TriumphAnt

Happy New Year!

One of my New Year’s goals (I can hardly call it a resolution, because the likelihood of its being realized is none too strong) is to become smarter.

Because…

1. My wife is smarter than I am.

Santa, indeed, was most happily compliant this year in delivering to me a small but necessary piece of electronics called a “pre-amp”, that sits between my record turntable and my computer, providing the power necessary for my LP records’ music to be “heard” by my computer’s digital recording software. This is a necessary process if I am ever to convert my records to an alternative medium like a CD.

After several long hours of fiddling with the various ports on the back of my computer, and fiddling, too, with the resident automatic sound level-setting features of the software program I am trying to learn, I was still being told the hook-up had failed to connect. But I was also bound and determined to avoid reaching the point I have reached in the past with over-optimistically named plug-and-play hardware. (Readers will recall, for example, my recent experience with an iPod that resulted in my passing it along to my wife, rather than pulverizing it on my concrete garage floor in a fit of frustration.)

Fortunately, in this case, my wife has no use for a pre-amp and thus, the option of passing it along to her simply isn’t there.

So I asked for her patient assistance after my software informed me – for about the 50th time – that it was still faithfully “searching for the audio from the turntable”, and still faithfully unable to hear so much as a single plucked guitar string.

In very short order, my wife looked at my hook-up and asked, in all innocence, “Shouldn’t the wires from the turntable to the pre-amp connect to its [the pre-amp’s] ‘Line in’, and the wires running from the pre-amp come from its ‘Line out’ port?”

Being a guy, I realized I had just been asked the equivalent of “Is it plugged in?” “Of course they should.” I replied.

Well of course they weren’t. Somewhere in the course of hooking up the pre-amp, I had reversed both my brain and the line-in-line-out links, in the process immediately deleting that simple correction process as a factor in trying to figure out why the software wasn’t finding a signal. Because there’s no way I would have done anything that dumb. Right?

Right?

Sigh.

It took about seven seconds to make the swap and immediately my software’s sound level indicators leapt across my monitor in response to each note of the music emanating from the record.

Up next… I ask my wife for help tying my shoes and she informs me that they have velcro fasteners.

= = =

2. A longtime good friend of mine is smarter than I am.

About a year ago, I received an e-mail out of the blue. The subject line was addressing me by a nickname I hadn’t heard for about 40 years, followed by “Is that you?” It was a message from a guy I last knew when he and his family lived right next door to us while my Dad was stationed at RCAF Station St Hubert, Quebec. After a brief exchange of “Holy cow, what the heck are you up to?” messages, we met at a local pub and swapped stories for more than two hours.

It turned out he had tripped over my name in the departmental e-mail directory and decided to send me the message. Now I realize that it might seem unlikely to have missed each other for the past few years while both of us were working for the same government department, but consider that our department has a population about the same as the entire City of London, Ontario and we’re scattered across not only several buildings in Ottawa and Gatineau, but also in lots of regional offices all across Canada.

Fast forward to a recent day when I received another message from him, suggesting that we get together once again. Then he really surprised me by describing in his message a person he sees almost every morning on his walk to work, and the time of day and location when and where he sees this person. But absent even a flicker of recognition from that person (you just know where this going, don’t you?) he had steadfastly refrained from extending a greeting.

And so once again, he asked me by e-mail, “Is that you?” And after reviewing the time of day and location in his message, I realized that of course it is. And the very next morning, there he was. Again. And this time we stopped and said hello to one another.

For my part, I could only plead the fact that, on a typical morning at about 7:15 am, I am sufficiently alert to remember no more than that “walking” is accomplished by placing one foot in front of the other. Later, some 10 ounces of black African dark roast coffee later, I am capable of more direct (a) recollection and (b) communication.

And despite his follow-up message that included the line, “What a couple of nimrods we are,” I know he meant just me.

And he’d be right.

= = =

3. My boss is smarter than I am.

When we greeted each other after returning to work on Tuesday the 2nd, he told me he had just “opened the TV” (a common francophone rendition of the many English verb options employed to describe the process of switching on an electric appliance or light) to discover that former US President Gerald Ford had died. I was frankly astonished to discover that he hadn’t viewed a moment of news coverage since he left the office before Christmas. I had always assumed that passive media monitoring ruled his life, even when he is officially “off duty”. (I confess I had occasionally dialed in a news channel just to provide some noise when I was in a “puttering around” mode during this year’s holiday.)

As everyone likely recalls, there were in fact three newsworthy deaths of note all within days of each other over the Christmas holiday period.

I found great amusement in watching the near schizophrenic turns exhibited by the more rabid US newsreaders and they wrenched their faces around in search of the appropriate expression to use to describe, often as items 1, 2, 3 of the same newscast, the latest information about each of the three competing passings that commanded much of the holiday headline news: James Brown, Gerald Ford, and Saddam Hussein.

The former required an “entertainment level” of respect – that’d be on the order of: “We’re sorry he’s gone, but let’s applaud a wonderful body of work.” (And with James Brown, most people are really hard-pressed to name anything other than “AooooWWWWW – I feel GOOD!”) Now granted, that dutiful combination of respect and celebration also was occasionally conveyed with a facial expression that combined shock and outright puzzlement – of the type normally reserved for passing a massive roadside trainwreck – when the “reclusive King of Pop”, Michael Jackson, stepped to the microphone and lamented Mr Brown’s death with his (Jackson’s) three-octaves-higher-than-normal, “And I love you very much.”

Gerald Ford-related coverage required that the newsreader look respectful, pensive, especially when he or she repeated the late President’s signature quote: “Our long national nightmare is over.” Bonus points for avoiding an obvious onscreen look that said, “Oh Lord, I can’t wait until the first President to follow the current one uses the same quote!”

And as for Hussein, just about anything without smugness would pass for objectivity. (For my part, I screamed at my doorstep Globe and Mail the day it arrived with its third consecutive front-page, “The last moments of Saddam Hussein’s life” article, complete with photo. But that’s probably just me.)

And in the occasional newscast where coverage of all three led the line-up, watching the newsreader get whiplash in the transition from one facial expression to another was far more fun than this one lowly media analyst should be allowed to have while watching TV news.

= = =

But all’s not gloomy on the subject of who’s smarter than whom. The good news is that I’m still way smarter than the Canadian government.

Anyone following the news round about November 11 just this past year might recall that considerable pressure was put on the Canadian government to hold a state funeral for the last veteran of World War I. (One presumes that’ll only happen after he dies, but never underestimate stupidity. But I digress.) At last count, there were officially three left; all are over 100 years old; the oldest is 107. After receiving a petition with over 100,000 names on it calling for a state funeral, the government acquiesced. On November 21, Canada’s Parliament voted unanimously to hold a state funeral. So the balls are in the air; the game is afoot. The nation begins to wonder who will be the lucky “winner” in the macabre last-man-to-die-gets-a-state-funeral lottery. Nothing will be held back. Everything has been taken into consideration.

Let’s see, is there absolutely anything else we should have thought of? Anything?

(from the CBC website / cbc.ca):
“First World War veterans don't want state funeral
(Last Updated: Tuesday, January 2, 2007 | 12:07 PM ET)
The Canadian government has agreed to hold a state funeral for the last First World War veteran to die, but none of the three veterans still living wants a state funeral.”

Oh.

= = =

Random quote.

In a recent New York Times op-ed, author Paul Theroux, I thought, resonates globally with this description of contemporary America:

“We are passing through a confused period of aggression and fear, characterized by our confrontational government, the decline of diplomacy, a pugnacious foreign policy and a settled belief that the surest way to get people to tell the truth is to torture them. (And by the way, ‘water boarding’ was a torture technique at the worst of the Khmer Rouge prisons.) It is no wonder we have begun to squint at strangers. This is a corrosive situation in a country where more and more people, most of them strangers, are a feature of daily life. Americans as a people I believe to be easygoing, compassionate, not looking for a fight. But surely I am not the only one who has noticed that we are ruder, more offhand, readier to take offense, a nation of shouters and blamers.” (“America the Overfull”, December 31, 2006)

The next step is to find someone who can just as effectively articulate a solution. Part 3 involves convincing everyone to adopt it. (Somehow, I have a feeling it will have to be something other than, “Kill all the infidels”.)

= = =

And finally, “Taps”, if you will. A last, lingering note on the current events topic of celebrity farewells. Say what you want about the US military, no one, but no one, can belt out the concluding verse of The Battle Hymn of the Republic like an all-male voice choir of the US Marines, who did just that during a service in Grand Rapids Michigan, the final public event in the long road to interment for former President Gerald Ford who, in death, was described as the most widely traveled Presidential corpse since Lincoln. My admittedly cynical view of course, is that the American way of honouring their late former Commanders-in-Chief and their war dead is so damned good because they get so very much practice at it.

Until next time.