It’s summer, so no great burning issues to write about – just lots of little things to blow ‘way out of proportion. So consider this post an opportunity for Baby Ducklings to muse over the mental state of someone who not only thinks about things like this, he actually pauses to write ‘em down.
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Just as the meaning of “gay” has long since and forever been changed from the days (“Don we now our gay apparel, Fa-la-la-la…” etc and “The Flintstones” television theme song, which promised, “We’ll have a gay old time!”) when it didn’t mean “same-sex”, I fear we’re now losing “repatriate” as a result of our most recent foreign wars.
The term has suddenly (or so it seems to me) become the word to use to describe the return home of the bodies of soldiers killed overseas. I looked it up. The most proximate use says it means “to return to one’s home country” or in definitions offering longer explanations, to return former refugees to the country or village from which they might have been forcibly expelled, or chose to evacuate for any of a hundred local-crisis-driven reasons. But always, it seems, has been the implication that the people so relocated are alive.
Now, sadly, what not so long ago meant something to feel good about – the act of returning home – has been co-opted by a system that somehow aims to make it sound vaguely positive that our soldier is coming back home. Oh sure, in a flag-draped box and maybe not entirely intact, but “repatriated” nonetheless.
So OK, while we’re at it, let’s re-define “back to the land” too, from its original and present use to mean a positive return to simpler times to… well, to this:
“If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England.
There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam;
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.”
(The Soldier, by Rupert Brooke, 1914)
= = =
Apparently I have a pair of magic pants.
I discovered this just the other day while at home in the early morning, getting ready to go to work. Pre-coffee. After gathering up the Globe from my doorstep, I started upstairs, heading for the kitchen, while looking in dismay at an especially grim front-page photo of a badly injured victim of the July 11 Mumbai subway blasts. At some point near the top of the stairs, there was an apparent disconnect between part of my brain, which clearly signaled my feet they had reached the top step, and another part of my brain that said, “Wait! There’s still one step to go!” (My eyes-to-brain network was still occupied with the Globe’s front-page gore.) In a millisecond, the “No, you’re already there” message had carried the day and, consequently, those selfsame feet only lifted sufficiently high to complete a normal step on a level floor.
The toes of my leading foot slammed into the one remaining riser and, as if that weren’t bad enough, my trailing foot, in an effort to rush forward and help me recover my balance, hooked its toes on the bullnose edge of the top step. (Notice how I try to deflect the entire blame away from me and, instead, to my toes, as though they were wholly separate and sentient entities on the ends of my feet. Passing the buck. It’s the hallmark of being a government worker.)
The penultimate outcome was to pitch me forward violently onto my knees and, in that position, to slide gracelessly into the kitchen, catching a shoulder and chin firmly against the doorframe as I did so, sending the Globe and two seriously startled nearby cats flying in every direction. At that point, I just sagged onto my back, staring at the ceiling, and delivered the routine’s finale – a stream of invective that would have turned a blue sky black.
After some 30 seconds of flexing everything – including my jaw – to make sure nothing was bent into any new, exciting and inoperative directions, I stood up and brushed the previous evening’s pita crumbs off my knees. (OK, so housekeeping is not a priority. Especially with my wife and daughter out of town for a few days.)
It was then I noticed that the pants I had put on a few minutes earlier still bore an especially rough scrape mark on one knee – the visible reminder of a vicious early Spring tumble a few months back off the rolled pavement edge of a sidewalk I use on my daily homeward-bound commute.
So apparently these pants are possessed, and make the wearer prone to falling down.
(I never said it was a “good” magic. Anyone want to borrow them? I’ll be happy to launder them before passing them along. As it is, I think I’ll just roll them up and forward them, Jumanji-like, to some unsuspecting shopper at the local Salvation Army Thrift Store.)
“Prone to falling down”… Get it? Get it? Oh my, there’s just no end to the man’s way with a scintillating pun!
= = =
Wasn’t one of the sidebar storylines in the movie “Caddyshack” about a psychotic golf course groundskeeper’s ongoing battle with a gopher? (Yes it was.) Along my walking route to and from work, there is a similarly epic battle shaping up between the City of Ottawa and those of us who dare to use one of their public parks in its off-season – winter, in order to get where we’re going.
The park, such as it is, is rather hilariously named “The Garden of the Provinces”. And I say “hilariously” because the provincial and territorial floral emblems on display there are actually sculpted and coloured stone reliefs mounted in a concrete wall. You enter and exit the “park” by way of wide flights of stone stairs. And the park is also home to two large steel and stone fountains. Its actual growing greenery is made up of two large rectangular enclosures in which several trees and patches of grass struggle valiantly to find access to sunshine and carbon dioxide in an urban location scant feet away from one of the City’s major downtown access routes.
But as it relates to pedestrian travel, this “garden” park is ideally situated to be passed through, because it lies on the line (picture the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle) between two busy points of pedestrian gathering that would otherwise require a walker to travel along one side, turn 90 degrees and then travel along the other. So the diagonal trans-park path is a very well traveled shortcut – winter and summer.
But during the winter the City puts up a chain slung between two posts at each of the park’s four entrances (or exits, depending on your direction of travel) from each of which is hung a sign proclaiming, “Closed for the Season”. They have no deterrent value at all, however, because inevitably about a day after the chain barriers go up, some pedestrian will tilt one post (which are mounted on heavy concrete blocks about a foot square) onto its side, effectively laying each chain down along the ground. And all winter long, people continue to pass through the park.
Now I’m thinking that one – if not several – of the City’s lawyers has entered the picture, because on a recent blazing hot mid-July day, while I was walking through the park along my hypotenudinal path, I chanced upon a work crew at one entrance vigorously erecting a phalanx of heavy-duty black steel fenceposts, fastening each to the ground with four enormous anchor bolts. The poles are about three feet apart. Each has a welded steel “o” at the top, through which, no doubt, later this Fall a chain will be slung that could stop a runaway bus.
As I watched one worker, I asked him, “Is there going to be a gate?” He replied, “Yes, but in the winter it’ll be closed and locked.” Then, I guess he decided the mere fact of my stopping offered him an opportunity too good to miss, because he switched off the power bolt-driver he was operating and asked me, “Do you believe in Jesus Christ?”
“Oh Jesus Christ,” I muttered quietly to myself. (So I guess that could mean “Yes”.) Without waiting for an answer, he pressed gamely on, “No, really, Jesus changed my life. And His spirit has been with us for over 2,000 years now without any changes, and a lot of other religions have come and gone, or had major changes in that same amount of time.”
On a different day, I might have waited for more of the sermon, or pointed out to him that the Pima Indians of Arizona still have a spiritual culture that had already produced ruins by the time Jesus was going about “my Father’s business”, not to mention some of the inherent messaging contradiction exemplified by actions like forcing “Love Thy Neighbour” and “Thou Shalt Not Kill” onto people at ruthless sword-point during the Crusades or by way of bomb blasts in Ulster. Instead, I opted for a graceful (I thought) retreat and wished a good day on him.
To matters more secular, as I walked away I began muttering more earnestly about the whole process of erecting a large black solid steel fence at the entrances of a park (as the workers bolt their all-encasing way around its perimeter over the next week or so) that presents itself as a bit of urban retreat from the countless nearby glass, steel and concrete towers. Does our government (or in the case of Ottawa, “Do our governments…”, because we are ruled by four: the Governments of Canada, Ontario, the City of Ottawa and the National Capital Commission. Cross the river and you can add the Governments of Québec and la Ville de Gatineau – formerly Hull. Each also comes with its own police force, by the way, which leaves us as one of the most complexly governed and policed jurisdictions on earth – not to mention taxed, because everybody gets a bite of our paycheque every two weeks as well. But I digress.)…
Where was I?
Oh yes, does Big Brother really need to impose himself this thoroughly and this expensively on our day-to day lives? Why not just post a sign on a pole: “Park pathways are not cleared in the winter. Use at your own risk”?
And make people responsible for their own choices.
= = =
I got back to my desk after a recent run for coffee to discover that someone had placed a survey form on my chair while I was away.
Entitled, “Persons Requiring Emergency Evacuation Assistance”, the form solicits my needs in the event of a looming building disaster sufficient to precipitate a general evacuation. In my case, and based on several previous fire drill experiences, this will involve a hike down 12 flights of stairs into a growing people jam at about the 6th floor, as floor after floor of emergency-exit-bound evacuees fill the staircase.
There are 12 specific disabilities listed under the question, “Type of Disability and Assistance Required”. Included are choices like “pregnant”, “wheelchair”, “back problem”, “blind with dog”, “broken limb (cast / no cast)”. The list concluded with an “Other (Specify)” option.
So I thought about what would be going through my mind if any level of this building were ablaze and ever-thickening volumes of smoke were accumulating in the hopelessly crowded top-to-bottom chimneys that are our emergency exit stairwells.
So I ticked the “Other (Specify)” box and wrote in: “Ever-increasing panic (Someone to hug!)”.
Then beside the question “Would you like us to assign persons to assist you?”, I wrote, “You bet!” and penned the name of a singularly attractive administrative assistant whose torque-converting wardrobe has an entire floor of guys starting to look forward to “Casual Friday” by about Tuesday every week.
We’ll see how this turns out, but I do labour in a work / life balance-focused department. If they’re at all serious about it, well then the mental health of employees should be every bit as much a priority as our physical health.
= = =
When I went to my regular Friday take-out lunch restaurant early in July, it was the first workweek-ending trip there since the GST had been dropped by one per cent. (I am somewhat of a creature of habit and have exactly the same thing, every Friday – a couple of Thai dishes that I like a lot; they’re not overly heavy and they’re both really tasty. Add the same drink and the total bill has always been, for many months, $13.94.) For the past couple weeks, I’d been joking with the ladies behind the counter that I was looking forward to the huge savings when the new, reduced GST came in.
But they didn’t joke back. No doubt wanting to ensure I harboured no major discount illusions – or delusions – they kept insisting worriedly that yes my lunch cost would go down, but maybe ten to 12 cents. Tops.
So on this first Friday in the era of the 6 per cent GST, I ordered up precisely the same items and the cashier rang it in: $14.10. Then she actually pointed to the total and said, “Like the new number?”
“Well,” I replied, “it’s always been $13.94 so what item have you raised the price on?”
And she was flabbergasted. “No prices raised. Didn’t you pay $14 – something?” “No. I’ve always paid $13.94, every week for months.” Then suddenly there were the other two counter workers gathered at the cash. The frowning trio pored over the paper printout receipt and, item by item, they agreed the prices were correct and told me it was my recollection that obviously was not. As a salve to my obviously failing neural powers, they then gave me the receipt. Which, when you think about it, does nothing to buttress either their argument or mine, since all it says is “See? You paid what we asked you to pay.”
“Look, it’s not a problem,” I said, and paid my new “reduced” price of $14.10.
But over lunch, I thought some more about this. OK, so if the actual prices are the same – and the entire counter crew seemed adamant this was the case – just as I am utterly positive in my recollection of $13.94 – then that leaves as the only possibility an error in programming the new reduced federal tax into their cash register. And if that’s the case, then every single customer that’s gone through their restaurant since July 1 – if my bill is an example – has been paying just slightly over 1% more, not less (taking my difference of 16 cents as a percentage of $13.94). And, given this is a pretty popular place, that makes a not insignificant total windfall for them, that will only accumulate if the error is allowed to stand.
In the grand scheme of things, paying 16 cents more, once a week, for a lunch I enjoy doesn’t bother me in the least. But what does bother me is the vigour the three counter workers applied to the process of trying to talk me out of the accuracy of my memory of the total I have been paying for months, and their insistence that their bills are indeed now reduced to reflect the single point drop in GST.
I have a good friend who occasionally is given to arguing little quirks like this with some force. He jokes, in fact, that he has “gone ballistic” so many times with one particular local hardware big box company that he’s been banned from every one of their stores in the capital and now has to drive to Arnprior just to buy his tools and building supplies.
Unfortunately, I have only a current receipt, nothing from the pre-reduced GST era, which reduces us to a discussion of “you say / I say”. But this sort of gang challenge to one’s recollection is precisely the sort of thing my friend would love to get into with them.
Several years ago, I sat down to an evening meal at a different Thai restaurant close to where I worked at the time. It was a frequent lunch stop and I thought it’d be a great place for a supper for my wife and me. After ordering, I carefully explained to the waitress that I have a highly sensitive shellfish allergy. Reviewing my order, she assured us there was no shellfish anywhere among its items. A few seconds after I’d had a couple bites of a beef curry, I started to get my reaction. We immediately ordered a couple glasses of ice water. (So swift is my reaction that it only takes a tiny amount to set the alarm bells off, and the water “flush” of my lips and mouth usually helps bring it to a sufficient halt that I don’t have to be rushed to the nearest hospital.)
But with the water, the waitress also brought the manager, who was adamant that I was not having my allergic reaction. “You can’t,” she argued. “No shellfish in your food.” There again was that, “The customer is always wrong” argument. My wife and I have never been back.
(To make a long story short, I have since discovered that Thai curries frequently begin with a broth that includes varying amounts of fish sauce, and Thai fish sauce almost always includes a shrimp paste or some other shellfish component. In one of life’s little ironies, the only brand I have found so far that has no shellfish in it at all is one called “Four Crabs”.)
I haven’t got a conclusion to this story. Neither, I hasten to add, do I have an anti-Thai bias in my choice of preferred restaurants – just an anti-this-particular-restaurant bias in the second of the above two examples. But sometimes I do wonder if my very Canadian-ness is all that’s standing between me and a leap to my feet, followed by a string of introductory expletives by way of making my key point, “DON’T TELL ME I’M CRAZY! I KNOW (a) WHEN I’M GETTING A REACTION; or (b) THAT I PAID MORE THIS WEEK THAN I DID LAST WEEK BEFORE THE GST REDUCTION!”
Which on most days I guess makes me feel pretty darned good that I am a Canadian.
= = =
Is this a problem over there?
In a recent search for rice vinegar to use in a sushi recipe, I figured it would probably be best to buy a bottle from a country with whom one might reasonably expect to associate the production of rice-related products – China or Japan. I usually buy groceries at a humongous store that carries everything under the sun simply because they have the floor and shelf space to enable them to do so. Sure enough, they had about 16 different brands of rice vinegar to choose from, including ones decorated with labels that carried what I’m sure must have been the bare legal minimum requirement of English and French.
One included the rather ominous (I thought) admonition: “For cooking. Not to use as beverage.”
Wine tasters will tell you that a really great dry wine includes a measure of astringency they characterize as its “pucker power”. I can only imagine that, if they ever get hold of a glass of this rice vinegar, it’ll immediately eclipse the world’s great Bordeaux among oenophiles everywhere. Once they unlock their jaws sufficiently to render their judgments, that is.
= = =
He ain’t crony, he’s my brother.
News of the recent appointment of Poland’s new Prime Minister made laugh. The country’s President, Lech Kaczynski, appointed his identical twin bother, Jaroslaw, to the post, making Poland the first country in history to have its two highest posts of government occupied by identical twins. What made me laugh was this observation from the Associated Press story about the announcement. When first elected to government office, “Both ran on a pledge to fight the cronyism that has since flourished.” (San José Mercury News, July 11)
Princeton University’s WordNet defines “cronyism” as “favoritism shown to friends and associates (as by appointing them to positions without regard for their qualifications)”. See? Doesn’t say anything at all about twin brothers. So there. Cue the ethnic humour tape.
= = =
And finally, some days, despite all the glamour and non-stop glory of work as a Government of Canada media analyst, I do occasionally wonder if maybe I boarded the wrong career bus.
To wit, this line from a recent (July 9) Ottawa Citizen story about the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Fund:
“Even though the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan has an astounding $96 billion in assets, that’s still not enough to support the generous benefits its members receive.”
No, that “b” in “billion” is not a typo. Ontario’s unionized teachers are supported in retirement by a pension plan whose $96 billion balance still leaves them unable to cover its expected payouts.
Is it just me, or is anyone else going to laugh hysterically if the next unionized teachers’ strike in this province includes “improved pension benefits” as one of the trigger issues?
À la prochaine...
Wednesday, July 05, 2006
Pre-reading warm-up exercise:
(Sing the following in your best “Chairman of the Board” voice. Repeat as required.)
“It seems to me I’ve heard that song before.
It’s from an old familiar score.
I know it well – that melody.”
(I’ve actually been doing some navel gazing about the growing number of my work-related communications howls of outrage appearing in this place. I think it boils down to my being doubly irritated by the simple fact that the people who produce these messages, are, like me, supposedly trained and hired to work as communicators. And frankly, it offends my professional training and my efforts to adhere to my job description that they are allowed to unleash this stuff on a public – or on subordinates and co-workers – who don’t deserve such shabby treatment. For me, it’s becoming an almost daily mutter to wonder where the devil the “Edit” function has gone in the senior offices in our department. We still have a unit labelled “Quality Control”, but the growing number of glaring abuses of The Mother Tongue has led me to view the mere fact of its existence as laughably oxymoronic. But I digress.)
So, (deep breath) continuing with my seemingly endless litany of spluttered complaints about the quality of messages put out by people in or near my government department who really should know better, here’s another. (With this most recent missile, I am seriously beginning to wonder if my department has been taken over by the Boys from Brazil.)
We received a system-wide memorandum about an unauthorized bit of software that apparently has been downloaded by some employees. The memo included the following bit of gentle phrasing:
“Due to a significant security vulnerability to the Departmental network, your Client Technical Services (CTS) teams have been instructed, starting immediately, to remove the free downloadable software, WinAmp, when it is found on Departmental workstations. Reports will be generated and any workstations with this software installed will be identified, WinAmp will be removed, and each case will be reported to the proper authorities. Under no circumstances is this software to be re-installed by any user of the Departmental Network.”
Text like, “reports will be generated…” and “each case will be reported to the proper authorities” sounds to me like something lifted straight from the script of movies like “Casablanca”, (“Round up the usual suspects!”) or “Lives of a Bengal Lancer” (“We have ways to make men talk… Little bamboo slivers… not much to look at, but when driven under the fingernails and set alight…”) except spoken with a very thick German accent. (Try channelling Otto Preminger in “Stalag 17” or Erich von Stroheim in “Sunset Boulevard”.)
What bothers me most about this message is its implicit assumption that anyone with the offending program on his or her computer must have brought it aboard solely for the purpose of sabotaging this vital network, without which a quarter of a million Canadians might not receive their first Conservative government child care cheques on time.
As a totally programming-unschooled computer user who more than once has been advised by my computer, “You need to install the Thunderbolt-Humungo-TorrentStream Player 2007 to view this file. Do you wish to download it now?” and pushed the “Oh why not?” button, I can see that if the damned program does exist on my workstation, or on anyone else’s, more than likely it was downloaded with no more intent than to enable someone to view some highly creative Swedish commercial for Saab Turbo-photocopiers, or some such thing, that a co-worker sent along for one’s brief amusement.
The “guilty until proven innocent” tone of the message almost makes me think that it was composed by someone working in my local union office, not a person working in a division of our “work life balance” touchy-feely department, the home of employment insurance compassionate leave benefits in Canada.
Instead we get, “Compassion this, you bloody serfs!”
(Whoops, gotta run. I hear the sound of hobnailed boots on my front porch and someone with a Bavarian accent asking for “Der-schweinhund-who-vorks-in-der-media-readen-writen-watchen-und-schpitzen-back-out-again department”.)
= = =
Criswell predicts!
Wondering where popular literature is heading, indeed has already arrived? Well wonder no more. (Here at Baby Duck, it is part of our mission to save you the trouble of wandering off to your nearest bulgiblioteque to peruse the shelves for yourself. Instead, this’ll save you the trouble.)
At a recent visit to a local monster bookstore -- whose name is the same as the divisions of a typical book – the first thing I encountered as I entered the store was a large display table festooned with books under a sign, “If you liked the Da Vinci Code, here are some other titles you will enjoy”. On the table was gathered what, I am sure, must have been every last book in the entire store that had the word “Jesus” or “Templar” or “Code” somewhere in its title or sub-title.
Turning from that to the adjacent “New in Paperback” shelf, the first novel I picked up – Kathy Reichs’ “Cross Bones” – included this cutline in the front cover small print: “A spirited rival to The Da Vinci Code!” On the same shelf, the very next novel I picked up also bore on its cover the scorching news, “Fast paced! Unfolds in the manner of The Da Vinci Code!” (You mean with a beginning, followed by a middle and concluding with an end?) Elsewhere in the store, I noticed a Guide to Da Vinci Tourism in the travel section, several “Da Vinci Code” and “Code”-like board games and even, imagine my surprise, books about Leonardo da Vinci in the art section!
Can “The Da Vinci Cooking Code” (Mona Pizza? The Fast Supper?) or a “Laughing with Leonardo” joke book be far behind? (How many Florentines does it take to screw in a lightbulb? None, Electricity hasn’t been invented yet! BWAAAAAHahahahahahahaha!)
= = =
I work in a windowed cubicle on an upper floor of a National Capital Region building that affords a nice view of the Ottawa River (I guess that’d be the Outaouais River on this side of the water) and the back of the National Library and Supreme Court of Canada, as well as the new National War Museum. None of which is relevant to the point of this comment except to note that a spider, by the time it gets this high above the street far below, has to be a rather large and especially robust species.
Call me squeamish, but there is something gut-churningly horrific in watching a spider that measures about two inches from leg tip to leg tip explode out of its corner nook to sweep over a hapless mayfly that has become snarled in its web. The motion of its charge caught my eye on a recent cloudy afternoon and it took all of 15 seconds for the arachnid to envelop the winged insect, spin it around half a dozen times to coil it up in webstrands, then drag it back to the top corner of the window frame where it, presumably, began snacking while it sat and waited for exactly that same sort of web-tickle to occur again.
Watching this little nature drama unfold just outside my window, all I could think of was that, “Help me… heeeelllllllllppp me…” final scene of the old Vincent Price classic B horror flick, “The Fly”, where the tiny half-fly / half-human is overwhelmed by the relentlessly advancing spider.
= = =
And while we’re on the subject of horrors of nature, we undertook a family camping excursion on the Canada Day Weekend. Lakeside campsite: $32 a night; small bag of firewood: $5; buying three folding chairs because we forgot our own at home: $45. Being far, far away from the nation’s capital during the annual Canada Day orgy: Priceless. (And yes, being a guy, I did relieve myself in the woods on a couple occasions. But no photographers were present.)
And I hasten to add that the simple fact of camping was not what I meant when I referred to the “horrors of nature”. Rather, it was early one morning as we were sitting at our site’s picnic table enjoying our first cup of coffee (Brief digression: my daughter now understands the metaphor, “sister-kisser”, because I used it several times to describe the questionable purpose of even bothering to brew de-caff coffee in a blue-enamelled steel coffee pot while camping) when I saw a flash of motion among the many tree trunks in the short stretch of woods that separated our site from the lakeshore. I almost dropped my mug when I realized it was a Great Blue Heron that was striding purposefully up the hill from the water. When we spotted him, he was already about 10 yards inland and still moving forward. Suddenly, he stopped and froze. This bird was enormous! For a few puzzled seconds, I had no idea what had brought him this far ashore.
As my wife and I watched, completely mesmerized (he was by now no more than a half dozen yards away), his head darted forward and down. A short, sharp, very urgent squeal was abruptly cut off by two snapped “clack-clack” sounds. Then the heron triumphantly lifted his head to reveal to us a newly-dead small red squirrel hanging from his long, sword-shaped beak. Then he turned and headed swiftly back down to the lake.
The next sound to enter this little drama of the wild was that of my wife’s and my jaws dropping simultaneously, punctuated by my, “Holy shit!” My wife at least had the presence of mind to grab the digital camera and stalk the avian hunter back to the shoreline where she caught this pretty darned good photo of predator and prey just seconds before the heron flew off with his catch:
Now a Great Blue Heron (which is so majestic, its name is rendered in Capital Letters even when spoken) is not an unusual sight in eastern Ontario and I have seen many in my lifetime, some even seen in the act of catching small fish at the edge of the lake or river where I have spotted them. But I have never, until that moment, been aware that a small mammal was on a heron’s menu. And in that, it seems I am not alone. Here, for example, is a note on the heron’s eating habits from the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology Animal Diversity website (http://animaldiversity.ummz.umich.edu/site/accounts/information/Ardea_herodias.html):
“Great blue herons fish in both the night and the day, with most of their activity occurring around dawn and dusk. Herons use their long legs to wade in shallow water and their sharp "spearlike" bills to catch their food. Great blue herons' diet consists of mainly fish, but also includes frogs, salamanders, lizards, snakes, birds, shrimps, crabs, crayfish, dragonflies, grasshoppers, and many other aquatic insects. Herons locate their food by sight and usually swallow it whole. Herons have been known to choke on prey that is too large. (Ferguson, 1998)”
I don’t even see mammals on that list, much less “terminally startled squirrels”. But “small mammals” does show up if you Google deeper into the enormous bird’s diet. Suffice to say we felt a kind of grisly, fascinated privilege in being permitted to view this rather harsh display of one little link in Ontario’s wildlife food chain on the shore of Sharbot Lake.
= = =
On a more sublime note, I am of the opinion that one of ornithology’s most egregious mistakes is in having allowed the official English language name of the bird genus “Gavia Immer” to be entered into the world’s bird rosters as “common loon”.
We had a family of loons – a male, a female and a fuzzy brown chick -- pay a twice-daily visit to the shoreline by our site, first in the early morning and again in the early evening. And there is nothing whatsoever that is “common” about these utterly stunning birds, including their fierce devotion as parents.
Our site was located at a small bay at one end of Sharbot Lake. It is calm even on windy days and its shore is, in parts, quite weedy and marshy – exactly the sort of thing a loon looks at as prime real estate. It’s clearly the time of year for mom and dad to be teaching Junior the ropes because Junior was just past the “ride on parent’s back” stage. Instead, the little one was happily bobbing around under the carefully watchful eyes of always at least one, often both of its parents.
We spent a considerable time watching our resident trio. Anyone familiar with the loon will already know that this bird often dives and remains underwater for as long as a couple minutes at a time, popping up several hundred yards from where it first dove. But with our little family, there were very few instances where both parents were underwater at the same time. In fact, I recall that happened only once, and Junior was bobbing solo for all of two seconds before the fishing parent re-appeared very near by.
There were also several occasions when the birds were disturbed by approaching paddlers or (I hesitate to use the word) boaters. (“Hesitate” because the craft in question was one of those damnable banes of the small Ontario lake, the Sea-Doo, or whatever of several imitators – all of them sounding like dirt-bikes on water – it might have spawned).
Even the well-intentioned canoeists obviously would find, as they quietly drifted towards the trio for a better look, that an invisible boundary of about 30 yards in diameter ringed the family. If they drifted too close, one of the birds would emit a relatively quiet, single-tone note that clearly serves as an advisory to the entire family to get ready. Then, if the canoe continued to drift even closer, the calling bird’s note changed to that classic throat-shaking vibrato call that is undoubtedly the source of the noun “loon” in the bird’s name. Then Zang! One bird disappears underwater and re-appears a few seconds later, farther away from the other parent with the chick, but still calling loudly and repeatedly, making itself the centre of attention, rather than the youngster. This took place several times in quick succession as the bird would duck, resurface and shrill its trademark “laugh”.
I have seen a land-based equivalent displayed by a delicate-looking little bird called the kildeer. When I was cycling across a field once, I was suddenly distracted by an adult bird that threw itself in my direction, beating about on one wing as though it were unable to fly, clearly trying to demonstrate to me that it was injured and, therefore, easy prey. I stopped and watched as the bird repeated its thrashings, each time moving slightly closer to me. Looking around, I spotted a quartet of barely visible babies, each looking like a small brown egg on stilts, not too far away from what I presumed was a well-concealed nest sited among some wild grass tufts in the field. My “Aha!” lightbulb clicked, so I slowly resumed pedalling towards the thrashing parent as she carefully steered me away from her brood. Then, when she got to what she obviously assumed was a “cancel red alert” distance, she soared into the air and made a wide circle before coming back to her nestlings from the other side. What else could I do but heartily applaud her magnificent performance?
To return to our aquatic visitors, without exception every canoeist we saw drew no closer when this lovely and noisy piece of theatre occurred. There’s something about a canoeist, I think, that carries an automatic respect for nature and a healthy admiration for the amount of work that a parent puts into defending its young. Once the canoeists were safely back outside the loon’s “intruder alert” radar, the diving, calling parent would duck one last time, to re-appear back among the remaining pair of its family. And here they are, as caught by my eagle-eyed (or perhaps, in this case, loon-lensed) photographer daughter, cropped by my equally adept spouse:
= = =
Finally, to close the circle of this entry where it began, here’s a parting shot at my department’s communication skills, this one from as far up the ladder you can go before you have to be elected to office and appointed a Minister:
We just received a department-wide e-mailed “Glad to be here” message from our new Deputy Minister. It included this short paragraph:
“I am excited to be part of such a dynamic department that impacts on the quality of life in Canada. The policies, programs and services of this department touch Canadians throughout their lives. It is a privilege to be part of a department that is responsible for so many of the supports that enable Canadians to access the opportunities of this great country and fulfill their potential.”
As long-time readers of this whine – and particularly members of my own immediate, long-suffering family – will correctly have concluded, the enverbiating of “impacts” and “access” a mere 44 words apart just delighted me, oh, let me tell you.
I could also go on a rant about the fact that this paragraph consists of three sentences that all say exactly the same thing: “Gee whillikers, I'm happy to be working in a department that gives money to Canadians.”
But I won’t. (The sighs of reader relief are noted.)
In fact, recalling this couplet from the Cantate Domino, “As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen”, from this day forward let’s just accept the fact that I work as a communicator for a government department home to many communicators who communicate – and probably will forever continue to do so – in often appallingly bad language. And let’s agree that I'll try to inflict them upon y’all no more. Doing so is getting to be like writing, “The sun rose again this morning.” (But it is my blog and I do reserve the right to insert an especially stupid or laughable example at some future date. But given the norm recently on display here, you just know anything that makes the cut in future is going to be worth it.)
Besides, now that I’ve discovered how easy it is to upload photos on Blogger, finding much more interesting stuff to whine about, or applaud, should be easy!
À la prochaine...
(Sing the following in your best “Chairman of the Board” voice. Repeat as required.)
“It seems to me I’ve heard that song before.
It’s from an old familiar score.
I know it well – that melody.”
(I’ve actually been doing some navel gazing about the growing number of my work-related communications howls of outrage appearing in this place. I think it boils down to my being doubly irritated by the simple fact that the people who produce these messages, are, like me, supposedly trained and hired to work as communicators. And frankly, it offends my professional training and my efforts to adhere to my job description that they are allowed to unleash this stuff on a public – or on subordinates and co-workers – who don’t deserve such shabby treatment. For me, it’s becoming an almost daily mutter to wonder where the devil the “Edit” function has gone in the senior offices in our department. We still have a unit labelled “Quality Control”, but the growing number of glaring abuses of The Mother Tongue has led me to view the mere fact of its existence as laughably oxymoronic. But I digress.)
So, (deep breath) continuing with my seemingly endless litany of spluttered complaints about the quality of messages put out by people in or near my government department who really should know better, here’s another. (With this most recent missile, I am seriously beginning to wonder if my department has been taken over by the Boys from Brazil.)
We received a system-wide memorandum about an unauthorized bit of software that apparently has been downloaded by some employees. The memo included the following bit of gentle phrasing:
“Due to a significant security vulnerability to the Departmental network, your Client Technical Services (CTS) teams have been instructed, starting immediately, to remove the free downloadable software, WinAmp, when it is found on Departmental workstations. Reports will be generated and any workstations with this software installed will be identified, WinAmp will be removed, and each case will be reported to the proper authorities. Under no circumstances is this software to be re-installed by any user of the Departmental Network.”
Text like, “reports will be generated…” and “each case will be reported to the proper authorities” sounds to me like something lifted straight from the script of movies like “Casablanca”, (“Round up the usual suspects!”) or “Lives of a Bengal Lancer” (“We have ways to make men talk… Little bamboo slivers… not much to look at, but when driven under the fingernails and set alight…”) except spoken with a very thick German accent. (Try channelling Otto Preminger in “Stalag 17” or Erich von Stroheim in “Sunset Boulevard”.)
What bothers me most about this message is its implicit assumption that anyone with the offending program on his or her computer must have brought it aboard solely for the purpose of sabotaging this vital network, without which a quarter of a million Canadians might not receive their first Conservative government child care cheques on time.
As a totally programming-unschooled computer user who more than once has been advised by my computer, “You need to install the Thunderbolt-Humungo-TorrentStream Player 2007 to view this file. Do you wish to download it now?” and pushed the “Oh why not?” button, I can see that if the damned program does exist on my workstation, or on anyone else’s, more than likely it was downloaded with no more intent than to enable someone to view some highly creative Swedish commercial for Saab Turbo-photocopiers, or some such thing, that a co-worker sent along for one’s brief amusement.
The “guilty until proven innocent” tone of the message almost makes me think that it was composed by someone working in my local union office, not a person working in a division of our “work life balance” touchy-feely department, the home of employment insurance compassionate leave benefits in Canada.
Instead we get, “Compassion this, you bloody serfs!”
(Whoops, gotta run. I hear the sound of hobnailed boots on my front porch and someone with a Bavarian accent asking for “Der-schweinhund-who-vorks-in-der-media-readen-writen-watchen-und-schpitzen-back-out-again department”.)
= = =
Criswell predicts!
Wondering where popular literature is heading, indeed has already arrived? Well wonder no more. (Here at Baby Duck, it is part of our mission to save you the trouble of wandering off to your nearest bulgiblioteque to peruse the shelves for yourself. Instead, this’ll save you the trouble.)
At a recent visit to a local monster bookstore -- whose name is the same as the divisions of a typical book – the first thing I encountered as I entered the store was a large display table festooned with books under a sign, “If you liked the Da Vinci Code, here are some other titles you will enjoy”. On the table was gathered what, I am sure, must have been every last book in the entire store that had the word “Jesus” or “Templar” or “Code” somewhere in its title or sub-title.
Turning from that to the adjacent “New in Paperback” shelf, the first novel I picked up – Kathy Reichs’ “Cross Bones” – included this cutline in the front cover small print: “A spirited rival to The Da Vinci Code!” On the same shelf, the very next novel I picked up also bore on its cover the scorching news, “Fast paced! Unfolds in the manner of The Da Vinci Code!” (You mean with a beginning, followed by a middle and concluding with an end?) Elsewhere in the store, I noticed a Guide to Da Vinci Tourism in the travel section, several “Da Vinci Code” and “Code”-like board games and even, imagine my surprise, books about Leonardo da Vinci in the art section!
Can “The Da Vinci Cooking Code” (Mona Pizza? The Fast Supper?) or a “Laughing with Leonardo” joke book be far behind? (How many Florentines does it take to screw in a lightbulb? None, Electricity hasn’t been invented yet! BWAAAAAHahahahahahahaha!)
= = =
I work in a windowed cubicle on an upper floor of a National Capital Region building that affords a nice view of the Ottawa River (I guess that’d be the Outaouais River on this side of the water) and the back of the National Library and Supreme Court of Canada, as well as the new National War Museum. None of which is relevant to the point of this comment except to note that a spider, by the time it gets this high above the street far below, has to be a rather large and especially robust species.
Call me squeamish, but there is something gut-churningly horrific in watching a spider that measures about two inches from leg tip to leg tip explode out of its corner nook to sweep over a hapless mayfly that has become snarled in its web. The motion of its charge caught my eye on a recent cloudy afternoon and it took all of 15 seconds for the arachnid to envelop the winged insect, spin it around half a dozen times to coil it up in webstrands, then drag it back to the top corner of the window frame where it, presumably, began snacking while it sat and waited for exactly that same sort of web-tickle to occur again.
Watching this little nature drama unfold just outside my window, all I could think of was that, “Help me… heeeelllllllllppp me…” final scene of the old Vincent Price classic B horror flick, “The Fly”, where the tiny half-fly / half-human is overwhelmed by the relentlessly advancing spider.
= = =
And while we’re on the subject of horrors of nature, we undertook a family camping excursion on the Canada Day Weekend. Lakeside campsite: $32 a night; small bag of firewood: $5; buying three folding chairs because we forgot our own at home: $45. Being far, far away from the nation’s capital during the annual Canada Day orgy: Priceless. (And yes, being a guy, I did relieve myself in the woods on a couple occasions. But no photographers were present.)
And I hasten to add that the simple fact of camping was not what I meant when I referred to the “horrors of nature”. Rather, it was early one morning as we were sitting at our site’s picnic table enjoying our first cup of coffee (Brief digression: my daughter now understands the metaphor, “sister-kisser”, because I used it several times to describe the questionable purpose of even bothering to brew de-caff coffee in a blue-enamelled steel coffee pot while camping) when I saw a flash of motion among the many tree trunks in the short stretch of woods that separated our site from the lakeshore. I almost dropped my mug when I realized it was a Great Blue Heron that was striding purposefully up the hill from the water. When we spotted him, he was already about 10 yards inland and still moving forward. Suddenly, he stopped and froze. This bird was enormous! For a few puzzled seconds, I had no idea what had brought him this far ashore.
As my wife and I watched, completely mesmerized (he was by now no more than a half dozen yards away), his head darted forward and down. A short, sharp, very urgent squeal was abruptly cut off by two snapped “clack-clack” sounds. Then the heron triumphantly lifted his head to reveal to us a newly-dead small red squirrel hanging from his long, sword-shaped beak. Then he turned and headed swiftly back down to the lake.
The next sound to enter this little drama of the wild was that of my wife’s and my jaws dropping simultaneously, punctuated by my, “Holy shit!” My wife at least had the presence of mind to grab the digital camera and stalk the avian hunter back to the shoreline where she caught this pretty darned good photo of predator and prey just seconds before the heron flew off with his catch:
Now a Great Blue Heron (which is so majestic, its name is rendered in Capital Letters even when spoken) is not an unusual sight in eastern Ontario and I have seen many in my lifetime, some even seen in the act of catching small fish at the edge of the lake or river where I have spotted them. But I have never, until that moment, been aware that a small mammal was on a heron’s menu. And in that, it seems I am not alone. Here, for example, is a note on the heron’s eating habits from the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology Animal Diversity website (http://animaldiversity.ummz.umich.edu/site/accounts/information/Ardea_herodias.html):
“Great blue herons fish in both the night and the day, with most of their activity occurring around dawn and dusk. Herons use their long legs to wade in shallow water and their sharp "spearlike" bills to catch their food. Great blue herons' diet consists of mainly fish, but also includes frogs, salamanders, lizards, snakes, birds, shrimps, crabs, crayfish, dragonflies, grasshoppers, and many other aquatic insects. Herons locate their food by sight and usually swallow it whole. Herons have been known to choke on prey that is too large. (Ferguson, 1998)”
I don’t even see mammals on that list, much less “terminally startled squirrels”. But “small mammals” does show up if you Google deeper into the enormous bird’s diet. Suffice to say we felt a kind of grisly, fascinated privilege in being permitted to view this rather harsh display of one little link in Ontario’s wildlife food chain on the shore of Sharbot Lake.
= = =
On a more sublime note, I am of the opinion that one of ornithology’s most egregious mistakes is in having allowed the official English language name of the bird genus “Gavia Immer” to be entered into the world’s bird rosters as “common loon”.
We had a family of loons – a male, a female and a fuzzy brown chick -- pay a twice-daily visit to the shoreline by our site, first in the early morning and again in the early evening. And there is nothing whatsoever that is “common” about these utterly stunning birds, including their fierce devotion as parents.
Our site was located at a small bay at one end of Sharbot Lake. It is calm even on windy days and its shore is, in parts, quite weedy and marshy – exactly the sort of thing a loon looks at as prime real estate. It’s clearly the time of year for mom and dad to be teaching Junior the ropes because Junior was just past the “ride on parent’s back” stage. Instead, the little one was happily bobbing around under the carefully watchful eyes of always at least one, often both of its parents.
We spent a considerable time watching our resident trio. Anyone familiar with the loon will already know that this bird often dives and remains underwater for as long as a couple minutes at a time, popping up several hundred yards from where it first dove. But with our little family, there were very few instances where both parents were underwater at the same time. In fact, I recall that happened only once, and Junior was bobbing solo for all of two seconds before the fishing parent re-appeared very near by.
There were also several occasions when the birds were disturbed by approaching paddlers or (I hesitate to use the word) boaters. (“Hesitate” because the craft in question was one of those damnable banes of the small Ontario lake, the Sea-Doo, or whatever of several imitators – all of them sounding like dirt-bikes on water – it might have spawned).
Even the well-intentioned canoeists obviously would find, as they quietly drifted towards the trio for a better look, that an invisible boundary of about 30 yards in diameter ringed the family. If they drifted too close, one of the birds would emit a relatively quiet, single-tone note that clearly serves as an advisory to the entire family to get ready. Then, if the canoe continued to drift even closer, the calling bird’s note changed to that classic throat-shaking vibrato call that is undoubtedly the source of the noun “loon” in the bird’s name. Then Zang! One bird disappears underwater and re-appears a few seconds later, farther away from the other parent with the chick, but still calling loudly and repeatedly, making itself the centre of attention, rather than the youngster. This took place several times in quick succession as the bird would duck, resurface and shrill its trademark “laugh”.
I have seen a land-based equivalent displayed by a delicate-looking little bird called the kildeer. When I was cycling across a field once, I was suddenly distracted by an adult bird that threw itself in my direction, beating about on one wing as though it were unable to fly, clearly trying to demonstrate to me that it was injured and, therefore, easy prey. I stopped and watched as the bird repeated its thrashings, each time moving slightly closer to me. Looking around, I spotted a quartet of barely visible babies, each looking like a small brown egg on stilts, not too far away from what I presumed was a well-concealed nest sited among some wild grass tufts in the field. My “Aha!” lightbulb clicked, so I slowly resumed pedalling towards the thrashing parent as she carefully steered me away from her brood. Then, when she got to what she obviously assumed was a “cancel red alert” distance, she soared into the air and made a wide circle before coming back to her nestlings from the other side. What else could I do but heartily applaud her magnificent performance?
To return to our aquatic visitors, without exception every canoeist we saw drew no closer when this lovely and noisy piece of theatre occurred. There’s something about a canoeist, I think, that carries an automatic respect for nature and a healthy admiration for the amount of work that a parent puts into defending its young. Once the canoeists were safely back outside the loon’s “intruder alert” radar, the diving, calling parent would duck one last time, to re-appear back among the remaining pair of its family. And here they are, as caught by my eagle-eyed (or perhaps, in this case, loon-lensed) photographer daughter, cropped by my equally adept spouse:
= = =
Finally, to close the circle of this entry where it began, here’s a parting shot at my department’s communication skills, this one from as far up the ladder you can go before you have to be elected to office and appointed a Minister:
We just received a department-wide e-mailed “Glad to be here” message from our new Deputy Minister. It included this short paragraph:
“I am excited to be part of such a dynamic department that impacts on the quality of life in Canada. The policies, programs and services of this department touch Canadians throughout their lives. It is a privilege to be part of a department that is responsible for so many of the supports that enable Canadians to access the opportunities of this great country and fulfill their potential.”
As long-time readers of this whine – and particularly members of my own immediate, long-suffering family – will correctly have concluded, the enverbiating of “impacts” and “access” a mere 44 words apart just delighted me, oh, let me tell you.
I could also go on a rant about the fact that this paragraph consists of three sentences that all say exactly the same thing: “Gee whillikers, I'm happy to be working in a department that gives money to Canadians.”
But I won’t. (The sighs of reader relief are noted.)
In fact, recalling this couplet from the Cantate Domino, “As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen”, from this day forward let’s just accept the fact that I work as a communicator for a government department home to many communicators who communicate – and probably will forever continue to do so – in often appallingly bad language. And let’s agree that I'll try to inflict them upon y’all no more. Doing so is getting to be like writing, “The sun rose again this morning.” (But it is my blog and I do reserve the right to insert an especially stupid or laughable example at some future date. But given the norm recently on display here, you just know anything that makes the cut in future is going to be worth it.)
Besides, now that I’ve discovered how easy it is to upload photos on Blogger, finding much more interesting stuff to whine about, or applaud, should be easy!
À la prochaine...
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