Once in a while– very rarely, I’ll admit – but once in a while, I wake up with the feeling that it just sucks to be Canadian.
Early in the last week of November, in a co-ordinated torrent of announcements, a whole bunch of anti-poverty activist groups led by the Campaign 2000 coalition issued reports condemning the lack of progress on reducing poverty, especially child poverty, in this country.
Government spokespersons and editorialists leapt into action. By the end of the week, newspaper op-eds and letters-to-the-editor pages were filled with boiling arguments over the statistical standards that are used to define poverty in this country. In Canada, that argument revolves around something called the Low-Income Cut-Off (LICO) vs the Low-Income Measure (LIM). But it’s not even that simple. There’s an argument over whether the LICO should be used in a before-tax configuration, or an after-tax configuration.
No one, it seems, can agree. Because Canada has a “progressive” tax system, argue those in favour of pre-tax LICO, the taxes themselves have a bearing on the definition of poverty because they are used to fund services that poor people would otherwise have to pay for themselves, or go without. So defining “income” as the after-tax LICO, according to its supporters, means you should include services that people receive in addition to their actual cash-in-hand income. And that means a different level – a much lower gross dollar income level – at which one can be called “poor” than under the pre-tax LICO number. Which means fewer poor people. And so it goes.
Needless to say, the government loves the after-tax LICO as the poverty line. Because when the bean counters arbitrarily decide that, instead of being poor when, say, you have an annual household income of $25,000 or less, now you are poor when you have an annual household income of $20,000 or less. Suddenly all those people who fall in that $20,000 to $25,000 range are no longer poor! And out come the positive government news releases – in a flood.)
Many years ago, the Department for which I worked announced a new standard that it spent literally years to develop – something called a “Market Basket Measure” (MBM). It was remarkably uncomplicated. It began with a list developed by a massive bureaucratic process. The “market basket” was a week’s supply of ordinary but typically essential household expenses. And it factored in things like transportation and recreation, including some very reasonable leisure-related purchases such as admission to a community swimming pool or skating rink. The cost of that cost-of-living list, naturally, would vary depending on where in the country you live. (A bunch of broccoli purchased in a remote Arctic community’s general store is going to cost at least three or four times what a bunch of broccoli will cost in an Ontario farm belt supermarket, for example. But the standard, “a bunch of broccoli”, is something to which everyone can relate no matter where in Canada they live.)
What made you “poor” under the MBM? Again – ridiculously simple. If you could afford the basket where you lived, you were above the poverty line. If you couldn’t afford it, you were below the poverty line. The beauty of the MBM lay in its flexibility, its real world application to ordinary family needs and the fact that it was based on the daily cost of living where they lived. In short, it made sense; it was easy to understand; it was easy to explain.
It lasted about a year.
Not surprisingly, it melted away in a sea of discussion over details like why the MBM’s “standard” family car was a four-year old Chevy Nova, or why a car was even factored in as “necessary” at all in areas where public transportation is readily available. And on and on and on the dance went.
So here we sit – with everyone agreeing that we have poor people in Canada – but no one agreeing how many we have, at what level they stop being poor, or even whether the number has risen or fallen since the last time the census of poor people was taken.
From all this morass, this week the Government of Ontario launched its new four-year term with a quintessential Canadianism – a Speech from the Throne. And here’s what Premier Dalton McGuinty and company pledged to do about poverty in this province – verbatim from his end-of-November Speech:
"A new cabinet committee will begin work developing poverty indicators and targets and a focused strategy for making clear-cut progress on reducing child poverty."
Warms your heart in the cold winter month of December, doesn’t it? Problem? Poverty in general and child poverty in particular. Solution? Create a committee… to develop new indicators… that will form the basis of a new strategy… a “focused” strategy, mind you… that will give us… progress, clear-cut progress. No ordinary progress that. “Clear-cut” progress! Does anyone understand what the hell that means? Because I don’t.
You can ruddy well bet that one group that won’t be poor will be the dozens, perhaps hundreds of bureaucrats who will be involved in the process of crafting that committee, sending it on a round-the-province whirl of “public and stakeholder consultations”, and developing all the reports and events through which it will herald its own “success stories” in the coming years – all in the name of developing a “focused strategy for making clear-cut progress”. Those stories will be trumpeted in news releases loaded with language like “bold new initiative”, “aggressively committed to dealing with the issue”, “an agenda for excellence measured in progressive strides taken to reduce poverty”.
Heck, maybe we’ll even get a whole new provincial government Department with a “broad mandate aimed at giving families a hand up, not a handout”.
But if you have any doubts at all what “throne” that speech comes from, here’s a hint: the flush handle is right behind the speech reader.
= =
There is no end to the learning curve of being a homeowner. I say this because I am, even as I write this, still learning about the system with which our house is heated. And I am doing that now (learning, I mean), because it recently broke and we are in the process of having it fixed.
Here is what I have learned so far:
1(a) If you use a pipe made of something called black iron, there are two things with which it should never, ever come in contact: water, because water rusts iron (which you might already have known), and concrete, because the lime in concrete will corrode black iron (which might actually be news for you, because it was for me).
1 (b) I have just learned that our heating system includes a 15 to 20-foot length of water-carrying black iron that is buried underneath the cement of our basement floor. Not surprisingly, apparently it has corroded.
Our heating system is called a “hydronic” system, (which I personally believe to be a combination of the Greek words for “water” and “haemorrhoid” – to put it colloquially, a big wet pain in the ass).
In a hydronic system, water comes into the house, is heated by a boiler almost to the temperature of steam, and then is pumped through pipelines into radiators throughout the house. From the last radiator in the chain, a return line then returns the now cooler water back to the start.
There are many elements in the system whose very names suggest not only the system’s inherent safety, but also a varying range of possibly calamitous outcomes should any of them fail: a pressure relief tank, a low pressure cut-off switch, individual radiator bleed valves, Mrs McGillicuddy’s ointment for first-degree scalding burns, to name but a few.
It is a closed system. This means that if something happens to interrupt that closure, such as a leak or the accumulation of enough air to create a system-blocking bubble (a hydronic system’s equivalent of an embolism) then it is likely that the pressure will fail throughout the system. If that happens, there are two ways a system will attempt to rebalance itself.
The worst water interruption you can experience with a hydronic system is if the water flow is cut off by a leak along the line that brings it into the system. Because what will happen next is that your boiler will begin firing itself up to do what it thinks is heating water – because your upstairs thermostat is calling for hot water to warm the radiators that heat the house. And the boiler, lacking a brain (I was just kidding about it “thinking” in that previous sentence), will just go right on firing until, as our gas inspection guy told us recently and a little too cheerfully, I thought, something could melt – maybe the burners after almost constantly burning in the blue bath of a natural gas flame.
This is not a good outcome, and is what a low water cut-off switch is specifically designed to prevent. If it should ever happen that the water is interrupted as it flows into the system, the cut-off switch, which is set to a very safe low pressure level, will immediately shut off the burner. Nothing melts. Of course, nothing gets any warmer either, which means that if this happens on a really cold day, you will want to get it repaired before your house looks like a local domestic setting in the movie, “The Day After Tomorrow”.
If you’re still with me here, you will not be surprised to read that the other place a leak can develop is in the water return part of the system. In this event, warm water will leak – slowly or quickly, depending on the size of the leak – out of the system until the leak is either patched or bypassed. Sometimes you will be lucky and it will be readily apparent where in the water return line the leak is occurring. However, in a closed hydronic system, there is typically not a whole lot of lines that are in plain view. Most of the system – being pipes – is usually placed out of sight, unless your home’s original designer was big on “industrial chic” or his previous job was designing your local East Side Mario’s.
With a leak in the water return end of the hydronic process, what will happen is that your system, seeking to maintain its pressure to keep even the most distant radiators warm, keeps calling for the water necessary to keep its internal pressure up. In this scenario, nothing melts, but if you don’t get the leak fixed or bypassed, eventually you will find you are being billed for roughly the same amount of water as that required to stage an Esther Williams movie remake.
At this writing, we are in the middle of the repair process. First, nothing melted (*phew*). But we have been hearing an almost constant gentle stream of water being pumped into the system. Pressure is holding, because our upstairs radiators – the ones farthest along the line – are warm. So – those of you still awake should by now (correctly) have concluded that we have a leak in our water return line.
And is it in a part of the line that is easy to get at? No, of course not.
“Watch this,” said the plumber we brought in to confirm the process. Pointing what looked like a fat automatic pistol at our basement floor, he pressed the trigger and a bright little laser light spot appeared on the floor. Meanwhile, a small LED screen mounted on the back of the pistol registered a temperature. “This,” he said, “is the temperature of your floor.” As he moved the laser dot across the floor, suddenly (and I mean suddenly) the temperature reading shot up about 10 degrees. “That shouldn’t happen,” he said. “It means something is under the floor making it a lot warmer than the rest of the floor.”
“I think that’s where your water return pipe is leaking.”
“But,” he added quickly – obviously noting that my face reflected the gawd-awful possibility of smashing my basement concrete floor apart to excavate and replace a leaking pipe – “there’s good news.” I looked at him bleakly.
“Your return pipe comes into the basement on the other side of that wall” (he pointed to one end of our basement), “and comes out right there” (he pointed to a pipe emerging from the floor very close to our boiler). “And on the other side of that wall” (pointing back to the first location), “is your crawlspace.”
I’m not the world’s fastest thinker, but immediately I saw a possibility and asked him, “Can we just cut the leaky part of the line right out of the loop, patch a new length of pipe into the line from there (now I pointed to the first location) to there (second location) and just bring it across the top of the floor – maybe tucked right against the wall?”
“Yep, yep and yep.”
So that’s what we’re going to do. The bad news for the City’s water department is they’ll have to find someone else to fund their staff Christmas party this year because pretty soon, the municipal coffers we’ve been swelling will dry up – quite literally in fact.
And now I know a huge pile more about home heating the hydronic way.
Now if I can just get my hands around the neck of the idiot who used a length of black iron pipe to carry water right through a concrete floor. (Because, added our plumber, this is not new knowledge. Black iron is typically used to carry gas, and its combination water / concrete corrosion properties have been known for... forever.)
= = =
Finally, a couple one-offs…
My wife and I were recently kicking around the difference, if any, between “among” and “amongst”.
I honestly didn’t know, but my suspicion has always been that the latter is simply an archaic version, because for the life of me I can’t think when it would apply, and “among” not do so.
So off to Google… Well knock me over with a feather! (Admittedly after a skin-deep quick internet search) I was unable to find an online dictionary reference site that allows it, despite Amazon.com’s listing it in a whole lot of places, often (as will be seen) amongst the titles.
Our Compact Oxford (snarf -- that's the massive two-volume edition with a combined weight of about 30 lbs and a typeface so small that you have to read it with a magnifying glass "compact") allows it, but it ain't pretty. They call it an "adverbial genetive" version of "among" that essentially was a 16th C "corruption" of "among". No wonder you won't find it in too darned many contemporary dictionaries.
= =
‘Tis the season. A lot of radio ads are using all manner of enticements in the coming consumer orgy in a sustained promotional effort by various merchants to get you to come into their stores to do your Christmas shopping. So why not a car for Christmas, asked one local auto dealership whose ad I recently heard? And to get you to visit and into (hopefully) one of their cars, they were also offering a “free gift” with every test drive. Which – me being an anal dork and everything – begged the question, what other kind of “gift” is there?
Until la prochaine.
Friday, November 30, 2007
Thursday, November 22, 2007
"No… when I said, 'Keep in touch', I meant…"
A couple months back, we bid adieu to a co-worker who transferred to a different government department. One of the last things I said was, “Keep in touch”.
Now, about every third day or so, I get an e-mailed note with an embedded link either to an “Odd News” media article or a You Tube video. The actual message text is almost always a variation on “LOL – this is SO cool!” (On the odd chance that you’ve just emerged from a cave or are actually a 20-year cicada who last appeared in 1987, “LOL” is a “netcronym” that stands for “Laughing Out Loud”. It’s a three-letter way of saying, “I found this to be somewhat amusing and am sending it along by e-mail to share with you on the odd chance that you, too, might find it to be funny.” It’s also a chuckling version of the netcronym "ROTFLMAO", which literally means “Rolling On The Floor Laughing My Ass Off”. Translation? You can change the “somewhat amusing” in the above explanation to “really hilarious”.)
I think I was hoping for more of an occasional brace of sentences that ventured a description or an opinion of some part of the new job. But I can’t grouch too loudly, because I have to confess that I also do it myself.
Which leads to today’s question o’ de day: Has the Internet improved or wrecked the process of the kind of communication we used to conduct by means of letter-writing? There’s an essay in there somewhere… I’m just not sure that a blog I routinely fling into people’s e-mail is the best place in which to make that ramble.
= =
If anyone is polling bloggers about the RCMP’s tasering Robert Dziekanski, that disoriented Polish visitor in the Vancouver airport, and subsequently causing his death, here’s where I am (after viewing the actual video several times and reading an enormous amount of print reporting of the story, editorial and columnists’ reaction to it, listening to “talking head” discussions on both radio and TV and the RCMP’s official responses beginning with the very first pack of CYA (cover your ass) lies they spun out to the Vancouver Sun just hours after the man died):
- The RCMP has been wrong, probably criminally so, every single step of the way from the moment those four officers first entered the passenger waiting area.
So on the sliding scale of satisfaction, you’ll find me right at the end under “strongly dissatisfied”. Just for the record.
= =
I guess the Globe and Mail’s sports page readers are… uh… less fiscally astute than their wider business readership, as evidenced by this golf-related stream that appeared in a recent sports story:
“The championship also would include an annual $10-million bonus pool. The winner will receive $1.66 million.
The Order of Merit will be renamed The Race to Dubai, with the player finishing No. 1 at the end of the season receiving $2 million.
If a player wins both the Dubai World Championship and the overall season title, he will earn a total of US$3.66 million.”
(That last sentence seems to have been for the benefit of those incapable of adding 2 + 1.66. Which the Globe, I guess, assumes describes its sports news readers.)
= =
Random musical notes based on recent acquisitions:
Really, really, REALLY lovely blues album: Suitcase, by Keb Mo. A voice like a satin curtain brushing a varnished mahogany window sash in a light breeze on a warm summer evening. A way with a guitar that makes it sound ridiculously easy… until you pause and really listen to the complexities of what he’s doing. Accompanying beverage of choice? A rich smoky single malt scotch.
Really, really, REALLY rip-em-up blues album: timeBomb, by the Blues Caravan (Sue Foley, Deborah Coleman, Roxanne Potvin) I saw two of these three live a few months back and they simply owned the Centrepointe Theatre stage for two fantastic hours. Blues with a thumping drive and voices that suggest way more living than these youngsters have actually done. And who knew the lyric, “Don’t start the car if you ain’t gonna drive”, could be rendered with such a sexual intensity?
And speaking of lots o’ living… Really, really, REALLY excellent new stream of fan loyalty: “Washington Square Serenade” by Steve Earle. I don’t know where Steve’s music all comes from, but it’s been coming from there for years and it’s still wonderful stuff! Physically, he has just uprooted himself from Nashville and moved to New York City. I saw him interviewed recently by CBC’s George Stroumboulopoulos and his politics have lost none of their anti-Bush edge. But this album is more about his music and, in that, he is still utterly true to self. (That, I realize, will say nothing to someone who doesn’t know him, but his fans will go, “Great!”) He may well be on the verge of having a whole genre named after his style – Nashville Soul. All I need to hear is that there’s a new Steve Earle album (Thanks, Angela!) to send me off to buy it.
Really, really, REALLY excellent retro album: DYLAN. 18 of Bob’s best, slung out in order from “Blowin’ in the Wind” to “Forever Young”. For some reason, Columbia spun off this single album from the larger, more complete three-disc compilation but unless you’re a hard-core Dylan career follower, these 18 are the only ones you need and it’s about a third of the price of the three-disk set. (Although I would also suggest adding his “Highway 61 Revisited” on the shelf beside “DYLAN“ because… well, “Desolation Row” is because.)
Really, really, REALLY big piece of disappointing self-indulgent claptrap (well, besides this blog, I mean): Led Zeppelin’s “Mothership”. Guys, guys, guys. Wishing it was 1972 again doesn’t make it so. Long whiny guitar solos are nice, for one or two tracks. Just to remind us what was once really meaningful after overindulging in the reality-altering substance of our choice, then nesting in a near-fetal position in a corner beside a four-foot tall stereo speaker and murmuring “Oh wow!” as our eardrums sought desperately to evolve swiftly and sufficiently to fold over on themselves. But, well, we’ve kind of moved on and were hoping “re-mixed” meant “emphasis on the music”. (Of course, the Internet is partly to blame here. Try, for example, to listen to “The Immigrant Song” without flashing on the Viking Kittens video -- You Tube-able, I suspect -- someone made of it a few years back. Maybe that’s where LedZed assumes their fan base lies now.) But how can Jimmy Page compile a two disc, greatest hits collection and not include “Living, Loving Maid (She’s Just a Woman)”? Feh.
The really, really, REALLY great reminder that behind the big hair, some folks in the 80s could still spit out some hard rocking pop: “Best of the J Geils Band”. You-Tube yourself on over to “J Geils Band, Centrefold” and try to sit still (admittedly while snickering at the parade of big-haired, bird-of-prey-eyed beauty that was the eye candy of the 80s). But the album also displays a much wider versatility than just their two monster hits: “Centrefold” and “Freeze Frame”. Great fun!
And finally, if you never, ever thought that Country and Western could work a successful fusion with Rhythm and Blues, well not only need you wonder no more, you could have stopped wondering in 1970, and don’t click “stop” on this one until the very last second. (With apologies to anyone not yet video linkable. But that’s just so 2006! Get with the program already. … :-) … )
LOL! C-U L8R.
A couple months back, we bid adieu to a co-worker who transferred to a different government department. One of the last things I said was, “Keep in touch”.
Now, about every third day or so, I get an e-mailed note with an embedded link either to an “Odd News” media article or a You Tube video. The actual message text is almost always a variation on “LOL – this is SO cool!” (On the odd chance that you’ve just emerged from a cave or are actually a 20-year cicada who last appeared in 1987, “LOL” is a “netcronym” that stands for “Laughing Out Loud”. It’s a three-letter way of saying, “I found this to be somewhat amusing and am sending it along by e-mail to share with you on the odd chance that you, too, might find it to be funny.” It’s also a chuckling version of the netcronym "ROTFLMAO", which literally means “Rolling On The Floor Laughing My Ass Off”. Translation? You can change the “somewhat amusing” in the above explanation to “really hilarious”.)
I think I was hoping for more of an occasional brace of sentences that ventured a description or an opinion of some part of the new job. But I can’t grouch too loudly, because I have to confess that I also do it myself.
Which leads to today’s question o’ de day: Has the Internet improved or wrecked the process of the kind of communication we used to conduct by means of letter-writing? There’s an essay in there somewhere… I’m just not sure that a blog I routinely fling into people’s e-mail is the best place in which to make that ramble.
= =
If anyone is polling bloggers about the RCMP’s tasering Robert Dziekanski, that disoriented Polish visitor in the Vancouver airport, and subsequently causing his death, here’s where I am (after viewing the actual video several times and reading an enormous amount of print reporting of the story, editorial and columnists’ reaction to it, listening to “talking head” discussions on both radio and TV and the RCMP’s official responses beginning with the very first pack of CYA (cover your ass) lies they spun out to the Vancouver Sun just hours after the man died):
- The RCMP has been wrong, probably criminally so, every single step of the way from the moment those four officers first entered the passenger waiting area.
So on the sliding scale of satisfaction, you’ll find me right at the end under “strongly dissatisfied”. Just for the record.
= =
I guess the Globe and Mail’s sports page readers are… uh… less fiscally astute than their wider business readership, as evidenced by this golf-related stream that appeared in a recent sports story:
“The championship also would include an annual $10-million bonus pool. The winner will receive $1.66 million.
The Order of Merit will be renamed The Race to Dubai, with the player finishing No. 1 at the end of the season receiving $2 million.
If a player wins both the Dubai World Championship and the overall season title, he will earn a total of US$3.66 million.”
(That last sentence seems to have been for the benefit of those incapable of adding 2 + 1.66. Which the Globe, I guess, assumes describes its sports news readers.)
= =
Random musical notes based on recent acquisitions:
Really, really, REALLY lovely blues album: Suitcase, by Keb Mo. A voice like a satin curtain brushing a varnished mahogany window sash in a light breeze on a warm summer evening. A way with a guitar that makes it sound ridiculously easy… until you pause and really listen to the complexities of what he’s doing. Accompanying beverage of choice? A rich smoky single malt scotch.
Really, really, REALLY rip-em-up blues album: timeBomb, by the Blues Caravan (Sue Foley, Deborah Coleman, Roxanne Potvin) I saw two of these three live a few months back and they simply owned the Centrepointe Theatre stage for two fantastic hours. Blues with a thumping drive and voices that suggest way more living than these youngsters have actually done. And who knew the lyric, “Don’t start the car if you ain’t gonna drive”, could be rendered with such a sexual intensity?
And speaking of lots o’ living… Really, really, REALLY excellent new stream of fan loyalty: “Washington Square Serenade” by Steve Earle. I don’t know where Steve’s music all comes from, but it’s been coming from there for years and it’s still wonderful stuff! Physically, he has just uprooted himself from Nashville and moved to New York City. I saw him interviewed recently by CBC’s George Stroumboulopoulos and his politics have lost none of their anti-Bush edge. But this album is more about his music and, in that, he is still utterly true to self. (That, I realize, will say nothing to someone who doesn’t know him, but his fans will go, “Great!”) He may well be on the verge of having a whole genre named after his style – Nashville Soul. All I need to hear is that there’s a new Steve Earle album (Thanks, Angela!) to send me off to buy it.
Really, really, REALLY excellent retro album: DYLAN. 18 of Bob’s best, slung out in order from “Blowin’ in the Wind” to “Forever Young”. For some reason, Columbia spun off this single album from the larger, more complete three-disc compilation but unless you’re a hard-core Dylan career follower, these 18 are the only ones you need and it’s about a third of the price of the three-disk set. (Although I would also suggest adding his “Highway 61 Revisited” on the shelf beside “DYLAN“ because… well, “Desolation Row” is because.)
Really, really, REALLY big piece of disappointing self-indulgent claptrap (well, besides this blog, I mean): Led Zeppelin’s “Mothership”. Guys, guys, guys. Wishing it was 1972 again doesn’t make it so. Long whiny guitar solos are nice, for one or two tracks. Just to remind us what was once really meaningful after overindulging in the reality-altering substance of our choice, then nesting in a near-fetal position in a corner beside a four-foot tall stereo speaker and murmuring “Oh wow!” as our eardrums sought desperately to evolve swiftly and sufficiently to fold over on themselves. But, well, we’ve kind of moved on and were hoping “re-mixed” meant “emphasis on the music”. (Of course, the Internet is partly to blame here. Try, for example, to listen to “The Immigrant Song” without flashing on the Viking Kittens video -- You Tube-able, I suspect -- someone made of it a few years back. Maybe that’s where LedZed assumes their fan base lies now.) But how can Jimmy Page compile a two disc, greatest hits collection and not include “Living, Loving Maid (She’s Just a Woman)”? Feh.
The really, really, REALLY great reminder that behind the big hair, some folks in the 80s could still spit out some hard rocking pop: “Best of the J Geils Band”. You-Tube yourself on over to “J Geils Band, Centrefold” and try to sit still (admittedly while snickering at the parade of big-haired, bird-of-prey-eyed beauty that was the eye candy of the 80s). But the album also displays a much wider versatility than just their two monster hits: “Centrefold” and “Freeze Frame”. Great fun!
And finally, if you never, ever thought that Country and Western could work a successful fusion with Rhythm and Blues, well not only need you wonder no more, you could have stopped wondering in 1970, and don’t click “stop” on this one until the very last second. (With apologies to anyone not yet video linkable. But that’s just so 2006! Get with the program already. … :-) … )
LOL! C-U L8R.
Wednesday, November 07, 2007
I'm not ignoring y'all. In my job, whenever government does something major -- such as a Speech From the Throne (SFT) or a budget, my work-related bustle increases for a while. Well, for anyone inside the fishbowl that is the National Capital Region, this won't be news, but the rest of the country probably missed the press-stopping headlines announcing that we recently suffered exactly that -- those, in fact -- an SFT followed just days later by an "Economic Fiscal Update" that was, for all intents and purposes (or as played on my desk... "for all intensive purposes"), a mini-budget.
Which is why the Duck got bumped.
Just in case you were wondering.
We now return you to our regular stuff 'n' nonsense.
= =
Things I’m starting to realize I don’t want to make time for any more…
- Continuing to read a book I am not enjoying, or at best coming to a compromise with myself and “bleeping” over the unenjoyable parts if I’m far enough into it that I just want to know how the story comes out. Recently I started a new book by an author with whom my previous experience was, quite literally, a “couldn’t put it down” page turner by the time I reached its last 150 pages. But in the next of his books that I started, he embarked early on into some horribly graphic “flashback” descriptions of Nazi concentration camp atrocities (Actually, I think that might be a triple redundancy) that simply didn’t suit the experience I want from “recreational reading”, no matter how exciting the eventual storyline was going to turn out to be.
Now it wasn’t that long ago that with a book I bought (rather than borrowed), for whatever reason it was bad – its writing or its subject matter – I felt an obligation to read it through to its end.
Well no more, and it seems I have a mighty kindred spirit. And wow, does she have clout in the world o’ reading! Nancy Pearl is a woman who is not only a librarian, she is so good at it she has actually been rendered as an action figure (“with amazing push-button shushing action!”).
Here’s what she has to say about unpleasant reading experiences. (Both quotes were pulled from the web. Google her if you’re using Baby Duck as a reference for an essay and you need the authoritative citations.):
"’A bad book,’ she explains, ‘is any book you don't like. A good book is any book you like. Time is short and the world of books is very large,’ she says. ‘To slog through a book you're not loving is a waste of your time. If you don't like a book, no matter how old you are, you should stop reading it.’"
I especially like the fact that she at least advocates giving a bad book a slight chance. It gives people like me a happy compromise between never buying a particular book in fear of not liking it, vs trudging all the way through it long after you’ve clearly decided you don’t like it. She calls it the Rule of 50:
“To answer the question ‘How long should I read a book before I give up?’ Nancy developed the Rule of 50: ‘If you are 50 years of age and younger, you should read the first 50 pages of the book then ask ‘Do I really love this book?’ If at the bottom of page 50 all you really care about is who the murderer is, read the end and put the book away. If you’re over 50, subtract your age from 100 and the resulting number is the number of pages you should read before giving up.’ Nancy says it’s one of the few rules that rewards people for getting older.”
Bad news for high schoolers and book club members, though. She makes it quite clear that her Rule of 50 doesn’t count for a book group’s assigned works, or for homework.
So suffice to say that I simply closed this book at that point in my early morning bus commute where I ran first into the unpleasantly rendered atrocities; and at lunch hour I re-embarked among the novel’s pages with my “new eyes” -- skipping those parts while still deriving considerable enjoyment from its suspense-laden balance.
Thank you, Ms Pearl. Guilt-free book and/or chapter abandonment. (I just have to tell myself not to dwell on how much more widely read I’d be today had I only started doing this years ago.)
= = = =
Had a hearty laugh recently at some poor nameless Wal-Mart employee’s expense. There’s a colour photo making the rounds of the Internet that shows a custom-decorated cake that someone ordered from a Wal-Mart bakery on which the orderer directed (obviously over the phone) that what should appear on the cake was the message:
“'Best Wishes Suzanne', and underneath that, 'We will miss you'”.
Here’s what came back from Wal-Mart (the photo is a thing of beauty, so try the link first. But Neatorama is an extremely active blog and I don’t know how long the link will live… so the text of the actual icing-rendered message follows immediately below this link.
"Best Wishes Suzanne
Under Neat that
We will Miss you"
I’m really going to validate my gray hair here, but this reminded me of an episode that dates from one of my early office jobs obtained when the ink was still wet on my Carleton University Bachelor of Journalism.
True story.
I was in a communications unit where we all had dictaphone microphones on our desks. You dictated the letter into a microphone; it went to a central word processing unit, and a half day or so later, you received a paper copy on your desk to proofread before sending it out.
Everyone had their little dictating conventions for clarifying what they were saying (because, on a tape, things like “e”, "d", "b" "t", “p”, “v” can all sound very similar, especially to someone not used to your pronunciation).
My boss at the time showed me a letter he received for proofreading.
What he had dictated was:
"This is a letter to B – B for 'Bob' – Wilson..." and then he went on to dictate the letter.
When it came back, Word Processing had typed the first line of the address as:
"B Beaver Bob Wilson..."
= = = = =
And surprise! – I actually have something good (with a qualification) to say about a cellphone service provider.
I don’t use a cellphone often enough to justify entering into one of those “anytime” plans for large amounts of money and right up-to-date hardware. Instead, I have a cellphone that… well, it rings when someone calls me and it lets me call out when I want to do so. My daughter has also discovered it plays rudimentary games. But it does not, for example, take pictures (I have a camera for that), upload / download music (I have a CD player, turntable and a radio for that), download movies (I have a TV and DVD player for that), make coffee (coffeemaker) etc, etc. It is, in other words, a phone. It's just smaller and wireless, by way of marking its difference from previous phones I’ve owned.
The billing plan I have is called PayGo, short for “pay as you go”. It is simplicity itself. Each month, you re-charge its balance, either by phone or by going to the Rogers website to add however much credit you think you’ll need that month. So long as you reload each and every month by the due date, your balance carries over and you’re good for another month.
The catch, however, is that if you forget and let the date slide by, your balance just vanishes. Where? Who the hell knows? But my suspicion is that I can’t be the only idiot in the Rogers PayGo customer list and that Rogers shows a heck of a “Miscellaneous Revenue” line each year solely on the strength of all the forgetful customer balances they absorb as the deadlines pass.
Well recently, and probably for about the fifth time in my life, I let a re-charge deadline go by because I was out of town and frankly just forgot about it. (That’s a refreshing reason to be able to offer, by the way. The previous times it’s happened, the best I can plead is “I forgot”.) The balance in my account at the time was $31. Now I know that $31 in the grand scheme of things is just not a whole heck of a lot. But ask yourself two things: 1. How many times have other $31-ers contributed to the Rogers coffers over the life of their PayGo plan? (Subtract five from your guess, because those would be mine.) And 2. If someone gave you $31 and said take it out in the backyard and set fire to it, how would you feel? Probably a little angrier than the relative value of $31 merits, but that’s an understandable function of your -- and my -- perception of pointless waste.
Not so long ago, my wife embarked on an attractive cellphone package agreement with Virgin Mobile, and at the same time set a separate one up for our daughter. In the process of setting up the payment options, she discovered (in persistent research that was probably on the order of extracting one of your own molars, because initially she was actually told by a Virgin rep that it was not possible) that setting up an automatic monthly deduction was indeed possible.
So to make their long story* short, not only was it possible, both she and my daughter are now on Virgin Mobile’s carefree “Just give us your credit card number and let us worry about topping up your account” plan.
* No such luck, however, about shortening _my_ story. Onward.
So she suggested I look into it with Rogers.
When I had first joined the PayGo plan, I had been given one payment option. Period. And it went like this: Once a month, no later than midnight on the renewal date, let us know that you want to renew and for how much. Forget to let us know and we de-activate your account and the balance resets at zero. Even if you renew the very next day.
Well after my most recent teeth-gnashing let-the-date-slip-by, my wife suggested that maybe Rogers has buried something similar deep among its PayGo options – in the same way as Virgin turned out to have just such a plan – and just like Virgin, they just weren’t going to wave signs around in front of their customers promoting the option because… well, because it’s… you know – a service. And convenient. And less stressful… all of those things that make perfect sense to customers but less revenue to the company.
And sure enough, about four layers deep under the main 1200-question FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) directory, there it was: the PayGo Auto Saver Plan. Automatic monthly renewal with no need to call in or confirm online once you’d set the basic plan in place. And no loss of unused balance as each renewal date passed.
My reason for saying good things – despite the layers-deep hunt to find the option – is this: I had to confirm my identity to an honest-to-goodness real person, rather than the recording that takes you through the first ten minutes or so of the “convenient” automated renewal process. And when that honest-to goodness person (named Mark) heard that I’d lost my previous balance due to my having been out of town when the renewal date slid by, he restored it! Just like that.
Oh -- but my “qualified” re the “good things”? The previous night, when I’d tried to enrol in the Auto Saver plan, after those same ten minutes that it took for me to reach the point where I was transferred to an honest-to-goodness person, I was kicked over instead to a recording informing me that their office was closed and no one was available to take my call and I should call during their regular hours of business.
Why, I wondered, could that message not have been put up front? For example, “Welcome to Rogers automated Customer Service hotline. If you’re calling to change your method of billing, please stop now because eventually you will have to speak to a representative and they are only available during regular business hours.” Not ten ferschlugginer minutes after I’d wasted all the time it took to get through all the recorded options to get there, for heaven’s sake.
So thank you Rogers.
I think.
= =
And finally, a big welcome to the new kid on the Internet, YouTube Canada, which was officially launched in Toronto on November 6.
(Actually, it doesn’t look a whole lot different from YouTube central. But I do confess a twinge of pride at seeing that teeny Canadian flag in the top right corner of the site’s front page.)
Until la prochaine…
Which is why the Duck got bumped.
Just in case you were wondering.
We now return you to our regular stuff 'n' nonsense.
= =
Things I’m starting to realize I don’t want to make time for any more…
- Continuing to read a book I am not enjoying, or at best coming to a compromise with myself and “bleeping” over the unenjoyable parts if I’m far enough into it that I just want to know how the story comes out. Recently I started a new book by an author with whom my previous experience was, quite literally, a “couldn’t put it down” page turner by the time I reached its last 150 pages. But in the next of his books that I started, he embarked early on into some horribly graphic “flashback” descriptions of Nazi concentration camp atrocities (Actually, I think that might be a triple redundancy) that simply didn’t suit the experience I want from “recreational reading”, no matter how exciting the eventual storyline was going to turn out to be.
Now it wasn’t that long ago that with a book I bought (rather than borrowed), for whatever reason it was bad – its writing or its subject matter – I felt an obligation to read it through to its end.
Well no more, and it seems I have a mighty kindred spirit. And wow, does she have clout in the world o’ reading! Nancy Pearl is a woman who is not only a librarian, she is so good at it she has actually been rendered as an action figure (“with amazing push-button shushing action!”).
Here’s what she has to say about unpleasant reading experiences. (Both quotes were pulled from the web. Google her if you’re using Baby Duck as a reference for an essay and you need the authoritative citations.):
"’A bad book,’ she explains, ‘is any book you don't like. A good book is any book you like. Time is short and the world of books is very large,’ she says. ‘To slog through a book you're not loving is a waste of your time. If you don't like a book, no matter how old you are, you should stop reading it.’"
I especially like the fact that she at least advocates giving a bad book a slight chance. It gives people like me a happy compromise between never buying a particular book in fear of not liking it, vs trudging all the way through it long after you’ve clearly decided you don’t like it. She calls it the Rule of 50:
“To answer the question ‘How long should I read a book before I give up?’ Nancy developed the Rule of 50: ‘If you are 50 years of age and younger, you should read the first 50 pages of the book then ask ‘Do I really love this book?’ If at the bottom of page 50 all you really care about is who the murderer is, read the end and put the book away. If you’re over 50, subtract your age from 100 and the resulting number is the number of pages you should read before giving up.’ Nancy says it’s one of the few rules that rewards people for getting older.”
Bad news for high schoolers and book club members, though. She makes it quite clear that her Rule of 50 doesn’t count for a book group’s assigned works, or for homework.
So suffice to say that I simply closed this book at that point in my early morning bus commute where I ran first into the unpleasantly rendered atrocities; and at lunch hour I re-embarked among the novel’s pages with my “new eyes” -- skipping those parts while still deriving considerable enjoyment from its suspense-laden balance.
Thank you, Ms Pearl. Guilt-free book and/or chapter abandonment. (I just have to tell myself not to dwell on how much more widely read I’d be today had I only started doing this years ago.)
= = = =
Had a hearty laugh recently at some poor nameless Wal-Mart employee’s expense. There’s a colour photo making the rounds of the Internet that shows a custom-decorated cake that someone ordered from a Wal-Mart bakery on which the orderer directed (obviously over the phone) that what should appear on the cake was the message:
“'Best Wishes Suzanne', and underneath that, 'We will miss you'”.
Here’s what came back from Wal-Mart (the photo is a thing of beauty, so try the link first. But Neatorama is an extremely active blog and I don’t know how long the link will live… so the text of the actual icing-rendered message follows immediately below this link.
"Best Wishes Suzanne
Under Neat that
We will Miss you"
I’m really going to validate my gray hair here, but this reminded me of an episode that dates from one of my early office jobs obtained when the ink was still wet on my Carleton University Bachelor of Journalism.
True story.
I was in a communications unit where we all had dictaphone microphones on our desks. You dictated the letter into a microphone; it went to a central word processing unit, and a half day or so later, you received a paper copy on your desk to proofread before sending it out.
Everyone had their little dictating conventions for clarifying what they were saying (because, on a tape, things like “e”, "d", "b" "t", “p”, “v” can all sound very similar, especially to someone not used to your pronunciation).
My boss at the time showed me a letter he received for proofreading.
What he had dictated was:
"This is a letter to B – B for 'Bob' – Wilson..." and then he went on to dictate the letter.
When it came back, Word Processing had typed the first line of the address as:
"B Beaver Bob Wilson..."
= = = = =
And surprise! – I actually have something good (with a qualification) to say about a cellphone service provider.
I don’t use a cellphone often enough to justify entering into one of those “anytime” plans for large amounts of money and right up-to-date hardware. Instead, I have a cellphone that… well, it rings when someone calls me and it lets me call out when I want to do so. My daughter has also discovered it plays rudimentary games. But it does not, for example, take pictures (I have a camera for that), upload / download music (I have a CD player, turntable and a radio for that), download movies (I have a TV and DVD player for that), make coffee (coffeemaker) etc, etc. It is, in other words, a phone. It's just smaller and wireless, by way of marking its difference from previous phones I’ve owned.
The billing plan I have is called PayGo, short for “pay as you go”. It is simplicity itself. Each month, you re-charge its balance, either by phone or by going to the Rogers website to add however much credit you think you’ll need that month. So long as you reload each and every month by the due date, your balance carries over and you’re good for another month.
The catch, however, is that if you forget and let the date slide by, your balance just vanishes. Where? Who the hell knows? But my suspicion is that I can’t be the only idiot in the Rogers PayGo customer list and that Rogers shows a heck of a “Miscellaneous Revenue” line each year solely on the strength of all the forgetful customer balances they absorb as the deadlines pass.
Well recently, and probably for about the fifth time in my life, I let a re-charge deadline go by because I was out of town and frankly just forgot about it. (That’s a refreshing reason to be able to offer, by the way. The previous times it’s happened, the best I can plead is “I forgot”.) The balance in my account at the time was $31. Now I know that $31 in the grand scheme of things is just not a whole heck of a lot. But ask yourself two things: 1. How many times have other $31-ers contributed to the Rogers coffers over the life of their PayGo plan? (Subtract five from your guess, because those would be mine.) And 2. If someone gave you $31 and said take it out in the backyard and set fire to it, how would you feel? Probably a little angrier than the relative value of $31 merits, but that’s an understandable function of your -- and my -- perception of pointless waste.
Not so long ago, my wife embarked on an attractive cellphone package agreement with Virgin Mobile, and at the same time set a separate one up for our daughter. In the process of setting up the payment options, she discovered (in persistent research that was probably on the order of extracting one of your own molars, because initially she was actually told by a Virgin rep that it was not possible) that setting up an automatic monthly deduction was indeed possible.
So to make their long story* short, not only was it possible, both she and my daughter are now on Virgin Mobile’s carefree “Just give us your credit card number and let us worry about topping up your account” plan.
* No such luck, however, about shortening _my_ story. Onward.
So she suggested I look into it with Rogers.
When I had first joined the PayGo plan, I had been given one payment option. Period. And it went like this: Once a month, no later than midnight on the renewal date, let us know that you want to renew and for how much. Forget to let us know and we de-activate your account and the balance resets at zero. Even if you renew the very next day.
Well after my most recent teeth-gnashing let-the-date-slip-by, my wife suggested that maybe Rogers has buried something similar deep among its PayGo options – in the same way as Virgin turned out to have just such a plan – and just like Virgin, they just weren’t going to wave signs around in front of their customers promoting the option because… well, because it’s… you know – a service. And convenient. And less stressful… all of those things that make perfect sense to customers but less revenue to the company.
And sure enough, about four layers deep under the main 1200-question FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) directory, there it was: the PayGo Auto Saver Plan. Automatic monthly renewal with no need to call in or confirm online once you’d set the basic plan in place. And no loss of unused balance as each renewal date passed.
My reason for saying good things – despite the layers-deep hunt to find the option – is this: I had to confirm my identity to an honest-to-goodness real person, rather than the recording that takes you through the first ten minutes or so of the “convenient” automated renewal process. And when that honest-to goodness person (named Mark) heard that I’d lost my previous balance due to my having been out of town when the renewal date slid by, he restored it! Just like that.
Oh -- but my “qualified” re the “good things”? The previous night, when I’d tried to enrol in the Auto Saver plan, after those same ten minutes that it took for me to reach the point where I was transferred to an honest-to-goodness person, I was kicked over instead to a recording informing me that their office was closed and no one was available to take my call and I should call during their regular hours of business.
Why, I wondered, could that message not have been put up front? For example, “Welcome to Rogers automated Customer Service hotline. If you’re calling to change your method of billing, please stop now because eventually you will have to speak to a representative and they are only available during regular business hours.” Not ten ferschlugginer minutes after I’d wasted all the time it took to get through all the recorded options to get there, for heaven’s sake.
So thank you Rogers.
I think.
= =
And finally, a big welcome to the new kid on the Internet, YouTube Canada, which was officially launched in Toronto on November 6.
(Actually, it doesn’t look a whole lot different from YouTube central. But I do confess a twinge of pride at seeing that teeny Canadian flag in the top right corner of the site’s front page.)
Until la prochaine…
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