A few months ago, I mentioned to someone that a sure sign you’re going to have a bad day (or perhaps a good day because there’s not much worse that could happen) is when you swing your bare feet out of bed and land smack on a cold, wet hairball that one of your long-haired bundles of feline warmth horked up sometime during the night. Well, under the “Be careful what you wish for” column, you can now add this cautionary tale:

One recent cold January evening, I was running a couple of daughter-chauffeuring errands. After a couple of minutes, I realized I had the toe of my sock bunched up inside my winter boot, but since most of my errand-related stuff was driving, rather than walking, I decided I could ignore it.

The next morning, I rammed my winter-socked foot into my heavy winter boot the same way and the same damned sock bunching happened again. This time, knowing I would be walking for at least half an hour on my daily commute, I pulled my foot back out of my boot, looked at my sock – but there was no bunching. So assuming the problem was a wrinkle at the toe end of my thermal boot liner, I stuffed my hand deep into the toe of my boot…

And extracted one badly mashed and very dead mouse.

The poor unfortunate must have hopped in there the previous evening around suppertime, no doubt to escape one of our two cats. Judging by his condition, I obviously had dispatched him instantly.

I apologized to my wife later that same day when I returned home from work and explained that, if she had been awakened that morning by a prolonged running water sound from the kitchen, it was due to my vigorously (really vigorously!) washing my hands of sundry mouse bits.

= =

Every two weeks in our very large Government of Canada office tower, we have an awareness drill designed to review the various building evacuation alarms. In a nutshell, the alarm sequence goes like this:

1. First alert alarm: An emergency has arisen in some part of the building; stand by for a further announcement. (As a precaution, they might at this point direct a preventive evacuation of the floor on which the alarm was activated, plus the floors immediately above and below it.) All elevators automatically drop to the first floor, doors open and they lock down.

2. Second alert alarm (if required): A radically different tone from alarm 1, this is the general evacuation alarm. Stair wardens on every floor do a quick tour of the sections of the floor for which they are responsible and order all workers to the nearest staircase. Generally this runs quite smoothly until you get down to about the 5th floor. At that point, the staircases clog up with the accumulated humanity from all 14 floors of the tower and the evacuation slows to a crawl. Occupants evacuate to the other side of the street and await the signal to return to work.

In a real alarm, sometimes step 2 will be replaced by the all-clear if it is deemed that a general evacuation is not required.

It all sounds eminently sensible, and people who have worked there for a while are well-schooled in the tone difference between the first alert and general evacuation alarms.

On a recent Friday afternoon, here’s how it actually went. (For the record, I was away from my 12th floor desk having lunch on the ground floor.)

1. The general evacuation alarm sounded. It rang for about five minutes. Then came an announcement that an emergency had been detected and, as a precaution, floors 1 and 2 were to be evacuated. (Understand that the general building evacuation alarm had already been ringing for five full minutes.)

The announcement was delivered in both official languages by someone who was obviously a francophone first, because when he attempted to elucidate in English, he came across as the bastard child of an especially disappointing seduction of Jacques Clouseau by Pepé le Pew. To further complicate things, the public address system on this day appeared to have been constructed as a tribute to the 1950 sound systems installed in every small town bus station, drive-in restaurant and drive-in movie theatre in North America. Even though standing directly under one of the speakers, I was able to catch about one word in ten.

That’s gripe 1. Gripe 2 is about the decision to evacuate only floors 1 and 2 in a 14-floor tower. Last time I looked, smoke rose, and in every article or film I’ve ever read or seen that features a high rise “emergency”, stairwells are always characterized as the most effective chimneys in the city.

Ah well, ours not to question why.

After about ten minutes of milling around with a growing collection of ever more confused workers in the tower's massive lobby (lobby, because it was the tail end of lunch hour; probably half the tower’s workers had been elsewhere for lunch – elsewhere indoors, that is, because we have a food court that can accommodate hundreds; outside it was about minus 15 and no one without a coat was going to evacuate to the other side of the street.) Then came the all-clear.

Our ground floor elevator foyer has four elevators. They all dutifully stood by while about 60 to 75 people in all boarded.

And stood by.

And stood by.

After about five full minutes, the general evacuation alarm sounded again. This time there was no announcement, simply a quartet of commissionaires who bustled into the elevator foyer and ordered, “Everybody back out!”

So out we went again to the lobby. Now, in addition to the confusion, there was a growing sense of several hundred different manifestations of fed-upedness you could almost absorb from the surrounding air.

Finally came an announcement that the “urgence est fini” and we were invited to return to our work stations. Or it could have been a direction to spay-neuter your pet to halt the spread of rabies. It wasn’t fully clear.

When I got back to my desk on 12, I noticed that the floor was pretty well fully populated. Odd, because I had been on one of the first elevators to be reactivated when the urgence was declared fini. So I asked one of my co-workers who informed me that even though the first alarm had been a general evacuation alarm, everyone ignored it and when the announcement came to evacuate only floors one and two, people pretty well simply shut out everything that followed.

Boy. Wolf. Cry. Meet your rendition for the new millennium.

If, God forbid, if ever our tower should be hit with a genuine emergency that actually sends smoke spewing up those magnificently arrayed chimneys with stairs in them, I don’t even want to think what the eventual casualty count will be.

And how the $#%@$ hard can it be to install a sound system with technical clarity and an emergency instruction-giver who is actually fluent in both official languages? In the Government of Canada in 2008, the answer seems to be, “Too $#%@$ hard!”

= =

Toronto the centre of the universe? I don’t think so. At least not in the eyes of our national mother broadcaster.

Recently, the CBC “disciplined” one of its on-air television reporters, the unlimitedly perky Krista Erickson, for helping Pablo Rodriguez, a member of the Opposition Liberal Party, develop troubling (“troubling”, that is, to the governing Conservatives) questions during December’s Mulroney / Schreiber “Airbus Affair” Committee hearings. Ms Erickson was based in Ottawa (which was only natural because, as a Parliamentary reporter, she needs to be where the Parliamentarians are).

What made me clap hands delightedly was the announcement that her “sentence” was an immediate transfer – to Toronto.

Canada’s own version of being “sent to Coventry”, I guess.

= =

We needed science for this?

I think it’s a sure sign that we’re overspending on research when the studies return breathtaking, cutting-edge findings like this:

1. “The Statistics Canada study confirms higher levels of formal education were consistently linked to higher levels of literacy.” (from a Canadian Press news release, January 7)

2. (Just in case you’re thinking such institutional stupidity is limited to our side of the border): In a study funded by the US National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism and reported in the January issues of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research, two distinguished co-authors, one the director of the Center for Alcohol and Drug Studies and Services at San Diego State University and the other a research assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Michigan found that “Playing drinking games at a party leads to increased levels of alcohol in the bloodstream.” (reported in the New York Times, January 5)

= =

And file this next collection under “Something I wanted to share”, because it obviously supports my overall Mission Statement here – making me look smart, de facto, by giving examples of just how stupid other people can look in comparison. (For one thing, I can use “de facto” in a sentence!)

I don’t know if you followed any of the recent golf commentator Kelly Tilghman controversy but, if not, here’s the Coles Notes crib: A couple weeks ago, she was in an on-air chat with golfer / colour commentator Nick Faldo about what she thought the other golfers in an upcoming tournament would have to do to beat Tiger Woods, who was also playing. Her joking reply was that they’d have to gang up, take him out in a back alley and lynch him.

Well, not too smooth, that. “Lynch” is an ugly trigger word among American blacks, not surprisingly (Check out the lyrics to Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” for a powerful representation of its resonance). And even though Ms Tilghman meant nothing at all like what the word can suggest in that context, she is being rightly criticized for a rather hefty lapse of sensitivity. In consequence, she was given a two-week timeout without pay.

But that probably pales in any comparison with what subsequently happened. The editorial staff at a golf magazine called Golfweek decided the story merited even more attention – cover story attention, in fact. And to illustrate it, they actually met as an editorial staff, discussed it, and agreed that a big colour photo – on the cover – of a hangman’s noose was completely appropriate, just in case, I guess, their readers failed to understand the cover’s text cutline, “Caught in a Noose: Tilghman slips up and Golf channel can’t wriggle free”.

Wonderful.


Reaction was immediate, and really, really angry. Said GolfWeek Editor Dave Seanor*:

“There's been a huge, negative reaction," he said. "I've gotten so many e-mails. It's a little overwhelming." Also among the high-profile critics was PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem, who said he found the imagery to be "outrageous and irresponsible." "It smacks of tabloid journalism," he said in a statement. "It was a naked attempt to inflame and keep alive an incident that was heading to an appropriate conclusion."

GolfWeek’s explanation? “[Editor* Dave] Seanor said on Thursday that his intention was not to be ‘racially provocative,’ but to illustrate a noose tightening around Tilghman, the Golf Channel and golf. He said: “There weren’t a lot of other ideas for the cover; either you put Kelly out there or this image, which is emblematic of what this controversy is about.” (New York Times online edition, January 18)

* Oops. That should be “former” editor Dave Seanor. At this writing, Golfweek is minus an editor. But on the plus side, No doubt they’ll be able to fill up the space normally given over to another of their “We know best” editorials with a lavish printing of the written apology released by the president of the publishing company.

When I was discussing all this with a co-worker recently, I made the comment that I recalled another golf commentator saying something to the effect that women will never make great golfers because “their boobs get in the way of their swing”, which prompted me to try to track it down. And sure enough, that’s what he said. The hunt led me to this decathlon of sports commentator train wrecks that appeared in a 2006 edition of the Sydney (Australia) Morning Herald (including the “boobs” comment):

= = = = =

The top 10 inappropriate sports comments (11 if you count the introduction)

“With Dean Jones for his terrorist quote against South African batsman Hasham Alma, Dig Deep gaining infamy [when he stated, "The terrorist has got another wicket" during what he thought to be an advertisement break. The statement referred to Hashim Amla, a coloured South African batsman and devout Muslim, who had just caught Sri Lanka's Kumar Sangakkara during the second Test in Colombo] has delved into the archive to find that Jones is not the first sports commentator to make inappropriate remarks - and sadly, will not be the last.

- 0 -

“He's what is known in some schools as a f---ing lazy, thick ni---r.”

That's what former Manchester United and Aston Villa manager Ron Atkinson (pictured above) called Marcel Desailly commentating for ITV in 2004 after a Champions League game between Chelsea and Monaco. He resigned from his job. Unfortunately it wasn't the last time Atkinson courted controversy.

- 0 -

“Do you think she's been flown in?”

Tony Greig's aside comment after witnessing Filipino-born Marlene Zorn leave St Marks church opposite North Sydney Oval during a domestic limited overs game. Channel 9 paid compensation to Mrs Zorn for the "mail order bride" inference.

- 0 -

“Stroppy little frog.”

Sounds harmless enough but rugby television commentator Steve Smith landed in hot water for this comment during a match between France and Fiji at the 1999 Rugby World Cup. Fourteen viewers complained to ITV citing the remark as unnecessary, offensive and racist. And Britain's regulator agreed.

- 0 -

“Lesbians in the sport hurt women's golf. . . . Women (golfers) are handicapped by having boobs. It's not easy for them to keep their left arm straight, and that's one of the tenets of the game. Their boobs get in the way.”

Comments attributed to British golf commentator, Ben Wright in an article in the Wilmington News-Journal. He initially publicly denied making them, but lost his job eventually.

- 0 -

“Dopey, hairy-backed sheila.”

David Hookes's description of South African woman Helen Cohen Alon after she accused Shane Warne pestered her for sex. The matter ended up in court, and it wasn't Warne who went to jail.

- 0 -

“As long as [aborigines] conduct themselves like white people . . . everyone will admire and respect them.”

Collingwood President Allan McAlister in 1993. A member of the Walpiri tribe in the Northern Territory put a curse on McAlister as a result.

- 0 -

“Oh, it's the most grotesque thing I've ever seen in sport is that Chinese woman (Zheng Haixia). Six ... was she a woman? Six feet nine (207 centimeters). I mean the Chinese are knee high to a grasshopper at the best of times, and this great big beast. Oh, a heifer. Six feet nine. And ... and they call it sport. And all she does is stand and put her hands up when they throw the ball to her. And these other women are jumping and then she whacks a basket in and then lumbers away up court. God, I hope they don't beat anybody. China. You know they walloped us because this heifer put her hands up in the air and sort of kept on catching the balls. Dreadful. Not my idea of sport.”

Alan Jones on Zheng "Baby Huey" Haixia when the Women's World Basketball Championships were held in Australia in 1994.

- 0 -

“None of your business. I don't want to talk about it. I had my period.”

Pat Cash answering questions about a "mystery illness" that hampered him during his fourth round loss to Stefan Edberg at the 1989 Australian Open.

- 0 -

“Well, I'll be blessed . . . if there isn't a fellow fielding out there in black kid gloves.”

English bowler Johnny Briggs commenting on the first coloured man to play test cricket, Sam Morris, in a test match in 1884.

- 0 -

“This is probably going to get me in trouble, but the Asians are killing our (LPGA) tour. Absolutely killing it. Their lack of emotion, their refusal to speak English when they can speak English. They rarely speak.”

Aussie golfer Jan Stephenson in Golf Magazine in 2003. Yes, the comments did land her in trouble and she promptly apologized.

(SMH online, August 9, 2006)

= =

And finally, I am seriously thinking of adopting this as my new motto:

"Lemme tell ya something, Webster. Grammar am for people who can't think for myself -- understand me?"

From the comic strip "Get Fuzzy" (January 25)

Until la prochaine.

Sigh, let he who is without sin cast the first… etc, etc.

I think I’m going to have to stop raving about other people’s spelling errors, after looking back over my previous entry in which I rabbited on about my snowblower’s “augur”.

For the record: “augur” means “bode: indicate by signs; for example, ‘These signs augur bad news’".

And “auger” means “Long tubular piece of equipment to move grain. Augers have a spiral screw inside an outer tube which pushes the grain from the lower end to the top end. They are usually powered by electric motors and vary in diameter from 75mm up to 300mm”.

I don’t think my snowblower is capable of indicating much by signs, beyond of course the simple sign that a non-turning auger augurs a driveway clearing that will take twice as long as usual, until a kindly neighbour points out that the auger is only half augering, thus auguring an augering that will take twice as long.

= = =

Two book reviews in one:

1. If you only read, or feel the need to own, one guide to the understanding and appreciation of wine, have I got the one for you!; and 2. A guide to the understanding and appreciation of wine that I would not recommend to anyone, except perhaps someone who enjoys reading publications like the phone book.

Contrast the following. Of her visit to the hallowed hills of Burgundy, Lettie Teague, in “Educating Peter”, writes: “There are more than thirty grand cru vineyards in Burgundy; theoretically they are where the greatest wines in Burgundy are from, although some are more famous than others (La Tâche, Le Montrachet, Corton) and some grands crus are greater than others. In fact, some select premier cru vineyards can produce better wines than some grand cru vineyards, depending, of course, on the producer. There are hundreds of premier cru vineyards, and their quality is even more various than the grands crus, though theoretically a premier cru wine is the second-best wine produced in Burgundy, after a grand cru. After the premiers crus come the hundreds of wines made from vineyards that aren’t officially recognized but can be of good quality; these unofficial vineyards are called lieux dits, or ‘place names’.”

Of her visit to a Burgundy vineyard, Natalie MacLean in “Red, White, and Drunk All Over” writes: “Over one wall, we see the fields of neighbours who use chemicals. We pull over to take a closer look. The earth between the vines is covered with tractor marks under a dusting of snow, compressed as though one of those evil Star Wars machines has rolled through. The blackened vine stumps look like victims in a burn unit, sitting up on their hard, white hospital beds, reaching with outstretched spindly arms for morphine. By contrast, Leflaive’s hand-tilled soil is a vibrant mahogany colour and smells like a forest floor: fresh, mushroomy, alive. The earth wraps like a lavish pashmina shawl around contented dark gray vines.”

If you’re still feeling uncertain about who will offer you the better read, here is Ms Teague describing a part of the experience of tasting wine: “In fact, aroma is all-important when it comes to judging the nature and the character of a wine. The famous French enologist Émile Peynaud (the great Bordeaux guru and so-called father of modern wine-making) once posited that aroma is what gives wine its personality. Some have even dared to put an exact figure to its importance, rating it a neat 80 per cent of the overall impression of a wine. But whether a full 80 per cent or otherwise, there is a great deal that can be learned about a wine from its aroma alone. For example, the aroma can tell you if a wine is dry or sweet, if it has lots of acidity or too much alcohol. Aromas also offer the first indication of trouble: a corked wine can smell like a damp basement or a pile of wet newspapers.”

And here is Ms MacLean on her encounter with what she calls her first “good wine”: “As I raised the glass to my lips, I stopped. The aroma of the wine rushed out to meet me, and all the smells that I had ever known fell away. I didn’t know how to describe it, but I knew how it made me feel. I moistened my lips with wine and drank it slowly, letting it coat my tongue and slide from one side of my mouth to the other. The brunello trickled down my throat and out along a thousand fault lines through my body, dissolving them. My second glass tasted like a sigh at the end of a long day: a gathering in and a letting go. I felt the fingers of alcoholic warmth relax the muscles at the back of my jaw and curl under my ears. The wine flushed warmth up into my cheeks, down through my shoulders and across my thighs. My mind was as calm as a black ocean. The wine gently stirred the silt of memories on the bottom, helping me recall childhood moments of wordless abandon... By the time we were on our second bottle, I started to feel so flammable that I wondered if I were violating the building’s fire code.”

My vote is for the one that required me to take a cold shower before I moved on to Chapter 2.

The “Peter” in “Educating Peter” is long-time Rolling Stone magazine film critic Peter Travers. As nearly as I was able to figure it, his role in the Teague book is to serve the same function as characters like the gravediggers in a Shakespearean play. Or Walter Brennan in a John Wayne western. That’d be comic relief. Either that, or simply to make the author look smart. Travers spouts idiocies and naive assumptions that allow Teague to display her encyclopaedic knowledge of “enology” (which is “oenology” pretty well everywhere else in the world but the US).

Teague’s book is also somewhat aggravating in that she takes the view that her long experience gives her the right to tell everyone else – Peter, certainly, but also most irritatingly, her readers – that if you hold to any perceptions but hers, then you’re wrong and all you need is time and money to come around to her way of thinking. Her book also becomes, rather swiftly, nothing more than what any competent encyclopaedia is -- a global review of the world’s wine regions. I gave up the lecture, and the tour, at about the halfway point.

But MacLean brings a more loosely organized structure to her book. As a result, she quickly strips away the pretension about wine and makes you genuinely want to widen your own tasting experience. Not least of all because she has a terrific sense of humour that makes her narrative infectious. And unlike Teague, she is also quick to dismiss the equating of very good wine with a very high price. (Burgundy is one of the hardest wines to nail down, she says, and very few people will even come close to understanding all its many variants. But as a rule of thumb, she writes that a good burgundy will cost you about $500 – $450 for all the mediocre bottles you will try before finding a good one for $50.)

Teague, frankly, sounded to me like a wine snob, an impression that was strengthened – as I’ve already mentioned – by her dismissively invalidating any declaratives about wine but hers. I’m hoping she and Travers were still friends by the end of the year she claims it took to “educate” him. But had I been Travers, I’m pretty sure I would have smacked her with an empty Chardonnay bottle by the end of the second month.

And MacLean? She quotes San Francisco wine expert Chuck Hayward: “Selling expensive wine is easy. Many people think if it’s pricey, it’s good. But expensive brands already have a following. All you have to do is play classical music and walk around with a grim expression and your hands behind your back, like you’re in a morgue.” (Hayward is no slouch, and he’s no snob. His own wine store in San Francisco is called The Jug Shop, and he was among the first to bring Australian wines commercially to North America. That’d be Shiraz, for example.)

MacLean even concludes with a joke: “As [New York novelist Jay] McInerney and I finish off the Rounier, he sits back thoughtfully and says, ‘This is why I could never be a socialist. I enjoy the good life too much.’ His features have softened with the liquid relaxation of the evening. He compliments me on my ability to hold my liquor. I tell him that I’m not affluenced by incohol.”

If you’re not up to 275-odd pages about wine – even 275 delightfully written pages – I recommend at least an e-dabble. She has her own website. (Click on “Wine Picks”, for example and pick a date from among the dozens and dozens you’ll find there.)

À la next time.

Happy New Year! Let’s get right to the whining.

So I guess I can no longer claim that there’s not a discriminatory bone in my body. Because in two recent supposedly anti-discriminatory judicial rulings in this country, I have to confess I’m kind of leaning away from what might at first glance seem to be the “thing to do” and more towards the highly subjective, “right thing to do”. In both cases.

Case 1:
The Canadian Human Rights Tribunal recently issued a new ruling that the federal government has been “discriminating against” a group of federally employed nurses for more than 30 years. The ruling found that these particular nurses, who determine eligibility for Canada Pension Plan disability benefits, perform essentially the same work as doctors who are paid twice as much, a “discriminatory practice” the Tribunal says has existed since 1972.

Me, I tend to side with a follow-on editorial that appeared in the Ottawa Citizen a couple days later (December 21). The writer blasted the Tribunal’s decision, characterizing it as a “mindlessly applied” interpretation of pay equity policy. “Hundreds of nurses worked for 35 years in the belief they were nurses. Turns out they were doctors. Who knew?” In effect, the writer argued the Tribunal has built its case on entirely the wrong foundation. Contrary to the Tribunal’s ruling that the nurses were paid less “because most of them were women”, the editorialist argued that “doctors were overqualified for the assessment work in the first place, and shouldn’t have earned the money they did.” “That nursing generally pays less than doctoring makes sense,” added the editorialist.

Hear hear.

Case 2:
The Ontario Human Rights Tribunal recently ruled against an Ottawa company, ADGA Group Consultants Inc, and decided the company had “discriminated” when it fired a man with bipolar disorder. (The company had argued that it fired the man not because of his disability, but rather because he “was not capable of performing the essential functions of the job for which he had been hired”.) The adjudicator, however, ruled that ADGA “did not, as required, make a significant effort to accommodate [the man] or properly assess the situation to determine whether it could accommodate [his] disability without ‘undue hardship’”.

For me the kicker is what the company does. From their own website:

“ADGA is experienced in task-based delivery of services and can easily respond to a wide variety of client needs. ADGA performs system development and maintenance services in a variety of fields: client/server desktops, command and control, communications security, InfoSEC, weapon systems,…”

Weapon systems.

They make software that governs the computer-controlled firing of artillery under a Department of National Defence contract, and the guy that was fired was in part responsible for testing that software.

I looked up “bipolar disorder”. The National Institute of Mental Health’s own website defines it thusly: “depressive disorder in which a person alternates between episodes of major depression and mania (periods of abnormally and persistently elevated mood). Also referred to as manic-depression.”

So with all due respect to the sufferer of bipolar disorder, in this case I for one do not feel that firing you from a job in which you can affect the landing spot of an artillery shell after it leaves the barrel of a very large gun was discriminatory.

It was good sense.

… Must… resist… “fired”… puns…

(Obviously, he just wasn’t the right calibre of employee for that post.)

Sorry.

= =

I think I expect too much.

Ottawa at the moment is in the throes of one of the heaviest-snowfall winters we’ve had for some time. December, in fact, set a record for the most snow since the people who measure snowfall began keeping track of that sort of thing. And our local hardware stores – without exception – ran out of snow shovels.

Now I’m not talking Gus’s General Store and Hammers, here. I’m talking Canadian Tire, Home Depot, Rona… and not just one store – the entire chains in the National Capital Region. It actually made the news. They ran out of snow shovels.

In December.

As for me, I set aside my snow shovel when the snow gets deep enough to justify firing up my snowblower. And that has already happened about five times this year. (By way of contrast, last year, I fired it up once. I barely touched my one gallon gas can. This year, I’m already down to about one or, at best, two clearings way from having to go and refill my gas can.)

One recent day, while both my neighbour and I were clearing our respective driveways, he waved and pointed to the front end of my blower. I cut the engine back to idle, and heard him say, “The right augur isn’t turning.”

Here’s what he meant: Each half of a typical heavy-duty snowblower’s augur is linked to the drive shaft by something called a shear bolt. A shear bolt is actually, despite the minor frustration it can trigger, a wonderfully useful device. It’s a bolt with a nut on the end. But it’s a bolt that has been deliberately machined to snap under severe pressure. On a snowblower, it passes through the augur axle and the drive shaft and is secured by the nut.


But here’s the catch. If you’re happily grinding away through your most recent snowfall and should happen to encounter something that might jam the machine – like, say, a small boulder of rock-solid ice the street plow pushed into your driveway – the shear bolt will fulfill its title, and it will shear. Both its head and its nut will snap off and that half of the augur will simply turn freely on the shaft, no longer being powered by the motor and drive shaft. What this does is stop the obstruction from jamming the augur and tearing the motor apart under the stress – the fixing of which would require an enormous repair bill.

(The same principle is used on a motorboat’s outboard motor propellor if it should be fouled by excessively thick weeds. The shear pin will snap, leaving the propellor to turn freely, or simply stop while the drive shaft whirls happily away – driving nothing, but neither is it burning out the motor.)

At home, we also have shear pins on our tilt windows, oddly enough. A good part of our windows’ tilt mechanisms resides in their frames and damaging one would require tearing out the entire window, frame and all, to repair it. So the shear pin snaps before any significant stress is place on other parts of the mechanism. (Unfortunately, the designers of this particular line of windows have set the “significant stress” bar really low and the pins in our windows seem to shear if you so much as brush them with a Swiffer duster. But I digress.)

So all that background was to tell you (and of course, to whine about) this: I also discovered that Ottawa’s hardware stores, the same ones that ran out of snow shovels in December, had also run out of snowblower shear bolts.

In December.

In a moment of unintended hilarity, I actually had one helpful clerk in a Home Depot store escort me all the way to the “Seasonal” shelves and point out to an empty wall hook. “That’s where they’d be. But we’re out.” Helpful, that. At least I know where to look the next time they’re likely to be in stock. In August.

(Fret not, Ducklings. The manufacturer thoughtfully provided a replacement shear bolt with the snowblower when I bought it. So I didn’t have to go without. But now I want to replace the replacement, so the next time one shears, I won’t be without one. And that’s where their present absence from Ottawa store shelves grates a bit.)

My wife is more tolerant than am I. When I told her this story, she pointed out that the storms we’ve suffered this winter have dropped a completely unexpected amount of snow on us. Last year, in fact, it was mid-January before we got any snow at all. So she reasoned that if they based their Winter 2007-08 orders on the Winter of 2006-07, then it’s no wonder they blew through their snow removal supplies so quickly.

I however, take a different view. Last year was the odd one. While I will grant that this year is atypical in the other direction – more snow than usual – Ottawa / snow / December historically really do go together. And to make it doubly maddening, had I been shopping for barbecue or gardening supplies, I noticed they were stocked to the rafters! In the spaces normally occupied by snow shovels, I guess.

One-offs

* 1. Add me to the list of people who are really, really, really disgusted with the folks who make Tide detergent for co-opting jazzman Vince Guaraldi’s lovely little “Linus and Lucy” theme from “A Charlie Brown Christmas” to use as the music in one of their recent commercials. And if there’s no such list, well, then call this its start.

* 2. There is nothing that will make you discover faster just how much of the inside of a city bus is made of metal than to board one and sit down on a day when the wind chill is minus 30 and the bus has a broken heater. And if ever a driver had a legitimate claim about unsafe working conditions, it was the hapless chauffeur of our frozen bus on that especially frigid day. At least the rest of us shivering passengers were dressed for the weather, but I don’t think he left home anticipating having to spend a significant portion of his working day in an “office” quite that cold.

* 3. Santa brought me an Apple iPod for Christmas. I’m in the process of building its music inventory and I am boggled by how much memory capacity resides in such a comparatively small space. But more about that in a future jotting. For the one-off, here’s my point. Apple is the Toyota of the mp3 business.

They have a simple and remarkably effective business plan: “Here’s our product; here’s its price. Wait for a sale? Won’t happen. And if you don’t buy it, well there’s a whole bunch of people a scant few hours behind you, if not actually standing behind you in line while you ponder, who will happily snap it up if you decide to pass. Take it or leave it. And because we are Apple, we will also price our accessories accordingly, putting exactly none of them in the box with the product and making you buy any and all of them separately, and at our prices."

Accessories like a protective, shock-absorbing silicon Apple “skin”, for example. (Here at the electronics store, it’s $35.00. And guess what? The only one we have left is silver with a pretty little snowflake motif. Take it or leave it. The princess behind you in line is already eyeing its perfect match to her hair barrettes.)

Well guess what, Apple? Loblaws photo processing shop has a large wall display of Belkin and Lowepro digital camera bags. They’re made of ballistic nylon, complete with zip pouches, shoulder straps and belt loops. Many adult colours to choose from. And because digital cameras are getting really teeny these days…, well, for a bag perfectly sized to the iPod? $12.99. Ka-ching.

I gotcher "Apple skin" right here.

Until la prochaine.