TriumphAnt

(*Eesh*)

Here’s a quote from a Globe and Mail (online) story about Gomery inquiry witness Paul Coffin, the day (May 31) it was announced he had elected to plead guilty to 15 counts of fraud:

“Testifying before the inquiry earlier this year,
Mr. Coffin had admitted that he issued inflated
invoices as part of his handling of sponsorship
contracts. Mr. Coffin told the inquiry that he
discovered during his dealings with Public
Works Canada that, although his agency did
not keep accurate timesheets, he could tailor
his invoices to match the maximum budgets he
could claim. ’When year-end would arrive, we'd
get a phone call from somebody at the office at
Public Works [saying], ‘There's still so much in
the budget. Are you sending more invoices?’ ‘
he recalled. Then, ‘we would immediately send
more invoices to complete the budget,’ Mr. Coffin
said.”

And here’s a key sentence in a recent public opinion survey on how little Canadians trust their politicians as a class (an oxymoronic collective noun, in this case, if ever there was one):

“Canadians have grown increasingly dissatisfied
with all politicians, with nearly two-thirds saying
they have little or no confidence in their political
leaders, according to an Environics poll
commissioned by the CBC.”
(CBC news website, May 30)

You don’t think there’s a possible cause-and-effect thing happening there, do you? Or as the Star Trek writers would describe it, a “temporal causality loop”*?

* (From memory.alpha.org): “A temporal causality loop is a special condition of time in which time runs for a certain period, then resets itself to a point back in time, after which the events play out over again.”

And again, and again, and again, and again… (Sigh.)

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Munchkin and I had a couple D&D days recently (Dad ‘n’ Daughter), so like any Dad would do when given such an opportunity, I took her out for a little good old-fashioned vicious onscreen violence, specifically, Star Wars episode XXVII-B(ii), “Revenge of the Sith” (which I will render as the bandwidth-conserving ROTS from this point forward).

I confess I quite liked it and, if a voiced 3-4 word review is anything to go by, so did she.

But I also confess to thinking that George Lucas is in serious need of a consultant on the imagery of names. Consider, for example, his Christopher Lee character. In this movie, the often-sinister Mr Lee plays one of the especially darker villains in Lucas’ multi-part universe – a Sith Lord. And in this movie, Mr Lee can generate lightning bolts from the palms of his hands with a mere gesture. Now you would think a character who is both nasty and possessed of great power that he has channelled for purposes other than good would have a suitably sinister-sounding swath of syllables by which his cowering underlings are required to address him.

But no, and picture this. (This is a hypothetical scene, so it’s not a spoiler if you haven’t yet seen ROTS.) A large fortress has just been reduced to smouldering rubble as the result of a successful, but costly onslaught of combined land and air weapons. The victory secure, the dark forces step aside as a sinister-looking towering starship descends, touching down amid a sea of freshly created bodies. Its ramp extends and a herald steps forward. Taking a deep breath, he announces loudly, “Now all bow down before your new lord or suffer the instant wrath of… Count Dooku”.

I strongly suspect the required reverential silence would be broken by more than a couple stifled snickers… “Did he say ‘Dooku’? (mmmmmpppph)”

There’s also a Darth Vidious (not too bad, but in the previous movie there was a Darth Sidious. Probably the Mary Kate and Ashley of the Dark Side of the Force) and a General Grievous. With that second one, you can just imagine Lucas saying, “I know, we’ll use that and say he gave his name to what eventually became the word – like Dr Joseph Ignace Guillotin, or Shirley Temple, or the southern France village of Condom.”

And does Lucas have an uncle in War Amps, or something? I swear that almost every light saber fight scene I’ve seen across the whole three decades of this sextet involves someone getting one or another of his limbs simultaneously hacked off and cauterized. The concept goes to the extreme in ROTS. In fact, I can promise you that for everyone whose entertainment experiences include both this movie and “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”, there is a point in this movie where Lucas probably intends to bring tears of pain to your eyes, but to both me and my daughter (Yep. Fandom four decades apart, which oughta show you the staying power of the British comedy troupe), it brought tears of laughter as we both recalled a certain infamous duel:

ARTHUR:
Now stand aside, worthy adversary.
BLACK KNIGHT:
'Tis but a scratch.
ARTHUR:
A scratch? Your arm's off!
BLACK KNIGHT:
No, it isn't.
ARTHUR:
Well, what's that, then?
BLACK KNIGHT:
I've had worse.
ARTHUR:
You liar!
BLACK KNIGHT:
Come on, you pansy!
[clang]
Huyah!
[clang]
Hiyaah!
[clang]
Aaaaaaaah!
[ARTHUR chops the BLACK KNIGHT's right arm off]

ARTHUR:
Victory is mine!
[kneeling]
We thank Thee Lord, that in Thy mer--
BLACK KNIGHT:
Hah!
[kick]
Come on, then.
ARTHUR:
What?
BLACK KNIGHT:
Have at you!
[kick]
ARTHUR:
Eh. You are indeed brave, Sir Knight, but the fight is mine.
BLACK KNIGHT:
Oh, had enough, eh?
ARTHUR:
Look, you stupid bastard. You've got no arms left.
BLACK KNIGHT:
Yes, I have.
ARTHUR:
Look!
BLACK KNIGHT:
Just a flesh wound.
[kick]
ARTHUR:
Look, stop that.
BLACK KNIGHT:
Chicken!
[kick]
Chickennn!
ARTHUR:
Look, I'll have your leg.
[kick]
Right!
[whop]
[ARTHUR chops the BLACK KNIGHT's right leg off]

BLACK KNIGHT:
Right. I'll do you for that!
ARTHUR:
You'll what?
BLACK KNIGHT:
Come here!
ARTHUR:
What are you going to do, bleed on me?
BLACK KNIGHT:
I'm invincible!
ARTHUR:
You're a looney.
BLACK KNIGHT:
The Black Knight always triumphs! Have at you! Come on, then.
[whop]
[ARTHUR chops the BLACK KNIGHT's last leg off]

BLACK KNIGHT:
Oh? All right, we'll call it a draw.
ARTHUR:
Come, Patsy.
BLACK KNIGHT:
Oh. Oh, I see. Running away, eh? You yellow bastards! Come back here and take what's coming to you. I'll bite your legs off!

= = = = = = = = = =

(Sigh… maybe get a map that has something on it other than “Unexplored” up there, you howling moron!)

Here’s a headline from Matt Drudge’s website, “The Drudge Report”, June 3: “Flight to New York diverted over terror scare; jet sent to remote site as precaution”.

The “remote site”?: Halifax International Airport, which annually routes about three million passengers and 100,000 plane movements off and on its runways. Halifax International Airport operates 24 / 7 with over 160 departures daily to 38 destinations in North America and Europe.

But I guess if your benchmark is “New York”, pretty much everywhere else in the world is “remote”. Then again, if you’re Matt Drudge, pretty much everyone else in the world is a genius.

= = = = = = = = = =

Note to Tory headquarters… You’re reduced to defending the indefensible.

It’s like my father-in-law told me recently about a restaurant he used to frequent. On his last visit, he had occasion to visit the gentleman’s lav. He pronounced it filthy. Now you can extrapolate that one of two ways: either “Oh, well I guess they concentrate all their attention to cleanliness in the kitchen then.” Or the other way. He hasn’t been back.

“In Search of Excellence” author Tom Peters used to be fond of telling an anecdote about travelling by air with the President of the airline. When Peters folded down his tray, he commented on how spotless it was. To which the airline President replied that a flying passenger, faced with a coffee ring on his fold-down tray, would not see a coffee stain. He’d see faulty engine maintenance and a slapdash approach to safety. So, said the airline President, “We spend a lot of money keeping our trays clean.”

So to bring this back to my memo to the Tories. It no longer matters if every last remaining audible word on the damned Grewal tapes is accurate, once you’ve admitted to their having been altered at all, whether by accident or design, then you’ve immediately called into question the entire content. Period. Yes, all of it.

Neither the transcript nor your stupid MP (no racism intended; anyone doing something so idiotic as releasing a doctored transcript would be stupid were he possessed of 16 eyes suspended on mauve stalks and a passport from Alpha Centauri.) is defensible. I suggest you abandon hitching any future message to anything connected with the tapes. And I also suggest you immediately separate Gurmant Grewal from his Radio Shack credit card.

= = = = = = = = = =

And while we’re on the subject, I think the most recent outburst from Mr Grewel compels us to declare “MBPE” a legitimate disease.

What’s MBPE, you ask? A couple years ago, a Baby Duckling introduced me to the phrase “management by psychotic episode” to describe the occasional outbursts by a mutually known manager whose responses often seemed way out of synch with the place of the triggering problem in the grand scheme of things. It Googles up with only a single source as reference, a memo written on August 28, 2002 by a NASA manager offering some observations on why morale had declined so much in the US space agency. The memo includes this reference:

“Mr. Goldin… eagerly accepted budget cuts, without the political difficulties of commensurate mission cuts, in a business that had no budget to spare. He decided in his own mind that sufficient chanting of the right mantra could make up for all the talents and resources that he was happily tossing away; he erected a framework of management by psychotic episode the like of which has probably not been seen since the Roman Emperors.”

And among a limited number of people of my acquaintance, MBPE now conveys, with a gritted-teeth smile and a clenched-fist nod, a precisely understood set of circumstances.

Which brings us back to the hapless Mr Grewel. As this is being written, it has just made the news that he is taking a stress leave from the House of Commons. This, after it had been confirmed by Air Canada that he was under investigation for soliciting Ottawa-bound passengers in the Vancouver airport to carry a package for him to the capital on a flight on which he was not ticketed to travel.

Now in the US, that sort of nonsense would have immediately seen a horde of Homelands Security SWAT team members descend on the airport which, in its turn, would already have been completely shut down to any, and I mean any, ground and air traffic, waterborne, too, were there a nearby canal. Trying to get an unaccompanied package aboard an airliner? That’s the stuff of terrorists.

And this man is an elected member of the Government of Canada? As my wife recently said, we really need to institute an intelligence test for MPs.

I think – perhaps over-generously given the man’s checkered history with ethics – that it’s possibly more like Svend Robinson’s not-so-long-ago MBPE, when Mr Robinson shoplifted an expensive ring from an auction house and promptly left politics. Has to be. That, and something damned peculiar in the air west of the Rockies.

Stress leave. No doubt a prescription written jointly by Dr Conservative Party leader Stephen Harper and Dr Communications Director Geoff Norquay. And no, “SOB” on the prescription form, in this case does not mean “Shortness Of Breath”.

Wanna bet the BC Stress Leave Centre is a back-to-the-earth community somewhere on Saltspring Island for whom electricity, and hence contact with the outside world, is the devil’s right hand? Like the good old days when drug-blown celebrities used to check routinely into the Betty Ford rehabilitation clinic because of “exhaustion”.

= = = = = = = = = =

And finally, what a difference a year makes – at least to the CBC.

It’s the difference between “young and hip” and “old fart” if this sentence in a recent programming note announcement is anything to go by:

“The Saturday evening Vinyl Tap begins its 10-week run on July 2, and although the program airs an hour earlier than Finkleman's 45s did (7 p.m., as opposed to 8 p.m.), the younger, hipper Bachman, aged 61, is essentially replacing the quirky, elder Finkleman, 62.”

On a related note, I’m going to miss “Finkleman’s 45s”. I was an occasional, not a regular listener but there is nothing on the planet to equal his mellow recollections when you’re sitting at a campsite with a fire gently crackling and the radio is in the background softly regaling your night-air, oxygen-saturated, port-mellowed brain with Mr Finkleman’s voluminous sense of recall, and his great love of the old “doo wop” tunes. I suspect Mr Bachman’s oldies will be more high-powered, given his place in the pantheon of Canadian rock guitarists as frontman for, in turn, Brave Belt, The Guess Who and Bachman Turner Overdrive.

Take us out, Mr B:

“You get up every morning
From your alarm clock's warning
Take the 8:15 into the city
There's a whistle up above
And people pushin', people shovin'
And the girls who try to look pretty
And if your train's on time
You can get to work by nine
And start your slaving job to get your pay
If you ever get annoyed
Look at me I'm self-employed
I love to work at nothing all day
And I'll be
Taking care of business [No, not “bakin’ carrot biscuits”]
every day
Taking care of business
every way.
I've been taking care of business,
it's all mine
Taking care of business
and working overtime
Work out.”