Lovely, this…
I was reading a recent Globe and Mail article about a backpack that uses what the writer claims is an “ingenious” bungee cord and pulley system to redistribute the load with every step the wearer takes, either walking or running. Seems like a great idea, I thought. Then I hit this line:
“By hanging the backpack load from springy cords suspended from a frame, a 55-pound backpack like Ms. Slack's can be transported using the same energy required to carry a conventional pack weighing 48 pounds.”
OK, hands up – everybody who is capable of recognizing the difference between 48 and 55 pounds when it’s slung on your back. (For the record, I have not raised my own hand.)
= = =
Peace on Earth…
Why is there a shortage of good news from Iraq, one might wonder? In fact, if one is among the ever-shrinking minority of Bush supporters, one might well whine that the bad news seems to be the _only_ thing on which the media is casting its eye these days. Well, there’s a very good reason for that, and it’s very well articulated in an online article from the Columbia Journalism Review. (December 14, “The ‘Good News’ Chorus Sings On”, by Paul McLeary)
The author makes one very good point here…
“There's a reason the press dwells on the constant stream of car bombings, mass kidnappings, suicide bombings, the ineffectiveness of the Iraqi government, and the daily discovery of mutilated bodies dumped on the streets of Baghdad: These things are, in part, the reality of life in Baghdad, and to a lesser extent, cities like Karbala and Mosul -- the population centers of Iraq. In other words, imagine that New York, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. were engulfed by an endless cycle of bloody violence, and people were complaining that the media was focusing their energies there, while ignoring a new irrigation project in Kansas. Of course there's more happening in Iraq than car bombs and sectarian murder -- children are going to school, couples are getting married, having children. But the job of a journalist, in Iraq or anywhere else, is not to write about the 99 percent of things that function as they should. How do these "good news" stories in Iraq stack up against 70 civilians getting blown up in back-to-back car bomb attacks, furthering the spiral of civilian casualties?” …
and cites (perhaps with his cheek not entirely tongue-free) another US reporter who lived in the region for two years and makes a second very good point here:
“More to the point, as Washington Post reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran noted in his excellent book about Iraq, "Imperial Life in the Emerald City," there were times during his two years in country when a reporter would request to go with the military to a newly opened power plant or school, but the military would turn the request down, saying that if the project got too much press, the insurgents would attack it.”
It all reminds me of a classic bit from the comic strip Doonesbury at the height of the Watergate crisis (a long time ago – well, 1973-ish – in a galaxy far, far away) where then-White House press secretary Ron Ziegler is fielding yet another wave of negative questions from the press:
-- “Ron, does the President have any comment on the most recent disclosures in the Watergate case?
-- NO! Watergate! Watergate! What is the matter with you guys?! What is this senseless orgy of recrimination week after week?! I've already said all that I'm going to! So why don't you stop wasting both our time and ask me questions I can deal with?
-- Ron, what color shirt is the President wearing today?
-- That's better. Blue."
That’s what we need – more sartorial exploration and less investigative reporting from Iraq. I’m just afraid the answer to the question, “What are most Iraqis wearing these days?” would more likely than not be “bandages”.
Or shrouds.
- - -
If Rick Mercer can rant, and Dennis Miller (both before and after he became an unfunny pro-Bushite) can rant, then I guess I can rant too.
In the Globe and Mail on Thursday, December 14, a story about Michael Ignatieff noted that he has called on the Liberal Party not to let itself “split” over the issue of Afghanistan.
The reporter also noted that Mr Ignatieff’s unselfish call for total Party unity came at a “private” social event held to honour him, and to which organizers had invited only those MPs who had supported Ignatieff’s recent and, as everyone now knows, ultimately failed leadership bid. But most pointedly, they also had deliberately not invited the newly-elected leader of the Party – Stéphane Dion.
Well here’s a memo to the Liberals – it isn’t going to be Afghanistan that keeps you possessed of more cleavage than what’s down the front of Belinda Stronach’s shirt, it’s going to be stuff like this. I mean for heaven’s sake! The odour of carpet cleaner still wafts through the halls of the Montreal hotels where your stinking drunk youth delegates threw up the excessive gallons of “hospitality” offered in various candidates’ suites, and already the knives are out for Dion, wielded by Ignatieff supporters who just can’t seem to grasp the fact that they lost the war? And in the continuing search for a new benchmark for “irony”, one of the partygoers is cited as having said that Mr I (he of the perpendicular pronoun, as Sir Humphrey Appleby might have cast him) “wanted to ‘emphasize that he’s on board for the future of a united loyal party’.”
Just so long as it’s united behind, and loyal to, him, I think we can safely assume.
What is wrong with you people?
Here’s what I think. I think we need a new political Party in Canada. Oh I know, you’re thinking, well sure. After all, look how well the last major “new Party” creations – Reform-stroke-Alliance-stroke-Conservative Party of Canada, and the Bloc Québécois -- worked out when it came to bringing the country together; and so you can certainly be forgiven for being skeptical at the thought of yet another new-Party stab at telling the “traditional” Parties to go stuff themselves. But bear with me, because (a) I think I’ve got a couple good ideas here; and (b) it’s my blog so I can say whatever the heck I want.
So, let’s pause for a moment while we savour this brief musical introduction:
Lion:
“If I were King of the Forest, Not queen, not duke, not prince.
My regal robes of the forest, would be satin, not cotton, not chintz.
I'd command each thing, be it fish or fowl.
With a woof and a woof and a royal growl - woof.
As I'd click my heel, all the trees would kneel.
And the mountains bow and the bulls kowtow.
And the sparrow would take wing - If I - If I - were King!
Each rabbit would show respect to me. The chipmunks genuflect to me.
Though my tail would lash, I would show compash
For every underling!
If I - If I - were King!
Just King!
Monarch of all I survey -- Mo--na-a-a--a-arch Of all I survey!”
My New Party would begin with all those former Liberal supporters in the land who, really deep down, would genuinely like to vote for the Liberal Party platforms but really dislike how those platforms became subverted (and, for that matter, perverted) under the stewardship of Chretien and Martin, whose respective “ites” (i.e. Chretienites, Martinites) made defeating the other guy the first priority on their agendas.
It would include people who are small-l liberal in their thinking, but who hate being labelled “the radical left” – people with broad societal concerns whose boundaries range from their own bedrooms through their own backyards all the way to the edge of the fragile atmospheric shell that surrounds this little planet of ours – but who hate being labelled “socialist”. It will consist of people who can gracefully and appreciatively accept government funding announced either with a special announcement or as part of a larger overall package like a budget, without immediately railing, “IT’S NOT ENOUGH!!”
It will drag leader-loyal “ites” out to the parking lot and beat them over the head with hardbound copies of The Red Book until they are genuinely devoted first to the Party’s platform, rather than whoever happens to be wearing the “leader” hat at any given time. (Those who persist in calling themselves “Dion Liberals” or “Ignatieff Liberals” or “Whoever Liberals” will be vigorously marginalized, shunted to a distant place where they can be neither seen nor heard. If they still insist on a label, shall be called “The Ignorati”, in honour of Mr Ignatieff.)
(A late-breaking PS… Somewhere between first draft and this Baby Duck upload, Mr Dion announced he is naming Mr Ignatieff to be his Deputy Prime Minister. Now there’s a novel idea! Naming a rival who heads a pack of really angry sore losers to a senior position within the Party. After all, that worked out so very well the last time, didn’t it – when the Prime Minister named his chief rival to be Finance Minister – does anyone remember that?)
But back to my Party.
For a name, I’m not quite sure what would work best here. It would have to acknowledge some roots in liberalism – if only because to be a “small-l” liberal thinker these days is generally to be possessed of an ability to, oh, you know… actually use your brain when it comes to discussing policy and making choices. But it would have to eschew (in the sense “run speedily away from”) any link to Big-L Liberalism. At the same time, the name would have to make it clear that your membership is in support of the national platform, not the woman / man at its head.
And finally, I suggest that the Party logo be a Klein Bottle, because such a Party simply cannot exist in the real world. Not in Canada, anyway.
Hmmmm… a Klein bottle. Maybe… Yesss….. That’s it! This Party will be driven by the mantra: Regular Application of Logical Philosophy on the Hill.
Thus, I eagerly await the birth of the RALPH Klein Bottle Party.
- - -
‘Tis the season. To all of you, and to all of yours (let me channel Kathleen Harrison here: “And a Merry Christmas to you… in keeping with the situation… Bob’s your uncle!”)
AND a Happy New Year!
As for me, well around about this time of year I like nothing better to immerse myself in a crowded shopping mall, find a central point where just scads of people are rushing by, studiously ignoring the Salvation Army Christmas kettles en route to yet another “Early Boxing Week Pre-Christmas Blowout SALE”, their VISAs and MasterCards so hot in their pockets they’re imprinting scorch marks in their denim, straighten up and, at the top of my lungs, bellow out one of my personal seasonal favourites (and if I find someone willing to accompany me by banging on a nearby display of half-price Lagostina cookware, well that’s just a bonus): “Fairy Tale of New York”, written by Maire Brennan and most famously performed by those poster boys for good dental health and clean living, The Pogues:
“It was Christmas Eve babe
In the drunk tank
An old man said to me, won't see another one
And then he sang a song
The rare old mountain dew
I turned my face away
And dreamed about you
Got on a lucky one
Came in eighteen to one
I've got a feeling
This year's for me and you
So happy Christmas
I love you baby
I can see a better time
When all our dreams come true
They've got cars big as bars
They've got rivers of gold
But the wind goes right through you
It's no place for the old
When you first took my hand
On a cold Christmas Eve
You promised me
Broadway was waiting for me
You were handsome
You were pretty
Queen of New York City
When the band finished playing
They howled out for more
Sinatra was swinging,
All the drunks they were singing
We kissed on a corner
Then danced through the night
(chorus)
The boys of the NYPD choir
Still singing "Galway Bay"
And the bells were ringing out
For Christmas day
You're a bum
You're a punk
You're an old slut on junk
Lying there almost dead on a drip in that bed
You scumbag, you maggot
You cheap lousy faggot
Happy Christmas your arse
I pray God it's our last
(chorus)
I could have been someone
Well so could anyone
You took my dreams from me
When I first found you
I kept them with me babe
I put them with my own
Can't make it all alone
I've built my dreams around you”
On a closer-to-but-still-not-there traditional note, if you’re looking for a huge pile of seasonal esoterica – a good lot of it hilarious, a bad lot of it groaners, some of it just plain out-and-out gross, and some nonsense that can charitably be called “wide of the mark” (for me anyway) – Miss Cellania is a blogger who regularly posts waves of material on a seemingly endless variety of themes. Her stream of Christmasing is here and if you arrive late, just scroll down to the entries tagged with seasonal titles, for example, “Letters to Santa”, “Christmas Links Volume… [whatever]”. Don’t say you weren’t warned.
Or if you just want to look at cute little animals, a great many of them decked out in Christmas colours at this time of year, pop on over here.
So don you now your gay apparel ("Not that there’s anything WRONG with that!”), get out there and enjoy yourselves, damn it! Back in double-oh-seven, the good Lord willin’ and the creek don’t rise.
Tuesday, December 05, 2006
If you’re wondering what sort of media / communications nonsense makes my mind shift from amused hilarity or resigned complacency to, well, to angry… here’s an example. At work recently, the following “Media Advisory” landed in my in-box:
- - -
“Photo Opportunity - Needy families receive free toys for Christmas…
News release via Canada NewsWire, Toronto 416-863-9350 -ME- Attention News/Assignment/Photo Editors:
Photo Opportunity - Needy families receive free toys for Christmas from The Scott Mission”
- - -
The anger kicked in by the time I’d read the first four words: “Photo opportunity – Needy families”.
I wonder, for example, if the needy families in question are aware that, in what may be for them an act of quiet desperation – the decision to go to the Scott Mission to get something to give their children this Christmas – this news release suggests that they will be confronted with TV crews and newspaper photographers from media outlets responding to this advisory, whose editors have decided this assignment will help convey the “true sprit of Christmas” to their readers and viewers, readers and viewers who may or may not even discover the photo or watch the 30-second clip, nested as it likely will be among the ads for multi-hundred dollar “stocking stuffers”, home electronics or even (and I am not making this up) special Christmas deals offered by a local SUV dealership.
And of course it’s not the act of supporting needy families that makes me angry.
It’s the fact that someone has decided that the act has to be converted into a “photo opportunity”. I think a timely thump upside the head from the ol’ clue-stick (to crib shamelessly a favourite bit of management advice from a friend and long-time reader) would be appropriate at this juncture.
With an echo of the advice from the charitable solicitors who had the misfortune to visit Ebenezer Scrooge at his place of business before he underwent his tri-spirit conversion (“Because it is at this time of year that want is most keenly felt”), I would strongly encourage the perpetrators of this “photo-op” at the expense of needy families to revisit one of Christ’s parables. As rendered in the King James Version of the Bible, it goes a little something like this:
“KJV Luke 18:10-14
(10) Two men went up into the temple to pray; the one a Pharisee, and the other a publican.
(11) The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican.
(12) I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of all that I possess.
(13) And the publican, standing afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner.
(14) I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other: for every one that exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.”
People… do support the needy… please. And not just during the Christmas holidays, but all year round. But just turn off the damned spotlight, OK?
= = =
The Great Canadian “Quebec as a Nation” debate, Chapter 3,214.
OK… 1. I agree with everything so far said by Maclean’s columnist Paul Wells, National Post columnist Andrew Coyne, and columnist-at-large Warren Kinsella on this issue. You can Google all three, and I recommend all three of their immensely readable blogs. 2. For my part, I’m going to begin and end – period – with an especially brilliant comment made by my better half while one of the evening newscasts was grinding away on TV during the most recent eruption of this mind-numbing issue in Canada: “I’ve just figured it out – in Canada, people with any intelligence at all don’t go into politics!”
Insofar as this issue is concerned, anyway, QED.
= = =
There is, in New York City, an annual meeting of a group known as the Corduroy Appreciation Club. Their meeting date is always November 11th. Now at first glance, one might think that there is perhaps some meaningful affiliation of corduroy with the military that would prompt the annual linking to what we observe in Canada as Remembrance Day and what is observed in the US as Armistice Day.
But no. If you check the boxed notation in the lower left corner of the framed certificate that is here, you will note: “11/11 is the date which most closely resembles corduroy.”
So it occurs to me that, by the same logic, the Snowman Appreciation Society should meet on August 8. (Although on sober second thought that seems a tad unworkable in this hemisphere.)
= = =
It’s really a no-brainer when it comes to understanding why North America has so far proven to be barren ground for the brand new Al Jazeera English language television news service to take root and find a western audience.
Here is a list of the leading news items that appeared on its English language news website the day it launched its television service worldwide:
Africa: Raid on Niger oil facility; Sudan to help southerners return.
Central / S. Asia: Pakistan and India in security deal; Bangladesh gripped by protests.
Europe: Vatican steps into veil debate; Euronext favors NYSE over Deutsche;
Americas: Climate change worsens biodiversity; Rice snub for Iran and Syria.
Asia-Pacific: Racial tensions on rise in Malaysia; China set to let foreign banks in.
Middle East: US general favors staying in Iraq; Mubarak meets Palestinian leader.
And on the same day on Google News (US and Canada), this news story yielded 152 separate clippings, most with a large accompanying photo: “La Senza soars with bid from Victoria's Secret owner (Canadian Press) MONTREAL — Shares of La Senza soared by almost half in early Thursday trading after the American owner of Victoria's Secret announced it will pay $710 million for the Canadian lingerie rival.”
So we just need to find a way to reconcile those two apparently divergent news priorities. (Maybe if Arab women removed their veils…)
= = =
Future deer-in-the-headlights topic alert. Recently, I bought myself a tiny electronic box with an unbelievably huge (well, “unbelievably” to me, that is) memory – an Apple 80GB iPod. Here’s what I was thinking: I decided finally to succumb to the global iPod Borg-like assimilation – after receiving some pretty strong assurances from Santa that there likely would have been a positive response to my request for a turntable that converts vinyl to digital media – so I could copy and store virtually (Hah! In this case, “virtually” does NOT mean “almost”! It means, in fact, “in a virtual format”. Take that, cunning linguists!) my entire collection of a couple hundred LPs, plus a sea of cassette tapes and 45 rpm “singles”, and consign the actual disks in their cat-shredded sleeves to a yard sale or perhaps the local “Legend Records” outlet. (Although, to confess, I expect I will find it hard to let go of the album art for Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass’ “Whipped Cream and Other Delights”.)
Where was I? Oh yes… After I bought the virtual warehouse, I discovered immediately that Apple seems to take the attitude that purchasers of this memory behemoth are likely upgrading from an earlier generation of iPod. Because the instruction “book” that came in its box amounted to a couple pages telling you how to download “iTunes” from the Apple homepage and charge the device’s battery so that it’ll work. I received a longer owner’s manual with my Tilley hat, for heaven’s sake!
So I found an online 72-page “Features Guide” that I printed out – something that many in my comfort-in-paper generation still need – to begin my latest techno-adventure.
And I discovered in very short order two maxims I really should have remembered: “Plug and Play” won’t. And “User Friendly” isn’t.
So after several hours of my unsuccessfully grappling with an utterly useless “operator’s manual”, my better half is now the happy if somewhat puzzled owner of an unsolicited 80GB iPod. Because the alternative was to take it out to my concrete garage floor, unhook a nine-pound sledgehammer I have hanging on the wall and smash the damned thing to little tiny pieces of Gigabyte. While it would have been immensely satisfying, it would also have been tantamount to converting the machine’s cost into paper money, taking that out into the backyard and setting fire to it.
As for me, I am now in the process of exploring software options to convert my LPs and cassette tapes. And I have decided I will convert them to CDs, rather than a wholly virtual format like mp3. And since CDs take up much less room than LPs, in our house that means everyone’ll be happy.
I’ll keep you posted.
= = =
Recently at work we had an “employee recognition day”. Everyone duly recognized was the (I really hesitate to use the word “proud”; let’s go instead with… oh, “hapless”) recipient of a gold pin and personalized certificate recognizing his or her accomplishment.
There were 100 or so people in the room. They handed out 96 employee recognition awards.
Now how inept, I wondered – in fact just how plain gawdawful – a worker does someone have to be in order to become one of the teeny minority that did not receive a 2006 employee recognition award? (I can answer that question – I didn’t win one. But in fairness, my boss nominated our entire team, rather than single out any one member over the others. And the team did, indeed, win one of the 96.)
But the director presenting the awards actually had the gall to announce in advance that the Department is exceedingly sensitive to the risk of criticism of spending public money for the purpose of expensive personnel recognition and so, consequently, assured us all, “Don’t worry; because the gold is not real gold.” So not only is this little award, she said, in effect, so meaningless that we gave it to just about everyone with a pulse, it is a dirt-cheap little award.
The Government of Canada. Nothing is too good for our employees. (So we’ll give you less than nothing.)
= = =
And utterly-boring-future-postings-to-this-blog alert:
I’m going to try to lose some weight, I think.
As I make what a cockpit crew would call my “final approach” to Runway 55 at the Airport o’ Life, I’ve been reading everything from actuarial charts to BMI (Body Mass Index) articles to well-intentioned columns offering gratuitous advice on how to live healthily. And if nothing else, I find I’m paying more attention to them. So it’s a start.
Of course, I’m also paying more attention to the President’s Choice Holiday Insider’s Report where a single serving portion of, for example, PC Campania Gnocchi Pomodoro, rings in with 510 calories and a whacking 1510 mg (63% of the recommended daily value) of sodium. Or a mere 37g (1.3 oz) of the all-new President’s Choice white chocolate cranberry pistachio bark – an amount that I think I accidentally dropped when offered a complimentary sample by a cheery “Try some” sample hostess at the store where I shopped last weekend – tilts the calorimeter at an even 200.
But the bottom line for me is that, regardless of who the authority is, I’m carrying more pounds or kilos or stone than I should be. And when you reach a certain point in life, it’s a whole lot harder to lose than say, when you’re at that same point in life minus 20 years.
I have no trouble at all with intellectually understanding that, when all is said and done, the best diet plan one can follow is hinged to a simple, inescapable and unarguable bit of mathematical logic: burn off more calories than you take in. But like the guy with the cartoon angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other, listening to my inner intellectual and ignoring my inner imp is not always the choice I make.
And since, at my present rate of typical daily consumption, achieving that by “burning off more than I take in” would require running all the way to and from work, instead of taking the bus, I’m going to attempt to reduce my intake.
But here’s what I’m up against. First of all, I love to eat. And what I love to eat most is rarely what falls entirely on the good-for-you side of the ledger. If it’s high-sodium, or high-fat, or high-sugar, then chances are very good that it’s also high on my favourite foods list. And frankly, it’s damned near an addiction.
Second, I have an especial weakness for being an inveterate sampler and snacker while I prepare a meal. Again turning to my intellectual shoulder-dweller, it’s easy to understand that while I’m working with preparing food, of course I’m going to associate that with thoughts of… well, eating food. That doesn’t prevent me, however, from succumbing to the urgings of my alternate shoulder-perched imp.
And third, I’m a nighthawk. I usually head to bed about midnight, typically some five hours after dinner. Which means I’m reaching an almost mealtime hungry state of mind at about bedtime. Definitely not conducive to weight loss.
My idol of the moment is a comedian who has made a career out of routines based on overeating. But John Pinette has also gone from being a grossly overweight 450 lb to being just a moderately overweight 300. Now admittedly to do that, he went somewhere I am not going to go – the surgical suite. He lost all that weight five years ago and (so far, knock on wood) he seems to be keeping it off. He also does some of the best overeating-themed comedy routines of any entertainer on the comedy circuit.
Being a man, he’s working in comedy territory that has traditionally been more the domain of women comics. And that may help account for why so much of the “fat comedy” is even funnier coming from him. In one hilarious routine, for example, he describes counseling sessions with a nutritionist, noting that he was told he’s free to eat all the food he wants, so long as the food in question is salad. Salad, he explodes, is “not food. Salad is a promissory note that food will soon arrive.”
Other Pinette bon bons?: "My cholesterol count has a comma." (Commenting on performing in Las Vegas): "It doesn't matter if I lose money at the tables, 'cause I can always make it up at the buffet. $2.98 breakfasts? Hell, I can eat $2.98 worth of toast! I go up to the Prime Rib table and say 'Hit me!'"
So bear with me. Baby Duck could become home to some boring bits in the weeks and months to come if reading about food discoveries is not your piece of cake… (Hmmmmm. No no no! Make that, “your cup of tea”.) But just as the old adage holds that confession is good for the soul, I’ve also read that making a public announcement of your intent to lose weight can also be a big help in keeping one at last closer to the path of nutritional righteousness.
Because who wants all of one’s friends to know that one failed?
A la prochaine...
- - -
“Photo Opportunity - Needy families receive free toys for Christmas…
News release via Canada NewsWire, Toronto 416-863-9350 -ME- Attention News/Assignment/Photo Editors:
Photo Opportunity - Needy families receive free toys for Christmas from The Scott Mission”
- - -
The anger kicked in by the time I’d read the first four words: “Photo opportunity – Needy families”.
I wonder, for example, if the needy families in question are aware that, in what may be for them an act of quiet desperation – the decision to go to the Scott Mission to get something to give their children this Christmas – this news release suggests that they will be confronted with TV crews and newspaper photographers from media outlets responding to this advisory, whose editors have decided this assignment will help convey the “true sprit of Christmas” to their readers and viewers, readers and viewers who may or may not even discover the photo or watch the 30-second clip, nested as it likely will be among the ads for multi-hundred dollar “stocking stuffers”, home electronics or even (and I am not making this up) special Christmas deals offered by a local SUV dealership.
And of course it’s not the act of supporting needy families that makes me angry.
It’s the fact that someone has decided that the act has to be converted into a “photo opportunity”. I think a timely thump upside the head from the ol’ clue-stick (to crib shamelessly a favourite bit of management advice from a friend and long-time reader) would be appropriate at this juncture.
With an echo of the advice from the charitable solicitors who had the misfortune to visit Ebenezer Scrooge at his place of business before he underwent his tri-spirit conversion (“Because it is at this time of year that want is most keenly felt”), I would strongly encourage the perpetrators of this “photo-op” at the expense of needy families to revisit one of Christ’s parables. As rendered in the King James Version of the Bible, it goes a little something like this:
“KJV Luke 18:10-14
(10) Two men went up into the temple to pray; the one a Pharisee, and the other a publican.
(11) The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican.
(12) I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of all that I possess.
(13) And the publican, standing afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner.
(14) I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other: for every one that exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.”
People… do support the needy… please. And not just during the Christmas holidays, but all year round. But just turn off the damned spotlight, OK?
= = =
The Great Canadian “Quebec as a Nation” debate, Chapter 3,214.
OK… 1. I agree with everything so far said by Maclean’s columnist Paul Wells, National Post columnist Andrew Coyne, and columnist-at-large Warren Kinsella on this issue. You can Google all three, and I recommend all three of their immensely readable blogs. 2. For my part, I’m going to begin and end – period – with an especially brilliant comment made by my better half while one of the evening newscasts was grinding away on TV during the most recent eruption of this mind-numbing issue in Canada: “I’ve just figured it out – in Canada, people with any intelligence at all don’t go into politics!”
Insofar as this issue is concerned, anyway, QED.
= = =
There is, in New York City, an annual meeting of a group known as the Corduroy Appreciation Club. Their meeting date is always November 11th. Now at first glance, one might think that there is perhaps some meaningful affiliation of corduroy with the military that would prompt the annual linking to what we observe in Canada as Remembrance Day and what is observed in the US as Armistice Day.
But no. If you check the boxed notation in the lower left corner of the framed certificate that is here, you will note: “11/11 is the date which most closely resembles corduroy.”
So it occurs to me that, by the same logic, the Snowman Appreciation Society should meet on August 8. (Although on sober second thought that seems a tad unworkable in this hemisphere.)
= = =
It’s really a no-brainer when it comes to understanding why North America has so far proven to be barren ground for the brand new Al Jazeera English language television news service to take root and find a western audience.
Here is a list of the leading news items that appeared on its English language news website the day it launched its television service worldwide:
Africa: Raid on Niger oil facility; Sudan to help southerners return.
Central / S. Asia: Pakistan and India in security deal; Bangladesh gripped by protests.
Europe: Vatican steps into veil debate; Euronext favors NYSE over Deutsche;
Americas: Climate change worsens biodiversity; Rice snub for Iran and Syria.
Asia-Pacific: Racial tensions on rise in Malaysia; China set to let foreign banks in.
Middle East: US general favors staying in Iraq; Mubarak meets Palestinian leader.
And on the same day on Google News (US and Canada), this news story yielded 152 separate clippings, most with a large accompanying photo: “La Senza soars with bid from Victoria's Secret owner (Canadian Press) MONTREAL — Shares of La Senza soared by almost half in early Thursday trading after the American owner of Victoria's Secret announced it will pay $710 million for the Canadian lingerie rival.”
So we just need to find a way to reconcile those two apparently divergent news priorities. (Maybe if Arab women removed their veils…)
= = =
Future deer-in-the-headlights topic alert. Recently, I bought myself a tiny electronic box with an unbelievably huge (well, “unbelievably” to me, that is) memory – an Apple 80GB iPod. Here’s what I was thinking: I decided finally to succumb to the global iPod Borg-like assimilation – after receiving some pretty strong assurances from Santa that there likely would have been a positive response to my request for a turntable that converts vinyl to digital media – so I could copy and store virtually (Hah! In this case, “virtually” does NOT mean “almost”! It means, in fact, “in a virtual format”. Take that, cunning linguists!) my entire collection of a couple hundred LPs, plus a sea of cassette tapes and 45 rpm “singles”, and consign the actual disks in their cat-shredded sleeves to a yard sale or perhaps the local “Legend Records” outlet. (Although, to confess, I expect I will find it hard to let go of the album art for Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass’ “Whipped Cream and Other Delights”.)
Where was I? Oh yes… After I bought the virtual warehouse, I discovered immediately that Apple seems to take the attitude that purchasers of this memory behemoth are likely upgrading from an earlier generation of iPod. Because the instruction “book” that came in its box amounted to a couple pages telling you how to download “iTunes” from the Apple homepage and charge the device’s battery so that it’ll work. I received a longer owner’s manual with my Tilley hat, for heaven’s sake!
So I found an online 72-page “Features Guide” that I printed out – something that many in my comfort-in-paper generation still need – to begin my latest techno-adventure.
And I discovered in very short order two maxims I really should have remembered: “Plug and Play” won’t. And “User Friendly” isn’t.
So after several hours of my unsuccessfully grappling with an utterly useless “operator’s manual”, my better half is now the happy if somewhat puzzled owner of an unsolicited 80GB iPod. Because the alternative was to take it out to my concrete garage floor, unhook a nine-pound sledgehammer I have hanging on the wall and smash the damned thing to little tiny pieces of Gigabyte. While it would have been immensely satisfying, it would also have been tantamount to converting the machine’s cost into paper money, taking that out into the backyard and setting fire to it.
As for me, I am now in the process of exploring software options to convert my LPs and cassette tapes. And I have decided I will convert them to CDs, rather than a wholly virtual format like mp3. And since CDs take up much less room than LPs, in our house that means everyone’ll be happy.
I’ll keep you posted.
= = =
Recently at work we had an “employee recognition day”. Everyone duly recognized was the (I really hesitate to use the word “proud”; let’s go instead with… oh, “hapless”) recipient of a gold pin and personalized certificate recognizing his or her accomplishment.
There were 100 or so people in the room. They handed out 96 employee recognition awards.
Now how inept, I wondered – in fact just how plain gawdawful – a worker does someone have to be in order to become one of the teeny minority that did not receive a 2006 employee recognition award? (I can answer that question – I didn’t win one. But in fairness, my boss nominated our entire team, rather than single out any one member over the others. And the team did, indeed, win one of the 96.)
But the director presenting the awards actually had the gall to announce in advance that the Department is exceedingly sensitive to the risk of criticism of spending public money for the purpose of expensive personnel recognition and so, consequently, assured us all, “Don’t worry; because the gold is not real gold.” So not only is this little award, she said, in effect, so meaningless that we gave it to just about everyone with a pulse, it is a dirt-cheap little award.
The Government of Canada. Nothing is too good for our employees. (So we’ll give you less than nothing.)
= = =
And utterly-boring-future-postings-to-this-blog alert:
I’m going to try to lose some weight, I think.
As I make what a cockpit crew would call my “final approach” to Runway 55 at the Airport o’ Life, I’ve been reading everything from actuarial charts to BMI (Body Mass Index) articles to well-intentioned columns offering gratuitous advice on how to live healthily. And if nothing else, I find I’m paying more attention to them. So it’s a start.
Of course, I’m also paying more attention to the President’s Choice Holiday Insider’s Report where a single serving portion of, for example, PC Campania Gnocchi Pomodoro, rings in with 510 calories and a whacking 1510 mg (63% of the recommended daily value) of sodium. Or a mere 37g (1.3 oz) of the all-new President’s Choice white chocolate cranberry pistachio bark – an amount that I think I accidentally dropped when offered a complimentary sample by a cheery “Try some” sample hostess at the store where I shopped last weekend – tilts the calorimeter at an even 200.
But the bottom line for me is that, regardless of who the authority is, I’m carrying more pounds or kilos or stone than I should be. And when you reach a certain point in life, it’s a whole lot harder to lose than say, when you’re at that same point in life minus 20 years.
I have no trouble at all with intellectually understanding that, when all is said and done, the best diet plan one can follow is hinged to a simple, inescapable and unarguable bit of mathematical logic: burn off more calories than you take in. But like the guy with the cartoon angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other, listening to my inner intellectual and ignoring my inner imp is not always the choice I make.
And since, at my present rate of typical daily consumption, achieving that by “burning off more than I take in” would require running all the way to and from work, instead of taking the bus, I’m going to attempt to reduce my intake.
But here’s what I’m up against. First of all, I love to eat. And what I love to eat most is rarely what falls entirely on the good-for-you side of the ledger. If it’s high-sodium, or high-fat, or high-sugar, then chances are very good that it’s also high on my favourite foods list. And frankly, it’s damned near an addiction.
Second, I have an especial weakness for being an inveterate sampler and snacker while I prepare a meal. Again turning to my intellectual shoulder-dweller, it’s easy to understand that while I’m working with preparing food, of course I’m going to associate that with thoughts of… well, eating food. That doesn’t prevent me, however, from succumbing to the urgings of my alternate shoulder-perched imp.
And third, I’m a nighthawk. I usually head to bed about midnight, typically some five hours after dinner. Which means I’m reaching an almost mealtime hungry state of mind at about bedtime. Definitely not conducive to weight loss.
My idol of the moment is a comedian who has made a career out of routines based on overeating. But John Pinette has also gone from being a grossly overweight 450 lb to being just a moderately overweight 300. Now admittedly to do that, he went somewhere I am not going to go – the surgical suite. He lost all that weight five years ago and (so far, knock on wood) he seems to be keeping it off. He also does some of the best overeating-themed comedy routines of any entertainer on the comedy circuit.
Being a man, he’s working in comedy territory that has traditionally been more the domain of women comics. And that may help account for why so much of the “fat comedy” is even funnier coming from him. In one hilarious routine, for example, he describes counseling sessions with a nutritionist, noting that he was told he’s free to eat all the food he wants, so long as the food in question is salad. Salad, he explodes, is “not food. Salad is a promissory note that food will soon arrive.”
Other Pinette bon bons?: "My cholesterol count has a comma." (Commenting on performing in Las Vegas): "It doesn't matter if I lose money at the tables, 'cause I can always make it up at the buffet. $2.98 breakfasts? Hell, I can eat $2.98 worth of toast! I go up to the Prime Rib table and say 'Hit me!'"
So bear with me. Baby Duck could become home to some boring bits in the weeks and months to come if reading about food discoveries is not your piece of cake… (Hmmmmm. No no no! Make that, “your cup of tea”.) But just as the old adage holds that confession is good for the soul, I’ve also read that making a public announcement of your intent to lose weight can also be a big help in keeping one at last closer to the path of nutritional righteousness.
Because who wants all of one’s friends to know that one failed?
A la prochaine...
Wednesday, November 08, 2006
A really great concert!
Thursday, November 2nd at the Centrepointe Theatre in Nepean / Ottawa, internationally renowned “Texas blues” * guitarist Sue Foley fronted a show called Guitar Women. The show was partly a chance for her to plug her latest album and her upcoming book about women guitarists, and partly a fundraiser for the Ottawa Folklore Centre’s new bursary for a deserving, would-be scholar of the guitar, under 18 years old (the student that is, not the instrument), whether the student be boy or girl.
* “Texas blues” is a reference more to a style than to geography. In fact, Ms Foley now hails from Perth, Ontario and made a point of thanking “folks” in Perth for bussing a local contingent to this show (! Second Perth citation in a row here.). I could rabbit on about what make some blues “Texas”, but not surprisingly, someone has (or some several have) done a much better job of it on the Wikipedia web site.
I’ve been a big fan of Ms Foley’s for years. She has a clear nasal voice that seems tailor-made for singing girl blues but it is her electric (in every sense of the word!) guitar playing that has always wowed me. Her trademarked instrument of most frequent choice is a pink Fender Telecaster that has been custom painted to give it a vaguely paisley appearance. It (and she) is pictured here.
But a bonus for me was knowing in advance that also on the bill was a slide guitar player I had last seen around about 1972 in a small pub at Carleton University’s Unicentre – Ellen McIlwaine. As it turned out, on this night she was clearly the anchor around whom the concert was framed. Sue Foley was officially introduced as the host, on a bill that would also feature some stunning guitar work by another blues guitarist named Roxanne Potvin and a slide guitar whiz named Rachelle Van Zanten. But when Ellen McIlwaine was onstage, it was clear that she was the grande dame of the guitar to whom the others deferred. She was introduced by Rachelle Van Zanten in what was probably intended to be a deeply moving story about driving across the northern US very late one night and being reduced to tears when the McIlwaine tune, “Say a Single Word”, came up on her mp3 player. As she looked across at Ms McIlwaine, sitting patiently but clearly uncomfortably while a young woman about a third her age lionized her, Van Zanten must have seen the unspoken, “Oh c’mon!” radiating from her idol, because she paused and said, “OK, shut up and play the guitar, right?” It brought the house down and immediately yanked the stage back to the “Let’s have some fun!” atmosphere it would prove to be from beginning to end.
I already own just about everything Sue Foley ever recorded, so I came home with “Mystic Bridge”, Ellen McIlwaine's most recent CD, that is a weirdly hypnotic blend of east and west that she described to us as “an album whose heart is in India, but whose soul is in the south”. And she didn’t mean Bangalore.
The evening’s format allowed for lots of opportunity for each of the women to showcase in turn her incredible abilities on the fret board. And as an added bonus, there were also several style mergers. After telling her story, for example, Ms Van Zanten sang the small, sad “Say a Single Word”, while its writer sat a few feet away providing her own guitar counterpoint.
And Sue Foley let it be known that she and Ms Potvin were in the process of finalizing the assembly of a band to unite for a coming tour and to produce a new album together. The two then united for a blazing preview of just what a show that is going to be! At one point, standing face to face, they traded electric blues licks at a pace that had the audience just bouncing along, erupting in applause when the two guitarists finally backed away from each other.
The finale – and you just knew this was coming – was an onstage showcase of how well four guitar masters can work together, even though the music they played was authored by just one of them – fittingly, a brace of Ellen McIlwaine tunes. (In introducing the numbers, she was hilarious. She had already told the audience she is coming back from two hip replacements and has only recently recovered the ability to be able to do a simple thing like take a shower standing up. So she made a point of saying, “Look, we have an official ‘finale’, but you know the drill. We play it. Then we’re supposed to say good bye, walk off stage while you scream for a while, and then come back on to play our real last song, OK? But I’m getting too old for this walk-off-the-stage-touch-the-back-wall-chat-for-30-seconds-then-come-back-on-after-you’ve-screamed-for-a-bit crap. So I’ll just hang around, let the girls do that thing, and then we’ll do our second finale. Got all that?”)
Which of course was exactly how this fantastic show ended.
I was sufficiently taken with the show that I was moved to seek out the means to contact Ellen McIlwaine and tell her so. The miracle of the Internet led me to her website, a “Contact Ellen” option and, within two days, a reply. I mentioned to her the last time I saw her, and my recollection of a guitar-heavy tune that I remembered as “40 Guitar Band”.
During the concert, she had also mentioned that her most recent CD had been released, for the first time in her long musical career, on her own personal label. She had expressed to the audience that she was motivated to take this enormous step because of her long-standing consternation over having to buy a large number of her own CDs from the label with whom she had been contracted, and then turn around and sell them at her concerts in order to extricate herself from the debt of having had to purchase them in the first place. In this, she told me she was not alone, adding that, in fact, precisely the same requirement is presently constraining two of her three co-performers at the concert. So here’s a thoughtful little plug to buy indie where possible:
“hello! that was 'roosters' at carleton university i think and the song is called '30-piece band'. thanks for all the years! so glad you all enjoyed the show...we did too! i am so proud of the new cd and of finally starting my own label...we did two other dates in ontario (sue, rachelle and i) and i heard that they are both in debt to a label (yet another!) in germany which financed recordings for them and sold them back to them to sell at shows and now they owe big bucks to the company! no more! i will own all my own recordings from now on. i hope they will do the same! thanks again for coming to the show and for all your wonderful kind words!... it keeps me going! i will put you on my concert dates email list and keep you posted if i/we come through again. take good care. ellen”
= = =
The spam game…
After literally years of my complaining to my Internet Service provider – Rogers – about how much “unsolicited bulk commercial e-mail” (that’d be yer “spam”) was landing in my in-box, they finally came up with a not-too-bad filtering system that traps probably 99% of it in an easily-set-up “Bulk” basket that sits on their server’s memory, before it ever gets to my computer.
So spammers have to come up with more creative ways to try to get around it. But Rogers, to their everlasting credit, flags spam not by its subject line, but rather by how many addresses are in a message’s “To” Field. (That could be bad news for anyone who has me on a many-address “family” or “friends” mailing list, because your messages go first to this “Bulk” basket, rather than to my “In” basket. However, it takes me no time at all to scan the “From” field in these messages and exercise my “Move to” option to transfer such messages to my “In” basket before downloading them to my home PC.)
But as I quickly scan the messages flagged as “Bulk” to ensure I don’t miss one that isn’t spam, I can’t help but chuckle over the often sad ways spammers will try to circumvent spam-blockers. A lot of people, for example, have spam-blocking that begins and ends with an embedded instruction to their e-mail program to automatically dump anything into their “Trash” if it contains in its subject line a word like, for example, “penis”, or “bigger penis” (because as any regular receiver of e-mail knows all too well, a sizeable number of spam messages offer the recipient the opportunity to acquire a bigger one). So a spammer will send out a subject line like “Get a biger peni$”. See how that works? If your only spam filter is a command to block a specific, correctly spelled text, you’re still gonna get the “biger peni$” e-mail.
And that’s why I like Rogers’ filtering. They ignore the subject line and dump “biger peni$” automatically because it was sent to hundreds of “To” addresses at the same time. And that suits me just fine.
All of which is a very long-winded introduction to the observation that, when an e-mail message landed in my spam-trap recently under the Subject heading, “Small pen is?”, I chose to fill it in mentally with “… mightier than the letter-opener?”
= = =
Bug o’ de Blog
For the past few years, I have worked myself up to the point where I am now religiously reading the white “Nutritional Information” boxes on the groceries I buy. (By “religiously” I mean of course that halfway through the list of ingredients and the column of numbers, I invariably will have muttered “Jesus H Christ!” to myself at least once, more likely several times.)
I’ve come to reluctant terms with the startling – and disappointing – discovery of just how much salt is packed into processed foods (Powdered and cubed soup base, for example, is just evil. Ingredients in this country have to be listed in descending order of their respective presence in the product, and in at least two of the popular brands of soup stock, salt is the very first ingredient. Soup stock powders, in other words, are essentially just flavoured salt. A single Bovril cube or one of its clones can shoot fully 1/3 the recommended adult daily maximum intake of sodium into your system. But I digress.)
But my main beef (haw haw) with such information is the necessity of determining just what constitutes a “serving”, even on what seems at first glance already to be a simple, single serving portion. Reading that line on a product is a real education in just how much smoke and mirrors a “food” – and don’t think I’m not using that word very, very loosely – producer employs to minimize the visible coronary risks associated with consuming a particular product.
Take, for example, what looks for all the world like a single serving of a bottled beverage – “Minute Maid Pink Grapefruit Cocktail”. It is “single-serving”, as it turns out, in name only. In most convenience stores and supermarkets, it typically is sold in a 473 mL bottle. Now just how in hell anyone decided the fluid in the bottle should total 473 mL was at one time way beyond my rational thinking. But now I understand it to be a sop to the vastly larger markets south of the border, where the imperial measure is still the standard order of the day. And 473 mL converts precisely to 15.994 US fluid ounces. Or to flip the conversion, a 16 US fluid ounce drink converts to 473.176 mL – rounded down to (surprise!) – 473 mL, an amount that for absolutely everyone who buys it and drinks it is a single serving!
But check the “nutritional information”. And note the fluid measure that someone has decided will be a “single serving” – 250 mL (!?). That number, and the percentage daily intake of each of the ingredients, seems to have been based on some God-only-knows-how-it’s-arrived-at portion of the liquid volume of the contents. And the “single serving” is never a simple fraction like “one half” or “one third”. 250mL, for example, works out to 8.453 (plus five more decimal places) fluid ounces. Which doesn’t matter anyway, because no one who has passed his or her fourth birthday is going to drink less than the bottler’s entire danged two cups’ worth at a sitting.
So what can we learn from this? Obviously that the labeled bottle’s size is governed by the vastly larger US market demands, but the label’s information in this country is determined by Government of Canada regulation. The combination offers the consumer all the helpful use of receiving a VHS instruction manual with your new DVD recorder.
But for a real laugh, if you’re given to occasionally snacking on something with “Frito-Lay” or “Humpty Dumpty” on its label, or a sugar-rich breakfast cereal, take a look at what they consider to be a “serving” (usually an odd derivation like “approximately 15 chips” or about 1/3 cup of cereal). Well sure, if you’re a friggin’ anemic squirrel, I guess. But for most humans, it’s maybe a trio of bites, if that much! Try limiting your “serving” of Lay’s potato chips to the label’s guideline. Their marketing types didn’t come up with “Betcha can’t eat just one!” for no reason.
= = =
And finally, from the “Why in heaven’s name do we put up with crap like this?” folder, I really can’t say it much better than did columnist and author Paul Wells in a blog entry he made on Monday, November 6:
From Question Period today:
Bill Graham: How can the Prime Minister pull out of the Canada-EU summit? How can he justify this decision when he will already be in Europe for a meeting of NATO and in the region anyway?
Jason Kenney: First of all, Mr. Speaker, I would note that the last Liberal prime minister cancelled two EU-Canada summits.
————
True. I may have been the only press gallery member with so much time on my hands that I noticed Martin's two cancellations. Still, it's probably not great when your excuse is that you're no lamer than your predecessor.
Vote for us – we’re no lamer than the previous crooks. Now there’s an epitaph for the leaders of the New Millennium.
… But to end on a political news o’ the day upside, as this issue was gong to press, the media coverage of the day was reporting the recapturing of Congress by the Democrats in the US. Anyone interested in starting a pool on the date of the first Presidential veto of House-approved law? For bonus points – name the first new piece of Democrat-driven House of Representatives law that’ll earn the Presidential thumbs-down. (Minimum wage? Structured troop withdrawals from Iraq?) Our lines are open.
Until next time…
Thursday, November 2nd at the Centrepointe Theatre in Nepean / Ottawa, internationally renowned “Texas blues” * guitarist Sue Foley fronted a show called Guitar Women. The show was partly a chance for her to plug her latest album and her upcoming book about women guitarists, and partly a fundraiser for the Ottawa Folklore Centre’s new bursary for a deserving, would-be scholar of the guitar, under 18 years old (the student that is, not the instrument), whether the student be boy or girl.
* “Texas blues” is a reference more to a style than to geography. In fact, Ms Foley now hails from Perth, Ontario and made a point of thanking “folks” in Perth for bussing a local contingent to this show (! Second Perth citation in a row here.). I could rabbit on about what make some blues “Texas”, but not surprisingly, someone has (or some several have) done a much better job of it on the Wikipedia web site.
I’ve been a big fan of Ms Foley’s for years. She has a clear nasal voice that seems tailor-made for singing girl blues but it is her electric (in every sense of the word!) guitar playing that has always wowed me. Her trademarked instrument of most frequent choice is a pink Fender Telecaster that has been custom painted to give it a vaguely paisley appearance. It (and she) is pictured here.
But a bonus for me was knowing in advance that also on the bill was a slide guitar player I had last seen around about 1972 in a small pub at Carleton University’s Unicentre – Ellen McIlwaine. As it turned out, on this night she was clearly the anchor around whom the concert was framed. Sue Foley was officially introduced as the host, on a bill that would also feature some stunning guitar work by another blues guitarist named Roxanne Potvin and a slide guitar whiz named Rachelle Van Zanten. But when Ellen McIlwaine was onstage, it was clear that she was the grande dame of the guitar to whom the others deferred. She was introduced by Rachelle Van Zanten in what was probably intended to be a deeply moving story about driving across the northern US very late one night and being reduced to tears when the McIlwaine tune, “Say a Single Word”, came up on her mp3 player. As she looked across at Ms McIlwaine, sitting patiently but clearly uncomfortably while a young woman about a third her age lionized her, Van Zanten must have seen the unspoken, “Oh c’mon!” radiating from her idol, because she paused and said, “OK, shut up and play the guitar, right?” It brought the house down and immediately yanked the stage back to the “Let’s have some fun!” atmosphere it would prove to be from beginning to end.
I already own just about everything Sue Foley ever recorded, so I came home with “Mystic Bridge”, Ellen McIlwaine's most recent CD, that is a weirdly hypnotic blend of east and west that she described to us as “an album whose heart is in India, but whose soul is in the south”. And she didn’t mean Bangalore.
The evening’s format allowed for lots of opportunity for each of the women to showcase in turn her incredible abilities on the fret board. And as an added bonus, there were also several style mergers. After telling her story, for example, Ms Van Zanten sang the small, sad “Say a Single Word”, while its writer sat a few feet away providing her own guitar counterpoint.
And Sue Foley let it be known that she and Ms Potvin were in the process of finalizing the assembly of a band to unite for a coming tour and to produce a new album together. The two then united for a blazing preview of just what a show that is going to be! At one point, standing face to face, they traded electric blues licks at a pace that had the audience just bouncing along, erupting in applause when the two guitarists finally backed away from each other.
The finale – and you just knew this was coming – was an onstage showcase of how well four guitar masters can work together, even though the music they played was authored by just one of them – fittingly, a brace of Ellen McIlwaine tunes. (In introducing the numbers, she was hilarious. She had already told the audience she is coming back from two hip replacements and has only recently recovered the ability to be able to do a simple thing like take a shower standing up. So she made a point of saying, “Look, we have an official ‘finale’, but you know the drill. We play it. Then we’re supposed to say good bye, walk off stage while you scream for a while, and then come back on to play our real last song, OK? But I’m getting too old for this walk-off-the-stage-touch-the-back-wall-chat-for-30-seconds-then-come-back-on-after-you’ve-screamed-for-a-bit crap. So I’ll just hang around, let the girls do that thing, and then we’ll do our second finale. Got all that?”)
Which of course was exactly how this fantastic show ended.
I was sufficiently taken with the show that I was moved to seek out the means to contact Ellen McIlwaine and tell her so. The miracle of the Internet led me to her website, a “Contact Ellen” option and, within two days, a reply. I mentioned to her the last time I saw her, and my recollection of a guitar-heavy tune that I remembered as “40 Guitar Band”.
During the concert, she had also mentioned that her most recent CD had been released, for the first time in her long musical career, on her own personal label. She had expressed to the audience that she was motivated to take this enormous step because of her long-standing consternation over having to buy a large number of her own CDs from the label with whom she had been contracted, and then turn around and sell them at her concerts in order to extricate herself from the debt of having had to purchase them in the first place. In this, she told me she was not alone, adding that, in fact, precisely the same requirement is presently constraining two of her three co-performers at the concert. So here’s a thoughtful little plug to buy indie where possible:
“hello! that was 'roosters' at carleton university i think and the song is called '30-piece band'. thanks for all the years! so glad you all enjoyed the show...we did too! i am so proud of the new cd and of finally starting my own label...we did two other dates in ontario (sue, rachelle and i) and i heard that they are both in debt to a label (yet another!) in germany which financed recordings for them and sold them back to them to sell at shows and now they owe big bucks to the company! no more! i will own all my own recordings from now on. i hope they will do the same! thanks again for coming to the show and for all your wonderful kind words!... it keeps me going! i will put you on my concert dates email list and keep you posted if i/we come through again. take good care. ellen”
= = =
The spam game…
After literally years of my complaining to my Internet Service provider – Rogers – about how much “unsolicited bulk commercial e-mail” (that’d be yer “spam”) was landing in my in-box, they finally came up with a not-too-bad filtering system that traps probably 99% of it in an easily-set-up “Bulk” basket that sits on their server’s memory, before it ever gets to my computer.
So spammers have to come up with more creative ways to try to get around it. But Rogers, to their everlasting credit, flags spam not by its subject line, but rather by how many addresses are in a message’s “To” Field. (That could be bad news for anyone who has me on a many-address “family” or “friends” mailing list, because your messages go first to this “Bulk” basket, rather than to my “In” basket. However, it takes me no time at all to scan the “From” field in these messages and exercise my “Move to” option to transfer such messages to my “In” basket before downloading them to my home PC.)
But as I quickly scan the messages flagged as “Bulk” to ensure I don’t miss one that isn’t spam, I can’t help but chuckle over the often sad ways spammers will try to circumvent spam-blockers. A lot of people, for example, have spam-blocking that begins and ends with an embedded instruction to their e-mail program to automatically dump anything into their “Trash” if it contains in its subject line a word like, for example, “penis”, or “bigger penis” (because as any regular receiver of e-mail knows all too well, a sizeable number of spam messages offer the recipient the opportunity to acquire a bigger one). So a spammer will send out a subject line like “Get a biger peni$”. See how that works? If your only spam filter is a command to block a specific, correctly spelled text, you’re still gonna get the “biger peni$” e-mail.
And that’s why I like Rogers’ filtering. They ignore the subject line and dump “biger peni$” automatically because it was sent to hundreds of “To” addresses at the same time. And that suits me just fine.
All of which is a very long-winded introduction to the observation that, when an e-mail message landed in my spam-trap recently under the Subject heading, “Small pen is?”, I chose to fill it in mentally with “… mightier than the letter-opener?”
= = =
Bug o’ de Blog
For the past few years, I have worked myself up to the point where I am now religiously reading the white “Nutritional Information” boxes on the groceries I buy. (By “religiously” I mean of course that halfway through the list of ingredients and the column of numbers, I invariably will have muttered “Jesus H Christ!” to myself at least once, more likely several times.)
I’ve come to reluctant terms with the startling – and disappointing – discovery of just how much salt is packed into processed foods (Powdered and cubed soup base, for example, is just evil. Ingredients in this country have to be listed in descending order of their respective presence in the product, and in at least two of the popular brands of soup stock, salt is the very first ingredient. Soup stock powders, in other words, are essentially just flavoured salt. A single Bovril cube or one of its clones can shoot fully 1/3 the recommended adult daily maximum intake of sodium into your system. But I digress.)
But my main beef (haw haw) with such information is the necessity of determining just what constitutes a “serving”, even on what seems at first glance already to be a simple, single serving portion. Reading that line on a product is a real education in just how much smoke and mirrors a “food” – and don’t think I’m not using that word very, very loosely – producer employs to minimize the visible coronary risks associated with consuming a particular product.
Take, for example, what looks for all the world like a single serving of a bottled beverage – “Minute Maid Pink Grapefruit Cocktail”. It is “single-serving”, as it turns out, in name only. In most convenience stores and supermarkets, it typically is sold in a 473 mL bottle. Now just how in hell anyone decided the fluid in the bottle should total 473 mL was at one time way beyond my rational thinking. But now I understand it to be a sop to the vastly larger markets south of the border, where the imperial measure is still the standard order of the day. And 473 mL converts precisely to 15.994 US fluid ounces. Or to flip the conversion, a 16 US fluid ounce drink converts to 473.176 mL – rounded down to (surprise!) – 473 mL, an amount that for absolutely everyone who buys it and drinks it is a single serving!
But check the “nutritional information”. And note the fluid measure that someone has decided will be a “single serving” – 250 mL (!?). That number, and the percentage daily intake of each of the ingredients, seems to have been based on some God-only-knows-how-it’s-arrived-at portion of the liquid volume of the contents. And the “single serving” is never a simple fraction like “one half” or “one third”. 250mL, for example, works out to 8.453 (plus five more decimal places) fluid ounces. Which doesn’t matter anyway, because no one who has passed his or her fourth birthday is going to drink less than the bottler’s entire danged two cups’ worth at a sitting.
So what can we learn from this? Obviously that the labeled bottle’s size is governed by the vastly larger US market demands, but the label’s information in this country is determined by Government of Canada regulation. The combination offers the consumer all the helpful use of receiving a VHS instruction manual with your new DVD recorder.
But for a real laugh, if you’re given to occasionally snacking on something with “Frito-Lay” or “Humpty Dumpty” on its label, or a sugar-rich breakfast cereal, take a look at what they consider to be a “serving” (usually an odd derivation like “approximately 15 chips” or about 1/3 cup of cereal). Well sure, if you’re a friggin’ anemic squirrel, I guess. But for most humans, it’s maybe a trio of bites, if that much! Try limiting your “serving” of Lay’s potato chips to the label’s guideline. Their marketing types didn’t come up with “Betcha can’t eat just one!” for no reason.
= = =
And finally, from the “Why in heaven’s name do we put up with crap like this?” folder, I really can’t say it much better than did columnist and author Paul Wells in a blog entry he made on Monday, November 6:
From Question Period today:
Bill Graham: How can the Prime Minister pull out of the Canada-EU summit? How can he justify this decision when he will already be in Europe for a meeting of NATO and in the region anyway?
Jason Kenney: First of all, Mr. Speaker, I would note that the last Liberal prime minister cancelled two EU-Canada summits.
————
True. I may have been the only press gallery member with so much time on my hands that I noticed Martin's two cancellations. Still, it's probably not great when your excuse is that you're no lamer than your predecessor.
Vote for us – we’re no lamer than the previous crooks. Now there’s an epitaph for the leaders of the New Millennium.
… But to end on a political news o’ the day upside, as this issue was gong to press, the media coverage of the day was reporting the recapturing of Congress by the Democrats in the US. Anyone interested in starting a pool on the date of the first Presidential veto of House-approved law? For bonus points – name the first new piece of Democrat-driven House of Representatives law that’ll earn the Presidential thumbs-down. (Minimum wage? Structured troop withdrawals from Iraq?) Our lines are open.
Until next time…
Saturday, November 04, 2006
Hallowe’en in the federal public service…
In the Government of Canada, every department has its Human Resource (HR, what we used to call “personnel” or in those even more distant, pre-politically-correct days, “manpower”) cheerleaders. By now, you’ve probably seen that TV commercial where the guy says good-night to a half dozen office “types”, including, “Good night overly cheerful HR lady…” That commercial is hilarious, because it’s bang on with its labels. [“Good night nobody-knows-what-you-do guy” gets the biggest laugh in our house. Because (a) my better half knows at least one in her workplace; and (b) I am one in mine.]
On Hallowe’en in the federal public service, you can pretty well identify who works in a unit with just such an overly cheerful HR person. They are the people walking through the common areas in the most outlandish costumes, usually with semi-sullen “Holy shit, I can’t believe I let myself get talked into this!” looks on their faces. But what makes it uniquely Public Service is that they also seem to have commanded themselves to be utterly oblivious to their often-bizarre external appearances and, in every other way, to act as though it’s just another day in the halls of Government.
On Hallowe’en, while returning from a meeting in another of my complex’s quartet of towers, I passed a fellow walking along with three other guys in suits. He, on the other hand, was decked out in a truly magnificent rendering of, as nearly as I could figure, the elder Pharaoh from the old Cecil B DeMille / Charlton Heston take on “The Ten Commandments” – Egyptian headdress, elaborate collar jewellery, flowing white robe, and sandals. As far as I could tell as we passed each other, he was participating in a walking meeting.
And I imagined that his three colleagues were managing only with great difficulty to sustain straight faces in the presence of someone who, really, they probably just wanted to grab, look full in the face and shout, “Let my people GO!” And I also wondered why this guy even bothered to go to all that trouble when it was clear that his day’s work schedule was proceeding unimpeded by any duly costumed acknowledgement to the last day of October’s marketing-bastardized pagan traditions.
Seconds later, several paces on, I passed a line of people waiting for the opportunity to stock themselves from the local Tim Horton’s coffee / donut shop. And amid the variations on standard business dress stood one person encased in a full-blown (literally, because I think it was inflatable) outfit that made her look like a giant cartoon sumo wrestler. At least she was laughing, but that might just as easily have been a function of the fact that, at that moment in time, she was in a coffee line-up rather than at her workspace. The rest of the people waiting in line, on the other hand, made no visible acknowledgement whatsoever of the presence in their midst of a pseudo sumo wrestler roughly three times the size of anyone else.
But to me, far and away the most pathetic (“pathetic” here to mean, “deserving of pathos”) example was a woman who works not too far away from where I do. She had gone to no small amount of trouble to stuff herself into a Winnie the Pooh costume of a quality on the order of a sports team mascot. But when I saw her, it was near the end of the day, when it was apparent that spending the day indoors while completely encased in a mountain of fake yellow fur had perhaps triggered episodes of overheating. Because when I saw her, she was in profile and had peeled the entire upper half of the costume away and rolled it down around her waist.
Now a large Pooh-bear head is not something that rolls, so from where I stood it appeared to protrude oddly from her midriff, looking for all the world as if it were erupting from her. In fact, it looked exactly like someone had poured an entire bottle of tequila into Hollywood Director Ridley Scott, pointed him in the direction of a word processor and issued to him the blunt direction, “Ridley old man, we love the ‘Alien’ idea, but you need to make it more kid-friendly.”
= = = =
“Head-scratch-o-the day – 1”:
One has to ask if the US Foreign Policy Association knows something the rest of the world – especially Canada – hasn’t cottoned onto yet…. Like, f’instance, the target of the next major US-led pacification incursion to share the American version of democracy with a world hungry for mid-term elections. The following ad was linked via a web log I read occasionally:
= = =
“Project-Based Linguists
Organization:
Kwikpoint
Location:
United States (Alexandria, VA)
Website: http://www.kwikpoint.com
Contact Information:
Larry Golfer
Phone: etc
Email: etc
Description:
Immediate need for project-based native speaking linguists in Afghan Pashto, Farsi, Dari, and in Canadian French. No translation involved. Project involves creating phonetic pronunciations of translated phrases for military/intelligence use. Pashto, Dari and Farsi linguists selected must have current, colloquial, Afghan "street language" knowledge of their respective language. Canadian French must be Quebecois. The material is not formal or in a literary form of the language. Must be familiar with basic military/intelligence terminology. Compensation is hourly, to be negotiated. Professional references on linguistic ability required. Reply to email listed.”
= = =
“Canadian French”? Specifically “Quebecois”? I’m thinking the Jean Charest government in Quebec might want to send off a quick memo to the Harper government in Ottawa… “Uh Stephen, d’ya think maybe you could put some accelerators on that program you announced to train and arm the guards at Canadian border entry points? And could you upgrade the training beyond ‘How to deal with a rumoured wingnut approaching with a pistol’ [“Run away!”] to ‘How to deal with a mechanized column of US Marines armed to the teeth and supported by Hellfire-missile-equipped Apache attack helicopters’. Like… NOW!!? Love ya. Cheers, Jean”
= = =
“Head-scratch-o-the day – 2”. Here’s the start of a recent Government of Canada news release of the type that crosses my desk ten times a day. Once you get past the process of wondering just what sort of news organ in the entire country could possibly find even a shred of interest in the opening sentence, perhaps you will come to that place where, like me, you have more questions than answers, exactly the opposite of what a news release is supposed to do. (Recently I was asked, in my place of work, to undertake a review of departmental media coverage for the past few months and to include a comment or two about why certain program announcements received no pick-up whatsoever in the media. It’s too bad I didn’t have this news release available at the time. Because the stultifying dullness of its first breathless paragraph is also the answer to that question. But I digress.):
“OTTAWA, ONTARIO -- (Nov. 1, 2006) -- The Honourable Diane Finley, Minister of Human Resources and Social Development, announced today that the Agreements on Social Security between Canada and the Republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania will enter into force on November 1, 2006. The Agreements apply to Canada's Old Age Security program and the Canada Pension Plan, and to the comparable respective pension programs of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.”
As the news release itself goes on to explain in the most ponderous language possible, the agreements on Social Security mentioned here are aimed at ensuring that Canadian workers will continue to receive their Canada Pension Plan if they’re sent to work in the Baltic republics, and also that they cannot be compelled to contribute to the Baltic countries’ pension plans while working there. So then I wondered if perhaps I was being overly glib in light of the possible extent of such circumstances.
(GoogleGoogleGoogle, “Canadian workers in Latvia”): From “latvians online”, February 7, 2006: “Small-town Canada man plays hockey in Latvia”…
So in response to the question immediately above (Am I being overly glib?), that’d be a nope. But wait a minute here… OMIGAWD!! “But 23-year-old Vilis Ābele from Perth, Ontario…”.
He’s from my hometown! (So obviously it’s a huge issue.)
= = =
And finally, if you’re feeling at all anti-corporate as you read this update, well then you’ll appreciate this little zing from Maclean’s columnist and regular blogger Paul Wells who, in addition to all his other scribblings, has recently penned an insider’s look at Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s election win earlier this year, entitled “Right Side Up”. As he notes in a recent blog entry, it’s even findable in Ottawa, our nation’s bastion of conservatism, if you know where to look:
“My book is ‘now available in bookstores,’ if by ‘bookstores,’ you understand I mean ‘probably not the store you're looking in.’ Exceptions, in downtown Ottawa, include Nicholas Hoare on Sussex, which is not stocking it prominently but which seems able to cough up copies if you ask; and Smithbooks on Sparks St., which has been restocking its hardy little pile of Right Side Ups as customers have streamed in. Britton's on Bank St. in the Glebe is also selling Right Side Up, I'm told.
The Chapters cornerstone store on Rideau, on the other hand, seems genuinely not to have considered that a book about the Prime Minister of Canada might draw any interest, a block from where the Prime Minister of Canada works. Not a copy. Nary a one. But then, why should I expect better from a chain that has failed, completely, to update the cover art on their website, four weeks after my publisher asked them to?
This explains why my book launches — in Ottawa, Montreal, Calgary, Vancouver, Sarnia and London — will be staffed by independent booksellers, who will keep the profits, and my thanks, for showing slightly quicker wits than the Brezhnevian behemoth of Canadian bookselling.
‘The World Needs More Canada?’ Depends which parts.”
= = =
And a peek head to our next entry… back to things musical and a review of a completely fantastic recent Ottawa concert… plus the second Perth citation in a row!
A la prochaine.
In the Government of Canada, every department has its Human Resource (HR, what we used to call “personnel” or in those even more distant, pre-politically-correct days, “manpower”) cheerleaders. By now, you’ve probably seen that TV commercial where the guy says good-night to a half dozen office “types”, including, “Good night overly cheerful HR lady…” That commercial is hilarious, because it’s bang on with its labels. [“Good night nobody-knows-what-you-do guy” gets the biggest laugh in our house. Because (a) my better half knows at least one in her workplace; and (b) I am one in mine.]
On Hallowe’en in the federal public service, you can pretty well identify who works in a unit with just such an overly cheerful HR person. They are the people walking through the common areas in the most outlandish costumes, usually with semi-sullen “Holy shit, I can’t believe I let myself get talked into this!” looks on their faces. But what makes it uniquely Public Service is that they also seem to have commanded themselves to be utterly oblivious to their often-bizarre external appearances and, in every other way, to act as though it’s just another day in the halls of Government.
On Hallowe’en, while returning from a meeting in another of my complex’s quartet of towers, I passed a fellow walking along with three other guys in suits. He, on the other hand, was decked out in a truly magnificent rendering of, as nearly as I could figure, the elder Pharaoh from the old Cecil B DeMille / Charlton Heston take on “The Ten Commandments” – Egyptian headdress, elaborate collar jewellery, flowing white robe, and sandals. As far as I could tell as we passed each other, he was participating in a walking meeting.
And I imagined that his three colleagues were managing only with great difficulty to sustain straight faces in the presence of someone who, really, they probably just wanted to grab, look full in the face and shout, “Let my people GO!” And I also wondered why this guy even bothered to go to all that trouble when it was clear that his day’s work schedule was proceeding unimpeded by any duly costumed acknowledgement to the last day of October’s marketing-bastardized pagan traditions.
Seconds later, several paces on, I passed a line of people waiting for the opportunity to stock themselves from the local Tim Horton’s coffee / donut shop. And amid the variations on standard business dress stood one person encased in a full-blown (literally, because I think it was inflatable) outfit that made her look like a giant cartoon sumo wrestler. At least she was laughing, but that might just as easily have been a function of the fact that, at that moment in time, she was in a coffee line-up rather than at her workspace. The rest of the people waiting in line, on the other hand, made no visible acknowledgement whatsoever of the presence in their midst of a pseudo sumo wrestler roughly three times the size of anyone else.
But to me, far and away the most pathetic (“pathetic” here to mean, “deserving of pathos”) example was a woman who works not too far away from where I do. She had gone to no small amount of trouble to stuff herself into a Winnie the Pooh costume of a quality on the order of a sports team mascot. But when I saw her, it was near the end of the day, when it was apparent that spending the day indoors while completely encased in a mountain of fake yellow fur had perhaps triggered episodes of overheating. Because when I saw her, she was in profile and had peeled the entire upper half of the costume away and rolled it down around her waist.
Now a large Pooh-bear head is not something that rolls, so from where I stood it appeared to protrude oddly from her midriff, looking for all the world as if it were erupting from her. In fact, it looked exactly like someone had poured an entire bottle of tequila into Hollywood Director Ridley Scott, pointed him in the direction of a word processor and issued to him the blunt direction, “Ridley old man, we love the ‘Alien’ idea, but you need to make it more kid-friendly.”
= = = =
“Head-scratch-o-the day – 1”:
One has to ask if the US Foreign Policy Association knows something the rest of the world – especially Canada – hasn’t cottoned onto yet…. Like, f’instance, the target of the next major US-led pacification incursion to share the American version of democracy with a world hungry for mid-term elections. The following ad was linked via a web log I read occasionally:
= = =
“Project-Based Linguists
Organization:
Kwikpoint
Location:
United States (Alexandria, VA)
Website: http://www.kwikpoint.com
Contact Information:
Larry Golfer
Phone: etc
Email: etc
Description:
Immediate need for project-based native speaking linguists in Afghan Pashto, Farsi, Dari, and in Canadian French. No translation involved. Project involves creating phonetic pronunciations of translated phrases for military/intelligence use. Pashto, Dari and Farsi linguists selected must have current, colloquial, Afghan "street language" knowledge of their respective language. Canadian French must be Quebecois. The material is not formal or in a literary form of the language. Must be familiar with basic military/intelligence terminology. Compensation is hourly, to be negotiated. Professional references on linguistic ability required. Reply to email listed.”
= = =
“Canadian French”? Specifically “Quebecois”? I’m thinking the Jean Charest government in Quebec might want to send off a quick memo to the Harper government in Ottawa… “Uh Stephen, d’ya think maybe you could put some accelerators on that program you announced to train and arm the guards at Canadian border entry points? And could you upgrade the training beyond ‘How to deal with a rumoured wingnut approaching with a pistol’ [“Run away!”] to ‘How to deal with a mechanized column of US Marines armed to the teeth and supported by Hellfire-missile-equipped Apache attack helicopters’. Like… NOW!!? Love ya. Cheers, Jean”
= = =
“Head-scratch-o-the day – 2”. Here’s the start of a recent Government of Canada news release of the type that crosses my desk ten times a day. Once you get past the process of wondering just what sort of news organ in the entire country could possibly find even a shred of interest in the opening sentence, perhaps you will come to that place where, like me, you have more questions than answers, exactly the opposite of what a news release is supposed to do. (Recently I was asked, in my place of work, to undertake a review of departmental media coverage for the past few months and to include a comment or two about why certain program announcements received no pick-up whatsoever in the media. It’s too bad I didn’t have this news release available at the time. Because the stultifying dullness of its first breathless paragraph is also the answer to that question. But I digress.):
“OTTAWA, ONTARIO -- (Nov. 1, 2006) -- The Honourable Diane Finley, Minister of Human Resources and Social Development, announced today that the Agreements on Social Security between Canada and the Republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania will enter into force on November 1, 2006. The Agreements apply to Canada's Old Age Security program and the Canada Pension Plan, and to the comparable respective pension programs of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.”
As the news release itself goes on to explain in the most ponderous language possible, the agreements on Social Security mentioned here are aimed at ensuring that Canadian workers will continue to receive their Canada Pension Plan if they’re sent to work in the Baltic republics, and also that they cannot be compelled to contribute to the Baltic countries’ pension plans while working there. So then I wondered if perhaps I was being overly glib in light of the possible extent of such circumstances.
(GoogleGoogleGoogle, “Canadian workers in Latvia”): From “latvians online”, February 7, 2006: “Small-town Canada man plays hockey in Latvia”…
So in response to the question immediately above (Am I being overly glib?), that’d be a nope. But wait a minute here… OMIGAWD!! “But 23-year-old Vilis Ābele from Perth, Ontario…”.
He’s from my hometown! (So obviously it’s a huge issue.)
= = =
And finally, if you’re feeling at all anti-corporate as you read this update, well then you’ll appreciate this little zing from Maclean’s columnist and regular blogger Paul Wells who, in addition to all his other scribblings, has recently penned an insider’s look at Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s election win earlier this year, entitled “Right Side Up”. As he notes in a recent blog entry, it’s even findable in Ottawa, our nation’s bastion of conservatism, if you know where to look:
“My book is ‘now available in bookstores,’ if by ‘bookstores,’ you understand I mean ‘probably not the store you're looking in.’ Exceptions, in downtown Ottawa, include Nicholas Hoare on Sussex, which is not stocking it prominently but which seems able to cough up copies if you ask; and Smithbooks on Sparks St., which has been restocking its hardy little pile of Right Side Ups as customers have streamed in. Britton's on Bank St. in the Glebe is also selling Right Side Up, I'm told.
The Chapters cornerstone store on Rideau, on the other hand, seems genuinely not to have considered that a book about the Prime Minister of Canada might draw any interest, a block from where the Prime Minister of Canada works. Not a copy. Nary a one. But then, why should I expect better from a chain that has failed, completely, to update the cover art on their website, four weeks after my publisher asked them to?
This explains why my book launches — in Ottawa, Montreal, Calgary, Vancouver, Sarnia and London — will be staffed by independent booksellers, who will keep the profits, and my thanks, for showing slightly quicker wits than the Brezhnevian behemoth of Canadian bookselling.
‘The World Needs More Canada?’ Depends which parts.”
= = =
And a peek head to our next entry… back to things musical and a review of a completely fantastic recent Ottawa concert… plus the second Perth citation in a row!
A la prochaine.
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
It’s all relative…
In news coverage of the aftermath of the great Hawaii earthquake of mid-October 2006, the Governor of the State spoke on CBC-TV Newsworld to explain why he called for a declaration of a state of emergency. In quick order, he mentioned:
- It was going to take “most of the morning” to get things back to normal;
- They lost internet connectivity and were only just beginning to get it back after a whole day without it;
- Some 3,000 tourists still had not yet been cleared to return to their hotels.
Asked about injuries resulting from the quake, he said that not all the reports were in yet but, so far, they had one broken arm reported and, when that was confirmed, it would be the worst of the injuries reported so far.
All I could wonder was what must the people of New Orleans be thinking when they hear what prompts the declaration of a state of emergency on the Big Island of Hawaii.
(I also thought that it sort of parallels the now-infamous day in this country in mid-January 1999 when then Toronto Mayor Mel Lastman felt compelled to call out the Canadian Army to help his city deal with several days’ accumulated snowfall of some 100 cm overall that effectively paralyzed everything for a day at one point in the run of bad weather.)
= = =
A soundtrack disappointment to share…
Recently we (we being the immediate family) watched a movie that it turned out I liked a lot more than I thought I was going to – “50 First Dates”, with Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore, that proved to be an occasionally touching little romantic comedy.
One of the reasons I liked it was its music and three songs in particular really stood out for me – a nice piece of Bob Marley reggae called “Pressure Drop” (Coincidentally the same song by a different band, The Specials, figures in another movie soundtrack I like a lot – the music that backs up “Gross Pointe Blank”); there is also a wonderful interpretation of the Wizard of Oz’s signature piece – “Over the Rainbow” – that is backed up by the most unlikely of instruments, a ukulele. And because it occurs in at least two of the movie’s turning points, I really liked the way they used the Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t it be nice?”.
Not one of which, it turns out, is on the CD of songs from the movie.
Apparently, I’m not alone in my disappointment with these omissions. Here’s one rail from the “Was this review helpful to you?” order desk of Amazon.ca:
“hmmm.....i dont know HOW they missed out on Iz's song....hes known and loved throughout Hawaii. i think its a bit of a slap in the face to be missing this one....he is, i think, the greatest Hawaiian singer of all time...and come on! His song is playing during their wedding! Also missing the Beach Boys, 311 and of course: BOB MARLEY! Its a sad soundtrack....i won't go out and buy it but im sure the songs on the cd are good, its just not worth the money because its not complete”
The “Iz” in the foregoing is a reference to the artist who sings the gorgeous Island take on “Over the Rainbow”. After a couple e-mail exchanges with a Baby Duck regular, I received a copy of a message he got from his son, who informed us that he is also a big fan of the artist (and it’s a good thing because I doubt I ever would have come up with, “It’s Israel ‘Izzy’ Kamakawiwo'ole... beautiful.” in any Google search that I might have triggered!) Iz died in 1997 – way too young at age 38, but it was hardly surprising when you read this note on a tribute page: “Throughout his career, Iz also had a weight problem that plagued his 6-foot-2-inch frame. At one time he tipped the scales at 757 pounds, and vowed in 1995 to shed 360 pounds. At one point during his career, he required a forklift to get on stage.”
The full tribute, with some somewhat frightening pictures, appears here.
And without too much trouble, you can also Google up an online link to Iz’s lovely take on “Over the Rainbow”. Worth the search; and it’s just too bad it – and Bob Marley’s “Pressure Drop”, and “Wouldn’t it be nice?” – got bumped by a couple of the 80s cheese dips they included on the movie’s “soundtrack”.
= = =
Here’s a bit of spin to forever re-define “spin”. If you’re in the Florida Congressional District that is home to disgraced Washington page-chaser Mark Foley, well take heart, the Republican Party feels your pain. In fact, they’re urging voters to reject the pedophile by voting for him. It actually makes its own perverted sense once you read why, and I could try to explain it. But why bother when Florida author Carl Hiaasen, who has written some hilarious novels of his own about corrupt South Florida politicians, does it so much better in a recent Miami Herald column? (online edition, October 22 / 06):
GOP's logic: To reject Foley, vote for him
By CARL HIAASEN
If you think you've got problems, imagine what it's like to be Joe Negron.
The good news: You finally get to run for Congress.
The bad news: Your name won't be on the ballot.
The really bad news: Mark Foley's name will be.
Negron is a Republican state legislator from Stuart. He was chosen to run for Foley's seat in Florida's 16th congressional district after Foley resigned suddenly last month.
The move came so late that the ballots couldn't be updated. And last week, in a blow to the GOP, a judge ruled that election officials cannot post notices at polls to explain that a vote for Mark Foley is actually a vote for Joe Negron.
Given the heated publicity surrounding the scandal, only a cave dweller wouldn't already be aware that Foley has quit the race and has been replaced by another candidate -- Negron.
But this is South Florida, where several thousand folks mistakenly voted for screamer Pat Buchanan back in 2000 and threw the presidential election into epic turmoil. This time around, it's the Democrats who stand to benefit from voter confusion, and the Republicans are frantic with worry. That's why they suggested helpful, prominently displayed notices bearing Negron's name.
When Leon County Circuit Judge Janet Ferris ruled against the on-site notices, Democratic contender Tim Mahoney cheered the decision, saying it preserved ''the sanctity of the ballot box.''
It also preserved the convenient invisibility of Joe Negron. Mahoney probably wouldn't be riven with dismay if some voters who saw Foley's name on the ballot assumed that the ex-congressman was still in the race.
The 16th district, which includes parts of Palm Beach and eight other counties, is heavily Republican and conservative. Normally that would bode well for Negron, but Foley's antics were sufficiently reprehensible to deflate some rank-and-file enthusiasm.
Salacious e-messages
Had Foley merely been caught taking bribes, like his crooked colleague from Ohio, Bob Ney, the challenge facing Negron wouldn't be so daunting. However, Foley's salacious electronic messages to teenage House pages set a new subterranean standard of sleaze that offended virtually every core constituency.
It's so bad that Florida's top Republicans are loath to do what the ballot plainly does – mention Foley by name. You can't blame Negron for wanting a printed explanation of his weird predicament tacked up at all the polling places.
State Republicans, prodded by Gov. Jeb Bush, intend to appeal Judge Ferris' ruling that barred the posting of such notices. They say it's unfair to their candidate -- an amusing argument from the same people who blocked Al Gore from getting a statewide recount in his presidential contest with the governor's brother six years ago.
The proper spin
If the court's decision in the Negron case is overturned, the GOP should pull out all the literary stops with their election-day 'educational' signage. Leave nothing to chance:
Notice to All Registered Voters of the 16th Congressional District:
This is to remind you that a vote for that degenerate mollusk, Mark Foley, is really a vote for that upstanding family guy, Joe Negron!
Joe sincerely wishes his name were on the ballot instead of Mark Foley's. It certainly would make your task easier, and ours, too. And even though it might be distasteful -- even nauseating – to cast a vote for the disgraced former congressman, you can be confident that your vote won't be wasted.
Each and every one will be counted for Joe Negron, who is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING like Mark Foley, we swear to God.
For example, Joe Negron has never gone skinny dipping with a priest. Or even with a rabbi, for that matter. He has never flirted with teenagers on the Internet, or engaged in raunchy online sex while voting on an important appropriations bill.
Please don't punish Joe Negron just because his name isn't on your ballot. It would have been there, if only Mark Foley had been caught earlier.
That would have happened had the House Republican leadership not looked the other way, but that also isn't Joe Negron's fault. He is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING like Dennis Hastert, we swear to God.
Look at it this way: A vote for Mark Foley is really a vote against Mark Foley and the morally bankrupt system that allowed him to run wild for all those years.
Send a strong message to Washington by electing Joe Negron to Congress. Vote for Mark Foley on Nov. 7.
See? With the proper spin, it's really not so confusing.”
US Republican politics: what goes around, comes around.
= = =
And finally…
I’ve been a big fan of Steve Earle’s music for a long time and so was delighted to discover that the ongoing Eagle Rock Entertainment’s “Live at Montreux”* series now includes a 66-minute long set of his 2005 Montreux appearance.
* (Everything here subtitled “Live at Montreux” is part of the series.
Now if you are someone whose Earle lust is sated only by the thundering rock of tunes like “Copperhead Road”, or the bluegrass-heavy full-band music that you’ll hear on the albums he’s released in company with the likes of the Del McCoury Band, you might want to give this a miss, because what you get here is Steve, his acoustic guitar (which he swaps for one song for a mandolin), and his harmonica. Even his rendition of “Copperhead Road” is acoustic here.
What you also get on this Eagle Rock release is his trademark voice, and his reduction of the alphabet to a couple vowels and about six or eight consonants that he rolls over top of each other at the end of each line and the beginning of the next. And of course you get his politics. Steve Earle is a passionate opponent of the Bush White House and the depths to which it has dragged the “America” that he (Earle) so obviously cares about. (In fact, at the beginning of this Montreux concert, he is introduced by a Charles Aznavour clone as “the Michael Moore of the music set”.)
One of my favourite songs of his, “Dixieland”, is written as though it comes from the mouth of a US Civil War-era soldier named Kilrain, in the Union Army’s 20th Maine regiment. Civil War-o-philes can be forgiven for thinking Kilrain was an actual figure from history. The 20th Maine, after all, really existed and performed heroically at Gettysburg. Kilrain, meanwhile, figures prominently in the Michael Shaara novel, “The Killer Angels”, about the Battle of Gettysburg, and not surprisingly in the movie, “Gettysburg”, which pretty well takes its storyboards from Shaara’s book. But although he personally is fictional, Kilrain is very much based on historically real people – the Irish who fought for the Union in that War. (And even when you’re new to reading about the Civil War, it won’t be long before you’ve encountered The Irish Brigade, fearless and sadly renowned for the unbelievably high casualties they sustained at three major Civil War battles – Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville and Gettysburg.)
More here.
On the surface, “Dixieland” is about Kilrain fighting for his commander, Colonel Joshua Chamberlain. But then you hit the line:
“I am Kilrain of the 20th Maine and I damn all gentlemen
Whose only worth is their father's name and the sweat of a workin' man.”
(Anyone know of another such American “gentleman” placed perhaps in a more recent historical context?) Whoops! Suddenly you realize you’re listening not to a lively celebration of a fighting Irishman, but rather to a protest song. As Earle succinctly puts it after briefly reviewing some of the causes of the Civil War, when you boil it all down, it was all about money and it was one more in the endless series of class wars that threw the poor into the front lines to fight for the interests of the rich.
And so the following line then becomes less a statement of pride than a fervent wish, or a prayer, or perhaps even a bitterly sarcastic, “Oh sure, in your dreams!”:
“Well we come from the farms and the city streets and a hundred foreign lands.
And we spilled our blood in the battle's heat;
Now we're all Americans.”
Until next time.
In news coverage of the aftermath of the great Hawaii earthquake of mid-October 2006, the Governor of the State spoke on CBC-TV Newsworld to explain why he called for a declaration of a state of emergency. In quick order, he mentioned:
- It was going to take “most of the morning” to get things back to normal;
- They lost internet connectivity and were only just beginning to get it back after a whole day without it;
- Some 3,000 tourists still had not yet been cleared to return to their hotels.
Asked about injuries resulting from the quake, he said that not all the reports were in yet but, so far, they had one broken arm reported and, when that was confirmed, it would be the worst of the injuries reported so far.
All I could wonder was what must the people of New Orleans be thinking when they hear what prompts the declaration of a state of emergency on the Big Island of Hawaii.
(I also thought that it sort of parallels the now-infamous day in this country in mid-January 1999 when then Toronto Mayor Mel Lastman felt compelled to call out the Canadian Army to help his city deal with several days’ accumulated snowfall of some 100 cm overall that effectively paralyzed everything for a day at one point in the run of bad weather.)
= = =
A soundtrack disappointment to share…
Recently we (we being the immediate family) watched a movie that it turned out I liked a lot more than I thought I was going to – “50 First Dates”, with Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore, that proved to be an occasionally touching little romantic comedy.
One of the reasons I liked it was its music and three songs in particular really stood out for me – a nice piece of Bob Marley reggae called “Pressure Drop” (Coincidentally the same song by a different band, The Specials, figures in another movie soundtrack I like a lot – the music that backs up “Gross Pointe Blank”); there is also a wonderful interpretation of the Wizard of Oz’s signature piece – “Over the Rainbow” – that is backed up by the most unlikely of instruments, a ukulele. And because it occurs in at least two of the movie’s turning points, I really liked the way they used the Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t it be nice?”.
Not one of which, it turns out, is on the CD of songs from the movie.
Apparently, I’m not alone in my disappointment with these omissions. Here’s one rail from the “Was this review helpful to you?” order desk of Amazon.ca:
“hmmm.....i dont know HOW they missed out on Iz's song....hes known and loved throughout Hawaii. i think its a bit of a slap in the face to be missing this one....he is, i think, the greatest Hawaiian singer of all time...and come on! His song is playing during their wedding! Also missing the Beach Boys, 311 and of course: BOB MARLEY! Its a sad soundtrack....i won't go out and buy it but im sure the songs on the cd are good, its just not worth the money because its not complete”
The “Iz” in the foregoing is a reference to the artist who sings the gorgeous Island take on “Over the Rainbow”. After a couple e-mail exchanges with a Baby Duck regular, I received a copy of a message he got from his son, who informed us that he is also a big fan of the artist (and it’s a good thing because I doubt I ever would have come up with, “It’s Israel ‘Izzy’ Kamakawiwo'ole... beautiful.” in any Google search that I might have triggered!) Iz died in 1997 – way too young at age 38, but it was hardly surprising when you read this note on a tribute page: “Throughout his career, Iz also had a weight problem that plagued his 6-foot-2-inch frame. At one time he tipped the scales at 757 pounds, and vowed in 1995 to shed 360 pounds. At one point during his career, he required a forklift to get on stage.”
The full tribute, with some somewhat frightening pictures, appears here.
And without too much trouble, you can also Google up an online link to Iz’s lovely take on “Over the Rainbow”. Worth the search; and it’s just too bad it – and Bob Marley’s “Pressure Drop”, and “Wouldn’t it be nice?” – got bumped by a couple of the 80s cheese dips they included on the movie’s “soundtrack”.
= = =
Here’s a bit of spin to forever re-define “spin”. If you’re in the Florida Congressional District that is home to disgraced Washington page-chaser Mark Foley, well take heart, the Republican Party feels your pain. In fact, they’re urging voters to reject the pedophile by voting for him. It actually makes its own perverted sense once you read why, and I could try to explain it. But why bother when Florida author Carl Hiaasen, who has written some hilarious novels of his own about corrupt South Florida politicians, does it so much better in a recent Miami Herald column? (online edition, October 22 / 06):
GOP's logic: To reject Foley, vote for him
By CARL HIAASEN
If you think you've got problems, imagine what it's like to be Joe Negron.
The good news: You finally get to run for Congress.
The bad news: Your name won't be on the ballot.
The really bad news: Mark Foley's name will be.
Negron is a Republican state legislator from Stuart. He was chosen to run for Foley's seat in Florida's 16th congressional district after Foley resigned suddenly last month.
The move came so late that the ballots couldn't be updated. And last week, in a blow to the GOP, a judge ruled that election officials cannot post notices at polls to explain that a vote for Mark Foley is actually a vote for Joe Negron.
Given the heated publicity surrounding the scandal, only a cave dweller wouldn't already be aware that Foley has quit the race and has been replaced by another candidate -- Negron.
But this is South Florida, where several thousand folks mistakenly voted for screamer Pat Buchanan back in 2000 and threw the presidential election into epic turmoil. This time around, it's the Democrats who stand to benefit from voter confusion, and the Republicans are frantic with worry. That's why they suggested helpful, prominently displayed notices bearing Negron's name.
When Leon County Circuit Judge Janet Ferris ruled against the on-site notices, Democratic contender Tim Mahoney cheered the decision, saying it preserved ''the sanctity of the ballot box.''
It also preserved the convenient invisibility of Joe Negron. Mahoney probably wouldn't be riven with dismay if some voters who saw Foley's name on the ballot assumed that the ex-congressman was still in the race.
The 16th district, which includes parts of Palm Beach and eight other counties, is heavily Republican and conservative. Normally that would bode well for Negron, but Foley's antics were sufficiently reprehensible to deflate some rank-and-file enthusiasm.
Salacious e-messages
Had Foley merely been caught taking bribes, like his crooked colleague from Ohio, Bob Ney, the challenge facing Negron wouldn't be so daunting. However, Foley's salacious electronic messages to teenage House pages set a new subterranean standard of sleaze that offended virtually every core constituency.
It's so bad that Florida's top Republicans are loath to do what the ballot plainly does – mention Foley by name. You can't blame Negron for wanting a printed explanation of his weird predicament tacked up at all the polling places.
State Republicans, prodded by Gov. Jeb Bush, intend to appeal Judge Ferris' ruling that barred the posting of such notices. They say it's unfair to their candidate -- an amusing argument from the same people who blocked Al Gore from getting a statewide recount in his presidential contest with the governor's brother six years ago.
The proper spin
If the court's decision in the Negron case is overturned, the GOP should pull out all the literary stops with their election-day 'educational' signage. Leave nothing to chance:
Notice to All Registered Voters of the 16th Congressional District:
This is to remind you that a vote for that degenerate mollusk, Mark Foley, is really a vote for that upstanding family guy, Joe Negron!
Joe sincerely wishes his name were on the ballot instead of Mark Foley's. It certainly would make your task easier, and ours, too. And even though it might be distasteful -- even nauseating – to cast a vote for the disgraced former congressman, you can be confident that your vote won't be wasted.
Each and every one will be counted for Joe Negron, who is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING like Mark Foley, we swear to God.
For example, Joe Negron has never gone skinny dipping with a priest. Or even with a rabbi, for that matter. He has never flirted with teenagers on the Internet, or engaged in raunchy online sex while voting on an important appropriations bill.
Please don't punish Joe Negron just because his name isn't on your ballot. It would have been there, if only Mark Foley had been caught earlier.
That would have happened had the House Republican leadership not looked the other way, but that also isn't Joe Negron's fault. He is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING like Dennis Hastert, we swear to God.
Look at it this way: A vote for Mark Foley is really a vote against Mark Foley and the morally bankrupt system that allowed him to run wild for all those years.
Send a strong message to Washington by electing Joe Negron to Congress. Vote for Mark Foley on Nov. 7.
See? With the proper spin, it's really not so confusing.”
US Republican politics: what goes around, comes around.
= = =
And finally…
I’ve been a big fan of Steve Earle’s music for a long time and so was delighted to discover that the ongoing Eagle Rock Entertainment’s “Live at Montreux”* series now includes a 66-minute long set of his 2005 Montreux appearance.
* (Everything here subtitled “Live at Montreux” is part of the series.
Now if you are someone whose Earle lust is sated only by the thundering rock of tunes like “Copperhead Road”, or the bluegrass-heavy full-band music that you’ll hear on the albums he’s released in company with the likes of the Del McCoury Band, you might want to give this a miss, because what you get here is Steve, his acoustic guitar (which he swaps for one song for a mandolin), and his harmonica. Even his rendition of “Copperhead Road” is acoustic here.
What you also get on this Eagle Rock release is his trademark voice, and his reduction of the alphabet to a couple vowels and about six or eight consonants that he rolls over top of each other at the end of each line and the beginning of the next. And of course you get his politics. Steve Earle is a passionate opponent of the Bush White House and the depths to which it has dragged the “America” that he (Earle) so obviously cares about. (In fact, at the beginning of this Montreux concert, he is introduced by a Charles Aznavour clone as “the Michael Moore of the music set”.)
One of my favourite songs of his, “Dixieland”, is written as though it comes from the mouth of a US Civil War-era soldier named Kilrain, in the Union Army’s 20th Maine regiment. Civil War-o-philes can be forgiven for thinking Kilrain was an actual figure from history. The 20th Maine, after all, really existed and performed heroically at Gettysburg. Kilrain, meanwhile, figures prominently in the Michael Shaara novel, “The Killer Angels”, about the Battle of Gettysburg, and not surprisingly in the movie, “Gettysburg”, which pretty well takes its storyboards from Shaara’s book. But although he personally is fictional, Kilrain is very much based on historically real people – the Irish who fought for the Union in that War. (And even when you’re new to reading about the Civil War, it won’t be long before you’ve encountered The Irish Brigade, fearless and sadly renowned for the unbelievably high casualties they sustained at three major Civil War battles – Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville and Gettysburg.)
More here.
On the surface, “Dixieland” is about Kilrain fighting for his commander, Colonel Joshua Chamberlain. But then you hit the line:
“I am Kilrain of the 20th Maine and I damn all gentlemen
Whose only worth is their father's name and the sweat of a workin' man.”
(Anyone know of another such American “gentleman” placed perhaps in a more recent historical context?) Whoops! Suddenly you realize you’re listening not to a lively celebration of a fighting Irishman, but rather to a protest song. As Earle succinctly puts it after briefly reviewing some of the causes of the Civil War, when you boil it all down, it was all about money and it was one more in the endless series of class wars that threw the poor into the front lines to fight for the interests of the rich.
And so the following line then becomes less a statement of pride than a fervent wish, or a prayer, or perhaps even a bitterly sarcastic, “Oh sure, in your dreams!”:
“Well we come from the farms and the city streets and a hundred foreign lands.
And we spilled our blood in the battle's heat;
Now we're all Americans.”
Until next time.
Thursday, October 05, 2006
If the world’s developed countries soon plunge into a major recession, it’ll because of crap like this:
A few days ago, we received a voicemail from the fearsomely named “Home Depot Consumer Credit Relations Department”. Please call us back on an urgent matter, said the message.
I already knew what it was about. A few weeks previous, a quartet of bills to pay had turned up on my desk in a pile that had been unexplored for some time. (I’d offer, “You have to see my desk”, by way of explanation but trust me, you really don’t want to do that.) Anyway, one of these was a Home Depot bill and because I’d let it languish, we had missed the “Minimum payment due by” date. (We had just sent off payment in full but, obviously, they called before they received it.)
Now I have (actually “had”; read on) a credit limit at Home Depot of $500. I only have a Home Depot card because one day when we were at the store wheeling some $350 worth of stuff through the cash they had a special promotion that took 10% off your purchase if you applied on the spot for a Home Depot credit card. $35 is nothing to sneeze at, so we went for it and were told our credit limit would be $500.
So, in response to the call, I phoned the credit relations folks and advised them of the mix-up on our part – even apologizing for same. Plus I gave them the news that payment – in full – was on its way, if it hadn’t already been received. No problem, said the cheery phone worker, who thanked me and went on his way to harass the next deadbeat on his list.
The very next day… The. Very. Next. Day. I opened a letter from Home Depot to read a 36-point bold headline: “Congratulations [My name here], your credit limit has been increased to $9,000!” (The exclamation point is, in fact, theirs.)
That’s less than 24 hours after they had conveyed to me their concern about my apparent inability to meet the previous month’s demand for a minimum monthly payment. (And obviously their letter had to have been written and mailed even before then.) A 17-fold increase in my credit limit!
Never one to resist the opportunity for a little snarking, I immediately sent a letter to the Credit Relations Department telling them that, in view of their obvious worry about my apparent inability to meet the minimum monthly payment on a credit line with a $500 ceiling, I simply could not bring myself to accept risking their even greater trauma were I to repeat the oversight on an account with a limit 17 times greater. I ended by requesting an immediate reduction of the increase in my limit to a total of $1,000.
There is a serious, more practical side to this. A friend not so long ago has his wallet stolen and, within hours, the thief had tried to use one of his stolen credit cards in an attempt to purchase a big-screen television at a local Best-Buy. (The would-be home theatre builder had also run out the door when told the card needed to be checked, and made his escape. But he bolted from the parking lot in a van painted in large letters with the name of the company he worked for; apparently it was the only vehicle he could get his hands on that was large enough to cart off a big-screen TV. He is now awaiting sentencing. He is also a complete idiot who deserves pride of place on an upcoming Jay Leno “Stupid Criminals” Headlines segment. But I digress.)
Even when you’re the victim of credit-card fraud, the hoops you have to jump through to undo it are enormously time-consuming. By fixing lower limits on your store cards, you can reduce their attraction to thieves who swiftly find out that risking arrest for no more than the ability to purchase a standard home computer just isn’t worth it.
But what really bugs me about Home Depot’s congratulatory message is not only the simple fact of the massive increase in credit from $500 to $9,000 (???? What in hell do they think we earn to suggest that running up an amount like that in just one store’s credit line is something we can do?), it is also the fact that it was entirely unsolicited. It’s not like I suddenly decided I wanted to build a new wing on the family mansion and requested a credit line that would comfortably pay for the building materials after a mere half-dozen or so maximum limit purchases. It’s not even like we recently wanted to buy on credit something whose price exceeded our credit ceiling.
And despite being once more in the happy position of having cleared off our account in full, I nonetheless have no doubt whatsoever that we are now red-flagged in their file with a code that reflects a missed minimum payment. Yet still they responded by gratuitously whacking our limit up by 17 times its original ceiling.
So if you’re chatting over the family dinner table one evening about why global credit card interest is so high (it could happen), it seems it’s my fault.
Sorry about that.
- - -
Apparently I am the first person on the face of the earth to have ordered a CanWood Erika 2 loft / bunk bed ladder and side rail kit without actually having purchased the bed itself.
And thereby, you will not be surprised to hear, hangs a tale.
Several weeks ago, I built a combination loft bed / computer desk in a downstairs space that eventually will become offspring’s bedroom if everything works out. The size of the room is such that the length of the elevated bed spans the width of the room, which enables its head and foot to rest on wall-anchored ledger boards. However, that span is also just shy of ten feet long, considerably longer than standard bed kits (with the possible exception of those intended for sale in markets frequented by Africa’s Masai tribe).
And while I could have built an angled ladder and added home-made side rails, since both would be accent touches I thought why not find some product already nicely finished? By professionals, trained in the art of slathering on four coats of satin urethane. And the Erika 2 bed, it turns out, is not only a beautifully finished product overall, its ladder and side rails are available for separate purchase for a laughably reasonable price less than the cost of the materials alone that I would have had to buy, never mind the dollar value of my time to cut, sand, assemble and finish them. So I went to Sears to see what one looked like in its assembled state, and was more than happy. By a most serendipitous coincidence, its height was almost exactly suited to my home-built bed frame. (If you’d appreciate a visual distraction at this moment, here is the Erika 2 in loft bed / computer desk configuration, as Sears sells it. The assembled ladder and side rail kit is visible in the photo as, well, a ladder and side rails.):
After waiting several weeks, I finally received word from Sears that the kit had arrived. It came in a tightly packed box roughly the same dimensions as a small diving board. When I opened it, however, I also noticed immediately that it included a blister pack stuffed with an astonishing array of bolts, nuts, and completely mysterious threaded little things whose collective purpose defied my best guess. No matter, I concluded, all this will be made clear by the… instructions?
After I emptied the box of its beautifully finished wood, hardware bag and packing fillers, all that remained was a single sheet of paper that featured a sketch of the finished ladder and side rails, with the caption, “For assembly instructions, refer to the appropriate page in the instructions for assembling the Erika 2 loft or bunk bed”.
In other words, Sears plainly has assumed that no one would ever order only the ladder and side rails without having ordered the entire bed kit, and quite possibly the matching dresser, toy box and various other elements of the Erika 2 line.
Anyway, to end your pain, I will tell you that you will be delighted, as I was, to hear that CanWood – a company based in Penticton, British Columbia – has come through. When I finally got to speak to a real person after unsuccessful e-efforts to contact them, she regretfully informed me that they had no electronic version of the required instructions, but she would be only to happy to photocopy and mail the relevant section of the entire package of Erika 2 instructions (which, it turns out, is a book).
That evening, I interrupted our family dinner conversation about why global credit card interest rates are so high and quietly muttered about what I said was the stupidity of selling a separate component without providing separate assembly instructions. I suggested one possible alternative might be to include the full instructions with the ladder and side rail kit. To me, it was obvious from their omitting the instructions in the ladder kit's packaging that almost everyone orders the entire bunk or loft bed package. But by putting the instructions in the ladder / side rail kit box, CanWood would ensure that buyers of the full Erika 2 package also have what they need – requiring them only to open the ladder / side rails kit box. And those of us (so far, just me, I guess) who purchase it alone would also have the assembly guide.
My daughter, who plainly has a tolerance level she sure didn’t get from me, then asked, “But what about people who only want to buy the bed kit and not the ladder kit? Maybe they’re replacing a damaged bed and are perfectly happy with the ladder and rails they already have.” So dinner promptly became a discussion about which was the likelier outcome.
I lost. You’ll find that verdict in the Complete Dad Instruction Manual under “So what else is new?”
- - -
And finally, here’s a sort of re-assuring note for all of us “For Better or For Worse” fans. It turns out that Grandpa Jim didn’t die in the recent strip where he was found comatose at the nursing home. Nope. He just had a severe stroke that, at this writing, has utterly incapacitated him. So don’t… um, worry. It looks like a funeral, if it is in the cards, won’t be dealt to us readers for some time to come. In the meantime, we can smack the breakfast table with side-splitting mirth and hilarity as the family comes together to grapple with the sudden imposition of an unconscious and unresponsive father / husband / grandfather into their lives. Relevant? Well sure. This, after all, is happening ever more often these days to many families in this age of longer lives and more and more older baby-boomers’ succumbing belatedly to the combined effects of a couple decades’ worth of narcotic and hallucinogenic experimentation that began in the 1960s, since amplified by expanding family budgets that allow for the regular ingestion of really fine single-malt scotch, tequila and fine wines. Some of us, I fear, are well down the road to a single-digit brain-cell inventory. I can almost just about (OK, maybe not) hardly wait until the strip goes for the real knee-slapper series when the whole family has an hilarious prolonged debate over whether to take Grandpa Jim off life support. For Better or For Worse. Putting the “Augh!” in laugh.
Until next time…
A few days ago, we received a voicemail from the fearsomely named “Home Depot Consumer Credit Relations Department”. Please call us back on an urgent matter, said the message.
I already knew what it was about. A few weeks previous, a quartet of bills to pay had turned up on my desk in a pile that had been unexplored for some time. (I’d offer, “You have to see my desk”, by way of explanation but trust me, you really don’t want to do that.) Anyway, one of these was a Home Depot bill and because I’d let it languish, we had missed the “Minimum payment due by” date. (We had just sent off payment in full but, obviously, they called before they received it.)
Now I have (actually “had”; read on) a credit limit at Home Depot of $500. I only have a Home Depot card because one day when we were at the store wheeling some $350 worth of stuff through the cash they had a special promotion that took 10% off your purchase if you applied on the spot for a Home Depot credit card. $35 is nothing to sneeze at, so we went for it and were told our credit limit would be $500.
So, in response to the call, I phoned the credit relations folks and advised them of the mix-up on our part – even apologizing for same. Plus I gave them the news that payment – in full – was on its way, if it hadn’t already been received. No problem, said the cheery phone worker, who thanked me and went on his way to harass the next deadbeat on his list.
The very next day… The. Very. Next. Day. I opened a letter from Home Depot to read a 36-point bold headline: “Congratulations [My name here], your credit limit has been increased to $9,000!” (The exclamation point is, in fact, theirs.)
That’s less than 24 hours after they had conveyed to me their concern about my apparent inability to meet the previous month’s demand for a minimum monthly payment. (And obviously their letter had to have been written and mailed even before then.) A 17-fold increase in my credit limit!
Never one to resist the opportunity for a little snarking, I immediately sent a letter to the Credit Relations Department telling them that, in view of their obvious worry about my apparent inability to meet the minimum monthly payment on a credit line with a $500 ceiling, I simply could not bring myself to accept risking their even greater trauma were I to repeat the oversight on an account with a limit 17 times greater. I ended by requesting an immediate reduction of the increase in my limit to a total of $1,000.
There is a serious, more practical side to this. A friend not so long ago has his wallet stolen and, within hours, the thief had tried to use one of his stolen credit cards in an attempt to purchase a big-screen television at a local Best-Buy. (The would-be home theatre builder had also run out the door when told the card needed to be checked, and made his escape. But he bolted from the parking lot in a van painted in large letters with the name of the company he worked for; apparently it was the only vehicle he could get his hands on that was large enough to cart off a big-screen TV. He is now awaiting sentencing. He is also a complete idiot who deserves pride of place on an upcoming Jay Leno “Stupid Criminals” Headlines segment. But I digress.)
Even when you’re the victim of credit-card fraud, the hoops you have to jump through to undo it are enormously time-consuming. By fixing lower limits on your store cards, you can reduce their attraction to thieves who swiftly find out that risking arrest for no more than the ability to purchase a standard home computer just isn’t worth it.
But what really bugs me about Home Depot’s congratulatory message is not only the simple fact of the massive increase in credit from $500 to $9,000 (???? What in hell do they think we earn to suggest that running up an amount like that in just one store’s credit line is something we can do?), it is also the fact that it was entirely unsolicited. It’s not like I suddenly decided I wanted to build a new wing on the family mansion and requested a credit line that would comfortably pay for the building materials after a mere half-dozen or so maximum limit purchases. It’s not even like we recently wanted to buy on credit something whose price exceeded our credit ceiling.
And despite being once more in the happy position of having cleared off our account in full, I nonetheless have no doubt whatsoever that we are now red-flagged in their file with a code that reflects a missed minimum payment. Yet still they responded by gratuitously whacking our limit up by 17 times its original ceiling.
So if you’re chatting over the family dinner table one evening about why global credit card interest is so high (it could happen), it seems it’s my fault.
Sorry about that.
- - -
Apparently I am the first person on the face of the earth to have ordered a CanWood Erika 2 loft / bunk bed ladder and side rail kit without actually having purchased the bed itself.
And thereby, you will not be surprised to hear, hangs a tale.
Several weeks ago, I built a combination loft bed / computer desk in a downstairs space that eventually will become offspring’s bedroom if everything works out. The size of the room is such that the length of the elevated bed spans the width of the room, which enables its head and foot to rest on wall-anchored ledger boards. However, that span is also just shy of ten feet long, considerably longer than standard bed kits (with the possible exception of those intended for sale in markets frequented by Africa’s Masai tribe).
And while I could have built an angled ladder and added home-made side rails, since both would be accent touches I thought why not find some product already nicely finished? By professionals, trained in the art of slathering on four coats of satin urethane. And the Erika 2 bed, it turns out, is not only a beautifully finished product overall, its ladder and side rails are available for separate purchase for a laughably reasonable price less than the cost of the materials alone that I would have had to buy, never mind the dollar value of my time to cut, sand, assemble and finish them. So I went to Sears to see what one looked like in its assembled state, and was more than happy. By a most serendipitous coincidence, its height was almost exactly suited to my home-built bed frame. (If you’d appreciate a visual distraction at this moment, here is the Erika 2 in loft bed / computer desk configuration, as Sears sells it. The assembled ladder and side rail kit is visible in the photo as, well, a ladder and side rails.):
After waiting several weeks, I finally received word from Sears that the kit had arrived. It came in a tightly packed box roughly the same dimensions as a small diving board. When I opened it, however, I also noticed immediately that it included a blister pack stuffed with an astonishing array of bolts, nuts, and completely mysterious threaded little things whose collective purpose defied my best guess. No matter, I concluded, all this will be made clear by the… instructions?
After I emptied the box of its beautifully finished wood, hardware bag and packing fillers, all that remained was a single sheet of paper that featured a sketch of the finished ladder and side rails, with the caption, “For assembly instructions, refer to the appropriate page in the instructions for assembling the Erika 2 loft or bunk bed”.
In other words, Sears plainly has assumed that no one would ever order only the ladder and side rails without having ordered the entire bed kit, and quite possibly the matching dresser, toy box and various other elements of the Erika 2 line.
Anyway, to end your pain, I will tell you that you will be delighted, as I was, to hear that CanWood – a company based in Penticton, British Columbia – has come through. When I finally got to speak to a real person after unsuccessful e-efforts to contact them, she regretfully informed me that they had no electronic version of the required instructions, but she would be only to happy to photocopy and mail the relevant section of the entire package of Erika 2 instructions (which, it turns out, is a book).
That evening, I interrupted our family dinner conversation about why global credit card interest rates are so high and quietly muttered about what I said was the stupidity of selling a separate component without providing separate assembly instructions. I suggested one possible alternative might be to include the full instructions with the ladder and side rail kit. To me, it was obvious from their omitting the instructions in the ladder kit's packaging that almost everyone orders the entire bunk or loft bed package. But by putting the instructions in the ladder / side rail kit box, CanWood would ensure that buyers of the full Erika 2 package also have what they need – requiring them only to open the ladder / side rails kit box. And those of us (so far, just me, I guess) who purchase it alone would also have the assembly guide.
My daughter, who plainly has a tolerance level she sure didn’t get from me, then asked, “But what about people who only want to buy the bed kit and not the ladder kit? Maybe they’re replacing a damaged bed and are perfectly happy with the ladder and rails they already have.” So dinner promptly became a discussion about which was the likelier outcome.
I lost. You’ll find that verdict in the Complete Dad Instruction Manual under “So what else is new?”
- - -
And finally, here’s a sort of re-assuring note for all of us “For Better or For Worse” fans. It turns out that Grandpa Jim didn’t die in the recent strip where he was found comatose at the nursing home. Nope. He just had a severe stroke that, at this writing, has utterly incapacitated him. So don’t… um, worry. It looks like a funeral, if it is in the cards, won’t be dealt to us readers for some time to come. In the meantime, we can smack the breakfast table with side-splitting mirth and hilarity as the family comes together to grapple with the sudden imposition of an unconscious and unresponsive father / husband / grandfather into their lives. Relevant? Well sure. This, after all, is happening ever more often these days to many families in this age of longer lives and more and more older baby-boomers’ succumbing belatedly to the combined effects of a couple decades’ worth of narcotic and hallucinogenic experimentation that began in the 1960s, since amplified by expanding family budgets that allow for the regular ingestion of really fine single-malt scotch, tequila and fine wines. Some of us, I fear, are well down the road to a single-digit brain-cell inventory. I can almost just about (OK, maybe not) hardly wait until the strip goes for the real knee-slapper series when the whole family has an hilarious prolonged debate over whether to take Grandpa Jim off life support. For Better or For Worse. Putting the “Augh!” in laugh.
Until next time…
Tuesday, September 26, 2006
Call this one, “So do you want to try ‘er out?” “No thank you!” or The Cimarron Kid… (No, not him – me.)
Recently yours truly and spouse went toilet shopping. There is, in Ottawa, a magnificently well-stocked hardware store that calls to mind the glory days before “hardware” became the domain of the impersonal big box giants like RONA and Home Depot. Preston Hardware, probably because it is physically located in the heart of Ottawa’s Little Italy community, which in turn is home to countless ceramic tradesmen and plumbing specialists who no doubt apprenticed to grandfathers who learned their trades in the Old Country, actually has a Bath Showroom. (Little Italy is also heavily populated by home winemakers and, on the day we were there, an enormous section of the warehouse was given over to literally tons of crated wine grapes in the process of being moved out into basements all over the Roman expatriates’ community.)
We had already done a preliminary online search and had seen a model called a Cimarron, made by a company called Kohler. And it turns out that the Cimarron, when we gave a Preston Hardware customer rep a general description of the features we were looking for, was the very first one he showed us.
It’s hard to listen to a toilet salesman talk up its features without snickering. We were even invited to “try it out” when he talked to us about its “comfort” features. (I toyed with the idea of dropping my pants in mid-showroom – given that one is usually in that configuration when using the fixture at home – but fortunately that “toying” lasted all of about half a second.)
There was a pregnant pause while he referred to the larger diameter water inflow pipe that ensured the… [pause]… “waste” is more effectively carried off. He also referred to the larger diameter of the seat that, he said (and this is a direct quote), “lets you get at all your bits more easily”.
Ohhhh-kay.
But you have to admit, doesn’t that look like something Enzo Ferrari had his engineers whip up on their lunch hours?
Something you don’t truly appreciate in toilet design until you see something like this in a showroom is that clearly, the outside of a one-piece toilet is going to be infinitely easier to keep clean than the standard two-piece toilet where the tank is mounted separately atop the rear of the bowl and creates a bunch of hard-to-scrub nooks and crannies. As much as a toilet can be, the Cimarron is a really sleek work of toilet design. All smooth curves with no hard angles or narrow gaps between one part and another.
Another feature (I never even knew a toilet could do this!) is that if the seat or lid, or both, accidentally slip as you’re lowering them (something that usually only happens at 3am when the last thing you want resonating through your home is a house-wide slam that inevitably is amplified by the bell-shaped bowl into an echoing boom), a – for want of a better word – brake takes hold and gently lowers the seat and lid to the porcelain, where they meet soundlessly.
So impressed were we that we bought and have already taken delivery of two of these commodious Cadillacs and, at this writing, they sit in our garage awaiting installation.
= = =
Memo to Lynn Johnson… maybe you could revisit the “Comic” part of "Comic strip".
Background: I have met and spent a full day in the company of “For Better or for Worse” comic strip author and artist Lynn Johnson. She is probably one of the nicest people in the business and all too happy to return to the world some measure of the rewards she has earned through her daily syndicated comic strip. (As a memento of that day, I have a large, board-mounted poster of one of her cartoons over which she has written, “To Mike: For Better or Perverse”, and signed it. It’s a long story.) So the following, therefore, is not meant to disparage Lynn the person.
That being said, is it really necessary to inject yet another hammering reminder into your comic strip that people die? As I write this, she has just introduced what appears to be the quiet passing of the father of the strip’s lead character, Elly Patterson. Long-time followers of “For Better or for Worse” will recall other deaths and reality bites that have found their way into her strip: the heroic death of the family’s first sheepdog, Farley; the revelation that Lawrence, a friend of Elly’s son, Michael, is gay; the death of at least a couple of peripheral old folks, including Grandma Marian, Elly’s mother; the sexual assault of one of Elly’s daughters at her workplace.
And none without plaudits. Lynn has been hailed for both the courage and compassion she showed when she dealt with any of these storylines. But c’mon, do you really want to be known as the comic strip artist who reduced a continent to tears when you killed off your strip’s beloved family dog? (Lynn would happily answer yes. Her strip is about life, she would say, and dealing with life means dealing with its end.) And so now (at this writing) we seem to be on the verge of suffering the death of Elly’s Dad, her kids’ Grandpa Jim, and the strip’s long-suffering source of countless glib observations on things that bug and amuse senior citizens. He’s even got his own link on the strip’s website that chronicles his service in the Royal Canadian Air Force, including black-and-white photos of the aircraft he worked on while serving during the war.
At times like this in the life of this strip, I think it’s a little too real. A comic strip is, for me, a momentary escape from the realities of life, not one more reinforcement that eventually we are all bound for the destination that Hollywood's Woody Guthrie bio-pic called simply “Glory”, and which William Shakespeare describes thus:
“We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots. Your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service – two dishes, but to one table. That's the end.”
(Hamlet, Act IV, Sc 3)
Lynn herself has let it be known that she intends to draw (no pun intended) the curtain on the strip one day not too far off, perhaps as early as 2007. I just hope she’s not pulling a Blackadder on us and is intending to eliminate of every last one of the For Better or for Worse characters between now and then.
= = =
And finally, memo to Jan Wong…
Jan Wong is a well known and quite-well-regarded-by-many writer who likely will forever be first remembered for a series of columns she wrote for the Globe and Mail under the title and theme, “Lunch with Jan Wong”. In it, she recounted interviews – and food orders – savoured with a wide variety of celebrities held over (no surprises for guessing) a lunch table. Recently, in the wake of the Dawson College shootings in Montreal, she wrote a column in which she (according to the same Globe and Mail) “suggested Quebec's francophone culture may have contributed to the Dawson College shootings” and that shooters like the Dawson College killer and Marc Lépine, the man pulling the trigger in the 1989 École Polytechnique massacre “were people of foreign background, not 'pure laine' Quebecers, and their anti-social behaviour stemmed from their disaffection with Quebec society and its reluctance to welcome outsiders”.
The column drew the rather unusual response of sternly critical letters from both the Premier of Quebec, Jean Charest, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
Ms Wong then took it one step further and wrote a second column, in which she claimed the political heavyweights’ missives had been “crass” and “opportunistic” attempts at securing votes in the province. Said the writer, "In Stephen Harper's case, judging from his letter, I don't think he actually read the article. I think that they want votes in Quebec and they see this as a cheap and easy way to get it. Dump on a journalist." She then went to a place I thought people only go after they have exhausted all reasonable argument – she bleated racism: "’In a way, I think it might prove what I was trying to get at. I mean I'm a Quebecer,’ Wong said.” "Of course when this happens, I'm not. I'm actually one of those people in the middle that I was talking about. So, all a sudden I'm Asian."
Now admittedly that is a fairly lengthy introduction to what, as it turns out, is a pretty pithy little observation about who’s really being crass, because the article about Ms Wong concludes with this Catch 22: “Wong refused to discuss the content of her piece. ‘I didn't want to talk about what I wrote because what I wrote is out there.’ ‘If people don't want to agree, that's fine. I welcome a debate.’” (Globe and Mail online, Fri, 22 Sep 2006)
At what point, I wondered, do “I didn't want to talk about what I wrote” and “I welcome a debate” intersect? Well, it’s like this – they don’t.
So... oh yes, my memo:
Have a nice lunch, Ms Wong. Preferably somewhere else.
Until next time…
Recently yours truly and spouse went toilet shopping. There is, in Ottawa, a magnificently well-stocked hardware store that calls to mind the glory days before “hardware” became the domain of the impersonal big box giants like RONA and Home Depot. Preston Hardware, probably because it is physically located in the heart of Ottawa’s Little Italy community, which in turn is home to countless ceramic tradesmen and plumbing specialists who no doubt apprenticed to grandfathers who learned their trades in the Old Country, actually has a Bath Showroom. (Little Italy is also heavily populated by home winemakers and, on the day we were there, an enormous section of the warehouse was given over to literally tons of crated wine grapes in the process of being moved out into basements all over the Roman expatriates’ community.)
We had already done a preliminary online search and had seen a model called a Cimarron, made by a company called Kohler. And it turns out that the Cimarron, when we gave a Preston Hardware customer rep a general description of the features we were looking for, was the very first one he showed us.
It’s hard to listen to a toilet salesman talk up its features without snickering. We were even invited to “try it out” when he talked to us about its “comfort” features. (I toyed with the idea of dropping my pants in mid-showroom – given that one is usually in that configuration when using the fixture at home – but fortunately that “toying” lasted all of about half a second.)
There was a pregnant pause while he referred to the larger diameter water inflow pipe that ensured the… [pause]… “waste” is more effectively carried off. He also referred to the larger diameter of the seat that, he said (and this is a direct quote), “lets you get at all your bits more easily”.
Ohhhh-kay.
But you have to admit, doesn’t that look like something Enzo Ferrari had his engineers whip up on their lunch hours?Something you don’t truly appreciate in toilet design until you see something like this in a showroom is that clearly, the outside of a one-piece toilet is going to be infinitely easier to keep clean than the standard two-piece toilet where the tank is mounted separately atop the rear of the bowl and creates a bunch of hard-to-scrub nooks and crannies. As much as a toilet can be, the Cimarron is a really sleek work of toilet design. All smooth curves with no hard angles or narrow gaps between one part and another.
Another feature (I never even knew a toilet could do this!) is that if the seat or lid, or both, accidentally slip as you’re lowering them (something that usually only happens at 3am when the last thing you want resonating through your home is a house-wide slam that inevitably is amplified by the bell-shaped bowl into an echoing boom), a – for want of a better word – brake takes hold and gently lowers the seat and lid to the porcelain, where they meet soundlessly.
So impressed were we that we bought and have already taken delivery of two of these commodious Cadillacs and, at this writing, they sit in our garage awaiting installation.
= = =
Memo to Lynn Johnson… maybe you could revisit the “Comic” part of "Comic strip".
Background: I have met and spent a full day in the company of “For Better or for Worse” comic strip author and artist Lynn Johnson. She is probably one of the nicest people in the business and all too happy to return to the world some measure of the rewards she has earned through her daily syndicated comic strip. (As a memento of that day, I have a large, board-mounted poster of one of her cartoons over which she has written, “To Mike: For Better or Perverse”, and signed it. It’s a long story.) So the following, therefore, is not meant to disparage Lynn the person.
That being said, is it really necessary to inject yet another hammering reminder into your comic strip that people die? As I write this, she has just introduced what appears to be the quiet passing of the father of the strip’s lead character, Elly Patterson. Long-time followers of “For Better or for Worse” will recall other deaths and reality bites that have found their way into her strip: the heroic death of the family’s first sheepdog, Farley; the revelation that Lawrence, a friend of Elly’s son, Michael, is gay; the death of at least a couple of peripheral old folks, including Grandma Marian, Elly’s mother; the sexual assault of one of Elly’s daughters at her workplace.
And none without plaudits. Lynn has been hailed for both the courage and compassion she showed when she dealt with any of these storylines. But c’mon, do you really want to be known as the comic strip artist who reduced a continent to tears when you killed off your strip’s beloved family dog? (Lynn would happily answer yes. Her strip is about life, she would say, and dealing with life means dealing with its end.) And so now (at this writing) we seem to be on the verge of suffering the death of Elly’s Dad, her kids’ Grandpa Jim, and the strip’s long-suffering source of countless glib observations on things that bug and amuse senior citizens. He’s even got his own link on the strip’s website that chronicles his service in the Royal Canadian Air Force, including black-and-white photos of the aircraft he worked on while serving during the war.
At times like this in the life of this strip, I think it’s a little too real. A comic strip is, for me, a momentary escape from the realities of life, not one more reinforcement that eventually we are all bound for the destination that Hollywood's Woody Guthrie bio-pic called simply “Glory”, and which William Shakespeare describes thus:
“We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots. Your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service – two dishes, but to one table. That's the end.”
(Hamlet, Act IV, Sc 3)
Lynn herself has let it be known that she intends to draw (no pun intended) the curtain on the strip one day not too far off, perhaps as early as 2007. I just hope she’s not pulling a Blackadder on us and is intending to eliminate of every last one of the For Better or for Worse characters between now and then.
= = =
And finally, memo to Jan Wong…
Jan Wong is a well known and quite-well-regarded-by-many writer who likely will forever be first remembered for a series of columns she wrote for the Globe and Mail under the title and theme, “Lunch with Jan Wong”. In it, she recounted interviews – and food orders – savoured with a wide variety of celebrities held over (no surprises for guessing) a lunch table. Recently, in the wake of the Dawson College shootings in Montreal, she wrote a column in which she (according to the same Globe and Mail) “suggested Quebec's francophone culture may have contributed to the Dawson College shootings” and that shooters like the Dawson College killer and Marc Lépine, the man pulling the trigger in the 1989 École Polytechnique massacre “were people of foreign background, not 'pure laine' Quebecers, and their anti-social behaviour stemmed from their disaffection with Quebec society and its reluctance to welcome outsiders”.
The column drew the rather unusual response of sternly critical letters from both the Premier of Quebec, Jean Charest, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
Ms Wong then took it one step further and wrote a second column, in which she claimed the political heavyweights’ missives had been “crass” and “opportunistic” attempts at securing votes in the province. Said the writer, "In Stephen Harper's case, judging from his letter, I don't think he actually read the article. I think that they want votes in Quebec and they see this as a cheap and easy way to get it. Dump on a journalist." She then went to a place I thought people only go after they have exhausted all reasonable argument – she bleated racism: "’In a way, I think it might prove what I was trying to get at. I mean I'm a Quebecer,’ Wong said.” "Of course when this happens, I'm not. I'm actually one of those people in the middle that I was talking about. So, all a sudden I'm Asian."
Now admittedly that is a fairly lengthy introduction to what, as it turns out, is a pretty pithy little observation about who’s really being crass, because the article about Ms Wong concludes with this Catch 22: “Wong refused to discuss the content of her piece. ‘I didn't want to talk about what I wrote because what I wrote is out there.’ ‘If people don't want to agree, that's fine. I welcome a debate.’” (Globe and Mail online, Fri, 22 Sep 2006)
At what point, I wondered, do “I didn't want to talk about what I wrote” and “I welcome a debate” intersect? Well, it’s like this – they don’t.
So... oh yes, my memo:
Have a nice lunch, Ms Wong. Preferably somewhere else.
Until next time…
Friday, September 22, 2006
Well heck! I had a brilliantly comical post all set about the recent explosion of anger in the Muslim community, and its attendant outbreaks of violence all around the world as the result of the Pope’s comments suggesting they were a tad violent… and how the irony of it all seemed to be lost on them.
It was great, but you’ll have to trust me on this because on his September 19 comedy “fake news” show, “The Daily Show”, Jon Stewart did this brilliantly comical piece about the recent explosion of anger in the Muslim community, and its…
So rather than incur a web-wide condemnation as a plagiarist (even though mine was in draft form before Stewart’s was aired), I have voluntarily canned the brilliantly comical post I had all set about the recent explosion of anger in the Muslim community, and its…
Because nothing flies faster through the Internet than worldwide condemnation.
I will give Stewart one up for a zing I hadn’t thought of. He replayed video of a key section of the Pope’s speech (at the University of Regensburg) that triggered the rage, then added his own observation to the effect that for slamming another religion, there’s nothing that beats doing it in German.
= = =
I’m afraid I’m wasting your tax dollars at the start of every working day. Here’s how:
I am part of a unit that appears every morning at a meeting called “QRT”. Depending on whom you ask, it stands for either Quick Response Team or Quick Response Time. Its goal is to review anything that has lit up in that day’s morning media coverage that might blow up in a Minister’s face during Question Period later in the day.
For me (and this is where your wasted tax dollars come in), there is a significant problem in that the entire rest of the QRT team speaks French, often from beginning to end of the meeting.
Now I have a not-bad grasp of French vocabulary, and I am able to get hold of what’s being said – or what’s been written – en français, so long as I can hear the words articulated, or read them on paper. But francophones speak exactly the same way as do anglophones. Sometimes in slang, sometimes in a very low voice, sometimes “mumbly”, and sometimes two or more people at the same time. None of those circumstances is conducive to hearing the vocabulary. So I find that after a few minutes, the meeting’s chat begins to wash past me as alien sound. (Kind of like this blog… right? But I digress.)
I live in quiet fear that I’ll be distracted from the lulling drone one day and asked a question, like a truant high schooler caught in class with homework incomplete. Recently, for example, one of the news stories under discussion was about Coast Guard workers whose shifts include time spent bouncing all over the ocean in those inflatable Zodiac boats. They’ve complained about repetitive strain-induced back injuries, which defaults it to one of our files – occupational health and safety. And even though the news clipping was published in English, it was being discussed in our other official language. And I can just imagine what would have happened had I suddenly been thrown a question. As everyone turned to look expectantly at me, I would have blinked a couple times, mentally swirled myself back into a swift recollection of the recent tonalities that entered my brain, greenlighted on “Zodiac” and replied, “Uhhhh… Gemini”.
Like I said, I’m wasting your tax dollars.
= = =
One of the nice things about actually being read is that occasionally a BD regular will drop a note in reply to something he or she read here. 1. In the wake of my previous entry’s note that left up in the air the name for a seven-book sequence (that is, the seven-book equivalent of the three-book “trilogy”), a friend wrote to advise it is called a “heptalogy”, and sure enough, Google’s “define” feature even cites Narnia in this reference from Answers.com, which sources Wikipedia (And you just know it’s official when it opens, “An heptalogy…”):
“Heptalogy: An heptalogy is a set of seven works of art that comprise a common storyline. Trilogies and Tetralogies are the most common, and the only heptalogies known to general audiences are the Harry Potter series of books and the Chronicles of Narnia. Another well-known heptalogy is Stephen King's Dark Tower. (This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors.)”
2. In the wake of the same entry’s recollection of a long-ago visit to Oxford’s Eagle and Child pub (“The Bird ‘n’ Baby”), another friend and BD regular recounted a spectacularly serendipitous experience he and his wife had in that same city once. It began with their waiting streetside to flag a cab to take them to Magdalen College to do some research into the writings and theology of CS Lewis.
As things transpired, the cabbie who stopped immediately recognized them as tourists and, when they offered the information about why they were heading to Magdalen, he promptly informed them he was not just a cabbie, he was currently serving as the President of Oxford’s CS Lewis Society. Their day became a full-blown Lewis / Tolkien and the Inklings tour of Oxford as they wound up visiting their respective homes, their graves and many Oxford sites they touched in some way (and yes, there was time for a pint at The Bird ‘n’ Baby), all the while getting a voluminous running commentary about Lewis the man and Lewis the theologian. At the end of it all, the cabbie allowed as how he had also enjoyed the day so much, he wasn’t going to charge his passengers. (But I have nothing if not classy friends. They thanked him with a generous payment anyway, and asked him, if he wouldn’t accept it for himself as a thank you for what he had just treated them to, that he extend a complimentary ride offer to the next couple fares he picked up while once again wearing his “cabbie” hat. Somewhere in Oxford now, there’s a probably-retired cabbie with a very good impression of Canadian tourists.)
Baby Duck… sharing more than just a cheap whine among friends.
= = =
And finally… I think this is very much a sign (a) of the times, and (b) of just how far I’ve moved behind the times, because it actually took me several minutes to connect the dots and relate the sign’s message to an actual need for its being there in the first place.
By way of a brief bit of background, our office complex, as I think I’ve mentioned before, is a four-tower conglomeration called Place du Portage (Phase I through IV). Sandwiched between two of them (III and IV) is a not-too-ugly, generously treed and picnic-tabled courtyard that almost everyone in our department knows as the “L’escale Courtyard”, because a tremendously busy little coffee / lunch counter (L’escale)’s exit sits right beside a doorway into the courtyard. Another side of the courtyard is separated by an imposing wooden fence from a children’s play area that belongs to a day-care centre located in the complex. (It is also home to one of the single most puzzling sculptures I’ve ever seen – a series of ordinary objects like a chair, a table and a couple of odd symbolic representations of something or other, each mounted on a steel pole that has them all about 15 feet off the ground.)
To the sign. It’s a new addition to the courtyard and, in both English and French, says exactly this:
(I have an especially brilliant colleague who took about 30 seconds to make these links to what took me a good five minutes before my own mental “Aha!” light went on.)
- Trees attract squirrels.
- Picnic tables attract lunchers.
- Lunchers also attract squirrels.
- Squirrels, especially in the Fall when their tiny psyches are focused as much as, if not more so, on storing as they are on eating, are frequently given nuts or bread that a well-intentioned luncher might have brought in to provide himself a bit of lunchtime entertainment (and the squirrels a bit of lunch). But instead of eating the freebies, the soon-to-be snowbound rodents will often seek out hiding places for them instead.
- A big wooden fence that separates people from lots of hiding places – a large sandbox, for example – is going to seem to squirrels like an ideal place to cache nuts. (The play area is also home to patches of grass along its edges in which squirrels can dig.)
So here’s my theory: an energetic – and allergic – child recently dug up one such buried squirrel treasure, and that was the trigger for the rather convoluted string of dots that connects kids to allergies to animals that are fed by other people in the courtyard. And hence this somewhat circuitous admonition's appearance in our courtyard.
And the fact that it -- and this explanation -- have now found their way into this forum’s rambling paragraphs sure makes it an effective message, wouldn’cha say?
A la prochaine.
It was great, but you’ll have to trust me on this because on his September 19 comedy “fake news” show, “The Daily Show”, Jon Stewart did this brilliantly comical piece about the recent explosion of anger in the Muslim community, and its…
So rather than incur a web-wide condemnation as a plagiarist (even though mine was in draft form before Stewart’s was aired), I have voluntarily canned the brilliantly comical post I had all set about the recent explosion of anger in the Muslim community, and its…
Because nothing flies faster through the Internet than worldwide condemnation.
I will give Stewart one up for a zing I hadn’t thought of. He replayed video of a key section of the Pope’s speech (at the University of Regensburg) that triggered the rage, then added his own observation to the effect that for slamming another religion, there’s nothing that beats doing it in German.
= = =
I’m afraid I’m wasting your tax dollars at the start of every working day. Here’s how:
I am part of a unit that appears every morning at a meeting called “QRT”. Depending on whom you ask, it stands for either Quick Response Team or Quick Response Time. Its goal is to review anything that has lit up in that day’s morning media coverage that might blow up in a Minister’s face during Question Period later in the day.
For me (and this is where your wasted tax dollars come in), there is a significant problem in that the entire rest of the QRT team speaks French, often from beginning to end of the meeting.
Now I have a not-bad grasp of French vocabulary, and I am able to get hold of what’s being said – or what’s been written – en français, so long as I can hear the words articulated, or read them on paper. But francophones speak exactly the same way as do anglophones. Sometimes in slang, sometimes in a very low voice, sometimes “mumbly”, and sometimes two or more people at the same time. None of those circumstances is conducive to hearing the vocabulary. So I find that after a few minutes, the meeting’s chat begins to wash past me as alien sound. (Kind of like this blog… right? But I digress.)
I live in quiet fear that I’ll be distracted from the lulling drone one day and asked a question, like a truant high schooler caught in class with homework incomplete. Recently, for example, one of the news stories under discussion was about Coast Guard workers whose shifts include time spent bouncing all over the ocean in those inflatable Zodiac boats. They’ve complained about repetitive strain-induced back injuries, which defaults it to one of our files – occupational health and safety. And even though the news clipping was published in English, it was being discussed in our other official language. And I can just imagine what would have happened had I suddenly been thrown a question. As everyone turned to look expectantly at me, I would have blinked a couple times, mentally swirled myself back into a swift recollection of the recent tonalities that entered my brain, greenlighted on “Zodiac” and replied, “Uhhhh… Gemini”.
Like I said, I’m wasting your tax dollars.
= = =
One of the nice things about actually being read is that occasionally a BD regular will drop a note in reply to something he or she read here. 1. In the wake of my previous entry’s note that left up in the air the name for a seven-book sequence (that is, the seven-book equivalent of the three-book “trilogy”), a friend wrote to advise it is called a “heptalogy”, and sure enough, Google’s “define” feature even cites Narnia in this reference from Answers.com, which sources Wikipedia (And you just know it’s official when it opens, “An heptalogy…”):
“Heptalogy: An heptalogy is a set of seven works of art that comprise a common storyline. Trilogies and Tetralogies are the most common, and the only heptalogies known to general audiences are the Harry Potter series of books and the Chronicles of Narnia. Another well-known heptalogy is Stephen King's Dark Tower. (This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors.)”
2. In the wake of the same entry’s recollection of a long-ago visit to Oxford’s Eagle and Child pub (“The Bird ‘n’ Baby”), another friend and BD regular recounted a spectacularly serendipitous experience he and his wife had in that same city once. It began with their waiting streetside to flag a cab to take them to Magdalen College to do some research into the writings and theology of CS Lewis.
As things transpired, the cabbie who stopped immediately recognized them as tourists and, when they offered the information about why they were heading to Magdalen, he promptly informed them he was not just a cabbie, he was currently serving as the President of Oxford’s CS Lewis Society. Their day became a full-blown Lewis / Tolkien and the Inklings tour of Oxford as they wound up visiting their respective homes, their graves and many Oxford sites they touched in some way (and yes, there was time for a pint at The Bird ‘n’ Baby), all the while getting a voluminous running commentary about Lewis the man and Lewis the theologian. At the end of it all, the cabbie allowed as how he had also enjoyed the day so much, he wasn’t going to charge his passengers. (But I have nothing if not classy friends. They thanked him with a generous payment anyway, and asked him, if he wouldn’t accept it for himself as a thank you for what he had just treated them to, that he extend a complimentary ride offer to the next couple fares he picked up while once again wearing his “cabbie” hat. Somewhere in Oxford now, there’s a probably-retired cabbie with a very good impression of Canadian tourists.)
Baby Duck… sharing more than just a cheap whine among friends.
= = =
And finally… I think this is very much a sign (a) of the times, and (b) of just how far I’ve moved behind the times, because it actually took me several minutes to connect the dots and relate the sign’s message to an actual need for its being there in the first place.
By way of a brief bit of background, our office complex, as I think I’ve mentioned before, is a four-tower conglomeration called Place du Portage (Phase I through IV). Sandwiched between two of them (III and IV) is a not-too-ugly, generously treed and picnic-tabled courtyard that almost everyone in our department knows as the “L’escale Courtyard”, because a tremendously busy little coffee / lunch counter (L’escale)’s exit sits right beside a doorway into the courtyard. Another side of the courtyard is separated by an imposing wooden fence from a children’s play area that belongs to a day-care centre located in the complex. (It is also home to one of the single most puzzling sculptures I’ve ever seen – a series of ordinary objects like a chair, a table and a couple of odd symbolic representations of something or other, each mounted on a steel pole that has them all about 15 feet off the ground.)
To the sign. It’s a new addition to the courtyard and, in both English and French, says exactly this:
(I have an especially brilliant colleague who took about 30 seconds to make these links to what took me a good five minutes before my own mental “Aha!” light went on.)
- Trees attract squirrels.
- Picnic tables attract lunchers.
- Lunchers also attract squirrels.
- Squirrels, especially in the Fall when their tiny psyches are focused as much as, if not more so, on storing as they are on eating, are frequently given nuts or bread that a well-intentioned luncher might have brought in to provide himself a bit of lunchtime entertainment (and the squirrels a bit of lunch). But instead of eating the freebies, the soon-to-be snowbound rodents will often seek out hiding places for them instead.
- A big wooden fence that separates people from lots of hiding places – a large sandbox, for example – is going to seem to squirrels like an ideal place to cache nuts. (The play area is also home to patches of grass along its edges in which squirrels can dig.)
So here’s my theory: an energetic – and allergic – child recently dug up one such buried squirrel treasure, and that was the trigger for the rather convoluted string of dots that connects kids to allergies to animals that are fed by other people in the courtyard. And hence this somewhat circuitous admonition's appearance in our courtyard.
And the fact that it -- and this explanation -- have now found their way into this forum’s rambling paragraphs sure makes it an effective message, wouldn’cha say?
A la prochaine.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)