TriumphAnt

Overheard at a recent weekend brunch was this masterpiece of a business plan spilling over from an adjacent table:

“Yeah, I think I’m going to quit my job and open up one of those… oh you know, one of those whaddyamacallit places…”

Based on a foray into self-employment a few years back, I discovered that I’m hardly the model of a successful entrepreneur, but it does seem to me that a critical hallmark of a successful marketing plan would be at least to know what kind of business you are setting out to succeed at. Memo to the unknown would-be job quitter: I would really discourage you from embarking on Step 1 until you’ve got a better handle on Step 2 and all the others that follow. (Of course, “Shauvon’s Whaddyamacallits” is exactly the sort of storefront sign that would probably find a welcome and a clientele in Ottawa’s Glebe, a painfully trendy zone of little specialty boutiques and a glut of coffee shops staffed with barristas selling $6.00 mochaccinoppélattebrûlissimos.)

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Icy sidewalks: Bring ‘em on!

In a recent burst of common sense – yes, unusual for me (I’ll save everyone else the trouble of rejoining), I recently bought a full set of snow tires for the car and, within a couple days of that purchase, a pair of these things:

These are incredible winter urban footwear! On a recent Ottawa morning, our city woke up to one of those freezing rain mornings where absolutely everything was glazed over in a layer of ice. In previous years, I had always resigned myself to the likelihood of having my feet shoot out from under me at least once or twice a winter in exactly this sort of weather. There is, for example, an especially evil parking lot beside a church close to home that I have to cross on my morning commute to the bus stop. It’s cleaned pretty regularly, but it is never sanded or salted. And it has been an annual event – sometimes two or three times annually – and last year four! – for me to have my feet shoot out from under me and for me to land firmly on my butt in that lot.

Now why, you might perfectly reasonably ask, do I persist in walking across this Parking Lot of the Damned? The short answer is that it is so positioned that it lies squarely between where I am and where I want to be. Not crossing it would require my travelling its perimeter. And in the winter, going around it one direction takes me on a longer path of precisely the same slickly polished pavement surface and, the other way, through snow whose depth only increases as the winter goes on. (There’s also a case to be made for “I’m stupid” but since this is my blog, I have chosen to discount that line of reasoning.)

Last year, I bought a pair of Icer’s ** for my Dad on the recommendation of a friend (whose intelligence is beyond question – she’s a regular Baby Duck reader). After trying them out, Dad told me there was nothing better for navigating glare ice or plow-flattened snow. So this year, I got a pair for myself and this past week was their debut underneath my winter boots.

(** For the record, no they don’t belong to some guy named “Icer” and although I was really, really disappointed to see a business that sells products with the high quality reputation that normally attends the Lee Valley catalogue take such a cavalier approach to apostrophes, I was also surprised to discover that “Icer’s” is precisely how the name is permanently embossed on the underside of each sole… but I digress.)

Now I have read that one reason the Roman Army was so successful was due in part to the sandals worn by their Legions. Enormously durable, the combination of hobnailed soles and Roman roads gave the Legions of the Caesars mobility unmatched by their more barbaric and often barefoot opponents. “Caligae”, as they were known, proved to have such staying power that, even today, they have spawned a modern replica:

(I have no idea where you’d wear something like this. Officially, they’re sandals, but I suspect that most tropical hotels would have some difficulty with a tourist in hobnailed footwear grinding across their terrazzo-tiled mezzanine en route to the pool.)

But with Icer’s on my feet as I step out onto the ice, I have a sense of how those Roman conquerors must have felt (minus, of course, the weight of armour, the vocabulary entirely in Latin, the prospect of going into battle against hordes of barbaric foreigners each of whose most passionate wish is to skewer you on the end of his sword, and the knowledge that supper tonight is once again going to be a bowl of mashed chick peas in olive oil with a half cup of vinegary wine to drink, but otherwise exactly the same feeling, I’m sure of it.) It’s like wearing little army tanks of pedestrian invincibility. Don’t mess with me, parking lot. I’m ready for you this year.

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If you hear a crow making a sound like it’s being throttled, look up.

Twice in recent weeks, I’ve heard that sound coming from a crow and, in both cases, was rewarded with precisely the same scene.

I have no idea why it is, but a strangled (and loud!) sound coming from a crow seems to mean, “C’mon crow buddies, I’ve got a falcon cornered and I need help!”

The first time was a couple weeks ago when I was out hanging up some outdoor Christmas lights. I heard the sound and looked up just as an arrow-like blur flashed by not too far overhead. Abruptly, the blur became distinct as an absolutely gorgeous peregrine falcon flared its wings and tail and landed on a nearby maple tree branch. With no leaves to screen it, it was fully in view – and not only to me. In a few seconds, a trio of crows had swung down and landed, each in a different one of three other nearby trees. They proceeded to set up a racket of loud and frantically repeated calls that I’m pretty sure were not, “Hey baby, d’you come here often?”

I was actually quite surprised. Because where a crow has a beak, a mature falcon has a meat-ripping hook and where a crow has feet, the falcon is possessed of talons that look as if they could embed themselves in steel. To me a crow – or even three crows – hardly seems possessed of enough of an arsenal to take on a falcon. The falcon sat for a couple minutes until it obviously felt it had had enough – perhaps of just the noise. Then it rocketed off to another more distant tree, the crows in hot pursuit.

On a more recent early morning walk to work, I was passing a fence-enclosed yard when from a branch on a tree just on the other side of the fence, I heard that same loud strangled cry coming from a crow. This time, I stopped, but not because I remembered my previous encounter with the sound. Rather, it sounded so pained and so close, I thought was about to come upon a scene of a crow being throttled by a squirrel or something. As I looked up to try to see just where the sound was coming from, once again I caught the flash of a streak of feathers travelling blindlingly fast in a perfectly straight flight path towards a nearby tree.

It was the falcon – or a different one. But a majestic hawk it was, and the circumstances were precisely the same. This time, he planted himself on a branch directly over my head, according me an absolutely wonderful view of his speckled breast feathers and his yellow beak. He didn’t look the least bit perturbed as a hornet’s nest of no fewer than 10 or 15 crows swirled around the tree, angrily calling either each other, or howling for even more reinforcements. But even with those odds tilted that far to their favour, none was foolish enough to try even a passing tangle with the falcon’s array of avian offensive weapons.

After a few seconds, he tore off in another perfectly straight line as the crows displayed all the organization of a flock of keystone cops, dipping, swirling, nearly colliding with one another. I saw where the falcon landed some distance away, but it was clear that probably not one of the crows had managed to successfully track him, no doubt because avoiding the other members of their gang required all their in-flight attention. By the time they got their aerial bearings, the falcon was already resting on a new perch about a hundred yards away from where the crows circled in a loud and angry search.

In hindsight, I'm now thinking that strangled crow sound might well be that bird’s equivalent of a loud, “Damn it! He got away again!”

Either that, or a falcon just killing himself laughing.

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And finally, I have often proclaimed that I do love the Internet, but every once in a while it gives me a moment to pause and ponder a display of its near Twilight Zone-esque bit of reasoning.

Recently, I embarked on a Google dictionary search for the meaning of the word “estop”, which I have occasionally encountered in crossword puzzles. Google replied that there is no such word in English. (Now I know there is, and frankly, this non-reply from Google’s “define” feature surprised me.) However, added Google, if I were willing to check out this online Russian dictionary of International Trade Law, I will find the word. So, I clicked on the suggested link, and sure enough. In the online Russian Dictionary of English – Russian trade terminology, this:
“лишать права возражения, лишать сторону права ссылаться на какие-либо факты”
means “estop”. So what the heck? In for a penny, in for a pound. Capturing that very text, I went next to Alta Vista’s Babelfish, the online language translator, pitched that unpromising jumble into the open window and gave it a “Russian to English” request. Out came this: “to deprive the rights of objection, to deprive the side of the right to refer to any facts”.

With the Internet, all things are possible. Sometimes you just have to travel West to catch up to the sunrise. So to quote Peter Trueman when he was the first-ever news anchor on the newly-launched Global TV late news program:“That may not be news, but it sure is reality.”