TriumphAnt

When computers take things waaaay too literally…

In conjunction with that part of my life that keeps chocolate chip cookies in the pantry, I am a new subscriber to what I am told is the Cadillac of news monitoring services. The first and most immediate outcome is that my morning e-mail has taken a huge quantity leap from its 8-10 new messages waiting for me when I arrive at work each day, to upwards of 40 or 50 new messages, courtesy of all the news clippings, “Media Advisory Alert”s and scheduled photo-op notices that I apparently am now receiving.

An indication of just how thorough they are going to be was provided by the example of a spring training camp baseball game result that showed up in a recent e-mail. I was completely baffled until I read the following:

“Although they've got two cities in their name now, the Angels seem determined to seem homeless to fans attending their games. Just as they did last season in Anaheim, the Angels made no reference to a city of origin in their public announcements or promotional materials.”

One of the files I am tasked with watching is coverage of issues related to the nation’s homeless. Thus, someone has advised this service to send me anything referring to “homeless” and its noun form, “homelessness”. That reference to the vagrancy effect of the recent location of the now-unspecified (formerly the Anaheim formerly the California formerly the Los Angeles) Angels baseball team earned this sports story a trip to my work-related e-mailbox.

And even more recently, I received a breathless announcement from the Associated Press of several upcoming new book releases. The headline keyed on two new books about convicted murderer Scott Peterson. But the reason I received the mailing at all could only be found well down the list in this note: “Empire Rising (FSG) by Thomas Kelly takes place in 1930s New York, where an Irish immigrant construction worker becomes involved with an artist who is an underworld figure's paramour.” Another of my responsibilities is the Temporary Foreign Workers file (home of the ever more notorious Exotic Dancer saga) and it was the three-word phrase “immigrant construction worker” that triggered that clipping’s dispatch to my e-mailbox.

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“Petals Around the Rose”

I’m still trying to figure out if this puzzle in logical thinking is ridiculously simple, or mind-numbingly difficult. As you will note when you link to it, it has frustrated the likes of Bill Gates, which suggests that it tilts toward “difficult”. But you should also know that after about two hours of wrestling with it, I solved it. Clearly, that tilts the balance back past equilibrium way over to the “ridiculously simple” end of the scale. (My family will all too happily affirm this. I am someone who cannot play “Mastermind” because my mind doesn’t work that way. Both my wife and daughter can whip my butt at that game. Needless to say, they play most often against each other. I can only watch in envy at the logical leaps they are able to make as each new clue line reveals important information to them that, for me, might as well be cast in Linear B. But I digress.)

“Petals Around the Rose” has been called an exercise in “thinking outside the box”, an example of a conundrum that requires “lateral thinking”, and a whole lot of four-letter names by people either in the throes of trying to solve it, or who have knocked themselves unconscious after whacking their own foreheads when the light finally went on.

There are a couple hints which are permitted in passing it along. (Note: Apparently those who have solved it under no circumstances are allowed to reveal the answer.)

1. At each throw of the dice, the answer to the question, “How many petals around the rose are there?” will be either 0 (zero) or an even number.

2. An important clue to the puzzle’s solution lies in its name.

3. The vast majority of people who tackle it greatly overthink it.

Have fun.

http://www.borrett.id.au/computing/petals-bg.htm

Let me know how many neurons you kill in your quest to solve this thing.

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And here I’ve been thinking that regardless of how I feel personally about the current resident of the Oval Office, I can’t deny the man’s power. Well, it would seem it doesn’t hold a candle to that of businessman, adventurer and camera-not shy gadabout Richard Branson, if this clip from a recent report of enormous demonstrations in Beirut is anything to go by:

“[Globe and Mail reporter Mark] MacKinnon said that some of the soldiers seemed primarily concerned about stopping looting and that a number of them had fallen back to protect a Virgin Records store.”

That should tell you something about the importance of Avril Lavigne CD sales to the economy of Lebanon.

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What can we say? You all look the same to us!

The following lead appeared in a story at an online news site for the India sub-continent, keralanext.com

“A month after their arguments failed to budge John Gomery from the helm of the sponsorship inquiry, lawyers for former prime minister Jean Chretien are asking the courts to intervene.”

The story was featured under “US News”.

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Old Home Week Deluxe!

In one of those little series of coincidences that usually sends me off humming The Lion King theme, “The Circle of Life”, recently I wound up in a brief e-mail exchange that had me visiting a website dedicated to preserving the domestic memories of life at the Royal Canadian Air Force base in France where, as an Air Force “brat”, I spent four years of my childhood.

I was stunned the first time I browsed the site to discover my forty-years younger face staring out of at least two photos that appear on the site – one an official class photo of my Grade 2 class, all of gathered on the front steps of the school and ranked tallest to shortest, and the other a group shot of the Silver Falcon Wolf Cub Pack to which I belonged, and my Dad was a cub leader.

We bore the same name as the RCAF squadron based there and, as a result, got to sew the official squadron crest on our cub uniforms. It was a gorgeous profile of (what are the odds?) a silver falcon, its entire countenance reflecting the “Don’t mess with me” message that, now that I think of it, an attacking squadron of CF-86 Sabre jets at full afterburner could probably manage to convey just fine without the bird. But it was pretty damned cool, and much more appealing to a young boy than the placid and environmentally friendly names and logos adopted by most scouting organizations, especially the European ones. (The Edelweiss Troop; The Woodpecker Tribe; Rowan’s Sherpas) I recall that the badges were much sought-after whenever we went to gatherings of other cub and scout groups.

But about a week before that, I had also heard from a former Little Brother that a family celebration was being held to celebrate his Mom’s 70th birthday, and I was invited. I hadn’t heard from him for almost 15 years.

Then we heard from a young woman we had billeted for a week some 14 years ago as a part of the Rotary Club’s “Adventures in Citizenship” program. She was just calling to say hello.

And just a couple days ago I received a bolt-out-of-the-blue e-mail from a guy who was one of my best friends in the mid-1960s, on a different air force base. It turns out that he actually works in the same department I do. The fact that we never bumped into each other is not as amazing as it might sound. Our “department” is actually part of two separate complexes of six office towers in two separate locations in Ottawa and Hull, whose daytime population is probably on the order of 40,000 people. He had stumbled over my name in the computer e-mail directory while looking for someone else, and basically sent me an “Is that you?” greeting, using a nickname I hadn’t heard for about 40 years.

So that’s no fewer than four separate major flashbacks over a period of about two weeks, which might explain why I’m quietly humming the theme from The Lion King a lot these days.

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And finally… I think I might have found the perfect short-term antidote to the late winter blahs… The past couple days here in Ottawa, the temperature has had the gawdfersaken temerity to sink to Minus (multiple adjectives) 30 with the windchill! And it’s a damp cold!

So late one recent evening, after returning home with a cup of far-too-steeped Tim Horton’s Steeped Tea (probably tm reg Pat Pend), and browsing a few favourite blogsites, I suddenly realized that the TV, which sits not too far away as a minor distraction (Multi-media R-Us) was presenting the startling newscast images of a farmers’ demonstration today on the front snowpacked lawn of Queen’s Park, the home of the Government of Ontario. “Startling” because this particular demonstration was crashed, literally, by an obviously suicidal man driving a Budget Rent-a-Van (probably the last publicity that Budget wanted). Over the course of about half an hour, he apparently leapt from the driver’s seat several different times to pour gasoline all over himself. Finally, after racing his van back and forth obviously one too many times for the many police officers surrounding him, several police cars were employed to ram the van front and back, effectively shutting down his ability to move and, in consequence, possibly run someone over in the ever more crowded area.

At which point he ignited himself and I watched in horror as police and firefighters swiftly smashed the driver’s side window, dragged this now burning being out onto the ground and smothered the flames.

Which led me to seek some other distraction.

Enter a hopelessly shallow video collection of every last one of the hits of a group who were everywhere in the 1970s, and whose name derives from the first initials of its four principal members: Agnetha, Benny, Bjorn and Anni-Frid.

Yep, ABBA. “The Definitive Collection” (It says so on the box.)

This stuff is howlingly mesmerizing, from the garish outfits they wear, to every visual trick in the book (that’d be the pre-computer graphics 1972 book) employed by the producer to provide a camera break from simply watching them perform – Vaseline on the camera lens, splitscreen – sometimes split into 16 separate frames, and lyrics which, if cast in the role of filling a swimming pool, would not provide sufficient depth to moisten one’s ankles.

But for all that, enormously catchy, unignorable and I dare you not to find yourself singing along with such great ABBA couplets as:

“You are the dancing queen, young and sweet, only seventeen
Dancing queen, feel the beat from the tambourine
You can dance, you can jive, having the time of your life
See that girl, watch that scene, dig in the dancing queen.”

(I suspect that last one should be “diggin’ the dancing queen”, unless it’s a hitherto unsuspected paean to ritualistic cannibalism.)

and

“There was something in the air that night
The stars were bright, Fernando
They were shining there for you and me
For liberty, Fernando
Though I never thought that we could lose
There's no regret
If I had to do the same again
I would, my friend, Fernando.”

and

“Super Trouper lights are gonna find me
Shining like the sun
(Sup-p-per Troup-p-per)
Smiling, having fun
(Sup-p-per Troup-p-per)
Feeling like a number one.”

and of course:

“Mamma mia, here I go again
My my, how can I resist you?
Mamma mia, does it show again?
My my, just how much I've missed you
Yes, I've been brokenhearted
Blue since the day we parted
Why, why did I ever let you go?
Mamma mia, now I really know,
My my, I could never let you go.”

(There. I feel less blah-y already!)

Not so long ago, I discovered there is a dark side to one of the quartet. Anni-Frid (the brunette) was the love child of a Nazi soldier who sired her during a night of passion with her mother, a young Norwegian, during the German occupation of Norway in WWII.

The soldier was transferred to another post, and eventually presumed to have been killed later in the war. Anni-Frid, meanwhile, grew up under the hating eyes of many of her peers and their parents, eventually becoming a poster child for campaigns aimed at wiping out the stigma attached to these “war children”, who were brought into this life through neither politics nor passions of their own. (Along with, I was surprised to discover, guitarist Eric Clapton, whose mother was British and whose father was a Canadian soldier from Montreal).

Anni-Frid’s parentage suddenly exploded in her face in 1977 when a young lady in Germany was reading some just-released biographical information about the band and realized to her shock that Anni-Frid’s illegitimacy was due to a man very much alive – her uncle.

A reunion followed, 32 years of history was awkwardly recounted over a period of three days and a gap in the young entertainer’s life restored.

Surely there’s an ABBA song in there somewhere…

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I’ll be offline for a while. It’s spring break time and we’ve decided to leave electronics behind as we head off to the daytime distractions of nature and eventide in the company of – well, books, I seem to remember they’re called.

Descriptions and impressions of the Grand Canyon, Monument Valley and the Cirque de Soleil’s show, Ka, next time.