It was great, but you’ll have to trust me on this because on his September 19 comedy “fake news” show, “The Daily Show”, Jon Stewart did this brilliantly comical piece about the recent explosion of anger in the Muslim community, and its…
So rather than incur a web-wide condemnation as a plagiarist (even though mine was in draft form before Stewart’s was aired), I have voluntarily canned the brilliantly comical post I had all set about the recent explosion of anger in the Muslim community, and its…
Because nothing flies faster through the Internet than worldwide condemnation.
I will give Stewart one up for a zing I hadn’t thought of. He replayed video of a key section of the Pope’s speech (at the University of Regensburg) that triggered the rage, then added his own observation to the effect that for slamming another religion, there’s nothing that beats doing it in German.
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I’m afraid I’m wasting your tax dollars at the start of every working day. Here’s how:
I am part of a unit that appears every morning at a meeting called “QRT”. Depending on whom you ask, it stands for either Quick Response Team or Quick Response Time. Its goal is to review anything that has lit up in that day’s morning media coverage that might blow up in a Minister’s face during Question Period later in the day.
For me (and this is where your wasted tax dollars come in), there is a significant problem in that the entire rest of the QRT team speaks French, often from beginning to end of the meeting.
Now I have a not-bad grasp of French vocabulary, and I am able to get hold of what’s being said – or what’s been written – en français, so long as I can hear the words articulated, or read them on paper. But francophones speak exactly the same way as do anglophones. Sometimes in slang, sometimes in a very low voice, sometimes “mumbly”, and sometimes two or more people at the same time. None of those circumstances is conducive to hearing the vocabulary. So I find that after a few minutes, the meeting’s chat begins to wash past me as alien sound. (Kind of like this blog… right? But I digress.)
I live in quiet fear that I’ll be distracted from the lulling drone one day and asked a question, like a truant high schooler caught in class with homework incomplete. Recently, for example, one of the news stories under discussion was about Coast Guard workers whose shifts include time spent bouncing all over the ocean in those inflatable Zodiac boats. They’ve complained about repetitive strain-induced back injuries, which defaults it to one of our files – occupational health and safety. And even though the news clipping was published in English, it was being discussed in our other official language. And I can just imagine what would have happened had I suddenly been thrown a question. As everyone turned to look expectantly at me, I would have blinked a couple times, mentally swirled myself back into a swift recollection of the recent tonalities that entered my brain, greenlighted on “Zodiac” and replied, “Uhhhh… Gemini”.
Like I said, I’m wasting your tax dollars.
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One of the nice things about actually being read is that occasionally a BD regular will drop a note in reply to something he or she read here. 1. In the wake of my previous entry’s note that left up in the air the name for a seven-book sequence (that is, the seven-book equivalent of the three-book “trilogy”), a friend wrote to advise it is called a “heptalogy”, and sure enough, Google’s “define” feature even cites Narnia in this reference from Answers.com, which sources Wikipedia (And you just know it’s official when it opens, “An heptalogy…”):
“Heptalogy: An heptalogy is a set of seven works of art that comprise a common storyline. Trilogies and Tetralogies are the most common, and the only heptalogies known to general audiences are the Harry Potter series of books and the Chronicles of Narnia. Another well-known heptalogy is Stephen King's Dark Tower. (This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors.)”
2. In the wake of the same entry’s recollection of a long-ago visit to Oxford’s Eagle and Child pub (“The Bird ‘n’ Baby”), another friend and BD regular recounted a spectacularly serendipitous experience he and his wife had in that same city once. It began with their waiting streetside to flag a cab to take them to Magdalen College to do some research into the writings and theology of CS Lewis.
As things transpired, the cabbie who stopped immediately recognized them as tourists and, when they offered the information about why they were heading to Magdalen, he promptly informed them he was not just a cabbie, he was currently serving as the President of Oxford’s CS Lewis Society. Their day became a full-blown Lewis / Tolkien and the Inklings tour of Oxford as they wound up visiting their respective homes, their graves and many Oxford sites they touched in some way (and yes, there was time for a pint at The Bird ‘n’ Baby), all the while getting a voluminous running commentary about Lewis the man and Lewis the theologian. At the end of it all, the cabbie allowed as how he had also enjoyed the day so much, he wasn’t going to charge his passengers. (But I have nothing if not classy friends. They thanked him with a generous payment anyway, and asked him, if he wouldn’t accept it for himself as a thank you for what he had just treated them to, that he extend a complimentary ride offer to the next couple fares he picked up while once again wearing his “cabbie” hat. Somewhere in Oxford now, there’s a probably-retired cabbie with a very good impression of Canadian tourists.)
Baby Duck… sharing more than just a cheap whine among friends.
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And finally… I think this is very much a sign (a) of the times, and (b) of just how far I’ve moved behind the times, because it actually took me several minutes to connect the dots and relate the sign’s message to an actual need for its being there in the first place.
By way of a brief bit of background, our office complex, as I think I’ve mentioned before, is a four-tower conglomeration called Place du Portage (Phase I through IV). Sandwiched between two of them (III and IV) is a not-too-ugly, generously treed and picnic-tabled courtyard that almost everyone in our department knows as the “L’escale Courtyard”, because a tremendously busy little coffee / lunch counter (L’escale)’s exit sits right beside a doorway into the courtyard. Another side of the courtyard is separated by an imposing wooden fence from a children’s play area that belongs to a day-care centre located in the complex. (It is also home to one of the single most puzzling sculptures I’ve ever seen – a series of ordinary objects like a chair, a table and a couple of odd symbolic representations of something or other, each mounted on a steel pole that has them all about 15 feet off the ground.)
To the sign. It’s a new addition to the courtyard and, in both English and French, says exactly this:
(I have an especially brilliant colleague who took about 30 seconds to make these links to what took me a good five minutes before my own mental “Aha!” light went on.)
- Trees attract squirrels.
- Picnic tables attract lunchers.
- Lunchers also attract squirrels.
- Squirrels, especially in the Fall when their tiny psyches are focused as much as, if not more so, on storing as they are on eating, are frequently given nuts or bread that a well-intentioned luncher might have brought in to provide himself a bit of lunchtime entertainment (and the squirrels a bit of lunch). But instead of eating the freebies, the soon-to-be snowbound rodents will often seek out hiding places for them instead.
- A big wooden fence that separates people from lots of hiding places – a large sandbox, for example – is going to seem to squirrels like an ideal place to cache nuts. (The play area is also home to patches of grass along its edges in which squirrels can dig.)
So here’s my theory: an energetic – and allergic – child recently dug up one such buried squirrel treasure, and that was the trigger for the rather convoluted string of dots that connects kids to allergies to animals that are fed by other people in the courtyard. And hence this somewhat circuitous admonition's appearance in our courtyard.
And the fact that it -- and this explanation -- have now found their way into this forum’s rambling paragraphs sure makes it an effective message, wouldn’cha say?
A la prochaine.
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