Well, that was a short honeymoon.
On his first full day in Ottawa, Prime Minister-designate Stephen Harper was amply photographed as he walked his two children to school, and then proceeded to shake hands with them both at the gate to the school property. It was a fun moment, and the kids seemed to be enjoying it every bit as much as their newly even-more-limelighted Dad.
The next day, the Letters page of Canada’s national newspaper carried fully half a dozen letters ripping Mr Harper up one side and down the other for not having hugged his kids, or kissed them on the top of the head or something other than a handshake. He was reamed for being a cold, distant unfeeling fish.
What’s the four-letter version of, “Oh give me a BREAK!”
As a parent (admittedly not a celebrity parent, but a parent nonetheless), I have no trouble at all imagining that the breakfast table in the Harper house that morning played out a scene something not too different from this:
Dad: “Sorry kids, there’s no getting around it. There are going to be a bazillion cameras at the school this morning. But we’ll just do what we always do, OK?”
Kids in chorus: “Awwww Dad, do we have to do the huggy bit?! The other kids in my class will kill me if they see that on TV!!”
Dad: (speaking like any parent who already knows that PDAs – Public Displays of Affection – usually vanish from the list of OK Things To Do With Your Children at about precisely the age his kids have reached): “Wellllll… we have to do something. What about an air kiss? Like they do in Quebec?”
Kids: “Eeeeeeewwww!”
Dad: “OK, help me out here. I can’t just ignore you. They’ll think I’m a cold, distant, unfeeling fish.”
Kids: “What does a Prime Minister do?”
Dad: “Usually shakes hands.”
Kids: “Well that’s OK!”
So when they arrive at the gate, there’s that kid-grin fake solemnity as they over-formally shake hands with Prime Minister-designate Dad, and off they go into their school.
And Dad, in whose house there is probably more genuine affection for his kids than any of these self-righteous letter-writers have ever experienced, unfolds a ream of castigation in the next morning’s paper without so much as a whisper of contrary thought from someone who knows a little bit about what being a parent means.
And the media wonder in wide-eyed puzzlement why they are so often confronted with accusations of bias.
As one of the US Presidents during the Vietnam war, Lyndon B Johnson, once famously put it, “If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read: ‘President Can't Swim.’”
= = =
Adventures in music (1) (This could also be subtitled “Why I love the Internet – yet another in a continuing series”)
Sitting at home late, very late, one recent night, I was mindlessly clicking the channel-forward button on the remote, hoping for something other than the day’s basketball highlights or a studio audience gasping in awe and near-orgasmic pleasure as yet another apron-clad shill turned out a couple dozen perfectly symmetrical french-fry-cut potato pieces from his (synonym for “chop”)-o-matic.
Suddenly my screen filled with an outdoor concert stage on which a group of musicians were performing. What struck me right away was just how wildly out of synch the music was with their appearance. Because they were dressed like South Sahara Tuareg tribespeople, an image which for men marries a distinctive headdress with long, flowing robes, and for women appears to consist of the costumes Cecil B DeMille put on Yvonne (Sephora) deCarlo’s giddy young sisters in “The Ten Commandments” when they were all vying to be selected as wife-to-be to the strapping young Moses (Charlton Heston).
But it’s what they were playing that was absolutely mesmerizing. First of all, the only traditional instrument in sight was a drum; played by hand. The other musicians were playing electric guitars. But as I listened and watched, I caught several close-up glimpses of the way they were playing the guitars. Their hands worked the strings in what appeared to be a combination of rhythmic patting and a lightning-fast pluck-and-strum action. The result was a compelling, almost hypnotic sound, a vaguely jazz style repetition of a core pattern, over which each musician in turn would add his personal solo, while the vocalists sang a sort of call-and-answer lyric. (It’s tough to describe music when you have no formal education of the terms to describe what musicians do.)
After a few minutes, following a commercial break, the performance continued as the words, “Tinariwen” and “Oualahila ar Tesninam” appeared onscreen. I jotted them down and simply went on listening and watching. Then, despite the lateness, I lit up Google and keyed both sets of words into the search window. Unlike a human, Google doesn’t care if you don’t know which word, if either, is the name of the band and which is the name of the song they were performing at the time. Google simply flips through a bazillion online sites in a fraction of a second and suggests several places where you might possibly find your answer – several hundred thousand if it’s a common term.
(At this writing, the combination of “Tinariwen” and “Oualahila ar Tesninam” yields precisely 707 hits. By Google standards, that’s positively barren. But in this case, among its very first hits Google provided a site that linked to the band’s homepage (and if you’ve been wondering about the pace with which Internet technology is insinuating itself into the world, just pause and consider that a refugee rebel group of nomadic Tuareg musicians has its own website.)
Right off the bat, let me say I disagree with the leading reviewer’s characterization of their music as “relentlessly funky boogie”, a phrase that to me suggests to me something more like being sentenced to an eternity in an elevator with KC and the Sunshine Band playing, “That’s the Way – Uh huh, Uh huh – I like it” on its tinny Muzak speaker. Rather, on the same site, I found this brief paragraph that describes to a “t” what drew me to listen to the rest of their show:
“The instrumentation that the group uses is simple despite its modernity. Their link with traditional Touareg music is still clear. The instruments are of three types. First, strings, essentially guitars, acoustic or electric, but occasionally also other more traditional instruments like the tehardant or the n’goni which play the melodies. Secondly, the lead voices, which perform lyrics supplied by a composer. All the musicians join in with the choruses. Thirdly, the group use the percussion instruments commonly found in the desert. The most important is simply handclaps. Touareg music carries you away on a gently rhythmic journey, in step with the languorous pace of the camel.”
(I love the idea of a clapping hand as a “percussion instrument”. The Tuareg hand is indeed that – they clap in a flat-palmed manner with one hand exactly mirroring its opposite, with the result that their handclap is a very crisp and sharply defined beat, not at all like the mushier sound we tend to produce when applauding with one hand partially cupped.)
The very next morning, I dropped into a local CD shop in my neighbourhood that has a sizable international World Music section and slid a handwritten note across the counter to the clerk. After keying in the names (besides the band name, I had given him “Amassakoul”, the title of their most recent album) and in minutes, he produced the CD from his “Africa” shelf. (That too was an interesting process. His computer inventory showed it in stock, but he was at first unable to find it. He went a page deeper into his computer and produced a colour image of the album cover. He then quickly whirled through dozens of CDs and found it in a matter of seconds.)
So now my home office is occasionally echoing “the languorous pace of the camel” as Tuareg voices sing (in Tuareg – this is an English translation thoughtfully provided in the accompanying notes):
"I’m in a desert with a wood fire
I’m keeping the night company
With its shooting stars
Life
In the ruins
These traces that cry memories
I remember and I settle down
Deep in nostalgia
My head resting on a pillow of woes
Tonight I sleep in the ruins
I follow the traces of my past
It sometimes befalls me to live like this
My heart oppressed and tight
And I feel the thirst of my soul
Then I hear some music
Sounds, the wind
Some music which takes me far, far away
To the clear light of morning
Where, before my heart
The brilliance of the stars goes out."
It does wonderful things for the mind.
= = =
Adventures in music (2)
OK, sometimes – despite the considerable amount of music I listen to – it takes me a while before I will actually “hear” a song.
On a not-too-long-ago weekend, I was listening to what I modestly describe as one of the best gospel music albums ever compiled – the soundtrack album for the Robert Duvall tour de force movie, The Apostle.
And for some reason, when the track, “Far Side of the Jordan” came on, I listened closely to the lyrics for the first time in my life and quite honestly almost started crying by the time it was over.
The music itself is quite lovely, and the song – in this version by the Carter family – is immensely “sing-a-long-able”, which is probably what drew me into listening more closely.
I guess I’d always thought it was one of those “C’mon down to the river Jordan and getcherself baptized” messages but it’s not. “Crossing the river Jordan” is a Christian metaphor for dying, mirroring the passage of the lost tribes of Israel when they finally crossed into the Promised Land.
As one website explains, “As the Christian pilgrim is about to leave the wilderness of this world forever, he has to cross a dark stream. The Jordan of death rolls between this world and the Celestial Canaan. Before they obtained full possession of the promised land, the Israelites had to pass over Jordan; so every traveler to the Canaan above must cross over the river of death, before he is admitted into the courts of paradise, and obtains possession of the heavenly inheritance.”
The song, “Far Side of the Jordan” is about someone saying to someone she has obviously loved deeply and for a very long lifetime, “I’m dying, but we’ll meet again. In fact, I’ll wait for you.” The sadly elegant little song is not even the stuff of great poetry, but in its simple message is a powerful sermon of hope for the faithful.
Far Side of the Jordan
Terry Smith
“I believe my steps are growing wearier each day
Still I have a journey on my mind.
Hurts of this old world have ceased to make me want to stay
But my one regret is leaving you behind.
Now if it proves to be His will that I am first to go
Somehow I have a feeling it may be.
When it comes your time to travel likewise, don't prolong,
'Cause I will be the first one that you see.
(Chorus) And I'll be waiting on the far side bank of Jordan;
I'll be waiting, drawing pictures in the sand.
And when I see you coming I will rise up with a shout
And come running through the shallow waters reaching for your hand.
Now through this life we've laboured hard to earn our meagre share;
It's brought us trembling hands and tear-dimmed eyes.
But I'll just wait here on the shore and turn my face away
Until you come and we'll see Paradise.
And I'll be waiting on the far side bank of Jordan;
I'll be waiting, drawing pictures in the sand.
And when I see you coming I will rise up with a shout
And come running through the shallow waters reaching for your hand.”
The song is also part of the formidable gospel folio of Johnny Cash and the Carter family and at least one website notes that it is one of, if not the last song Johnny Cash and June Carter sang together in public, making its lyrics all the more poignant.
It works best, of course, with its accompanying music, and I commend to you any site that allows you to sample the Carter family’s version. Failing that, I commend to you wholeheartedly the entire soundtrack album (To be precise, “Music from and Inspired by the Movie”) . Just try to sit still while Lyle Lovett belts out, “I’m a soldier in the army of the Lord”. (My much more energetic Ms has already rolled that one into a collection of exercise-speed selections.)
= = =
On January 26, CBC-TV Newsworld carried a story about a Health Canada "recall". Apparently a Canadian hospital had just announced that a shipment of human tissue received from the US has been recalled because it was not properly tested for, and so might very well contain, a host of infectious diseases such as HIV, Hepatitis (B and C), syphilis and a couple of other can-I-please-buy-a-vowel viruses that are believed to cause cancer, and oh apparently it was possible that transplant recipients might have received some of the infected tissues but oh, by the way, there’s probably nothing to worry about.
Things that crossed my mind 1. How do you "recall" transplanted human tissue? (The opening sentence in the Health Canada notice is: “Health Canada is advising Canadians of a voluntary recall in the United States of tissue products used in implants and grafts that were imported into Canada.”)
We take you now to the stage of the Tayside Players, a Perth, Ontario amateur theatrical group who are still puzzled as to why the town’s surgeons were so strenuously advocating “The Merchant of Venice” as this year’s winter selection.
“No, no, no, Mr Wilberforce, we really do believe you’re the perfect choice for Antonio. And yes, Dr. Kutcherbitsov here has dreamed all his life about playing Shylock… OK, ready… aaaaa-and ACTION!”:
“D: Have mercy on Antonio, Shylock. Do not be so bitter.
S: I’ve promised to take my pound of flesh. If you do not let me have it, that will be a sign of weakness and no one will trust your laws any more. The greatness of Venice will soon be lost. Antonio is my enemy and I hate him.
B: Do all men kill the things they do not love?
A: It is useless trying to argue with Shylock. Don’t wait any longer. Pass judgement on me and give Shylock what he wants.
B: I’ll pay you six thousand ducats for the three thousand ducats that Antonio borrowed.
S: If you offered me six times what you have just offered, I would still take my pound of flesh. Give me my pound of flesh!”
A: OW!!!! I THOUGHT THE $@#%$-ING KNIFE WAS SUPPOSED TO BE MADE OF RUBBER!!!”
(Disclaimer: One of these lines does not actually appear in the Shakespearean dialogue.)
Things that crossed my mind 2. This was actually announced as probably nothing to worry about, (again from the Health Canada news release, “Although the risk is believed to be low…”) so let me just get myself on the record right now and say to everyone I know that if I ever hear or read any news story that begins "Health Canada has said they are worried about…" you can start looking for me somewhere near Goose Green in the Falklands!
(I suspect the next part of the story will be to try to get a satisfactory explanation from a wide range of Canadian Government and hospital authorities about why this only got into a public forum in Canada on January 26, 2006 when the US “voluntary recall” was issued over three months ago and the Health Canada advisory was first announced with a departmental news release on October 26, 2005! Cry havoc and let slip the lawyers! But I digress.)
= = =
And finally, if you’re accumulating arrows with which to stock your “Electoral reform?” quiver, consider this result from the federal election: Green Party supporters across Canada cast over 650,000 votes. The Party won no seats. In Atlantic Canada, Liberal Party supporters cast some 475,000 votes, a return that yielded 20 Liberal MPs from that part of the country. (Hat tip to Andrew Coyne's blog, where you'll find a much larger discussion of the whole election just past.)
Somehow, that just doesn’t seem right.
Monday, January 30, 2006
Wednesday, January 25, 2006
I’ve been hard pressed to come up with an original thought or two to summarize how I feel about Monday night’s election results. Not that I am absent original thoughts, but rather because I kept encountering other people in my morning-after-the-election reading who were saying – and usually much more efficiently and accurately – exactly what resonated with me.
For example, here’s a comment that was included in an e-mailed note from a friend:
“And last night went much better than I had dared to hope. Really, a best-case scenario: blue hands tied, reds remake themselves fast, orange gets a victory that isn't just a moral one, and hey! Olivia! Thank you, powers that be.”
(Translation for any non-Canadian-or-several-steps-removed-and-probably-gratefully-so-from-the-election-just-past readers: “blue” is Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, who did not win enough of a majority to take complete command of the government; “red” is Paul Martin’s Liberals, who ran what is, bar none, the single worst campaign in the history of Canadian politics and yet still managed to finish with an astonishing head count of 103 seats in the 308-seat House of Commons; “orange” is Jack Layton’s NDP Party, who also made significant gains last night to capture 29 seats; and “Olivia” is Mrs Jack Layton, Olivia Chow, who also ran and who also won. She is passionate about social issues and has built her political life around many such goals including housing the homeless and the elimination of child poverty. Just take a look at her “Past member of…” list here)
And this from a comment that appeared in an election-related blog post:
“If one looks over the totals, one almost gets the impression that the Canadian public stood the four leaders up against the wall and read them all the riot act. ‘Harper, we’ll let you try things out but we don’t trust you and if you get out of line, you’re toast. Martin, go stand in the corner and get your shit in order. Duceppe, don’t be getting any ideas about trying for independence because we’re not in the mood. And Layton, you still don’t have enough votes to be a power broker so shut the hell up and rein in your ego.’”
(Actually I confess I made a minor spell edit in that paragraph. In the original, the writer in fact had directed Mr Layton to “reign in your ego”. But given the tone of the rest of his comment, that would have been just too clever by half… even though it certainly would have made the Layton observation mesh more with my own – see below.)
And this from a brief blog comment by Maclean’s Magazine columnist Paul Wells that was written very late on election night itself:
“It is appropriate that Martin go; he has led the Liberal Party to its second-lowest share of the popular vote since Confederation. Harper continues to advance without triumphing. He does not get to rest just yet. Do not doubt that he has a plan, but he will need a plan and lots of luck. We made our democracy more functional tonight. The mixed result matches the uncertain moment, but there's progress. There's more to come.”
Any one of those remarks fits all or part of my own thinking, but somehow sending y’all a Baby Duck update that just says “Me too” ain’t enough either.
So… if you’re statistically inclined (or even if you’re not – as someone once said, 90% of Canadian high school graduates are competent in math; the other 18% still have some work to do), barring any recounts that overturn riding results, here’s how they crossed the finish line:
Conservative: 124
Liberal: 103
NDP: 29
Bloc Québécois: 51
Independent: 1
(And why I have sent a note to the International Brotherhood of Fortunetellers asking them to cancel my membership application? Well, I had predicted – using the same order above – 141, 93, 10, 62 and 2.)
A couple days after the fact, I still find myself mightily surprised by the strong final Liberal numbers. When one considers that the pre-election shadow of the Gomery Inquiry into Party corruption was actually lengthened by a campaign that was a textbook case of how not to run a campaign (off-message gaffes, being blindsided by a mid-campaign RCMP announcement that they were launching yet another investigation, releasing negative ads that were so over-the-top they have already become the stuff of legendary satirical knock-offs), their power-brokers must truly be shaking their heads at just how easily they likely could have won at least another minority had they been better organized.
I also find myself mightily surprised at the strong NDP showing. Before the vote, I was genuinely convinced that this country, having seen the power into which the Party parleyed its few seats won in the last election by agreeing to prop up the Liberals, would abandon the NDP in droves in the belief that they simply did not want to put that much power into their hands again. Well surprise! The next election date is now pretty well Jack Layton’s to determine. And contrary to the above commenter’s belief that Mr Layton lacks power-broking strength, I think that is precisely what he has managed to achieve. Again. “Reigning in his ego”, as it were.
And I was surprised by the swiftness of Paul Martin’s announcement that he will not lead the Liberal Party into the next election. I think everyone knew that just such an announcement would only be a matter of time following last night’s result, especially given how far the Liberal Party has managed to tank under his watch, but I don’t think anyone expected him to work it into his election night thanks to his campaign workers and his national roster of candidates. I suspect he doesn’t want to let the grass grow under his feet and can already see the sharpened knives poking out from the many darkened closets in the nether corners of his bedroom. No doubt he’s soon to be off to the drydocks in Liberia to paint Canadian flags on his Canada Steamship Lines lakers while he spends his evenings writing his memoirs and blaming Jean Chrétien for all his woes.
But all was not a total surprise. I had hopefully predicted that Pierre Pettigrew, Tony Valeri and Anne McClellan would all succumb. (But to offset that, I was also convinced that parachute intellectual Michael Ignatieff and pair o’ somethings Belinda Stronach would lose their respective ridings. And yet somehow both managed to convince enough of their local voters that sending them to Ottawa is a good thing.)
There are two predominate schools of thought about a minority government. One teaches the belief that it is a good thing, because its programs are much more likely to reflect the will of a larger population – their own voters, plus those loyal to the Party propping them up. The other teaches that it is a bad thing because “innovation” and “bold initiative” simply vanish from the language of the government’s agenda. While generally perceived as positives, innovative policies are also lightning rods for opposition and media criticism. Expect to see a wave of bland program launches backed up by news releases containing countless repetitions of “Canadians from coast to coast to coast have told us that they want…”
From the perspective of a public servant, however, in a minority government situation the “bad” is what usually dominates. Entire departments slide into developing programs and positions so unfailingly “motherhood” that their enactment, however much fanfare surrounds their announcement, usually occasions all the ripple of a teaspoon stroke in Lake Superior. Because no one, after all, wants to be the metal pole sitting on the roof while a thunderstorm builds up around you.
That means all of your department’s announcements are as safe as the “It’s a Small World After All” ride at Disney World and boring as hell. And if your job just happens to be media related, it means a struggle to find anything meaningful about your department in any medium. The media, you see, for some peculiar reason don’t see “boring as hell” as a sufficient grabber to lead any government-related coverage they might have been planning.
= = =
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sewer.
I have just seen where everything goes when you pull the commode’s flush handle. And that, surprisingly, is not as disgusting as it might at first sound.
Several years ago, we had a minor back up from a floor drain in our basement that indicated a problem in the main sewer line. In a matter of hours, a rooter company had been and gone and confirmed that the sewer line between our house and the street had been almost fully “intruded” by fibrous tree roots.
Recently, we experienced a mild olfactory caution from our floor drain to suggest that everything perhaps was not going as far as it should. This time, when we called a rooter company, the plumber who showed up brought in a massive spool of very stiff wire about the diameter of a thick pencil. (That’s a relative term, I know. If you’re a dust mite, a human hair is “about the diameter of a thick pencil”. And if you’re Polyphemus, the Cyclops into whose eye Odysseus and several of his crew rammed a sharpened tree trunk, then a log that it takes four men to lift is potentially “about the diameter of a thick pencil”. So let’s say the cable was about a half inch thick, 1.3 cm if you’re metric-minded. But I digress.)
But what was really interesting was that the business end of the cable was a tiny video camera ringed by a tremendously bright light. When he was done, he invited me to view the results. With a gulp, I thought, “Oh… OK.”
What unfolded onscreen was a film that recalls one of those National Geographic health films where you travel, via a catheter camera, through the esophagus into the stomach. The “esophagus”, in this case, was our sewage drain and I discovered that when such a pipeline is constructed, it is one diameter while still in the house; changes to a larger diameter after it exists the foundation and then becomes a veritable subway tunnel after it connects to the main sewer under the street on which we live.
I also learn that builders are occasionally complete idiots.
As we “travelled” along the line, he pointed to a place where a clean-out pipe could clearly be seen branching straight upwards. This, he said, is where he should have been able to start his camera line. Then he pointed roughly to where on the basement floor that clean-out opening should be. The surface of the floor was solid, unbroken concrete. So someone, in a display of utter stupidity in the long ago act of pouring my basement floor, had simply poured the cement right over top of the cleanout line and its cap. Future archaeologists no doubt will have a field day trying to guess the purpose of the “branchline to nowhere”.
Fortunately, in a clean dry crawlspace about 40 feet deeper into our house was a second clean-out entry and it was there he had started his photo run.
Fibrous tree roots are evil things. They find seams in the pipe where the very minutest of entry points exist and work their way into the line. Because the purpose of a tree root, you see, is to itself serve as an entry point for nutrients into the tree.
Nuitrients and water.
So to a tree root, a sewer line is pretty much a Thanksgiving buffet. And the tree spares no effort in probing sewer pipes with the thinnest of its fibrous roots. When it finds an opening, it’s like someone clanged the dinner triangle as the tree beams a “COME AND GET IT!!!” signal to any adjacent roots. And before you know it, you’ve got a thick cluster of hungry and thirsty hair-like tree roots happily bellying up to the table inside your domestic sewer line.
We called the diagnostic rooter first because two of our three front yard trees are officially city trees and the video, as it turns out, does indeed show the intrusion to be far enough along the line that it’s almost certainly a city tree root that has found its way in. And when that happens, not only will the city pay to have your line flushed clean with an unbelievably high pressure water blast, they will even re-imburse the cost of the “Fantastic Voyage” video you had to commission to diagnose the problem. But you have to have paid first for the diagnosis.
(Perversely, if you wait until your basement floods and then call the city, if a city tree is indeed the source of the blockage, they’ll pay the usually enormous repair bill. But if you’re commissioning a pre-disaster preventive diagnosis, paying for it is entirely your responsibility until it is confirmed to be a city tree root. Still with me here?)
Recently, we had two neighbours each experience a major basement flood on which the city had to pay repairs, to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars each. I expect they will be an easy sell when it comes to convincing them of the merit of footing the bill for this preventive rooting, before they have to foot the bill for a yet another full basement renovation and repair in yet another home on our little section of the street.
= = =
And finally, with the looming departure of Paul Martin from the Liberal leader’s chair, no doubt his thoughts are more and more given to pondering how he’ll be remembered.
Well, here’s one legacy I recently read about that quite struck me – and certainly there are worse ways to be remembered.
Samuel Pepys is much better known as a diarist, but in circles that deal with British naval history, he is also held by some to be the founder of the modern Royal Navy. And in a book entitled “A Brief History of British Sea Power” (which despite the title’s seeming military focus is also quite thorough in tracking British mastery of the world’s oceans in pursuit of spice and exploration), Pepys’ contribution in the face of a corrupt and often piratical leadership for whom the navy was merely a tool for enhancing personal wealth is summed up:
“Pepys has been called the saviour of the navy. Perhaps that is going a little too far. The navy was suffering rather acutely from the malaise of the times, and no doubt it would have survived and recovered when the standard of honesty in the rest of English society took a turn for the better. But he very much speeded the recovery. With this strange and wonderful little man at the head of affairs, incredibly energetic, humorous, the best of company, yet implacably strict and a source of terror when he was much displeased, the navy had a core of uncomfortable conscience, and was freed of most of the dead weight of thieves and rogues ashore which had crippled it so long… This was the greatest of all his services: in a selfish and cynical age when men did as little as they could, he worked like a beaver for the navy and his master.”
What a great way to say, and what better epitaph could there be than, “He was damned good at what he did.”!
Eat your heart out, Mr Martin.
For example, here’s a comment that was included in an e-mailed note from a friend:
“And last night went much better than I had dared to hope. Really, a best-case scenario: blue hands tied, reds remake themselves fast, orange gets a victory that isn't just a moral one, and hey! Olivia! Thank you, powers that be.”
(Translation for any non-Canadian-or-several-steps-removed-and-probably-gratefully-so-from-the-election-just-past readers: “blue” is Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, who did not win enough of a majority to take complete command of the government; “red” is Paul Martin’s Liberals, who ran what is, bar none, the single worst campaign in the history of Canadian politics and yet still managed to finish with an astonishing head count of 103 seats in the 308-seat House of Commons; “orange” is Jack Layton’s NDP Party, who also made significant gains last night to capture 29 seats; and “Olivia” is Mrs Jack Layton, Olivia Chow, who also ran and who also won. She is passionate about social issues and has built her political life around many such goals including housing the homeless and the elimination of child poverty. Just take a look at her “Past member of…” list here)
And this from a comment that appeared in an election-related blog post:
“If one looks over the totals, one almost gets the impression that the Canadian public stood the four leaders up against the wall and read them all the riot act. ‘Harper, we’ll let you try things out but we don’t trust you and if you get out of line, you’re toast. Martin, go stand in the corner and get your shit in order. Duceppe, don’t be getting any ideas about trying for independence because we’re not in the mood. And Layton, you still don’t have enough votes to be a power broker so shut the hell up and rein in your ego.’”
(Actually I confess I made a minor spell edit in that paragraph. In the original, the writer in fact had directed Mr Layton to “reign in your ego”. But given the tone of the rest of his comment, that would have been just too clever by half… even though it certainly would have made the Layton observation mesh more with my own – see below.)
And this from a brief blog comment by Maclean’s Magazine columnist Paul Wells that was written very late on election night itself:
“It is appropriate that Martin go; he has led the Liberal Party to its second-lowest share of the popular vote since Confederation. Harper continues to advance without triumphing. He does not get to rest just yet. Do not doubt that he has a plan, but he will need a plan and lots of luck. We made our democracy more functional tonight. The mixed result matches the uncertain moment, but there's progress. There's more to come.”
Any one of those remarks fits all or part of my own thinking, but somehow sending y’all a Baby Duck update that just says “Me too” ain’t enough either.
So… if you’re statistically inclined (or even if you’re not – as someone once said, 90% of Canadian high school graduates are competent in math; the other 18% still have some work to do), barring any recounts that overturn riding results, here’s how they crossed the finish line:
Conservative: 124
Liberal: 103
NDP: 29
Bloc Québécois: 51
Independent: 1
(And why I have sent a note to the International Brotherhood of Fortunetellers asking them to cancel my membership application? Well, I had predicted – using the same order above – 141, 93, 10, 62 and 2.)
A couple days after the fact, I still find myself mightily surprised by the strong final Liberal numbers. When one considers that the pre-election shadow of the Gomery Inquiry into Party corruption was actually lengthened by a campaign that was a textbook case of how not to run a campaign (off-message gaffes, being blindsided by a mid-campaign RCMP announcement that they were launching yet another investigation, releasing negative ads that were so over-the-top they have already become the stuff of legendary satirical knock-offs), their power-brokers must truly be shaking their heads at just how easily they likely could have won at least another minority had they been better organized.
I also find myself mightily surprised at the strong NDP showing. Before the vote, I was genuinely convinced that this country, having seen the power into which the Party parleyed its few seats won in the last election by agreeing to prop up the Liberals, would abandon the NDP in droves in the belief that they simply did not want to put that much power into their hands again. Well surprise! The next election date is now pretty well Jack Layton’s to determine. And contrary to the above commenter’s belief that Mr Layton lacks power-broking strength, I think that is precisely what he has managed to achieve. Again. “Reigning in his ego”, as it were.
And I was surprised by the swiftness of Paul Martin’s announcement that he will not lead the Liberal Party into the next election. I think everyone knew that just such an announcement would only be a matter of time following last night’s result, especially given how far the Liberal Party has managed to tank under his watch, but I don’t think anyone expected him to work it into his election night thanks to his campaign workers and his national roster of candidates. I suspect he doesn’t want to let the grass grow under his feet and can already see the sharpened knives poking out from the many darkened closets in the nether corners of his bedroom. No doubt he’s soon to be off to the drydocks in Liberia to paint Canadian flags on his Canada Steamship Lines lakers while he spends his evenings writing his memoirs and blaming Jean Chrétien for all his woes.
But all was not a total surprise. I had hopefully predicted that Pierre Pettigrew, Tony Valeri and Anne McClellan would all succumb. (But to offset that, I was also convinced that parachute intellectual Michael Ignatieff and pair o’ somethings Belinda Stronach would lose their respective ridings. And yet somehow both managed to convince enough of their local voters that sending them to Ottawa is a good thing.)
There are two predominate schools of thought about a minority government. One teaches the belief that it is a good thing, because its programs are much more likely to reflect the will of a larger population – their own voters, plus those loyal to the Party propping them up. The other teaches that it is a bad thing because “innovation” and “bold initiative” simply vanish from the language of the government’s agenda. While generally perceived as positives, innovative policies are also lightning rods for opposition and media criticism. Expect to see a wave of bland program launches backed up by news releases containing countless repetitions of “Canadians from coast to coast to coast have told us that they want…”
From the perspective of a public servant, however, in a minority government situation the “bad” is what usually dominates. Entire departments slide into developing programs and positions so unfailingly “motherhood” that their enactment, however much fanfare surrounds their announcement, usually occasions all the ripple of a teaspoon stroke in Lake Superior. Because no one, after all, wants to be the metal pole sitting on the roof while a thunderstorm builds up around you.
That means all of your department’s announcements are as safe as the “It’s a Small World After All” ride at Disney World and boring as hell. And if your job just happens to be media related, it means a struggle to find anything meaningful about your department in any medium. The media, you see, for some peculiar reason don’t see “boring as hell” as a sufficient grabber to lead any government-related coverage they might have been planning.
= = =
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sewer.
I have just seen where everything goes when you pull the commode’s flush handle. And that, surprisingly, is not as disgusting as it might at first sound.
Several years ago, we had a minor back up from a floor drain in our basement that indicated a problem in the main sewer line. In a matter of hours, a rooter company had been and gone and confirmed that the sewer line between our house and the street had been almost fully “intruded” by fibrous tree roots.
Recently, we experienced a mild olfactory caution from our floor drain to suggest that everything perhaps was not going as far as it should. This time, when we called a rooter company, the plumber who showed up brought in a massive spool of very stiff wire about the diameter of a thick pencil. (That’s a relative term, I know. If you’re a dust mite, a human hair is “about the diameter of a thick pencil”. And if you’re Polyphemus, the Cyclops into whose eye Odysseus and several of his crew rammed a sharpened tree trunk, then a log that it takes four men to lift is potentially “about the diameter of a thick pencil”. So let’s say the cable was about a half inch thick, 1.3 cm if you’re metric-minded. But I digress.)
But what was really interesting was that the business end of the cable was a tiny video camera ringed by a tremendously bright light. When he was done, he invited me to view the results. With a gulp, I thought, “Oh… OK.”
What unfolded onscreen was a film that recalls one of those National Geographic health films where you travel, via a catheter camera, through the esophagus into the stomach. The “esophagus”, in this case, was our sewage drain and I discovered that when such a pipeline is constructed, it is one diameter while still in the house; changes to a larger diameter after it exists the foundation and then becomes a veritable subway tunnel after it connects to the main sewer under the street on which we live.
I also learn that builders are occasionally complete idiots.
As we “travelled” along the line, he pointed to a place where a clean-out pipe could clearly be seen branching straight upwards. This, he said, is where he should have been able to start his camera line. Then he pointed roughly to where on the basement floor that clean-out opening should be. The surface of the floor was solid, unbroken concrete. So someone, in a display of utter stupidity in the long ago act of pouring my basement floor, had simply poured the cement right over top of the cleanout line and its cap. Future archaeologists no doubt will have a field day trying to guess the purpose of the “branchline to nowhere”.
Fortunately, in a clean dry crawlspace about 40 feet deeper into our house was a second clean-out entry and it was there he had started his photo run.
Fibrous tree roots are evil things. They find seams in the pipe where the very minutest of entry points exist and work their way into the line. Because the purpose of a tree root, you see, is to itself serve as an entry point for nutrients into the tree.
Nuitrients and water.
So to a tree root, a sewer line is pretty much a Thanksgiving buffet. And the tree spares no effort in probing sewer pipes with the thinnest of its fibrous roots. When it finds an opening, it’s like someone clanged the dinner triangle as the tree beams a “COME AND GET IT!!!” signal to any adjacent roots. And before you know it, you’ve got a thick cluster of hungry and thirsty hair-like tree roots happily bellying up to the table inside your domestic sewer line.
We called the diagnostic rooter first because two of our three front yard trees are officially city trees and the video, as it turns out, does indeed show the intrusion to be far enough along the line that it’s almost certainly a city tree root that has found its way in. And when that happens, not only will the city pay to have your line flushed clean with an unbelievably high pressure water blast, they will even re-imburse the cost of the “Fantastic Voyage” video you had to commission to diagnose the problem. But you have to have paid first for the diagnosis.
(Perversely, if you wait until your basement floods and then call the city, if a city tree is indeed the source of the blockage, they’ll pay the usually enormous repair bill. But if you’re commissioning a pre-disaster preventive diagnosis, paying for it is entirely your responsibility until it is confirmed to be a city tree root. Still with me here?)
Recently, we had two neighbours each experience a major basement flood on which the city had to pay repairs, to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars each. I expect they will be an easy sell when it comes to convincing them of the merit of footing the bill for this preventive rooting, before they have to foot the bill for a yet another full basement renovation and repair in yet another home on our little section of the street.
= = =
And finally, with the looming departure of Paul Martin from the Liberal leader’s chair, no doubt his thoughts are more and more given to pondering how he’ll be remembered.
Well, here’s one legacy I recently read about that quite struck me – and certainly there are worse ways to be remembered.
Samuel Pepys is much better known as a diarist, but in circles that deal with British naval history, he is also held by some to be the founder of the modern Royal Navy. And in a book entitled “A Brief History of British Sea Power” (which despite the title’s seeming military focus is also quite thorough in tracking British mastery of the world’s oceans in pursuit of spice and exploration), Pepys’ contribution in the face of a corrupt and often piratical leadership for whom the navy was merely a tool for enhancing personal wealth is summed up:
“Pepys has been called the saviour of the navy. Perhaps that is going a little too far. The navy was suffering rather acutely from the malaise of the times, and no doubt it would have survived and recovered when the standard of honesty in the rest of English society took a turn for the better. But he very much speeded the recovery. With this strange and wonderful little man at the head of affairs, incredibly energetic, humorous, the best of company, yet implacably strict and a source of terror when he was much displeased, the navy had a core of uncomfortable conscience, and was freed of most of the dead weight of thieves and rogues ashore which had crippled it so long… This was the greatest of all his services: in a selfish and cynical age when men did as little as they could, he worked like a beaver for the navy and his master.”
What a great way to say, and what better epitaph could there be than, “He was damned good at what he did.”!
Eat your heart out, Mr Martin.
Tuesday, January 10, 2006
Happy New Year, everybody! So you realize this online bit of ego-sharing is almost two years old? That's damned near teen-aged in blog years!
And today I got a Happy New Year greeting from my employer!
(Pay no attention to that small microphone-ish-looking object nesting among your pencils and pens.) Early this afternoon, I returned from lunch to find this printed-out note perched between the “QWERTY” and the numeric rows of my keyboard: “Dear client: The following CIRs have been installed on your workstation while you were out: ‘NXXXXX – MCPI – Missing Critical Patch Installer’; ‘5XXXX – MS Office XP Updates’; ‘5XXXXX – Quick View Plus 8.0 French DF (If applicable / si applicable)’; 5XXXXX – MS Office Project 2003 Pro Addin’; ‘5XXXX (If applicable / si applicable)’; ‘5XXXX – Project Web Access for Project Server’; ‘5XXXXX – Macromedia 8.022 Critical Update’; NXXXXX – ITD Web Interface (NCR / RCN)”
I don’t know if there is anything buried in that list of sinister-sounding names (“Missing Critical Patch Installer” ?) I should worry about but you can bet I am sure as hell going to keep an eye on my floppy drive.
= = = = = = = = = =
Just call me Nostradamus.
Regular readers (you both know who you are) will recall my review of our office Christmas party performance by a festive belly dancer (um… not be taken as referring to a dance of a festive belly), at the end of which I opined that, combined with one particular martial music choice of the dee-jay, the overall theme of this year’s gathering might well have been The Battle of the Bulge.
Well there were a couple occasions over the holidays when I was mentally capable of absolutely nothing more thought-requiring than sitting down and pointing my remote at the television. And on one such night, I happened to linger on The History Channel, which was airing – and I realize this requires a credibility stretch – a series of programs under its overall theme this day, “A Day of Tanks”.
And imagine my surprise and delight to find that the movie they had chosen for the cinematic representation of the theme was, you guessed it, the 1965 ensemble-cast classic, Battle of the Bulge. (Just check the cast list.)
It’s not a great movie; it’s not even a great war movie (You will note, for example, that “This movie sucks!” features prominently among the few reviews on the link’s page). It does take some rather appalling liberties with the actual history of the event whose story it purports to tell. But it is entertaining and once you get past little niggles like the fact its Hollywood-ized American Patton tanks look absolutely nothing like the Panthers, Tigers and King Tigers that crashed into the US forces in the Ardennes forest in December 1944, you can sit back and enjoy it as a not-too-bad diversion.
For me, one of the highlights is a scene where the overall German tank commander – an Aryan blonde-dyed Robert Shaw, if you can believe it – has demanded to meet with his individual tank captains, and is at first disheartened to discover that they are “Boys… too many boys”. One of them, sensing his commander’s uncertainty, takes the bold step – not of speaking out of turn, but rather singing out of turn – and launches into one of moviedom’s all-time stirring military marches, with which he is swiftly joined in a thundering baritone chorus by the entire roomful of tankers, all the while as each thumps a single booted foot in an accompanying march rhythm. It’s entitled Panzerlied.
Everybody now – Ein, zwei, drei…
“Panzerleid
Ob's stürmt oder schneit,
Ob die Sonne uns lacht,
Der Tag glühend heiß
Oder eiskalt die Nacht.
Bestaubt sind die Gesichter,
Doch froh ist unser Sinn,
Ist unser Sinn;
Es braust unser Panzer
Im Sturmwind dahin.
Und läßt uns im Stich
Einst das treulose Glück,
Und kehren wir nicht mehr
Zur Heimat zurück,
Trifft uns die Todeskugel,
Ruft uns das Schicksal ab,
Ja Schicksal ab,
Dann wird uns der Panzer
Ein ehernes Grab.”
“Vas ist die scheiss?” You might well ask.
Well of course, I rendered two of the five German verses just so you can truly appreciate it after it has been run through the meticulous and always-accurate online translator, Babelfish.
How can one not be stirred by:
“Tank wrong
Ob's storms or snows,
whether the sun us laughs,
the day glowing hot
or ice cold the night.
The faces are dust-laden,
but our sense is glad,
is our sense;
It brews our tank
in the storm wind there.
And to us in the pass
once the perfidious luck leaves,
and does not return
we no more to the homeland,
meets us the death ball,
calls us up the fate,
off fate,
then us the tank
becomes a ehernes grave.”
(Hmmmm… I think it’s probably much better in the original German. Either that, or Babelfish still needs a little fine tuning.)
= = = = = = = = = =
Memo to my Union: Go Auto-Procreate (expressed somewhat more colloquially)
Got home tonight to a notification from Canada Post that I had a Registered Letter waiting for me.
Knowing that one of my credit cards is no more than a couple months away from expiration, I assumed it was the early arrival of its replacement. But instead, when I opened my registered letter, I found instead a demand from an entity that signed itself not even with a name, but rather with the identifier, “CEIU NHQ Region Disciplinary Committee”. (CEIU – the Canada Employment and Immigration Union – is the division of the public service union to which I belong as a federal public servant.)
I could quote it here, but doing so would require my keying it in and that would likely cause me to seize my somewhat expensive flatscreen home monitor and hurl it through my home-office window out into the snow of my backyard in the growing rage of reading it one more time. So let me sum up its highlights in a few brief points:
-- CEIU has no record of having reported for picket duty last October 12, 13, and 14, when the Public Service Alliance of Canada (pronounced pee-sack) was on strike;
-- CEIU is therefore providing me the opportunity to explain my “reason for not picketing as required”;
-- CEIU gives me a couple choices: if I stayed home and refused to draw pay, then show them the pay stubs from that period, reflecting three payless days; if I was on approved leave (vacation or sick leave), then show them my approved leave form.
-- CEIU closes by cheerfully advising me that failure to provide the necessary documentation will be considered strikebreaking and the disciplinary committee will be left with no choice but to recommend to the general membership that I be disciplined “appropriate to the circumstances”.
It takes CEIU a full page to spell out all that horseshit, but that is its aromatic essence.
There is so much wrong with this… to put it kindly… ill-advised letter that it’s hard to know where to begin.
What I find most galling about the whole thing is that the option of their having made an error doesn’t even enter into their correspondence. I am being told they have no record of my having walked the line, therefore I did not walk the line.
But I received three days’ strike pay, and to do that, I had to show up many weeks later at a table in our office building to initial the very record they now claim they don’t have – the sign-in / sign-out sheet we had to sign each day of picketing. (Plus longer-term Baby Ducklings will recall my happily blogging all three days I spent with a picket sign around my neck – it’s in the archives. But hey, I could’a just made all that up, right?)
So anyway, I have written my union brothers and sisters (well, to be wholly accurate, the conveniently anonymous “Disciplinary Committee”) and copied my missive to the union President and Executive Vice President. (And I will gladly acknowledge here that I owe my better half a word of thanks for a pre-writing lecture that resulted in my preparing a letter that, while still mightily angry, was absent the thesaurus of four-letter words I had originally planned to write.)
I closed by telling them (not asking them) to amend their records. If the masters of diplomatic correspondence choose to pursue the matter, I’ll keep you posted.
Assuming I still have my monitor, that is.
= = = = = = = = = =
I see the Liberals have just launched their most recent wave of good reasons to vote for them. Apparently you should vote Liberal because Stephen Harper has been known to masticate undeveloped chicken embryos.
Scrambled.
For breakfast.
The horror. The horror.
Vote early; vote often!
À la prochaine.
And today I got a Happy New Year greeting from my employer!
(Pay no attention to that small microphone-ish-looking object nesting among your pencils and pens.) Early this afternoon, I returned from lunch to find this printed-out note perched between the “QWERTY” and the numeric rows of my keyboard: “Dear client: The following CIRs have been installed on your workstation while you were out: ‘NXXXXX – MCPI – Missing Critical Patch Installer’; ‘5XXXX – MS Office XP Updates’; ‘5XXXXX – Quick View Plus 8.0 French DF (If applicable / si applicable)’; 5XXXXX – MS Office Project 2003 Pro Addin’; ‘5XXXX (If applicable / si applicable)’; ‘5XXXX – Project Web Access for Project Server’; ‘5XXXXX – Macromedia 8.022 Critical Update’; NXXXXX – ITD Web Interface (NCR / RCN)”
I don’t know if there is anything buried in that list of sinister-sounding names (“Missing Critical Patch Installer” ?) I should worry about but you can bet I am sure as hell going to keep an eye on my floppy drive.
= = = = = = = = = =
Just call me Nostradamus.
Regular readers (you both know who you are) will recall my review of our office Christmas party performance by a festive belly dancer (um… not be taken as referring to a dance of a festive belly), at the end of which I opined that, combined with one particular martial music choice of the dee-jay, the overall theme of this year’s gathering might well have been The Battle of the Bulge.
Well there were a couple occasions over the holidays when I was mentally capable of absolutely nothing more thought-requiring than sitting down and pointing my remote at the television. And on one such night, I happened to linger on The History Channel, which was airing – and I realize this requires a credibility stretch – a series of programs under its overall theme this day, “A Day of Tanks”.
And imagine my surprise and delight to find that the movie they had chosen for the cinematic representation of the theme was, you guessed it, the 1965 ensemble-cast classic, Battle of the Bulge. (Just check the cast list.)
It’s not a great movie; it’s not even a great war movie (You will note, for example, that “This movie sucks!” features prominently among the few reviews on the link’s page). It does take some rather appalling liberties with the actual history of the event whose story it purports to tell. But it is entertaining and once you get past little niggles like the fact its Hollywood-ized American Patton tanks look absolutely nothing like the Panthers, Tigers and King Tigers that crashed into the US forces in the Ardennes forest in December 1944, you can sit back and enjoy it as a not-too-bad diversion.
For me, one of the highlights is a scene where the overall German tank commander – an Aryan blonde-dyed Robert Shaw, if you can believe it – has demanded to meet with his individual tank captains, and is at first disheartened to discover that they are “Boys… too many boys”. One of them, sensing his commander’s uncertainty, takes the bold step – not of speaking out of turn, but rather singing out of turn – and launches into one of moviedom’s all-time stirring military marches, with which he is swiftly joined in a thundering baritone chorus by the entire roomful of tankers, all the while as each thumps a single booted foot in an accompanying march rhythm. It’s entitled Panzerlied.
Everybody now – Ein, zwei, drei…
“Panzerleid
Ob's stürmt oder schneit,
Ob die Sonne uns lacht,
Der Tag glühend heiß
Oder eiskalt die Nacht.
Bestaubt sind die Gesichter,
Doch froh ist unser Sinn,
Ist unser Sinn;
Es braust unser Panzer
Im Sturmwind dahin.
Und läßt uns im Stich
Einst das treulose Glück,
Und kehren wir nicht mehr
Zur Heimat zurück,
Trifft uns die Todeskugel,
Ruft uns das Schicksal ab,
Ja Schicksal ab,
Dann wird uns der Panzer
Ein ehernes Grab.”
“Vas ist die scheiss?” You might well ask.
Well of course, I rendered two of the five German verses just so you can truly appreciate it after it has been run through the meticulous and always-accurate online translator, Babelfish.
How can one not be stirred by:
“Tank wrong
Ob's storms or snows,
whether the sun us laughs,
the day glowing hot
or ice cold the night.
The faces are dust-laden,
but our sense is glad,
is our sense;
It brews our tank
in the storm wind there.
And to us in the pass
once the perfidious luck leaves,
and does not return
we no more to the homeland,
meets us the death ball,
calls us up the fate,
off fate,
then us the tank
becomes a ehernes grave.”
(Hmmmm… I think it’s probably much better in the original German. Either that, or Babelfish still needs a little fine tuning.)
= = = = = = = = = =
Memo to my Union: Go Auto-Procreate (expressed somewhat more colloquially)
Got home tonight to a notification from Canada Post that I had a Registered Letter waiting for me.
Knowing that one of my credit cards is no more than a couple months away from expiration, I assumed it was the early arrival of its replacement. But instead, when I opened my registered letter, I found instead a demand from an entity that signed itself not even with a name, but rather with the identifier, “CEIU NHQ Region Disciplinary Committee”. (CEIU – the Canada Employment and Immigration Union – is the division of the public service union to which I belong as a federal public servant.)
I could quote it here, but doing so would require my keying it in and that would likely cause me to seize my somewhat expensive flatscreen home monitor and hurl it through my home-office window out into the snow of my backyard in the growing rage of reading it one more time. So let me sum up its highlights in a few brief points:
-- CEIU has no record of having reported for picket duty last October 12, 13, and 14, when the Public Service Alliance of Canada (pronounced pee-sack) was on strike;
-- CEIU is therefore providing me the opportunity to explain my “reason for not picketing as required”;
-- CEIU gives me a couple choices: if I stayed home and refused to draw pay, then show them the pay stubs from that period, reflecting three payless days; if I was on approved leave (vacation or sick leave), then show them my approved leave form.
-- CEIU closes by cheerfully advising me that failure to provide the necessary documentation will be considered strikebreaking and the disciplinary committee will be left with no choice but to recommend to the general membership that I be disciplined “appropriate to the circumstances”.
It takes CEIU a full page to spell out all that horseshit, but that is its aromatic essence.
There is so much wrong with this… to put it kindly… ill-advised letter that it’s hard to know where to begin.
What I find most galling about the whole thing is that the option of their having made an error doesn’t even enter into their correspondence. I am being told they have no record of my having walked the line, therefore I did not walk the line.
But I received three days’ strike pay, and to do that, I had to show up many weeks later at a table in our office building to initial the very record they now claim they don’t have – the sign-in / sign-out sheet we had to sign each day of picketing. (Plus longer-term Baby Ducklings will recall my happily blogging all three days I spent with a picket sign around my neck – it’s in the archives. But hey, I could’a just made all that up, right?)
So anyway, I have written my union brothers and sisters (well, to be wholly accurate, the conveniently anonymous “Disciplinary Committee”) and copied my missive to the union President and Executive Vice President. (And I will gladly acknowledge here that I owe my better half a word of thanks for a pre-writing lecture that resulted in my preparing a letter that, while still mightily angry, was absent the thesaurus of four-letter words I had originally planned to write.)
I closed by telling them (not asking them) to amend their records. If the masters of diplomatic correspondence choose to pursue the matter, I’ll keep you posted.
Assuming I still have my monitor, that is.
= = = = = = = = = =
I see the Liberals have just launched their most recent wave of good reasons to vote for them. Apparently you should vote Liberal because Stephen Harper has been known to masticate undeveloped chicken embryos.
Scrambled.
For breakfast.
The horror. The horror.
Vote early; vote often!
À la prochaine.
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