TriumphAnt

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.

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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!”

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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.

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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)

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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):

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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.

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“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.

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“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.

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“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.

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“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.

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“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.

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“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.

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“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.

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“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.

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“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.

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“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)

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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.