October 18, 2005
I had been trying to decide what I want “Baby Duck” to be before re-launching it after a “summer” hiatus in which it has been idle far beyond the parameters allowed by its “summer” break qualifier. Its unofficial sub-title is, of course, “A Great Canadian Whine”, but in its first year and a bit, Baby Duck has been more than just whining. It’s been a diary; it’s been a rant – often about the hopelessly trivial; it’s been wildly inconsistent. But mostly it’s been fun.
So rather than wait for something to come to mind that is profound enough to serve as a reason for booting myself back into the blogosphere, I’ve decided that, since it’s never really been profound, why try to start now?
Add to this the fact that I’m in a group of a very small number of e-mailers who regularly – daily in fact – oh, hell, some days hourly – flip interesting links back and forth with suitable comments, and so for all intents and purposes I’ve been blogging all summer. So why stop now?
So I’m going to take the advice of that great contemporary philosopher, Willie Nelson. If you’ve heard this story, it likely was some form of these few elements: Willie used to own his own golf course, and he used to say that he liked it because it wasn’t rule-bound. He could wear whatever he wanted, drink whatever he wanted and really just do whatever he felt like to get him through the round with the greatest possible enjoyment. “Now you take this hole,” he said one day to his golfing companion. “Par is whatever the heck I say it is. This one is a par 23 and yesterday I birdied the sucker!” (Think I’m making this up? Google “Willie Nelson, par”.)
So Baby Duck is going to keep on being whatever the heck I say it is. And right now I say it’s been too long without an update.
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How I spent my summer vacation:
“Oh, when I look back now
That summer seemed to last forever
And if I had the choice
Yeah - I'd always wanna be there
Those were the best days of my life.”
(Bryan Adams, “Summer of ‘69”)
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I read a lot and a lot of what I read was cheesy, schlocky summer reading stuff, mostly because I tend to reserve weightier leisure reading for weightier times of year. But not all.
One of the highlights for me was a gem of a book entitled “Wellington’s Smallest Victory”. It’s a true story about a model builder who set out to model one of the defining moments of the Battle of Waterloo in such painstaking accuracy that he even researched the uniform buttons of the various units involved – a staggering undertaking when you consider that his model was somewhat more than what you might think when you think of the word “model”. Consider this brief description: “VISITORS to the National Army Museum in London cannot fail to be impressed by the enormous, beautifully detailed diorama on display there. In front of you unfold some four hundred square feet of miniature farmland (the scale is 9 feet to the mile). Peopling that landscape are some 75,000 tin-lead soldiers, each one 10 mm high and hand-painted with absolute regimental accuracy.”
The model’s creator, a topographical specialist named Lieutenant William Siborne, was determined that his model would be a precise mirror of a particular time during that monumental battle – right down to recreating the crops planted on the fields of Waterloo over which the British, French and Prussian soldiers would fight that Sunday in June 1815.
After visiting and mapping the battleground itself, he wrote hundreds of letters to participants and eventually designed a model that accurately reflected the moment he chose to depict. But his problems began when he sent his design off to the English commander that day, the Duke of Wellington, for approval. Wellington after Waterloo swiftly rose to stand barely a step or two below “God” on England’s hierarchical ladder of veneration. And Siborne’s model placed Blucher’s 40,000 Prussians on the field much closer to the heart of the battle at that moment than where Wellington had ever said they were. The result was a model that showed a turning-point moment that was no longer solely owned by Wellington, and consequentially accorded the Prussians a much larger role in helping to defeat the French.
Welcome to politics in the early 19th century. The resulting post-Waterloo battle over its model portrayal between the Duke and the modeler eventually led to the removal of the 40,000 (!) Prussian figures, and turned a precisely accurate representation of the battle into a model of political expediency, leaving the Duke’s claim to the victory unshared and his image untarnished. (That’s if you don’t count the unbelievable pettiness and pique that attended his demands for “correction”. One wonders where that miniature 40,000-strong Prussian army is today. What a find that would be to carry into the “Antiques Road Show”!)
I also read bushels of blogs, endless e-mails, googols of Google and watched a lot of really good movies.
When the summer began, the family went to see a movie called Howl’s Moving Castle, the most recent release from Japan’s Studio Ghibli and their animator who walks with the angels, Hayao Miyazaki. While there, we saw a pre-movie ad for a DVD-by-mail service called zip.ca. Tried it out and haven’t looked back since. They do have the most recent mainstream studio releases, most with scorch marks still on the disks as the result of the speed with which they left the big screens and made the transit to home release. But zip.ca also has an unbelievable library of festival winners, foreign films, and old stuff you just can’t find in the Blockbusters of the world any more. Their mailbox return is a PO box in Ottawa and their turnaround time is phenomenal. We often experience the cycle of return-a-movie-and-get-a-new-movie in three days flat. By mail!
In the course of my blog-reading, I have come to the conclusion that the world’s conservative bloggers – generally lumped as “right wing” – include in their numbers some of the ugliest and most vicious writers I have ever read. Oh there are one or two exceptions, but they are distant and sidelined voices in a wilderness densely occupied by the shrill made-up-“facts” voices of some very, very unpleasant people. These are people who consider Bill O’Reilly and Robert Novak to be newsmen, Ann Coulter to be a fair and balanced writer and George W Bush to be a leader for the ages. I have come to know them by their writing; I don’t want them as friends. I certainly don’t want their Canadian counterparts running my country. Prior to writing this paragraph, I revisited a bunch of them long since deleted from my bookmarked list. They’re still swimming in bile.
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Things I bought that I like a lot: three metal die-cast aircraft models that now sit on my slowly growing aviation-themed shelf at work: a WWI Fokker Dr-I triplane painted in the blinding red colours of Baron Manfred von Richtofen, The Red Baron; a WWII Chance-Vought F4U Corsair, painted in US Navy colours, but no one’s perfect; and a Franklin Mint model of a CF-104 Starfighter, painted in red-and-white demonstration colours, with Canadian Armed Forces markings. The trio effectively doubles my growing die-cast air force, which had already consisted of a Spitfire, a Lockheed P-38 Lightning and a Messerschmitt Me-109.
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One of the best times I had this summer:
Actually, there were two. While offspring was spending a month at a summer camp, my wife and I shared a fantastic few days in Niagara-on-the-Lake. We took in two Shaw Festival plays and copious amounts of very good wine (not during the plays), and toured Fort George in the dark on a fascinating Ghost Walk that, frankly, surprised me by not being tricked out as might be expected but, instead, was a detailed and often very sad look at life and death in what was once a distant frontier outpost of European-settled Canada. We also enjoyed what might very well be one of the best restaurant meals I’ve ever had, at the Peller Estates vineyard dining room where they feature a menu item called the Chef’s Tasting Dinner. Each of some six courses was accompanied by its own wine and, thanks to an incredibly well-informed waiter, the meal was a seminar on how certain wine types work with various types of food.
I also experienced the eye (and palate)-opening reality that the shape of the glass has a direct impact on your perception of the wine. (I can just hear the “Oh c’mon!”’s from here.) But we tasted a full-bodied red in a big-bowled, large glass and then the same red in a narrow, much smaller glass. Likewise a lighter, fruitier Reisling. And if I hadn’t watched both glasses being poured from the same bottle, I would have sworn that each was completely different from what was poured into the differently shaped glass.
The second highlight? On August 28th, a group of senior citizens got together and rolled into Ottawa to present a concert. The Rolling Stones' “Bigger Bang” show was an unbelievably good time! The gang played a pile of their hits, beginning with their now-traditional concert opener, “Start Me Up” (they knew what the audience came to hear) and introduced a number of songs from their new album (A Bigger Bang – hence the tour name). It is somewhat unsettling to be standing on a solid concrete floor high up in a stadium seating section and feel the entire structure moving in time to the music. But when 48,000 fans stomp along to the music, concrete’s gonna bounce!
On the downside, a performance like this makes it a whole lot harder to try to convince teenagers that drugs and smoking are bad for you when you see the energy that Keith Richards can still summon after a lifetime of abusing both. At least until you see him in close-up. Then you realize that he probably could sub quite effectively as a warning in place of those blackened lungs and ruined gums whose images now adorn cigarette packets in this country.
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So off we go. The Government of Canada is back in session and there’s already a growing collection of evidence that there will be grist for more than a few tirades. My actual job puts enough of the world’s media in front of my face each day that there’ll undoubtedly continue to be a gold mine of nuggets of the curious, the bland, the profound, the trivial and the idiotic.
Baby Duck is whatever the heck I say it is! And I say that right now, it’s still (approximately) a weekly update and I only missed my last deadline by a day or so.
Assuming you live on Venus.
