Recently yours truly and spouse went toilet shopping. There is, in Ottawa, a magnificently well-stocked hardware store that calls to mind the glory days before “hardware” became the domain of the impersonal big box giants like RONA and Home Depot. Preston Hardware, probably because it is physically located in the heart of Ottawa’s Little Italy community, which in turn is home to countless ceramic tradesmen and plumbing specialists who no doubt apprenticed to grandfathers who learned their trades in the Old Country, actually has a Bath Showroom. (Little Italy is also heavily populated by home winemakers and, on the day we were there, an enormous section of the warehouse was given over to literally tons of crated wine grapes in the process of being moved out into basements all over the Roman expatriates’ community.)
We had already done a preliminary online search and had seen a model called a Cimarron, made by a company called Kohler. And it turns out that the Cimarron, when we gave a Preston Hardware customer rep a general description of the features we were looking for, was the very first one he showed us.
It’s hard to listen to a toilet salesman talk up its features without snickering. We were even invited to “try it out” when he talked to us about its “comfort” features. (I toyed with the idea of dropping my pants in mid-showroom – given that one is usually in that configuration when using the fixture at home – but fortunately that “toying” lasted all of about half a second.)
There was a pregnant pause while he referred to the larger diameter water inflow pipe that ensured the… [pause]… “waste” is more effectively carried off. He also referred to the larger diameter of the seat that, he said (and this is a direct quote), “lets you get at all your bits more easily”.
Ohhhh-kay.
But you have to admit, doesn’t that look like something Enzo Ferrari had his engineers whip up on their lunch hours?Something you don’t truly appreciate in toilet design until you see something like this in a showroom is that clearly, the outside of a one-piece toilet is going to be infinitely easier to keep clean than the standard two-piece toilet where the tank is mounted separately atop the rear of the bowl and creates a bunch of hard-to-scrub nooks and crannies. As much as a toilet can be, the Cimarron is a really sleek work of toilet design. All smooth curves with no hard angles or narrow gaps between one part and another.
Another feature (I never even knew a toilet could do this!) is that if the seat or lid, or both, accidentally slip as you’re lowering them (something that usually only happens at 3am when the last thing you want resonating through your home is a house-wide slam that inevitably is amplified by the bell-shaped bowl into an echoing boom), a – for want of a better word – brake takes hold and gently lowers the seat and lid to the porcelain, where they meet soundlessly.
So impressed were we that we bought and have already taken delivery of two of these commodious Cadillacs and, at this writing, they sit in our garage awaiting installation.
= = =
Memo to Lynn Johnson… maybe you could revisit the “Comic” part of "Comic strip".
Background: I have met and spent a full day in the company of “For Better or for Worse” comic strip author and artist Lynn Johnson. She is probably one of the nicest people in the business and all too happy to return to the world some measure of the rewards she has earned through her daily syndicated comic strip. (As a memento of that day, I have a large, board-mounted poster of one of her cartoons over which she has written, “To Mike: For Better or Perverse”, and signed it. It’s a long story.) So the following, therefore, is not meant to disparage Lynn the person.
That being said, is it really necessary to inject yet another hammering reminder into your comic strip that people die? As I write this, she has just introduced what appears to be the quiet passing of the father of the strip’s lead character, Elly Patterson. Long-time followers of “For Better or for Worse” will recall other deaths and reality bites that have found their way into her strip: the heroic death of the family’s first sheepdog, Farley; the revelation that Lawrence, a friend of Elly’s son, Michael, is gay; the death of at least a couple of peripheral old folks, including Grandma Marian, Elly’s mother; the sexual assault of one of Elly’s daughters at her workplace.
And none without plaudits. Lynn has been hailed for both the courage and compassion she showed when she dealt with any of these storylines. But c’mon, do you really want to be known as the comic strip artist who reduced a continent to tears when you killed off your strip’s beloved family dog? (Lynn would happily answer yes. Her strip is about life, she would say, and dealing with life means dealing with its end.) And so now (at this writing) we seem to be on the verge of suffering the death of Elly’s Dad, her kids’ Grandpa Jim, and the strip’s long-suffering source of countless glib observations on things that bug and amuse senior citizens. He’s even got his own link on the strip’s website that chronicles his service in the Royal Canadian Air Force, including black-and-white photos of the aircraft he worked on while serving during the war.
At times like this in the life of this strip, I think it’s a little too real. A comic strip is, for me, a momentary escape from the realities of life, not one more reinforcement that eventually we are all bound for the destination that Hollywood's Woody Guthrie bio-pic called simply “Glory”, and which William Shakespeare describes thus:
“We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots. Your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service – two dishes, but to one table. That's the end.”
(Hamlet, Act IV, Sc 3)
Lynn herself has let it be known that she intends to draw (no pun intended) the curtain on the strip one day not too far off, perhaps as early as 2007. I just hope she’s not pulling a Blackadder on us and is intending to eliminate of every last one of the For Better or for Worse characters between now and then.
= = =
And finally, memo to Jan Wong…
Jan Wong is a well known and quite-well-regarded-by-many writer who likely will forever be first remembered for a series of columns she wrote for the Globe and Mail under the title and theme, “Lunch with Jan Wong”. In it, she recounted interviews – and food orders – savoured with a wide variety of celebrities held over (no surprises for guessing) a lunch table. Recently, in the wake of the Dawson College shootings in Montreal, she wrote a column in which she (according to the same Globe and Mail) “suggested Quebec's francophone culture may have contributed to the Dawson College shootings” and that shooters like the Dawson College killer and Marc Lépine, the man pulling the trigger in the 1989 École Polytechnique massacre “were people of foreign background, not 'pure laine' Quebecers, and their anti-social behaviour stemmed from their disaffection with Quebec society and its reluctance to welcome outsiders”.
The column drew the rather unusual response of sternly critical letters from both the Premier of Quebec, Jean Charest, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
Ms Wong then took it one step further and wrote a second column, in which she claimed the political heavyweights’ missives had been “crass” and “opportunistic” attempts at securing votes in the province. Said the writer, "In Stephen Harper's case, judging from his letter, I don't think he actually read the article. I think that they want votes in Quebec and they see this as a cheap and easy way to get it. Dump on a journalist." She then went to a place I thought people only go after they have exhausted all reasonable argument – she bleated racism: "’In a way, I think it might prove what I was trying to get at. I mean I'm a Quebecer,’ Wong said.” "Of course when this happens, I'm not. I'm actually one of those people in the middle that I was talking about. So, all a sudden I'm Asian."
Now admittedly that is a fairly lengthy introduction to what, as it turns out, is a pretty pithy little observation about who’s really being crass, because the article about Ms Wong concludes with this Catch 22: “Wong refused to discuss the content of her piece. ‘I didn't want to talk about what I wrote because what I wrote is out there.’ ‘If people don't want to agree, that's fine. I welcome a debate.’” (Globe and Mail online, Fri, 22 Sep 2006)
At what point, I wondered, do “I didn't want to talk about what I wrote” and “I welcome a debate” intersect? Well, it’s like this – they don’t.
So... oh yes, my memo:
Have a nice lunch, Ms Wong. Preferably somewhere else.
Until next time…
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