TriumphAnt

If through some chance you’ve missed that pathetic Tim Horton “Roll Up the Rim to Win” story coming out of St Jerome, Quebec (still developing at this writing), here are the bullets so far:

- Ten-year old girl finds discarded Tim Horton contest coffee cup in school garbage can; can’t roll up the rim herself so gets help from a 12-year old friend;
- Cup is not only a winner, it’s a winner of one of the 30 grand prizes, a Toyota Rav-4 SUV that tilts the valuemeter at some $29,000;
- 10-year old’s Dad was first to the school when it was discovered the girls had found a winning cup. At last report, he was the person in possession of the cup;
- Parents of both kids have gone to war for a share of the prize; teacher at the school comes forward, claims to be the one who purchased – and tossed out – the cup, but demands a share of the prize;
- Tim Hortons corporate keeps their position real simple: they’ll give the prize (or the optional $25,000 cash) to whoever brings the cup through their door.

The story blew nationwide before you could look up “morons” in your Petit Robert. The extent of the coverage caused the father of the ten-year old – who at first said he’d share (but didn’t say 50-50) some of the prize with the 12-year old’s family – to rescind the offer and essentially told the 12-year old’s parents to go to hell. They had taken the story to a Montreal radio station “to determine their legal position” and so triggered the media torrent.

(I know that when I’m looking for information about how to write a radio news story, I go first to my lawyer, so seeking legal information from an on-air radio personality seems a perfectly logical quid pro quo, pro bono, habeus corpus, caveat emptor, habemus papum… but ego digresse, maximus.)

I’ve been musing (unamusedly, I hasten to add) about this whole thing, and first had to get past the thought that this is an absolutely perfect benchmark to forever-after define the relatively new word, “clusterf*ck” **.

** Good old Google has its etymology: “Marine slang -- A clusterf*ck was any group of Marines big enough to draw enemy fire, or several Marines close enough together to be wounded by the same incoming round. More generically, a clusterf*ck was something that was all screwed up, ie "That operation was a giant clusterf*ck!" Whenever three or more Marines gathered in the open, talking or working on something, somebody was sure to call out "clusterf*ck!" and one or more of the guys would walk away.”

But to me, this whole mess all seems to come back to, “What the devil does it teach our kids?”

Yes, $25,000 is a lot of money. But is it fair compensation for the loss of goodwill and crushing the sense of school community spirit in this little corner of St Jerome?

I will not be at all surprised to read, for example, that the ten and 12-year olds have already each been instructed by their parents to avoid contact with one other, in much the same way as a cabinet minister will plead, “I’m not going to comment on a matter that is before the courts”, (usually uttered by a cabinet minister who has him or herself come under investigation for some kind of impropriety).

I would also not be surprised to read that the school has whipped that teacher away from the school and strongly advised him not to put his face in front of the media. (What’s the French for “Cause you’ll look like a complete jerk!”?)

So, here’s my take:

To the teacher: You didn’t “lose” the cup; you threw it away. You’re not even in the picture. You are the weakest link. Go home.

To the parents of the 10-year old: Good going Dad, you beat Other Dad to the school and managed to become the holder of the cup. But it’s completely found money and had your daughter not been helped by her 12-year old friend, that cup right now’d be quietly rotting in whatever landfill receives St Jerome’s garbage. And Tim’s will give you cash in lieu of a prize. If I had the power, I would make you split it right down the middle.

To the parents of the 12-year old: Play nice. Under Québec law, possession trumps almost anything unless what you possess is stolen. You lost the race, so anything you gain is going to have to come from the goodwill of 10-year-old’s parents. And you’re fast peeing that away.

To both sets of parents: Once you’ve banked your cash – each couple of you – pick your kid’s favourite subject / classroom in their school. If it’s the band, buy $2,500 worth of instruments; if it’s the library, buy them a quartet of internet-enabled workstations or however many $2,500 will buy; if it’s drama, buy them a $2,500 video recording and playback system so they can record and critique each other; if it’s phys-ed, pick your sport and buy a poopload of new equipment for the department. (“Poopload”, by the way, is metric for $2,500 worth.) Use your imaginations, fergawdssake! End result: you each have $10,000 banked, and the school is $5,000 worth of your generosity richer, none of which would have been possible had your children not gone dumpster diving in the school just a couple short days ago.

And as a purely practical aside, has anyone, I wonder, considered how swiftly $25,000 is going to vanish (because, to date, three separate lawyers have descended on the fracas). Is that worth driving one or two permanent rifts through the heart of this community? (Here’s a free tip: The correct answer is “No”.)

PS… Since I’ve just saved you all a whack of legal fees, each of you reduce your deposits by $500 and mail me a cheque for $1,000. I’ll send you the particulars.

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Trekkies have taken over the Government of Canada!

At work recently, I received a directive related to a new priority in the Department. Brief background: US President George W Bush recently approved a contract placing responsibility for management (and security) at six seaports of entry into the US into the hands of a Dubai-headquartered company. Not to be outdone, our department has determined there is a Canadian angle to this story:

“We have received a new request to keep an eye out for anything related to the Port of Vancouver Terminal and the United Arab Emirates. A state-owned Dubai company is contemplating purchasing six major ports around the United States including the Port of Vancouver Terminal. The federal link is the grain that comes and goes and passes through the Terminal is a federal responsibility. Federal jurisdiction encompasses industries of national importance including port operations and longshoring plus industries declared by Parliament to be for the general advantage of Canada such as grain handling.”

Now, hilarity aside over the mysteries of a transportation flow reminiscent of The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock: “comes and goes and passes through the Terminal” (talking of Michelangelo?), the larger issue to my warped mind is the possibility that grain could be a security threat!

Which, as any Trekkie knows, is the very linchpin to the premise of one of the few episodes of Star Trek - the Original Series that is played for laughs: The Trouble with Tribbles, wherein a disguised Klingon, in an effort to sabotage the planned colonization of Sherman’s Planet, poisons an entire shipment of quadrotriticale seed grain. (The episode is also one of the only mentions of Canada in the series, because it was in Canada where the world’s first serious research into triticale, an enormously high-yield wheat hybrid, was undertaken at the University of Manitoba.)

“Quadrotriticale is a four grain hybrid of wheat and rye. Its root grain, triticale, can trace its origin all the way back to 20th century Canada...” (Mr Spock, in the episode)

And for real trivia nuts, the first part of Kirk’s line in the same episode, “Who put the Tribbles in the quadrotriticale, and what was in the grain that killed them?” is precisely the same meter as “Who put the overalls in Mrs Murphy’s Chowder?” (“triticale” is pronounced TRIT-uh-KAY-lee).

But don’t just take my word for it:

WHO PUT THE TRIBBLES IN THE QUADROTRITICALE?"
(to the tune of "Who Put the Overalls in Mrs. Murphy's Chowder?")
by Jean Lamb

Chorus:
"Who put the tribbles in the quadrotriticale?"
Nobody spoke, so we interrogated daily.
It's a Klingon trick, it's true,
And we'll lick the clique that threw
The tribbles in the quadrotriticale.

Verse the firste:
We were down on Sherman's Planet just about a week ago,
And our gallant crew decided to put on a show.
The Science Staff brought down a bin with seeds of a new strain—
Its fruitfulness would bring the rival Klingons lots of pain.
Mr. Spock, he opened it, and blushed a pure clear green,
For where the precious grain was, only tribbles could be seen.
The captain, he got screaming mad, his eyes were bulging out!
He got on Communications, and loudly he did shout:
(Chorus)

Verse the seconde:
Mr. Spock, he nodded grim, and said he had to then.
Then he started looking for a man called Cyrano.
Uhura picked up one of them, and it started purring fine;
Then she walked by a bureaucrat and it began to whine.
The Klingon spy confessed at length, then pleaded for the fuzz.
Even Federation jail was better than a tribble's buzz!
Mr. Spock let Cyrano Jones out of his makeshift jail,
Picked up his synthesizer, and it began to wail:
(Chorus)

Verse the thirde and the laste:
Now the tribbles have a home across the leap of time,
While littering the corridors of Station Deep Space Nine.
Worf is angry and frustrated, till he's almost sick,
And Quark is offering customers Roast Tribble On A Stick.
The Chronocops are wondering if all is truly well,
So Sisko takes his refuge in the phrase, "Don't ask, don't tell!"
When Klingon ships arrive to conquer where the beasties dwell,
They flee in panic to avoid this awful Tribble Hell!
(Chorus)
(Flourish and exeunt)

Sleep tight tonight, the Government of Canada is awake.

Keeping our grain safe from Klingons.

- -

It was fun while it lasted. (Another Bryson footnote)

If you, like me, were among those who enjoyed a meal or two of New Zealand orange roughy sometime about the mid-1980s, count yourself lucky, because it’s likely not an experience we’ll be repeating any time soon.

In my reading of Bill Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything”, I just finished a section of his “life on earth” chapters that makes a pretty compelling – and for me shocking – case for how badly we are managing our ocean-borne natural resources, especially its life forms. Not surprisingly, he touches on Newfoundland cod as a measure of how spectacularly we can deplete a resource once thought to be impossible to diminish. (As visitors to Algonquin Park’s Pioneer Logging Exhibit Museum can affirm, he could have written the same about Algonquin Park white pine, but I digress.)

New Zealand orange roughy is (hopefully “is” – although that verb tense could also possibly be “was”) a fish found only in the waters off the Kiwi and Australian coasts. As Bryson notes, in the 1970s, it was discovered to be delicious, and it was discovered to exist “in large numbers”. Great. So far, so good. But as Bryson notes, “In no time at all, fishing fleets were hauling in 40,000 metric tons of roughy a year”.

Then the marine biologists entered the picture and made “alarming” discoveries. A roughy, it turns out, is an unbelievably long-lived fish, with a truly astonishing life span of 150 years or thereabouts. This evolutionary adaptation is due to the fact they live in extremely resource-poor waters. But the real kicker (at least for the unfortunate roughy) is that in a self-managing evolutionary consequence they also typically spawn only once in a lifetime. By the time the biologists’ message got out to the commercial fishing fleets, it was already too late. As Bryson notes, sadly, even with immediate and exceedingly careful management it will be decades before the roughy population recovers, “if they ever do”.

And continuing with the Trekkie theme, as I read the foregoing in Bryson, I couldn’t help but think of the Star Trek Original Series episode whose plot was built around the threatened extinction of this species:

http://www.70disco.com/startrek/horta.htm

- -

We need a new term in the lexicon. And given the explosion in popularity of home renovation and decorating programs on TV, this is one that could catch on. Just remember where you first heard it:

DIY-do (pronounced DOO-ey DOO):

Definition: the sh*t in which a do-it-yourselfer finds yourself after realizing you’ve embarked on a home project that should have been contracted out to a professional.

Not surprisingly, I have an example. (Although in hindsight, “DIY-do” is probably being overly critical. But it did take the intercession of a professional – in this case a plumber – to discover the problem I was experiencing.)

We are in the process of finishing up a relatively minor redecoration of our half bathroom. “We” needs to be qualified. I am doing the guy things – tearing out the old light fixtures, towel rack and toilet paper dispenser and either installing new ones or re-installing old ones after the repainting is done. My wife is the family design specialist so she has selected the paint colours and done all the wall patching, sanding, surface preparation and priming required before applying the new colour to the walls.

Oh, and I get to clean up the paint tools.

As part of the preparation process, I removed the water tank from the back of the toilet in order to provide access to the bare wall behind it.

Whenever I do something like this, I never cease to be amazed at really how basic a fixture or appliance can be, even though it might seem at first to be a hideously complex system. Not to put too fine a point on it, but a household toilet is simply a device to channel water through a hole in the floor, in the process carrying off… well, you know perfectly well what it carries off. When it’s not being used for… well, you know perfectly well what it’s used for, it’s designed to perform two related functions: 1. hold a reservoir of water that can be discharged on demand (the “flush”); 2. keep a water dam trapped between the bowl and the hole in the floor to prevent the related aromas from the hole in the floor from coming back into one’s home. Everything else is just whistles and bells – a mechanism to shut off the water flow when your tank is full, a hydro-dynamic shape to channel the water in all sorts of artistic patterns around the inside of the bowl at various velocities, and the ability to do all this in attractively designed compatibility with the other appliances with which it shares floor space in the bathroom.

The water reservoir (that’d be the “tank”) has an opening on the bottom to which is connected a hose or pipe through which water enters, and a bigger opening, also on the bottom, through which water flows into the bowl. Obviously, your mission as a homeowner is to ensure that this one-way flow is hooked up correctly, and maintained without having the water take any unscheduled side trips – whether up (explosively into the air) or down (slowly or, God forbid, swiftly onto the floor or, even worse, under the floor).

To make a long story short, after I re-installed the tank, I discovered we were experiencing a maddeningly unstoppable leak of water. After four repetitions of the installation process, during which I replaced – after each new installation – some part that I suspected might be the culprit, the leak continued to manifest itself as a slow creeping wetness along the underside of the tank that gradually found the lowest point, built up to a shiny drip and fell with a “plonk” to the floor. In this case at the rate of about one drip every 30 seconds. Not enough to require a mop in the short term, but more than enough to wet the floor to an alarming degree when left undetected overnight, at which point it did indeed require a mop to clean up.

Finally, my patience and the threads on the plastic couplings both wearing a little thin, I called a plumber. After marveling at the array of new parts I had for him to choose from, he took about 15 minutes to discover, and inform me of same, a short hairline crack that began on the underside of the tank, turned the corner of its lower front edge and crept about an inch and a half up its face. “Hairline” here is being generous. This crack was considerably less than the width of a human hair. In fact, it was utterly invisible to the naked eye until the plumber shone some sort of blue or ultraviolet penlight beam on it that caused it to light up like a map of the Nile River. (Google is really sparse but not completely silent on “ultraviolet water leak detection”. How it works, I have no idea. That it works, I have no doubt. Certainly this particular leak source is something I never would have found myself.)

Oddly enough, he also found discolouration along the crack inside the tank, which apparently was indicative that it had been there for some time, probably as long as the tank has been in use (about two years). Why it only started its slow but relentless leak on my re-installing it, he could only speculate was due to the tightening down of the tank onto the bowl for a second time. He suggested it created just enough of a channel for the water to travel from inside the tank to out, something that obviously had not happened in the initial installation a couple years back.

So now we have a brand new tank, which actually comes with every last one of the same parts I had replaced and installed over the previous few days in the process of trying to get my slowly leaking tank to stop leaking. So now I’ve got a whole bunch of parts and gaskets, all of them brand new, left over. Replacing a toilet, anyone?

Kids! Don’t try this at home.

- -

My next entry should have a few anecdotes of what a week in Grenada feels like. And we’ll be doing the research first-hand.

(But if you’re expecting a review of what possum – apparently one of the island’s delicacies – tastes like, I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you.)