keys got lost. It's something I will never forget.'”
The horror! The horror!
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