TriumphAnt

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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