And we’re off.

As is my post-trip custom in the age o’ blogs, I will now embark on a series of posts to recount, both for your vicarious enjoyment and for its insomnia curative powers, Tales of Travels. (Don’t complain. I could set up a Kodak carousel projector and invite you all over for slides – “This is the Pacific Ocean…”)

This time around, it’s a few short days spent in a very pleasant place at precisely the right time of year to be there – the Monterey / Big Sur area of the Great State of California.

Getting out of Ottawa

In post-trip hindsight, I can relax in the knowledge that pretty well the entire trip went beautifully, but surely I can be forgiven for thinking anything but when, from the moment I* arrived at the Ottawa airport, I was confronted by a long line of people waiting in the United Airlines Express line-up for which I’d arrived in the recommended 90-minutes-ahead-of-your-flight time frame.

* My other half had already been in California at a work-related conference and I was heading down to join her. Thus, the first part of the trip’s recollection will be pronoun-ed “I”. Around about the time my taxi driver, Mako, gets me to the San Jose Marriott in Neutral (read on), “I” will become “we”. But I’m already getting ahead of myself.

Back to the Ottawa airport line-up.

After half an hour – during which time not one single person in front of me moved up, one of the United agents finally came down the line to advise us that the line was stalled while they tried to make alternative arrangements for passengers who were scheduled to have departed on two earlier United flights, both of which had been cancelled. She then asked who in line was here for the noon flight. (Me!) This resulted in several of us being moved to a different line that very quickly started moving, no doubt much to the consternation of those whose earlier flights had been cancelled.

Clearing departure customs remains, for me, one of those little necessities that really makes the typical airport experience the single most joyless aspect of air travel. Having been selected for, and undergone, a “random” pat-down search; having gone through the great fun of removing my shoes and padding along an industrial-strength carpet whose textile strength (and corresponding lack of comfort) was clearly selected on the assumption that a herd of water buffalo would one day have to undergo the pre-boarding process, I moved next to an utterly humourless US Customs agent. He took a look at the card I had filled out, including having checked the box labelled “Pleasure” beside the “Are you travelling for business or pleasure?” question, and promptly asked me whether I was flying today for business or pleasure.

Then he looked at the four-digit number I had filled in beside “Flt number?” “That’s not your flight number,” he said.

“Pardon?” I replied.

“Where did you get that flight number?” he demanded, tapping the “Flt number?” part of the card furiously.

Well dang, you caught me, man. I just pulled the first four numbers I could think of and entered them on the card because my principal form of entertainment is messing with the heads of people who are allowed to wear guns to work.

Leaving what I wanted to say unspoken, I instead took out a copy of the Expedia.ca confirmation that my other half had given me when she originally booked the flight. Now it was my turn to point and I did, to the line that identified today’s date, “Depart Ottawa” and the United Express flight number – the number that I had also transferred to the card and which had so plainly aggravated the officer.

“Well…” he said, “that’s not the number for this flight. This is,” he said, pointing to a completely different “Flt number?” on the ticket I had received a half hour earlier from the ticket agent. Then he firmly scratched the new number onto the card with a ballpoint stick pen. Tossing the card onto a growing pile beside his computer monitor, he ordered me to “Have a nice day,” with not one iota of the sentiment that occasionally is known to creep into the expression. “You too,” I said, hoping that in my turn I was not letting any of the dripping sarcasm I felt show.

Out of the air and into O’Hare

Following that introduction, the flight itself was smooth and uneventful. After touchdown at my plane-change city, the flight attendant thanked us all for choosing United and welcomed us to some place called the “Chicagoland area”. This set me to wondering whether the entire United States is in the process of re-casting itself as an amusement park. Of course, I might have misheard and she might have been welcoming us to the “Chicago land area”, as opposed to the “Chicago water area”, which I suppose might have been the welcome had we landed a few miles short of the runway with a titanic splash in Lake Michigan. But I digress.

Things you do not want to hear while walking from the C Concourse en route to the B Concourse at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport (number one in a series of one):

“Please be advised that the
Department of Homelands Security
has raised the threat advisory level
to ‘ORANGE’.”

Then, as you watch, you observe that not one person – not one… single… person – from among the hundreds in your field of view gives off any sign at all of doing anything even slightly different from what he or she was doing in the moments before that announcement was made.

So picking yourself up from beneath the steel bench under which you had flung yourself in a last, desperate effort to survive the blast and subsequent collapse of the massive roof, all the while wondering, “Is this why they call this building a ‘terminal’?”, you begin the long process of peeling months-old lumps of chewed gum off your shirt and proceed along the moving sidewalk to Concourse B.

And, before we take leave of Chicago’s airport, I also have a parting word for people who seem to think they are surrounded by an invisible telephone booth whenever they opt to use their cellphones: I don’t give the proverbial flying you-know-what for – to take just one example – the fact that you showed up on time for your meeting with “the engineer”, but he missed the meeting and you think it’s “probably because the $%#@$!! didn’t get laid last night”.

Really, I don’t care. Neither, I suspect, do the other two or three dozen people within earshot of your overloud conversation. Despite your apparent perception, the simple fact that you possess a cellphone does not make you important. In fact – simple fact, in fact – I have a great deal more respect for people who go out of their way (and mine) to be discreet about their cellphone conversations.

Got that? Thank you.

On to San Jose

Had I not taken note of the fact, not too long ago, that the popular Asian character actor Mako had passed away, I would have sworn he had chosen to slip into obscurity and take a quiet job driving an especially decrepit cab for a San Jose airport taxi company. Because the driver of the cab that sputtered up to the “Ground Transportation – Taxi” position looked exactly like this:

with the extra added feature of having so many leaky facial lesions that he looked to be preparing to audition for the most recent remake of Night of the Living Dead.

As we slowly chugged away from the airport, I noticed that his motor was giving off sounds of serious acceleration, but the physics of the process clearly was not making the connection to his wheels. While it sounded like it was reaching about 75 miles per hour, the speedometer registered barely 35 as we hit the freeway for the short trip into the downtown area.

But then he did quite one of the most extraordinary things I have ever seen done with an automatic transmission. As we moved up the freeway ramp, he jiggled the shift lever and, when it fell into “N” the car gave a lurch that I am sure produced a G-force, because it chucked me back into my seat. At that point, whatever was not connected began to connect because the speedometer crept slowly up to about 50 miles per hour. (For anyone who might be unfamiliar with an automatic transmission, “N” means “Neutral”. In its most common configuration, it simply lets the engine run while the vehicle moves neither forward nor in reverse),

“Um… I think you might need a little transmission work,” I ventured. He grunted in reply.

My other half is a librarian. I mention that only because, during our brief trip, the driver asked what convention was at the Marriott. When I told him it was a meeting of librarians and staff who use a particular library software system, he asked, “Ahhhhhh... So they gonna talk about doo-ey dess-i-mah system?”

Then for a few seconds, he almost seemed to drift into another place as he said to no one in particular that whenever he had to go to the San Jose State University Library (where apparently the University and the Public Library share a building, albeit in separately designated spaces), he could always find what he was looking for because of the “doo-ey dess-i-mah system”.

Eat your heart out, Library of Congress system users!

We completed the rest of the drive with him keeping one hand firmly clamped on the shift lever, the position indicator clearly notched on the “N”, at what seemed close to appropriate speeds, until we reached the hotel where my other half had been attending her conference. I actually tipped him quite generously – whether in relieved gratitude or for a tube of industrial-strength Clearasil I would leave to his interpretation.

But he did recommend an excellent restaurant. Then he sputtered off in search of either a new passenger or a transmission repair shop. A few minutes later, my wife found me – somewhat tired and greatly relieved – in the hotel lobby and we began the vacation part of the trip.

With her being tired after a busy day of conferencing and me being tired after some six hours in the air, bracketed by all the ground time required to clear the boarding procedures and make the necessary connection in “Chicagoland”, we opted to take the taxi driver’s recommendation and walk to the restaurant, which turned out to be a mere half block from the conference hotel.

“Original Joe’s” is one of those quintessential American Italian places where a “serving” produces a plateful of food that would yield leftovers if placed before a family of eight in most other countries. The entire table-waiting staff consists of older gentlemen in tuxedo jackets who all look and speak like they just can’t wait for “Godfather on Broadway” to sweep into town auditioning for performers. It was in decided contrast with the garb of their typical customer, almost all of whom – like we – were dressed in summer holiday wear.

I had a linguine with pesto that was excellent. We also shared a half bottle of a very nice Chianti (Hey, whadd-else you gonna order in an Italian restaurant?), which led me to wonder a bit about the logic of their pricing. It’s pretty common knowledge that restaurants make a killing on their alcohol sales. But a half bottle of their wine was priced at $20, and full bottle of the same product $39. To my mind, the differential of one lowly dollar (even a US one) likely means they are going to sell a great many more half bottles than bottles. Pricing it, on the other hand, at say, $35 for a full bottle would likely draw many more buyers to the larger volume, at a correspondingly higher profit for the restaurant in overall wine sales.

But they sure must be doing something right because the place was full, and the waiting list for a table seemed constantly to hover around ten parties or thereabouts waiting in the foyer and bar.

Another cellphone digression: The advent of the “earpiece” phone, which means a user can now conduct a cellphone conversation while actually holding nothing whatsoever in his or her hand, has at last eliminated any apparent distinction in the eyes of an observer between a raving lunatic standing in the middle of a crowd preaching the virtues of eating dirt, and a busy executive on the go.

Next morning dawned as one of those shabby California days I’d heard so much about – a sky completely devoid of clouds and the temperature already resting on “comfortable”. (As a matter of note, if you’re holidaying in the West after having just arrived from the East, be prepared to start your days at some laughably early hours. On my very first morning in San Jose, when my body was telling me I’d already overslept because it was feeling exactly as it had the previous morning at 8:30 am – awake and in search of coffee – the clock was advising me it was in fact only 5:30.)

One of our first acts this day was to grab an airport limousine to go claim our rental car. The limousine had been unintended on our part, but that was the vehicle to which the concierge had steered us when we asked where to get a cab to the airport. The absence of a meter clued me in right away – that and the fact that the car was spotless and leapt forward when the driver accelerated after shifting it into “D”. Before we got very far, though, I asked the fare. The driver quoted a flat price that turned out to be only a couple dollars more than the previous day’s trip in the rolling advertisement for Mr Transmission. So we sat back and enjoyed the ride.

As we cruised along, the driver asked where we were from. Now I have found that often, in the US, it’s probably best for non-Americans to start with the broad-sweep answer to that question and work towards more narrowly defined geography only if it seems your questioner (a) knows and (b) cares where you’re from.

So… “Canada,” I replied.

Well, this sent him off on a personal reminiscence of his having had a great time, not too many years previous, on Vancouver Island – in Nanaimo, specifically.

So being my usual chatty self, I immediately asked him if he’d tried a Nanaimo bar while he was there.

“Oh you bet!” he responded with great enthusiasm. “And you know what really surprised me?” Wondering what surprises there were to be found in the city’s signature chocolate-topped coconut confection, I opened the conversational door further by answering, “No, I don’t.”

“It was the first bar I’ve ever been in where men and women sat side by side even though the strippers were all women. There’s nothing like that here and I just thought that was so cool.”

I honestly did not have the heart to intrude on his happy recollection by defining my question more specifically. I suspect the result would only have been to make him feel somewhat embarrassed. And I could tell even without looking at her that, beside me, my wife was making a heroic effort not to laugh.

Up next: the drive to Carmel, a pause at Pebble Beach, cruising the coastal highway and finding the elusive olallieberry.

Opening with a note from the “Thanks, I really feel better about that” department, early in the week of May 14, Canadian media were alive with rumblings that, hot on the heels of a lockout of CN rail workers a few weeks ago, a strike by Canadian Pacific (CP) Rail maintenance workers seems imminent as talks aimed at producing a new contract have collapsed.

Which led to this re-assuring promise from a spokesman for the railway: “The vast majority of our trains will continue to operate, using regular conductors and engineers. These maintenance employees [That'd be the folks about to go on strike] do not operate trains.” (CPR spokesman Mark Seland, quoted in the Globe and Mail, May 14)

So there I am, sitting in the front seat of my car at a level crossing, watching while a vast chain of rolling boxcars, all emblazoned with the black-and-white CP logo and all filled with heavy steel auto parts, thunders by. And it crosses my mind that I have just been told not to worry because the trains will continue to operate; they just won’t be maintained.



Thanks very much.

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I have an idea for how the manufacturers of blood pressure medication can sell a whole lot more of their product. All they need to do is to arrange for hospital-based cardio specialists to test patients’ blood pressure after they’ve discovered how much it costs to park in the hospital parking lot, instead of testing it before the patient is told the parking lot fee.

Recently, I had to visit the office of a cardio specialist in Ottawa’s Riverside Hospital on a referral from my family physician. That particular hospital is not too far from home and on other days, I might have just walked or bicycled over. But this was a work day and I needed to finish up some stuff at home after the test before getting myself to work. So the most convenient solution was simply to drive over, park, get the test done and get back home. My car was in the parking lot for 65 minutes. When I stopped at the parking lot exit kiosk to pay, the cheerful attendant told me that the 65 minutes’ wear and tear that my car’s all-season radials imposed on their asphalt would cost me $10.50.

Had I been sporting a blood pressure cuff at precisely that moment, I suspect the soaring reading would have prompted my immediate air-ambulancing to the nearest pharmacy to drain their shelves of whatever blood pressure medication they had.

Note to blood pressure medication manufacturers: if this works, I expect a percentage.

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Note to CBC-TV onscreen headline writers…

"HAPPY HIPPOS HIT IT OFF" (May 2) looks rather, uhhhh – not to put too fine a point on it – unfortunate when you cram the text together onscreen to save space.

"HAPPYHIPPOSHITITOFF"

I'm just sayin'.

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Your tax dollars at work (1)

So here’s the thing… At work, I routinely get requests for reports on how well / how badly / or if at all / various programs are treated in media coverage. Now one might think that requesting such a report is a fairly straightforward thing to do. And “one” would be right, for the most part.

But every once in a while, I swear that the person making the request almost makes a conscious effort to be as nebulous as possible. Why be helpful, when you can ask for something so murky it makes the Mississippi Delta look like a sparkling mineral spring?

Recently, I was asked for a “review of quotes by the Minister on Bill C-357 over the past few years”. Period. The language of that request certainly seems simple enough. But consider this. Over the “past few years”, the Department in which I work has seen at least 14 Ministers. (Human Resources and Social Development Canada is a vast federal umbrella that also covers Labour and Special Responsibility for Seniors, a triumvirate that is, at the moment, “Ministered” by, respectively, Monte Solberg, Jean-Pierre Blackburn and Senator Marjory LeBreton.) And consider, too:

In 1999, Bill C-357 was “An Act to Amend the Indian Act regarding the definition of 'Indian child'”;

In 2001, Bill C-357 was “An Act to protect personal privacy by restricting the use of Social Insurance Numbers”;

In 2005, Bill C-357 was “An Act to provide for an improved framework for economic, trade, cultural and other initiatives between the people of Canada and the people of Taiwan”;

In 2007, Bill C-357 is “An Act to amend the Employment Insurance Act”.

Now it’s possible I can deduce, simply by virtue of the date of the request, that what the seeker probably means is the current Minister and the current Bill C-357. But then again, the phrase, “over the past few years”, coupled with the fact that my Department’s responsibilities include aboriginal issues, identity theft; foreign credential recognition and Employment Insurance, also provides considerable leeway for guessing incorrectly. But then again – again – maybe the requester knows full well my love of (a) puzzles and (b) Monty Python, and was simply channeling the famous “Cheese Shop” skit for my enjoyment:

MOUSEBENDER (John Cleese):
You do have some cheese, do you?
WENSLEYDALE (Michael Palin):
Of course, sir. It's a cheese shop, sir. We've got .....
MOUSEBENDER:
No, no, don't tell me. I'm keen to guess.
WENSLEYDALE:
Fair enough.

= = =

You tax dollars at work (2)

The bridge that sits in view outside my office window is one of several across the Ottawa River that connect Ottawa, Ontario to what is now Gatineau (and what was once Hull), Quebec.

It has three lanes in either direction, with one lane each way designated for buses, taxis or private cars – in the latter case, only so long as they are carrying three or more people.

Once in a blue moon, one of our friendly neighbourhood police services – the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in this case because the bridge is officially part of the federal government’s jurisdiction – decides it is going to enforce that lane-designation rule. For most of the year’s 365 days, you only ever see police on the bridge if there has been an accident, or if someone in officialdom is in need of a police escort (not an uncommon occurrence in a national capital). Traffic flows remarkably smoothly, but a big part of the reason for that is that hundreds of drivers flout the designated-lane rule and freely drive the lane even if his or her car is occupied solely by the driver.

But two or three times a year, the RCMP stake out the far end of the bridge (“far end” being relative to the traffic flow. Obviously if you’re at the end where the traffic is arriving, the police are sitting at the “near end”. But I digress.). Oh they’re fair about it. They actually have a warning sign mounted on a trailer that they wheel into position at the near end (see preceding note re “far end”) to warn drivers of the lane’s restriction.

And the result is, inevitably, one horrendous traffic jam as all those drivers who regularly ignore the designated lane rule now try to squeeze themselves out of that lane into the adjacent “anything goes” lane in order to avoid being tagged by the uniformed constabulary at the far end of the bridge.

The other factor to consider is that the bridge offers absolutely no space whatsoever to execute that traditional “Oh s**t I got caught” maneuver known as “pulling over”. So tagged drivers simply stop in the lane, forcing legitimate users such as bus and taxi drivers to jam up behind them while the offender gets a lecture from the officers about leaving that lane for its designated users so as to contribute to the free flow of rush-hour traffic yadda yadda yadda. Ironically, “rush-hour traffic” is all the while piling up for literally blocks behind the stopped drivers. So the RCMP, with infinite illogic, two or three days a year contribute to causing on a very large scale the very problem they are telling drivers not to cause.

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Bug o’ da Week

The environment is pretty well Canadian politicos’ theme of the day. One can’t help but get the feeling that a great many of them have just discovered it because it’s hard to be unanimously criticized for taking a step towards preserving the environment, however tentative that step might be.

But I confess I find myself baffled and not a little angry about the apparently sudden explosion of announcements in various legal jurisdictions that Thomas Edison’s venerable incandescent light bulb is bad for the environment and so it’s going to be – or in some cases already has been – declared illegal. And its replacement is to be that odd looking compact fluorescent light bulb that looks like an oversized piece of Scooby-Doo pasta and, in consequence, is already being called the “twisty” bulb.

I’m all for saving on energy. But is this really the way to go? Not according to some people, who share the thinking of this Alberta blogger:

“Heat Not Light

Well the Federal Government has finally caught up with me, I have been using compact fluorescent lights for over a decade. But you know what, my electricity bill has not gone down, it has gone up! Because of energy deregulation in Alberta and increasing gas costs.

And these bulbs also contain mercury, so you can't just junk them in the garbage. Efforts to recycle industrial fluorescent bulbs for their mercury is in an infant stage and not yet fully developed as an industry in Alberta. With an increase in use of compact fluorescent bulbs, this becomes an important need that has to be met.

Thus another Conservative plan that produces more ecological problems than it fixes. And one aimed not at industrial responsibility but at consumers.”
(La Revue Gauche blog – April 27)

And while they do last longer, there still remains the problem of what to do with them after they have burned out:

“The environmentalists had only good things to say about the efficiency of compact fluorescent light bulbs, which can last up to 15 times longer than regular bulbs and draw between one-fifth and one-quarter of the power. Perks notes, however, that they contain a small amount of mercury and therefore pose a disposal problem. 'Like batteries, they should be on a deposit-return system so the mercury can be reused,' he says. Simmonds says Philips Electronics is working on a mercury-free bulb.” (Toronto Star online, April 21)



But even more than that landfill issue, for me there is an equally unsettling, and related, bug. Because of their upfront cost, these things are sold in large measure in packages of one or two, and usually enveloped in a large plastic blister pack that includes a consumer information card congratulating you on the wisdom of your purchase and telling you just what a wonderful thing you’re doing for the environment. This is not, to my mind, the first choice of description I would apply to packaging whose throw-away volume is as much as, if not more, than the product it packages! (That $77.00 you see in the photo is, I think, an estimate of your energy savings over the life of the bulb, not its price. As a matter of interest, the Canadian website on which I found this photo lists its price at $7.99. These things don’t come cheap!)

So who’s the more environmentally astute consumer -- the would-be room illuminator who buys a box of eight incandescent lightbulbs packaged in flimsy card stock, which goes immediately into paper recycling when the box is emptied of bulbs, or the one who buys eight energy-efficient, longer lasting bulbs, but each of which comes wrapped in its own sea of decades-long-to-degrade, non recyclable plastic?

I don’t know the answer to that question, but I have yet to see any evidence that incandescent bulb-banning legislators do either.

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Finally, don’t give up!

After struggling through the foregoing, you’re wondering if I’m ever going to find anything even halfway interesting to write about. Well, have I got good news for you! I’m off for a few days to the Great-Environmentally-Conscious-Presently-Losing-Bazillions-of-Acres-of-Trees-to-Wildfires State of California.

I want to beat Canada’s imposition of its own no-fly list next month. (I have no doubt my Parliament Hill appearance at a demonstration in 1974 to protest US government plans to test-fly its then-still-experimental Cruise missile at a range in Northern Alberta is finally going to catch up with me. I did see myself on the TV news that night, so the Mounties had to have seen me too. So it’s either that, or they finally identified the source of that anonymous query to a local media hotline asking about how long a US President would remain buoyant in the Rideau Canal if he were punched full of holes. Look, I’m not proud of that one, but it was a Friday night, I was with a group of guys who were fully 2/3 of the way through a bottle of Jose Cuervo and it was on the eve of an official visit by the eventually-to-be-disgraced President Richard Nixon. And it was 35 years ago! Is that any reason to deny me permission to fly into the US from 2007 on?)

So in anticipation of providing you with some descriptions of the Big Sur coast, the Nero-esque excess displayed by William Randolph Hearst in building his San Simeon Estate, and the price of drinks in the 19th hole bar at Pebble Beach – no I’m not actually going to play the course, but I do intend to seek out a bar coaster as a souvenir – get ready. I’ve already begun to mine my Roget’s Thesaurus for synonyms for “Holy S**t!!!”

A la prochaine.