TriumphAnt

It’s Singalong Opposite Day!

Altogether now:

"Breakin' rocks in the hot sun;
I fought the law and the law won.
I fought the law and the law won.

I needed money 'cause I had none;
I fought the law and the law won.
I fought the law and the law won.

Well I miss my baby and I feel so bad;
I guess my race is run.
She's the best girl I've ever had.
I fought the law and the law won.
I fought the law and the law won.

Robbin' people with a six-gun;
I fought the law and the law won.
I fought the law and the law won.

Well I miss my baby and I feel so bad;
I guess my race is run.
She's the best girl I've ever had.
I fought the law and the law won.
I fought the law and the law won."

If you’d like to bring the above to life in a truly unique way, here are the Trailer Park Boys, with a mini-film (very “mini”) weaving its way around a rendition of the song performed by The Big Dirty Band (who look suspiciously like Getty Lee and company fronted by punk rocker Care Failure, formerly of what Wikipedia called the “sleaze band”, Die Mannequin and, before that, The Bloody Mannequins). Oh, and be sure to crank your sound up. Your neighbours will love you!

(Now to be fair, I did say “unique”. It's not my fault if you didn't take that as a warning.)

So why Singalong “Opposite” Day, you ask? Well, in my case, it’s because I fought the law and the law didn’t win (but if anyone asks, I’ll deny it! So don’t ask.)

A few weeks ago, I had a simple goal to meet – to get a package into the hands of a winery employee at the Opolo Vineyards in Paso Robles, California. During our little trip down there earlier this year, my wife and I passed a long, delightful lunch under canvas in the middle of that fine vineyard under the blazing sunshine of California’s Central Coast wine region at a combination lunch / wine tasting.

As was already recounted here, since I am an incurable chit-chatter, the very first time I went to the tasting bar I commented to the fellow pouring the wine that if they have an award for the farthest distance travelled to today’s tasting, my wife and I would probably win it.

The conversation grew swiftly when he found out we were from Ottawa, because he knew the Senators had just won their way into the Stanley Cup finals. (Finding a hockey fan in the middle of California’s Central Coast wine region was unusual enough; finding one who was following it closely enough to know Ottawa would play for the Cup was, well, to put it into wine terms, as frequent an occurrence as a Grand Cru year for grapes.)

Two things happened in fairly short order: first, our “tastings” rather abruptly became full four-ounce glasses of wine – to the obvious chagrin of tasters at adjacent tables as they sat down with their single-ounce shots, and saw what I was coming back from the tasting bar with; and secondly, the pourer and I discussed the possibility of a friendly bet should his team, the Anaheim Ducks, beat Detroit in their own semi-finals and then go on to become Ottawa’s opponents in the Cup finals.

After returning home, I followed up by e-mail, and we affirmed that the terms of our bet would be as follows: Should Anaheim – who did indeed beat Detroit to become Team 2 in the Cup final – win, then I was to send to him a Senators t-shirt and a bottle of Ontario icewine. Should Ottawa win, he would send an Opolo Vineyards t-shirt and a bottle of their award-winning Zinfandel north to our home.

My sojourn into lawbreaking began when the final buzzer sounded on Anaheim’s fourth win in the series.

First, I bought the booty. Then, like an idiot, I phoned Canada Post to ask if there were any restrictions applied to shipping a bottle of wine into the US. (The last thing I wanted to see was a late-evening television news clip showing a Homelands Security sniffer dog poking furiously around the periphery of a familiar-looking “suspicious package” to be followed by the inevitable clip of my wine shipment being blown to smithereens in the middle of a vacant lot near the border. This is, after all, the Agency that at one time considered toothpaste a possible threat to national security.)

Mistake number 1 (and you think I’d know this by now) was asking someone in officialdom if there are any rules about ANYTHING! [In a variation of the rule, you never phone up Canada’s tax agency around tax time each year to ask if something is taxable. Because (a) it is; and (b) it might trigger an audit.]

Need I even say so at this point? – Canada Post advised me there is but one restriction regarding the shipment of wine across the border by a private citizen – you can’t do it. Period.

Calling a couple shipping companies only resulted in my hearing elaborations of the rule. FedEx, in fact, went so far as to admonish me for even asking. “We can’t ship wine to the US! That would make us bootleggers.” (Methinks, dear, you have seen this movie maybe one too many times.)

Finally, after literally a couple weeks of my trying to find some sort of work-around, it turned out the best advice I got was from a co-worker who said, “Just package the damned bottle up and send it!” And he used to work for Canada Revenue!

As it turns out, in the end I did exactly that. In fact, I “packaged” the stuff so thoroughly that I began to think it would indeed take a Homelands Security explosives charge to open it. Fortunately, a bottle of icewine is a smaller than a typical wine bottle so right from the start I had size and weight working to my advantage when it came to allaying the suspicions of the watchful guardians of our frontiers. But no amount of wrapping was going to shield the “slosh” should one of those same guards decide to give the package a random shake.

My next bit of subterfuge, therefore, was to buy a 750 mL (typical wine-bottle-sized) bottle of Québec maple syrup to identify on the shipping label as the source of any sloshing that might be heard. (The near-Sauterne density of icewine is also such that it pretty much sloshes the same way as, indeed, does syrup.) I also wrapped it in close proximity to the icewine bottle. Now, I reasoned, only an X-Ray would reveal two bottles inside the container. And surely they’re not going to X-Ray every last shoebox-sized container crossing the border... are they? That left only the thought that maybe some far thinker in Homelands Security had devised a system of weight alerts to indicate when the package was noticeably heavier than its contents list suggested.

(I know, I know, and for the record I realize that, in my turn, I probably have watched one too many episodes of this show.)

So my final shipping label reported the syrup, the t-shirt and (surely about the same weight as a bottle of icewine) a “Special Commemorative edition of the Ottawa Citizen”. It was all packaged, as noted, under about a quarter mile of industrial strength transparent duct tape.

At the end of the day, it did indeed arrive safely and complete, precisely where it was supposed to arrive and in the message advising me he had received it, my US co-gambler added a compliment on the thoroughness of my packaging. (At least I think it was a compliment. After all, it invoked the name of the Son of God. Complete with His middle initial.)

As a footnote to this whole sordid saga of shameless flouting of Canadian shipping regulations, I most certainly do NOT recommend Canada Post’s self-touted “online tracking system”. For 19 days running, the only news the website conveyed was that my package had been “accepted for shipping” at the drugstore postal sub-station where I sent it off on a wing and a prayer. (Well, prayer anyway, since I decided I didn’t want to spend the money for air freight and ground transportation was guaranteed to be no more than ten working days to any address in California.)

On the 21st day after it left, my California friend sent me the message telling me it had arrived. Coincidentally (and why did this not surprise me?) Canada Post phoned me the very same day and acknowledged they had failed to fulfill their warranted “ten business days” shipping time so they were going to initiate a refund of the value indicated on the box’s contents list. They also told me that even if it did eventually get delivered, I would not have to return the refund. So, thinking about a half a second slower than I should have been doing – in other words, the typical speed for me – I blurted out to the friendly Canada Postie that they didn’t have to do that, because I had just received an e-mail from the intended recipient informing me the package had been safely delivered. So just close the file, I said.

(Feel free to cue Jethro Tull at this point in my story.)

(... Oh. PS... In case any official agent of either Canada Post or the Canada Revenue Agency should ever happen to be reading this, I’d like very much to thank my brother-in-law Bob for sharing the preceding hilarious story of how he worked his way around this fine nation’s justifiably protective legislation that keeps us safe from either sending or receiving harmful booze. I have actually reprinted his story here in its entirety exactly as he told it to me, hence the use of the first-person-singular pronoun throughout. So it’s him you want... not me.)

- - -

And continuing with our musical theme in this update:

25 per cent of the Beatles is still 100 per cent of the entertainment!

One of my recent music acquisitions is a Greatest Hits collection by none other than Ringo Starr, entitled “Photograph”. Besides being the title of the collection, “Photograph” is also the title of one of its biggest hits.

I have always been a fan of the post-Beatles Ringo. More than any of the Fab Four, he seemed to have the most fun making music after the quartet’s members went their separate ways. The result is a largely playful, immensely toe-tapable collection of original songs and covers, buttressed by a remarkable collection of supporting musicians who are themselves hardly slouches.

“Photograph” is also complemented by a series of liner notes in which Ringo places each tune in its context. Strangely enough, the context for almost all of them seems to be along the lines of “Well, we were sittin’ around one evenin’ ‘avin’ a bit of a lark and decided this would be fun...” Here, for example, is what he says went into “Only You (And You Alone)”:

“This version of the Platters song is good and
my voice is good because it was too high for
me so I went into this strange falsetto. And it
was like, ‘Wow, it works!’ And the video for
‘Only You’ is great. It’s just Harry Nilsson
and me on top of the Capitol Building. We just
went on the roof and filmed it. Harry was in his
bathrobe and no one thought anything about it.”

The album also features a duet with none other than country legend Buck Owens, “Act Naturally”:

“They're gonna put me in the movies;
They're gonna make a big star out of me.
We'll make a film about a man that's sad and lonely
And all I gotta do is act naturally.

Well, I'll bet you I'm gonna be a big star
Might win an Oscar you can never tell
The movies gonna make me a big star
'cause I can play the part so well.”

One of the few departures from comedy – although not entirely even here, as you’ll note – in the notes is when he describes why he wrote “Never Without You”, a lovely little tribute he wrote after George Harrison died:

“It’s all about George. This song is still very
poignant for me, and I tried not to do it on the
last tour, but I had to because it’s a beautiful
song and expressed what I felt for the man.
The song actually started with one of my
co-writers, Gary Nicholson. Then I thought
of putting Harry Nilsson, John Lennon and
George into the song – all of my friends who
had left. But in the end that got so mad, and
I thought let’s just do it about George. He
had just gone and I wanted to express my love
for him. Also the guitar solo is pretty good –
it’s by that guy who does ‘Layla’ – what’s his
name? He lives right down the road and who
else could I have? Peace and love, Eric.”

("That guy who does 'Layla'” is, of course, Eric Clapton.)

20 tunes in all. Beaucoups of fun!

So if you’ve got a few minutes left and haven’t already nodded off, thanks to the miracle that is You Tube, here are

1. Ringo and Harry doing “Only You” on the Capitol roof – with a more than nodding tribute to Klaatu and Gort, as well. (No, no major security threats were incurred. It’s the Capitol Records Building in Hollywood, not that other thingie in Washington DC.)

2. Ringo and Buck doing – well, essentially clowning their way through – “Act Naturally”.

and 3. Ringo’s touching good-bye to former bandmate George Harrison. I like this one a lot. Besides the subtly lovely touch of burying the images of George in little places like the viewscreen of a studio TV camera, the almost childish rhyming in the lyrics echo, perhaps, a much simpler time when “She Loves You, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah” went platinum overnight.

“I was in the greatest show on earth... for what it was worth.”
- “I’m the Greatest”... Ringo

All Things Must Pass.

À la next time.