TriumphAnt

Longing for the good old days of the Martin Liberals.

My Air Force brat roots are such that major news involving the Canadian Armed Forces almost always gets my attention. My understanding of the Armed Forces’ all-too-frequent role as political football was first germinated amid all the dark mutterings that arose a bazillion years ago when then Minister of Defence Paul Hellyer “unified” the services, effectively eliminating Air Force dress blue and Navy dress white from the uniform wardrobes and building an entirely new uniform code framed on army green. In the process, service-distinctive ranks such as “Air Vice-Marshal” were also eliminated and, sadly, a great deal of the individual service branch pride that came with the distinctions.

If you’re really interested, a concise summary of the effect of Hellyer’s decision on the Canadian Armed Forces is here. (Scroll down to “Modern re-organization – The Unification”. Here’s a key line: “The reorganization has been criticized, for example by JL Granatstein in Who Killed the Canadian Military? In particular, the wholesale replacement of traditional naval/army/air force identities with army-style ranks and rifle-green uniforms had done considerable damage to the esprit de corps of the Canadian Forces. Paul Hellyer has since admitted that he made a mistake in taking away the distinctive uniforms.” But I do, indeed, digress.)

No, what really bugs me about the whole issue of Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan turning captured Taliban prisoners over to the Afghani “authorities” who are widely suspected of torturing them – confirmed, if independent reports from numerous sources can be believed – is the absolutely appalling government messaging.

In recent days, Public Security Minister Stockwell Day has railed about giving any consideration to terrorists who would gladly hang your grandmother. Or as he himself put it, "[They had] no understanding of the rule of law, no understanding of the need for an independent judiciary, certainly no understanding of the democratic process where people can choose their leadership," he said.
"These people have no compunction about machine-gunning, mowing down little children. They have no compunction about decapitating or hanging elderly women. They have no compunction about the most vicious types of torture you can imagine." (National Post, April 25)

And the Prime Minister and Minister of Defence have both said, essentially, “Well, who are you gonna believe, us or people who’ve just been released from Afghani prisons?” Or as the Prime Minister put it, "We do not have evidence that [the torture] is true. And certainly I have to say that to suggest the Canadian Forces would deliberately violate the Geneva Convention, and to make that suggestion solely based on the allegations of the Taliban, I think is the height of irresponsibility." (Globe and Mail, April 25)

Interesting tactic, that, calling one’s own department of foreign affairs “Taliban”:

“But a secret report on human rights in Afghanistan prepared last year by the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs says "extrajudicial executions, disappearances, torture and detention without trial are all too common". Extracts were published in the Globe and Mail.” (Reuters UK online, April 25)

Equally interesting is the company these DFA “Taliban” keep:

“Similar claims have already been made in other major reports by Louise Arbour, the UN Human Rights Commissioner, the U.S. State Department and the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, among others.” (CTV.ca, April 25)

I don’t often feel embarrassed about being Canadian, but the way the Tories are just flat-out refusing to admit the violations of the rules of the Geneva Convention, the denial of basic human rights and their complicity in the brutalization of prisoners by ordering that they be turned over to known torturers, and offering as their only rationale the riposte, “Well, they do really bad things!”, turns my stomach.

Because you just know if any evidence were ever brought forward that indicated Canadian soldiers were being tortured in the hands of whoever might capture them, this same government would be the first to unleash a horde of citations decrying the practice.

If two people do a wrong thing, it is still a wrong thing.

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Things I’ve learned from doing cryptic crossword puzzles:

- An “ounce” is a kind of cat. A big cat. Specifically, an Asian snow leopard.

- “Pulse” is a collective word referring to edibles of the bean family, such as lentils.

- “Flower” can mean something that blooms. It can also mean “that which flows”.

- There are literally hundreds of different ways to say to a would-be cryptic puzzle solver, “re-arrange these letters”.

Fans of cryptic crossword puzzles are fans for many reasons, but always very high on the list is the fact that cryptic clue writers – and those who would seek to understand their creatively warped minds -- love the English language. And we (for indeed I consider myself a big fan of cryptics) love to play with it – from relatively simple twists like the two meanings in the above “flower” example, to some truly amazing linguistic twists and turns that are designed to keep the solving fan off balance.

If you’re already a crossword puzzle fan and you’ve been one for a long time and maybe you’re in search of a little bit more of a challenge and you think you might wish to try solving a cryptic, here are a couple things you need to absorb immediately.

1. Deciphering a cryptic crossword puzzle clue first of all requires that you forget everything you know about crosswords. A conventional crossword puzzle clue works on the formula: Here is a definition. You tell me the word, or its synonym (the clue will indicate “syn”); or its opposite (the clue will indicate “ant”), or its abbreviation (the clue will indicate, no surprise here, “abb”).

For example, the clue, “Capital of Canada” in a conventional puzzle will solve to “Ottawa”. Or in a slightly more creative turn, a conventional clue might ask you for “one of Canada’s ten (abb)”, which may be answered by “PEI”.

2. But a cryptic clue is designed to be a roadmap, or a brief set of instructions, to tell you how to assemble, or to show you the way to, the answer. Rarely does it offer anything so straightforward as a simple definition. So when that same phrase, “Capital of Canada”, appears in a cryptic puzzle clue, now it might be telling you that the letter “C” forms part of your answer. Because the capital of (the word) “Canada” is, of course, that uppercase letter with which it begins – “C”. And by that same logic, “the middle of Ontario” is the letter “a”; “end of time” is the letter “e”, and so on.

But there are dozens more cryptic cluing conventions. Anagrams, for example, are a big part of cryptic cluing, as are ways to tell you that you need to make an anagram. The clue might tell you to “break up”, “turn over”, “explode”, “shatter”, or any of dozens, indeed hundreds of other verbs that all mean “re-arrange” some or all of the letters.

For example, here is a cryptic clue: “Cathy breaks down when expensive boat appears (5)”. That seems a little weird, maybe even nonsensical as a definition. But treat it as a set of instructions. Start with the letters in “Cathy”, re-arrange them (“breaks down”) and the answer that “appears” is “yacht” (a word for “expensive boat”). It helps of course, that you’re told the answer has five letters and that’s a normal part of a cryptic clue – that’s what the parenthetical number at the end is.

Another convention? Homophones. The presence of a homophone is usually signalled by a phrase that suggests “sounds like”. That sounds simple, but like all things “cryptic”, sometimes it’s pretty deceptive.

For example: “Take in sound -- here in your ear.(4)” That’s a doubly misleading clue because there are actually two parts that could indicate the presence of a homophone: “sound” and “in your ear”. If you look at the first part of the clue, there’s really no other “sound” made by the words “take in” that could be anything else. So look at the second part of the clue: “here in your ear”, and Aha! “Here” sounds like (“in your ear”) “hear”. And “hear” means “take in sound”.

The best way I found to learn cryptics is to take a source that publishes one every day (the Globe and Mail, for example). Save a puzzle and, the following day when its solution appears, enter it word-by-word into its grid and try to make sense of how the clue writer created each answer. If you’re lucky, one a day will make sense for about a week. Then an occasional lightbulb clicks on and gradually, other conventions begin to make sense.

Containment is another popular cryptic convention. Take this clue: “A vast fleet emerges from a popular mad army.(6)” That doesn’t make much sense, but the clue is simply telling you that, among the words, “a popular mad army”, you will find something that means “a vast fleet”. And there, contained in “popular mad army”, is the word “armada”: populAR MAD Army.

As noted, cryptic clues also give the added hint of telling you if your answer is going to be a single word of X letters, or several words of “X” letters each. So if a cryptic clue is followed by (4,2,4), it means your answer will be a three-word phrase consisting of a four-letter first word, a second word of two letters, ending with a four-letter third word.

There’s a nice little book that’s been written about the love of cryptics. Its title is itself a cryptic clue: “Pretty Girl in Crimson Rose(8)”. I commend it to you. It’s written by someone who loves the genre and that comes across right from page 1.

Oh: “Pretty Girl in Crimson Rose(8)”? The clue is telling you to find your eight-letter answer by first taking a word that means “pretty girl”; then place it inside (“in”) a word that means “crimson” to give you an answer that means “rose”:

REBELLED

“belle” is your pretty girl.
“red” is crimson.
Placing “belle” in “red” gives you “rebelled”, which means “rose”, as in “The peasants rose against the evil tyrant.”

Wasn’t that easy? Of course not. But I can promise you that the sheer number of “Aha!” moments you derive from solving a cryptic’s wordplay is incredibly satisfying.

Weirdest cryptic clue I’ve ever seen? “E (13)”.

A single letter of the alphabet is all the clue you need to yield a 13-letter answer? In the most commonly accepted conventions, that one’s not really a completely correct form of cluing, because a cryptic clue customarily requires not only the clue, but also some indication of what the answer is. (In the above examples, "expensive boat", "vast fleet", and "rose" each point in turn to "yacht", "armada" and "rebelled". But “E(13)” while giving you an impossibly thin teaser and the number of letters in the answer, gives you nothing to indicate what that answer will be. (But one can hardly deny it’s cryptic!)

The answer, by the way, is “SENSELESSNESS”. And you get there by beginning with “SENSE”, subtract the letters in “NESS” and all you’re left with is “E”. But that’s not strictly in a cryptic cluing format.

Were I cluing “SENSELESSNESS”, I might cast it as… oh, “Touch, for example, without an Untouchable, is lunacy! (13)” You may need a bit of trivial recall to link “Untouchable” to “Ness”, but Kevin Costner’s portrayal of Elliott Ness in the 1987 movie, "The Untouchables" is certainly known to a great many in more recent generations, even if, to a great many of us old folks, the first link that comes to mind is of Robert Stack in the signature TV role from the series of the same name that ran from 1959 to 1963.

So my clue is telling you to start with a word that means “touch, for example” (“touch” is an example of a SENSE). Then find a word or phrase that means “without an Untouchable” (That’d be: LESS-NESS) to yield a 13-word answer that means “lunacy”: SENSELESSNESS.

But oh my golly gosh, isn’t “E(13)” elegant?

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(All over the media for a few days recently) “Shock jock says something shocking. Nation is shocked”. (In other news, “Half the planet is blanketed by darkness at night”.)

(All over the media in mid-April) Variations on a theme of: “Deranged gunman who massacred 32 fellow students before killing himself was a ‘loner’ and a social outcast who had no friends”. Wow, what are the odds?

And in a related story – high road? Ummmmm. Not so much. CBC-TV news on April 19 pretty well blanketed their news coverage of the Virginia Tech shooter’s “rambling” comments, video and staged photos by piously noting they would not be airing any of the photos or showing any video clips from the package the “deranged killer” sent to NBC-TV because, they dutifully intoned, “experts have told us that to do so might encourage copycats”. Fine so far.

Then their television coverage switched to Henry Champ on the Western Tech campus, who described several scenes on the video in some detail, then actually quoted several of the gunman’s statements. CBC radio, meanwhile, contented themselves with reading several verbatim transcripts from the shooter’s ravings. Journalistic integrity, that’s our motto here at the CBC.

And every once in a while, the brick of common sense (or the “clue stick”, as a regular Baby Duckling is frequently fond of invoking) soars across the room and hits its target right between the eyes. Referring to the same video footage, here’s one news organ’s spokesman explaining why his organ would “severely restrict” its airing anything from the video or pictures sent by the shooter: "It has value as breaking news," ABC News spokesman Jeffrey Schneider said, "but then becomes practically pornographic as it is just repeated ad nauseam."

Of course, that’s pretty well descriptive of television news coverage of anything, and it did come as families of the victims went ballistic at the heavy airing of what are, to them, deeply hurtful images. So they started simply canceling in disgust earlier commitments to appear on daytime talk shows of the offending networks. But the above-quoted newsie’s heart is in the right place, even if it only started beating about 12 hours too late.

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A couple evenings ago, we were doing the Ottawa thing when winter finally, grudgingly gives way to spring. That “thing” would be sitting in the backyard while dinner is cooked on the barbecue. Later, after the sun had set and dinner was in the recent past, we were relaxing, still outdoors, when from overhead there came this loudly audible flurry of feathers and a noticeable thump as something either collided with, or something big landed on, one of our backyard trees. Turned out it was the latter. To our complete and utter astonishment, we looked up among the branches of the tree to find one of these girls looking back at us.

Yep. That is a fully-grown female wild turkey.

Size notwithstanding, she’s officially a “hen”, albeit a “hen” about half the size of Prince Edward Island who hit our ash tree with sufficient noise to suggest that a rather luckless skydiver had dropped in, but a “hen” indeed. The following morning, my other half contacted a local bird sighting hotline and added our sighting to a relatively small, but quite certain number of appearances of female wild turkeys recently in a few of our downtown and suburban trees and yards.

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Life’s little ironies 1.

In another recent cryptic clue encounter, I discovered that “lynch law” is defined as “the process of punishing people by hanging without due process of law”.

Wait a minute – a law that is defined as the absence of law?

Life’s little ironies 2.

A colleague a couple cubicles away has a book – a book, understand – entitled “The Unwritten Rules”.

But... but... but... if they're "unwritten"... and this is a... you know, a book...

Life’s little ironies 3.

Recently at work we all received an e-mail advising us that a new “safe” storage place for employee bicycles has been built and is now open for business. The message announcing the new 50-bike cage began with this sentence:

“The Bike Cage provides a secure location where employees can lock their bikes safely and contribute to a healthy environment by helping control air pollution.”

And ended with this one:

“[The Department] is not responsible for any loss or damages resulting from the use of the Bike Cage.”

Until la prochaine.