TriumphAnt

In my last post, I referred (with some jealousy, I confess) to the number of graduating Glebe Collegiate students who indicated that “time off”, “travel” or similar diversion is what’s in their immediate future, instead of vaulting right away into some form of post-secondary education.

Well as it happens, that turns out to have been a somewhat timely observation. Just a few weeks later, in fact, the Globe and Mail reported the trend is actually applicable to a statistically significant block of students. Here’s the Globe’s lede**:

“New research into the way young Canadians approach higher education shows that today's students are a mobile bunch, just about as likely to take a zigzag course through college and university as they are to follow a straight line. The findings, part of a groundbreaking study that uses numbers gathered over several years by Statistics Canada, paints a picture of a group that often moves between programs and schools or takes a breather from the books for a year or more. It's a behaviour that could test traditional notions of education, with its structure of two, three or four-year programs, and raises many questions about how best to help teens settle on the type of higher education that suits them.” (Globe and Mail, July 14)

** It’s old news (but no less confusing for its age) to people who’ve worked with the printed news page, but just in case it crossed your mind either to wonder, “What the heck is a ‘lede’?” or perhaps even to dismiss it with, “Well that’s a typo; obviously he meant ‘lead’.”, here’s how one online source defines it:

“Lede: The start of a piece of writing. It is spelled this way to prevent confusion with lead, the metal that was used extensively in hot-type days, and a term that refers to the spacing of lines in a printed text.” (from Lupinworks, Resources for Technical and Business Writing)

Baby Duck, more than just drivel; it’s a friggin’ edjikayshun!

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This was a bit of a surprise when it landed in my work-related e-mail in-box recently. In government bureaucratic staffing circles, “EX-1” is a fairly significant classification in the overall hierarchy. You’re moving into upper management echelons; the scope of your responsibility is widening and, far more often than not, you are managing significant numbers of people.

So here are the salient points of a recent EX-1 job posting that landed in our e-mailboxes:

“Director, Income Security and Social Development Communications (ISSD)
Director, Stakeholder Relations
Director, Ministerial Communications Services

Position classification: EX-1

Salary range: $98,000 to $115,400 per year”

But what really made me sit up was when I read the first item under “Essential qualifications”:

“EDUCATION: Successful completion of secondary school”

High school? For an EX-1…? For up to 115 flipping thousand dollars a year??!!!

One of my BD friends likewise expressed surprise (as did my boss, who has been shoe-horning the pursuit of a Master’s degree in and around the almost inhuman scheduling demands of her present job) but in my BD friend's case, it was to observe, “I haven’t seen that qualification listed in decades!”

Turns out it was a much more common requirement in the years following World War II when bureaucracies wanted to continue to offer a career advancement opportunity to those who had effectively put their careers – and their education – on hold while serving overseas in the military. In that context, it was a nice touch. Government was saying to its returning veterans that there was likely some significant public service management value to be gleaned from the experience of commanding angry, armed-to-the-teeth people in combat. (No kidding!)

But why, in this day and age, they should be saying, in effect, “So you want to be a senior manager. Well, let’s see your Grade 12 report card.”, is a lot harder to understand.

The cynical view, of course, is that it could also explain a lot about why the present federal government experience, communications-wise, appears to have been one two-year-long rolling disaster.

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Thanks Bob! (“G’day. I’m Mike; this is my brother-in-law, Bob [“How’s it going’ eh?”], and OK, so like today’s topic is…”)

Recently my brother-in-law and I were returning from a cottage weekend when we pulled into a Perth gas station. At one pump, a car was parked and the driver – obviously with no thought at all for the possibility that someone might want to use the adjacent lane – had left his car door wide open as he stood pumping fuel into his tank.

For one brief moment I toyed with the idea of converting his car to an open-sided safari tourer, but the availability of a pump space the next lane over swiftly mitigated such dark thoughts.

As I braked to a stop, muttering about selfish inconsiderate jerks, my brother-in-law said, “You should blog about it.”

What Bob was doing, you see, making a caustic observation about the many things of earth-shattering importance that customarily find their way into these cyber-pages.

Well, as the purveyors of jurisprudence no doubt would observe: q.e.d.

Baby Duck. Blowing the trivial way out of proportion. It’s not just a job; it’s a mission statement!

But wait, there’s more!

Once I filled up, we pulled into the adjacent parking lot at a Tim Horton’s located right next to the gas station. While we took a stretch break, several bikes and a couple of near-heritage quality vintage four-wheeled vehicles also pulled into the parking lot. The male to female ratio of the drivers / riders / passengers who had assembled was about 20 to 1. And as the guys began to doff their leather outerwear, light up cigarettes and generally launch into the socialization for which they’d obviously gathered, guess who went into Tim’s to fetch the coffee?

Perth – where it seems the 1950s came for a visit, and stayed.

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Effect… meet cause:

“Dare knows that drinking 30 shots of espresso every day probably isn’t great for him. And he’s been having trouble sleeping lately,…”

from a fascinating New York Magazine article on caffeine addiction, here.

And if you’re dissatisfied with what you’ve been ingesting – foodwise – at the start of each day, there are lots and lots of good ideas, from a Chinese breakfast to what goes into a “true old-fashioned workingman’s lunchcounter / diner breakfast” in this follow-up article about New York City’s 20 tastiest morning meals, linked at the end of the preceding highly caffeinated one.

And in the same issue, this rather astonishingly wide-ranging taste test of 100 breakfast cereals with a likeability range from: “Organic smart bran: Tastes like goat food at a petting zoo. (1)” to “Good Friends: Stupid name, but densely flavorful (4)”.

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And just to continue with this update’s “There’s something for pretty much everyone on the Internet” theme, this appeared on Craigslist on July 9 and has pretty much been circulated to the whole, wide world (to me via Dave Barry’s blog), so my apologies if it’s already old news for you:

“Autographed Copy of Plato's Republic

Date: 2008-07-09, 11:00AM CDT

1st edition of The Republic signed by its author. There is of course a reasonable amount of wear and tear, (light highlighting and underlining, dog-eared pages, back cover missing, etc.), but it is in overall good condition considering its age.

First come first serve / Location: Chicago loop”

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How interesting, you might wonder, can yet another movie about Nazis possibly be?

Well I’m here to tell you that the answer to that is pretty damned interesting, and I base that observation – not surprisingly – on having recently seen yet another movie about Nazis that I found pretty damned interesting.

“The Rape of Europa” is the title of a moderately well-known painting.

My rule of thumb in describing where a painting sits in world consciousness is this: if I haven’t heard of it, I will still call it “moderately well-known”, because I have an exceedingly limited range of art awareness, much less, in fact, than almost anyone else. But if it should happen that neither Leslie nor I have heard of it, I will call it “unknown” because it has to be pretty darned obscure to have never crossed her experience. (And just for the record, if I actually have heard of a painting, I call it “famous”.) Hence, “moderately well-known” because as we left the theatre after the movie, Leslie informed me that “The Rape of Europa” it also the title of a painting.
In fact, if Google Images is to be believed, it’s actually the title of several paintings, by Titian (shown here), Boucher François and Claud Lorrain, to name just three. The fact that I have actually heard of Titian as someone who did more than just give his name to Rita Hayworth’s hair colour suggests to me that it is his painting that likely inspired the film’s title. But [a] What do I know? And [b] I digress.

Regardless of whose John Henry actually prompted the film-maker to use this title, it is wholly apt for this riveting documentary film that chronicles the systematic process by which the Nazis – Hitler and his Luftwaffe Reichsmarshall Hermann Goering in particular – set about to plunder the art treasures, quite literally the entire national cultural archive in some cases, of the lands they occupied. And not just the great galleries of Paris, Rome, Florence, St Petersburg, and others, but also private galleries, art auction houses, and even private homes. In the latter category, the vast majority were owned by Jews, which should come as no surprise to anyone with even a cursory awareness of the Nazis. The horrors of the Holocaust are widely known. But a lesser known aspect of the Nazi efforts to erase the Jews from Europe (and quite probably the world had they not lost the war) was the systematic effort to erase all vestiges of their culture as well.

To this end they and their minions not only looted Jewish homes of works of art, but also religious and personal items, books, furniture, china, cutlery, tapestries and carpets, even clothing. It was a terrifyingly, breathtakingly thorough attempt to “cleanse” Europe of all things Jewish, including its entire population.

Leslie always warns me off spoiling a movie in my reviews by giving away far too much of its plot, so I’ll depart after making just two brief additional points. A fascinating sidebar story woven throughout this excellent documentary is the story of post-war efforts to undo the Nazi piracy by returning the stolen art to its rightful owners, a process more easily accomplished in the case of the galleries, who generally kept very good records, but infinitely more complicated in the case of privately owned works. In the latter case, that work still goes on even 60 years after the war’s end. (There were heartbreakingly few of the original owners left to affirm a work’s provenance, you see. Much of the required detective work begins with a now-adult recalling with varying degrees of certainty that he or she can remember, as a child, seeing a particular work hung on their grandmother’s wall…)

In two far-too-short hours, the movie describes the Nazi hierarchy’s most senior leadership building their collections from the masterpieces of France, Italy and Russia. Heroes appear in the strangest places -- a frontline unit of American “Monuments Men”, for example, whose members advanced with the leading elements of US forces as the end of the war closed in and whose mission was to try to prevent the destruction of historically significant structures. Not always successful, they were able to make a difference often enough to save many an architectural treasure from an army whose soldiers just saw “big old stone building”, as a place where “Someone is hiding in there shooting at us so why the hell shouldn’t we flatten it?!”

And one anecdote. As the Nazi armies swept across northern Europe into France in 1940 and were moving swiftly towards Paris, the Louvre was essentially evacuated of its treasures, which were then parcelled out into the care of the aristocratic owners of the country’s many chateaux and palatial homes. In one episode so stunning it beggars the imagination, we listen as a middle-aged woman recalls for us being a young child of ten or so years old, when she and her sister would tiptoe up to one of several upstairs rooms to carefully open a box sitting alone on a carpeted floor in the middle of the room. After lifting the box lid, they would carefully draw back a velvet cover shielding a frame and there, she remembers, “never failing to smile back at us”, would be the Mona Lisa.

The Rape of Europa is well worth the viewing if it should come to a theatre in your town, or to a local TV station.

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Cycle-babble

Things I probably shouldn’t read as I get closer to the dates of my actual on-bike Ottawa Safety Council training course:

“I'm told that I and the bike flipped well up into the air, that I landed with a thud before the motorcycle landed on me, that I slid a few feet on the pavement. I heard later that an ambulance call to a course is a rarity, that the bike was back in use immediately and that average speeds among my surviving classmates dropped noticeably after the ambulance left. I am told the crash was ‘horrible to watch.’ What I remember is waking up to the anxious face of an instructor and being loaded into the ambulance. As I stared at the ceiling during the ride to Mount Sinai Hospital, I asked myself, ‘What on earth am I doing?’ My injuries were not serious, though the effects linger. Even now, I have a sore area on my left thigh; apparently the wristwatch I had stuffed in my jeans pocket caused deep-tissue damage. Still, I am grateful. As a friend said, I had ‘put the crisis back in midlife,’ yet emerged okay. After a few weeks my right hand was strong enough to operate a brake lever. I headed back to the course to finish what I had started. On Aug. 19, I was the most satisfied unremarkable graduate of the day.“

However, we should also recall what a wise man Shakespeare was, when he penned, “All’s well that ends well.” (nod to Max Shulman). The author ties his story up by noting that, the following Spring:

“In April, I collected my bike. Nervous, I was freshly awakened to the dangers and limitations of my novice rider status. Would I remember anything? But as I powered through first, second and into third, I smiled: There was something new in the experience - what my friend had promised me when I asked, ‘Why?’ ‘Why?’ he had answered. ‘Because riding will bring you joy.’"

(Globe and Mail, “Motorcycle Diaries”, by Larry Matthews, July 21, 2008)

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And finally, last time 'round, I described standing in the McMichael Gallery in front of a Lawren Harris painting as a quintessential Canadian experience. Well, I'm afraid it got knocked off the gold medal podium just a couple days ago as Leslie and I stood at the end of a dock on the shore of a lake named Kennebec watching a gorgeous sunset as it painted a dramatic array of red hues across the cloudscape when suddenly a large rodential head popped out of the water not 15 feet away from us and we watched with a mixture of surprise and very quiet amusement as a large adult beaver glided past the end of the dock, barely rippling the lake's pristine surface. The only flaw in making this a perfectly Canadian moment? The beer in my hand was a Brazilian Brahma, but beat that, Bob 'n' Doug!

Until la prochaine.