Recently I received the following e-mailed message at work. It had been sent to our entire branch – that’d be approximately 400 employees who all work in some aspect of our department’s public affairs. (Oh, for people outside the vast bureaucratic reserve that is Acronyms on the Rideau, “ADMO” is “Assistant Deputy Minister’s Office” a post that pretty much sits two steps below the Minister:
“For those who use the ADMO kitchen for dishes clean up, we're running out of dish soap.
There's a container (coffee cup) on the counter to leave a contribution for the next bottle. Someone will be purchasing soap tonight. Please remember to leave a contribution next time you're making use of the kitchen. This should be a shared cost; not one individual's.
Thanks for your consideration,"
[Name expunged for reasons of mercy]
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Well being me, I immediately cyber-roared off to Treasury Board Secretariat’s publicly accessible website and found the information about just how much senior public servants make. Then I sent this “Forward / Reply” to a current colleague who is also my former supervisor:
"I have a suggestion:
Current and Recommended Cash Compensation for the EX and DM Groups Level
Current 2008-2009 / Recommended 2009-2010
EX-1 115,400 / 117,200
EX-2 129,400 / 131,400
EX-3 144,800 / 147,000
EX-4 166,200 / 168,700
EX-5 186,200 / 189,000
DM-1 208,300 / 211,500
DM-2 239,600 / 243,200
DM-3 268,300 / 272,400
DM-4 300,400 / 305,000
(Source: Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat / Advisory Committee on Senior Level Retention and Compensation / April 29, 2009)
Maybe the ADM doesn't actually lower him / herself to _doing_ the dishes, but perhaps he / she could be the source of the cash to pay for his / her office kitchen dish soap instead of sending out a department-wide memo begging for loose change from the staff.
Just an idea. (Feel free to circulate this idea -- maybe even to the ADMO.)"
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The ways of the censor are mysterious indeed.
Recently I succumbed to an appeal by iTunes to purchase a fairly large collection of singles from the 70s, years when I was wallowing in pop music and buying a lot of records in both single (45 rpm) and long-playing (LP / 33 1/3 rpm) format.
As the song titles rolled by throughout the somewhat lengthy download process, I noticed that one seemed to have tripped the censorship trigger, because I was told by iTunes that I had just acquired “Rock ‘n’ Roll H******e Koo”, by Rick Derringer.
For those loyal readers who might not have been awash in AM radio in the 1970s, the song in question is “Rock ‘n’ Roll Hootchie Koo”, which of course made me wonder why either the expunged “ootchi”, or the fully reconstituted “Kootchie” was deemed too offensive to make its way onto iTunes’ titles list.
Google offered some help, and provided me with a little education in the process. “Your Dictionary.com”, or anyone else for that matter, refused to recognize it as a stand-alone word. But as one half of the phrase “hootchie-kootchie” (alternatively, “hootchy-kootchy”), the online dictionary tells us it means, “a kind of erotic performance somewhat like the belly dance, as formerly performed at carnivals, etc.”
Chicago bluesman Willie Dixon (1915 – 1992) certainly knew of that derivation, even with a flipped gender. Here are a few lines from his “Hootchie-Kootchie Man”, as performed a musical generation or so later by the hard-rocking band, Steppenwolf, fronted by Canadian John Kay:
“Yeah, you know I'm here
And everybody knows I'm here;
I'm your Hootchie-Kootchie man.
Oh Lord, Everybody knows I'm here.
I got a black cat bone
Lord; I got a mojo too.
I got little John, the conquered,
Oh baby, I'm gonna mess with you.
I'm gonna grab those pretty women;
I'm gonna grab 'em by the hand.
You know, the whole wide world gonna know
Oh Lord, I'm your Hootchie-Koochie man.
Yes, you know I'm here;
Everybody knows I'm here.”
And of course, had iTunes just left it alone, there likely would not now be a whole new generation of a growing number of “solid gold rock” music fans who are forever after going to snicker whenever Grandpa leans over to tickle grandchild under the chin and utter that immortal grandpa-ism: “Ootchie-kootchie-kootchie-koo”.
Baby Duck – soon to be a linguistics degree program all by itself.
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BD regulars will recall not too long ago when I described the paper “Eye of Sauron” cutout that Katie put together for me so I could paste it over my laptop’s resident video camera and thus avoid having my (now much regretted) Spice Girls tattoo broadcast all over that Internet thingie.
Katie’s next-gen eyeroll was more patronizing than sympathetic but I did get an Eye of Sauron lens block out of it.
Well hoo hah! Let me tell you who gets the last laugh on this one! Leslie recently acquired a computer program called “Anyplace” that allows her to link her computer to any computer she wants through the simple expedient of programming the respective IP addresses into both computers and triggering whatever has to be triggered to effectively “notify” both machines – or however many are in the loop – that the requisite permissions have been extended.
She did this because occasionally her Dad has experienced a computer problem and sometimes is not quite sure how he got there. So what Anytime enables her to do is call up her Dad’s computer (or anyone’s computer with the embedded permissions) and troubleshoot it from wherever she happens to be. In other words, she has full access to all the program commands on her Dad’s computer.
Before she did this, she installed it on my laptop to test it out.
It worked.
So hypothetically speaking (Lord I hope so!), were I to one day discover that my Eye of Sauron camera block is gone, I’d better be damned sure that Sporty, Baby, Scary, Ginger and... whoever the hell the 5th Spice is – Chunky? Oh no, wait, how could I have forgotten Ms Beckham / Posh? – are nip-and-tucked out of sight or I might just as well Google “Embarrassing Spice Girl tattoo” and there’ll I’ll be. Or they’ll be.
Digitally and pneumatically enhanced imagery aside, with my corpus as an easel, I assure you it won't be pretty!
My point is that, so long as evil programs such as Anyplace are out there, the Eye of Sauron lens block ain’t such a dumb idea after all.
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Meanwhile, into the "News releases best left unexplored" bin one not-too-long-ago-afternoon went:
“Application Forms for Government of Canada Slaughter Improvement Program Now
Available
OTTAWA, ONTARIO--(Marketwire - July 9, 2009) - The Honourable Jean-Pierre Blackburn, Minister of National Revenue and Minister of State (Agriculture) is encouraging all potential applicants to apply for the new federal Slaughter Improvement Program (SIP). The three-year, $50-million program is now accepting applications. ‘The Slaughter Improvement Program - a commitment made in Canada's Economic Action Plan - is now up and running,’ said Minister Blackburn.”
Man I'll bet it was tough for his communications people to come up with a quote to make that sound like good news.
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Up next – a mercifully meandering one-off overview of three and a half days in Chicago. (Willis Tower be damned! You’ll always be the Sears.)
Until la prochaine.