A couple days back, I was watching the CTV News Network with Closed Captioning and the news reader introduced a story about a new StatsCan survey suggesting that baby boomers are poised to become even more populous than the workforce. But what really made me laugh was when the Closed Captioning grabbed “baby boomers”, it was spit out onscreen as “Barack Obamers”. A left wing plot if ever there were one.

Which made me wonder if there’s a Canadian version. Oh wait, there is... it describes those people who are furiously complaining – constantly carping on and on without a let-up – about Conservative Party policies these days. You must have heard of the steaming carpers.

Let’s see if Closed Captioning handles that one accurately!

= = =

Teddy, where were you when I needed you?

Recently I watched one from the wave of anti-bullying TV commercials that seem to be appearing with ever-increasing frequency. I’m really glad to see this. I do respect their message, and I respect the frequency with which they are being repeated. I’ve also noticed that they almost all seem to carry some variation of the same simple advice – tell someone. That’s where the solution, they say, begins.

Makes sense to me.

So... 44 years after the fact, GW, this one’s for you.

In the Fall of 1968, my family had just relocated to Perth after Dad finished out his 20-year hitch in the Royal Canadian Air Force. My last high school class that spring had been at the South Shore Catholic High School (SSCHS) in Longueuil, Québec, just south of Montreal, because the base school only went to Grade 9 and so high school-aged base brats were bused to SSCHS.

It was a combined English / French school, but combined in a way that only a psycho with no kids could have dreamed up. French kids attended from 7 am to noon; English kids went from 1 pm to 7 pm. I remember I was in class M3D – “M” for “Mixed” – male and female (and yes, there were also “B” and “G” classes – I’ll let you figure out what those letters mean); “3” to designate the third year of the system supported by the school, in my case Grade 10, and D, along with several other letters of the alphabet, to distinguish one class from the other. I think they must have had a hell of a lot of Grade 10s. One of my friends from the base was in class M3T.

That description was just to let you know what I was coming from.

What I was coming to was Grade 11 at the Perth and District Collegiate Institute (PDCI). The summer before starting, I wasn’t really bothered by the thought of settling into a new school... again. The thing about being an armed forces brat is that you are likely to have been transferred not only to several different schools, but several different communities, perhaps even several different countries, by the time your father (or mother) has completed his or her armed forces career. It lends a certain resiliency to your ability to make a transition without feeling too unsettled. Or so I thought, anyway.

It was during my first few weeks at PDCI that Fall that I started to discover something of what the opposite of “resiliency” was. Pretty much every one of my classmates had shared classes right from kindergarten. For the first time in my life, I found myself among classmates with whom I shared no experience whatsoever. In no time flat, I was made to feel clearly that I was a rank outsider.

It wasn’t for lack of trying. But I kept running into a variation of an unspoken, “Who the hell are you?” theme whenever I tried to get to know a group or even an individual. (There were exceptions, I hasten to add, and one of them remains a close friend to this day. But by far the majority of PDCI social groups were sculpted fully into shape by Grade 11 and clearly none were accepting new members.)

So being a geek (and Oh Lord! was I a geek, complete with black-framed eyeglasses with densely thick lenses), it didn’t help that I had no athletic abilities whatsoever and like all small-town Ontario schools, PDCI tended to lionize its sports stars. We had, for example, a provincial champion cross-country runner; we had a guy who could toss a shotput farther than a lot of people could toss a tennis ball; and we had a pretty damned good football team. And GREAT! cheerleaders. Why when those girls rolled off a line of cartwheels, every guy in the stands would... (Or... urm... perhaps I’ve said too much.) Where was I going with this? Oh yes...

One day, my Grade 11 class and another class were on a field trip. It wasn’t a happy marriage. The class was geography and the other class was one of those collectives known as “shop”, in which kids were following a stream either of electrical shop, woodworking shop, mechanical (auto-repair) shop, or “commercial”, which consisted mostly of girls who were there to learn what were then called “secretarial skills”. Obviously, this was long before managers had computers and keyboards on their own desks and still dictated their letters to someone from the typing pool. (Yes friends, early in my working life, I lived “Mad Men”. Just not the good parts. But I digress.)

But every shop class also had one or two academic classes they were expected to take to provide a wider education experience, and it was one of those classes with whom we were sharing the bus. The field trip was in geography and we were specifically going to several local examples of glaciation-related landforms. I remember sitting in my seat, happily jotting down notes while our teacher gave a running commentary that added to the how and why of something we either had just seen, or were about to see.

And it was around about the time he was describing the classic whale-back shape of a drumlin, and while I was furiously sketching the same in my notebook, that I heard from one of the seats behind me, “Hey G... that guy sure is taking a lot of notes.” That rather obvious observation was followed by a second voice, “Yeah? Well he’d better not.”

Pardon? “He’d better not”... take notes? I thought I’d heard wrong so I went right on with my jottings. I was seated on the left side of the aisle with my right elbow on the armrest and suddenly my right arm was bashed from behind, driving a magnificent blue ballpoint ink line straight across my newly-sketched drumlin.

(Photo: a classic drumlin, good enough to be a template and you have to admit it really does look like a breaching whale. Slash a blue ink line right across the photo from right to left and you’ve got my sketch. Source: University of Maryland Department of Geology / online)

After several repetitions, I remember turning around and saying, “Look, kid... cut it out.”

I think it was the “kid” that did it. As I turned around, I realized I was looking at someone who, if possible, looked even more geeky than me. Big lenses, large nose, black Buddy Holly-style eyeglass frames, and with a facial blood flow peculiarity that gave him a permanent rosy circular patch on each of his otherwise pale cheeks.

(It was several years later, when I saw the Stephen King movie, “Christine”, that I realized he looked a lot like the pre-cool Arnie Cunningham.) But from the neck down, this guy clearly was bigger and stronger than me. So for the rest of the field trip, whenever I got back on the bus, I sat at a window seat where my elbow was unreachable. And that, I thought, was that.

About a week later, during a class change while the halls were just filled with kids flowing from one class to the next, I was thumping up the staircase not really paying much attention to anything other than where I was going when from out of nowhere, a hand reached down from the next level of the staircase passing me on the way up and delivered just a vicious slap across the side of my face.

You’ve heard of a “stinging slap”? This was the mother of all stings. Christ, it hurt! I looked up through eyes filled with pain-induced tears to see the aforementioned GW looking down at me and laughing.

And so it went. On and off for a few weeks like that. I worked at avoiding him as much as possible, even going so far as to find out what specific class he was in and visiting the office where a schedule was posted for every single class. Finding his gave me a way to map out my own between-class travels through the school that would reduce the frequency with which our paths crossed.

The final episode came a couple weeks after yet another hard contact.

Like any high school, the PDCI had its share of car drivers and even kids who actually owned their own cars. I had already discovered that his was a purply-blue big old ton-and-a-half model of some kind of Detroit iron – a mid-1950s Pontiac Chieftain. It actually was not a bad looking, if boxy, car and even then a borderline collector’s item. Its distinctiveness also helped make it easy to avoid. (And yes, I would cross the street to avoid having to walk past it whenever I spotted it parked along the road leading to the school’s front door.)

Photo: A 1956 Pontiac Chieftain.., give it a coat of purple-blue paint and you’re looking at my real-world version of Stephen King’s “Christine”.

On this day, it was parked literally at the last space before the door so there was no avoiding it. As I walked quickly by, and was heading for the door thinking I’d got into the clear, from behind me I heard, “Hey kid...” I turned around and there came GW, striding purposefully straight towards me. And I still remember this as clear as I remember yesterday’s dinner. I turned, spread my arms as much as a load of books and binder would permit, and got about two words into asking him, “Just what is your problem?” when he drove his fist fully into my face just below my right eye. He followed it with two more quick, hard punches, the last one connecting so solidly with my chin that it registered in my skull as a pattern of flashing lights.

It’s as close as I’ve ever come to being knocked out cold by anything that wasn’t delivered by an anaesthesiologist. The force of that last punch sent me backwards so hard, I slammed into the large plate glass window beside the front door, hitting it with a boom that I’m sure echoed through the school’s halls for 50 yards in all directions. My armload of books and binder flew one direction; my brownbag lunch the other.

And I suspect it was that collision with the plate glass that probably saved me from being punched a few more times. It brought several other students swiftly to the door from inside the school. Rather than have to deal with a whole bunch of “What happened?” questions, just as fast as I could I swept my books and binder up off the ground, yanked open the door and just before bustling into the school, turned in time to see GW walking back to his car, laughing.

For my part, I went to the nearest boys’ bathroom to check to see that I wasn’t bleeding. I wasn’t – at least not from my face. But already I definitely had the makings of a dandy big black-and-blue patch below my right eye. However, I also had a really good scrape – which was bleeding quite freely – across the back of one hand where I’d bounced sideways onto the concrete front step after hitting the plate glass.

Later, around about lunchtime, I realized that in the rush to gather up everything that his punches had caused me to send flying, I had missed picking up my brownbag.

= = =

That was my last physical contact with GW. I did meet him again a couple years later when I was working as a volunteer for a local summer festival and I was one of several drivers who would be chauffeuring a convertible in the festival’s opening parade, each of us with some minor local celebrity. (Sadly, it wasn’t Miss Eastern Ontario, who was a real babe that year and who was the hoped-for celeb that I think every last one of us hormone-driven volunteer drivers was wishing to find perched up on his convertible’s back seat backrest.)

GW was another of those drivers and as we all stood around getting a few final instructions before the parade, I stood in the group, but as far away from him as I could stand while still remaining in the group. The guy still terrified me and all the memories of those multiple hits and slaps and that final trio of full-face sucker punches came flooding back.

But he gave zero sign that he even recognized me.

So that’s my fulfillment of present-day anti-bullying campaigners’ directives to “tell someone”. (Probably they are hoping for more than a 44-year time lag between the event and the tell, but better late than never.)

To this day, I have never understood why my simply taking notes provoked that reaction and the following weeks of bullying. But more likely than not, it probably wasn’t so much what I was doing – that was simply the trigger. I’ve since come to think that I might well have been the only other person in the entire school that GW could beat up, and it’s possible that he himself was routinely pummelled by his own bully before finding someone he could pass it on to.

But GW... you owe me a lunch.

You bastard.

(My Perth high school experience greatly improved after Grade 11. GW did not return and I guess I gave off signs of starting to enjoy life in Perth, because I found my way into several activities including a student council parliament of which I was Head Boy by the end of Grade 13 – admittedly because the fellow to whom I had finished second in the election had to leave school abruptly early in the year when he and his girlfriend were... uh... somewhat careless about birth control and he was made to “do the honourable thing”. That too was Perth in the late 1960s. But hey, we wannabe-popular-in-high-school types have to grab our rewards where we can.)

So why “GW” instead of calling him out by name? When I was writing this story, I Googled him and there is someone by that name still living in Perth, not far from my parents’ house, in fact. I know my memories are (no pun intended) painfully accurate. But 44 years, while leaving me with crystal clear memories, have long since eliminated any chance of proving any of it if I were to be asked to do so.

Why didn’t I tell anyone at the time? A small-town Ontario high school in 1968-69 was not the most conducive of environments for accusing anyone of “bullying”. You would pretty much have to be attacked while a teacher was watching. And peer pressure. Admitting you were hurt by something as mundane as a punch in the face would likely get your friends telling you, first, to suck it up and, second, to go hit him back.

Plus they’d probably lay side bets on the outcome.

Anti-bullying groups today are formed around the slogan, “It gets better”. For the sake of kids who travel in their own unique orbits, I for one sure as hell hope so!

À la next time.

Next: Officially, I’m retired. Now what? The first of what may be many, many musings on that theme.

Why do people sometimes seem to fail utterly at the basic social skill of saying, “Thank you”?

I have a couple examples. Many months ago, after Mom died, I found a beautifully carved lightweight wooden cane in her trove of flea market / yard / garage sale acquisitions accumulated over the years.

Mom had a few simple rules that governed her buying at such sales: Did she like it? Was it low-priced? (Actually, come to think of it, that’s about it. She never bought for “cachet”, and rarely even considered “collectability”. For her, a trip to the Stittsville Flea Market or Bernie’s Sale Barn was a day well spent even if she didn’t add a single thing to the china cabinets.)

She did have a fondness for antique bottles. Her McLaren’s Perth Malt Whiskey bottle (photo) from the long-gone Perth Distillery is a much-welcomed addition to my own shelf of meaningful miscellany.

She also collected Depression Glass – tableware (plates, bowls, pitchers, cups and saucers, etc) with a faint tint of colour worked into the patterned glass. But that was about the only genre of collectible that she ever even considered whenever she would hit a flea market or sale barn.

But back to the cane. In addition to being beautifully carved with a leaf garland running from the curved crook to its bottom end, it included a name and the notation, “France 1916”.

Over a period of several weeks after Mom died, I decided I’d try to see if I could find something more specific that might enable me perhaps to find a more relevant home for it. The “France 1916” proved to be gold when it came to a starting point. Thinking that it might actually indicate the work of a soldier, I sent a note with a description of the cane, including the name carved on it, to a contact I have at the Queen’s Own Rifles (QOR) Museum in Toronto. (It’s a fascinating place if you’re interested in one highly significant unit’s military history from the present day all the way back to Canada’s historical roots. It’s located on the top floor of Casa Loma.)

How I came to know my QOR contact is a long story in itself, but let’s just say briefly that part of it involved my successfully shipping to the Museum – through Canada Post – a pair of military products I donated to them after they indicated they would be delighted to accept my offer: two WWII-era Mills Bombs, which is what the British and Canadian forces called the pineapple-shaped explosive the Americans know as a “hand grenade”. They were in pristine condition, and each was engraved with a deeply-cut “FW”, indicating they were made in the Frost and Woods factory in Smiths Falls, where one of my family tree dwellers had worked for a time during the War. It’s important to emphasize that they were completely disassembled and contained no explosive whatsoever – “inert” as my Museum contact labelled them when I described them to him before shipping them off.

So yes, Canada Post, I sent two bombs (photo) through the mail – carefully wrapped, totally disassembled, and wholly free of any explosive – but guaranteed to have triggered the scanner equivalent of a fire alarm had those classic pineapple shapes turned up on a random X-ray.

How my late relative came to be in the possession of two inert hand grenades that were subsequently passed on to my Dad is a family mystery that I suspect will forever remain a cold case.

Um... the preceding would be what one could call a “digression”. I can’t recall when I’ve ever digressed in this blog before...

Where was I? Oh yes. After e-mailing a description of the cane to my QOR Museum contact, I received – within 48 hours – an e-mailed copy of a document called a Certificate of Attestation. It is a document that every army recruit in WWI had to sign when he enlisted. Simply by signing it, the recruit attests, “Yes I am old enough to enlist”, and provides a few bits of personal information. Two things leapt out at me: 1. the name was identical to that on my cane; and 2. the clincher was what had been written in the box labelled “Occupation”: woodcutter. If anyone could be expected to have a job-related skill like woodcarving... The document also included the information that his home was in a small town in New Brunswick.

At this point, things got a little unbelievable. When I Googled the family name, plus the New Brunswick town name, I got one hit with the same surname that not only gave an address, but also a phone number. So having gotten this far, I dialled it and, after spending a few minutes explaining to the woman who answered the phone about the reason for my call, I listened as she shouted to someone at her end, “Grandpa was in the war, wasn’t he?... No, the First one.” Then she came back on the line. “It’s my husband’s father.”

Just like that. So I bundled the now-homebound package up so as to survive either Canada Post’s handling or being run over by a herd of stampeding wildebeest, added a copy of the Certificate of Attestation and a note summarizing how I had collected the background information – with the help of the QOR Museum curator – that led me to make that (to me) amazing phone call. Then I sent it off with a mail tracking code.

My last encounter with it was an online verification via the Canada Post tracking number that it had been delivered. That was almost a year ago. Since then, nothing.

Example 2. While Dad was in his last months, my brother and I regularly – every three weeks – arranged for him to be transferred via a private ambulance service from his nursing home in Perth to the Ottawa Cancer Centre (OCC) at the Ottawa Hospital campus on Smyth Road and back again after a five-hour chemo session.

Each of those trips also involved a personal meeting with a young, friendly and highly professional hematologist at the OCC. And after each visit, Dad regularly let both my brother and me know how completely comfortable both experiences had made him feel.

The ambulance crews in particular, without exception, were scrupulous about watching his portable oxygen level, even once replacing an expired bottle with one of their own when the nursing home inadvertently sent Dad off with only a partially filled one. Also, they never left Dad and me at the hospital (I met him on every trip at the Ottawa end; my brother sent him off and welcomed him back at the Perth end) until they made sure he was hooked up to the hospital’s oxygen supply, preserving the balance of his portable supply for the return trip to Perth.

And the young hematologist was never less than completely positive about how unexpectedly well the chemo appeared to be working. (The OCC chemo treatments were indeed astonishingly beneficial in pushing back the effects of his multiple brain tumours and, in fact, it was his emphysema that eventually was to kill him in a swift final attack.)

After Dad died, I wrote long and emotional letters to both the patient transfer service and the hematologist expressing my appreciation for making Dad’s last months as comfortable for him as they could possibly have been.

And you can guess where I’m going with this. I wasn’t looking for a “Thank you for your thank you” reply, but a short note telling me they got my letters... anything at all... would have been nice. That was five months ago.

So I don’t know... maybe the New Brunswick family once more in possession of what I imagine is a pretty special part of their family history is afraid I’m going to send them a bill for the shipping (I’m not); and maybe the patient transfer service and the medical specialist have been warned by their legal advisors never to enter into any personal written exchanges with clients / patients; or maybe it’s just a symptom of the times. But what I do know is that it’s kind of sad.

So say thank you, folks. And acknowledge it when someone says thank you to you. (In speaking, that would be, “You’re welcome,” or something equally simple.) Most of the time it costs not a damned thing but what it’s worth at the receiving end can mean everything.

= = =

Worlds and Estates (After listening to a Fifth Estate news report on yet another UN criticism of Canada’s Third World conditions on its native reserves)

It’s generally common terminology – some would argue too common – for the media typically to refer to desperately poor countries, or localized poverty conditions in countries not so desperately poor, as “Third World”. And on a related numbers topic, if from no other source than the name of a popular television investigative news show, we can pretty much guess that the term “Fifth Estate” has something to do with the media.

But hands up, everyone who – without having looked it up – knows what the First and Second Worlds are – and whether there’s a Fourth; and who knows what the first four “Estates” are. (I can tell you for sure that my hand was definitely not up.)

Describing what is First, Second or Third World can be as simple or as complicated as you want to make it. But what all the definitions have in common is that they are not driven by a country’s location or age or literacy or extent of over-population, but rather by economics.

At its simplest (emphasis on simplicity; some of my related reading on this could easily fill a book), the difference is essentially this: the countries of the First World are the developed nations, in which you will find a combination of a strong industrial or service-driven economic base, and no persistent state of epidemic or major pockets of life-threatening disease. Canada, Japan, the US, the UK and France are all considered to be in this classification.

Countries in the Second World have some degree of moderate economic development, perhaps an unlinked economy of several individual businesses or agricultural-based trade and export. (Occasionally, a Second World country in fact might also be small enough that it is driven only by a single national industry or commodity.) Healthwise, such countries will occasionally see disease outbreaks, but the really major epidemics have pretty much been relegated to the dustbins of their history. Mexico is considered to be a Second World country. So is Thailand.

A Third World country is pretty much what the First and Second are not. The vast majority of the country lacks urbanization or significant industrial development. Killing outbreaks of diseases that are readily beaten in other parts of the world, such as measles, malaria, leprosy or river blindness, are occasional if not regular occurrences. A great many of Africa’s nations are Third World, as are several on this side of the Atlantic in Latin America.

And several sources do indeed also define a Fourth World, whose inhabitants are even harder to nail down for the simple reason that they consist of highly mobilized, nomadic or even subset groups within a larger national context. The Fourth World does not know borders, but defines a people bound by, for example, religion or a powerful ethnic tradition that is independent of national boundaries. The world’s Roma, colloquially called Gypsies in the past, the Iberian Peninsula’s Basques, the Middle East’s Kurds, the Pashtun of Afghanistan / Pakistan, countless First Nations throughout the Americas and the indigenous peoples of the North like the Inuit or the Lapps, are all Fourth World.

With Estates, it’s a little more complicated. In British tradition, the terms originally referred to agencies that had influence over legislation. The First Estate was the Church; the Second the House of Lords and the Third the House of Commons.

The Fourth Estate has been less firmly fixed and the label was used for any other agency with the authority (whether granted or seized) to influence Parliament from time to time. Occasionally it has referred to the army, trade unions, even the poor, and occasionally it has referred to the press – in the most literal sense of the word: the Fleet Street newspapers. Later, when electronic media reporting became commonplace, the Fifth Estate was coined to include TV and radio reporting.

At least that’s what some sources say. Oxford, however, while starting with the same general distinctions, lumps the electronic media together with the press as the Fourth Estate, and calls the far more recent Internet-driven media such as websites, blogs, Tweets and the like the Fifth Estate. “It has characteristics similar to the Fourth Estate,” says Oxford, “but is sufficiently distinctive to warrant its recognition as a new estate.” (“Oxford Today”, online).

Now get out there and win a few pub trivia challenges, people!

Every day’s a school day on "Baby Duck!"

Next time: As this entry was going to press, CBC radio's "Cross-Country Checkup" with Rex Murphy was taking on the subject of bullying. I have a festering sore that I want to tear a 44-year old band-aid off. And you get to hear about it!

Until la prochaine.

Oh man, you're going to be SOOOO sorry you didn't rush your subscription cancellation to me. So here's what's happening. Every weekend, CBC radio runs a wonderful show called "Vinyl Tap", hosted by former Guess Who and Bachman Turner Overdrive front man Randy Bachman. When "Finkleman's 45s" ended, I despaired of finding anything to replace it, but Bachman's show is a lot of fun.

For one thing, he has a HUGE base of musical knowledge and a lot of his between-song comments refer to things happening in the song that you might not even have thought to listen for. More generally, his trivia fill-ins are drawn from an equally encyclopaedic familiarity.

And he always plays music -- for two hours -- related to a theme. Recently, for example, the theme was artists best known by one name, so the music was by people like Elvis, Sting, Ringo, Cher, Celine, and so on and so on. (I thought he was reaching a bit when he played a Neil Young song, and said that to the whole world he is just "Neil". Well how many times have you heard a DJ introduce a song like "Heart of Gold" by saying "Here's a classic by Neil"? If you're like me... not very often.)

Anyway, to make an incredibly long blog post even longer, Mr Bachman regularly invites "Vinyl Tap" listeners to submit suggested themes and even playlists. So being the very antithesis of "concise", I decided to go him one better and even throw in a whole bunch of taking points.

My suggested theme was Songs with Stories – that is, songs either about real events, or which take real events / settings / people as their starting point to make a social comment... or (as with "Snoopy vs the Red Baron") just to have a bit of fun.

I also stuffed it with You Tube links to some fascinating video versions of the songs -- some of them "official videos"; some are tributes by fans but with the original music, and still others are images from the event / era in question with the original music underlying it.

And there are about 30 of them in my proposed show -- because Mr Bachman said he requires about 26 to fill two hours, so I thought I'd give him a couple bonus options in case he didn't like something I'm suggesting for one reason or another.

I also suspect he gets about a jillion of these things and I rate its chances of getting to air right up there with the proverbial snowball in Hell. But it was a heck of a lot of fun to write and as I searched out either the videos or some relevant facts, I found myself just wallowing in the nostalgia of it all. So I thought why just take that ride myself? Why not inflict it on the Baby Ducklings?

You're welcome. :-)

So if you're an old fart like me, hopefully, you'll find some recollections popping into your head as you wade through this. And if you're on the younger end of the age spectrum, well maybe you'll just enjoy the discovery.

A final note before I cry havoc and let slip the songs of yore, You Tube links are notoriously fickle. The vast majority of fans simply upload things willy nilly with no regard for copyright or ownership, and there are vast corporate search engines out there who seek out unauthorized versions that have been put into cyberspace. So if you do hit a vanished link, just enter the song title into the You Tube search box.

It's the box right at the top of this page.

You won't always get the version I chose, but you'll at least get the enjoyment of the music. (Oh... and there are a lot of gawd-AWFUL cover versions out there by people who think the only thing separating them from Eric Clapton is that he has a more expensive guitar. So if you can seek out both the title and the artist, you're more likely to re-link to the one I used if it's been taken down from the link in this blog entry.)

Have fun. I know I sure did! It's a big gulp so don't swallow it all at one sitting. (It took days to write; so take a few to read and listen.)

Mike

1. “Sink the Bismarck” by Johnny Horton

About the hunt and eventual sinking of the German battleship Bismarck in the early days of WWII. The fight, which took place over several days, featured a combination of extremely accurate naval gunnery on both sides and blind luck on the part of the British when a torpedo dropped from a Swordfish aircraft jammed Bismarck’s rudder and sent her in an endless circle, preventing her escape. The song also makes note of the battle’s most devastating setback for the British, the sinking of one of her foremost battleships, HMS Hood, when one or more shells from Bismarck simultaneously detonated Hood’s ammunition and torpedo magazines, blowing the ship to pieces and killing all but three of her 1418-man crew.

2. “The Night Chicago Died” by Paper Lace

Loosely based on Chicago in the “Dirty 30s”, the song is not so much about a single event as it is about the atmosphere at the time in the City, whose Prohibition-era night life was dominated by ruthless gangs of bootleggers, thugs and murderers, each gang with its own “turf” or section of the City from which they drew enormous profits supplying illegal booze to a public that demanded it. The most famous of these gangsters, of course, was Al Capone and the event that most infamously represents the period was the St Valentine’s Day Massacre. The song, however, is not specifically about that event, for the simple reason that the song places its shootings “In the heat of a summer’s night” and the St Valentine’s Day Massacre took place on Valentine’s Day, February 14, when it was still winter in the Windy City. The song, however, does capture some of the sense of the fear that must have been felt by wives and families of police officers every single time they went out on duty in that violent era.

3. “The Night The Lights Went Out in Georgia” by Vicki Lawrence

The song is set in the “backwoods southern” United States and its lyrics make direct or oblique references to corrupt judges and lawyers, as well as lynching, reflected in the speed with which the accused in the song, once convicted, is promptly hanged that same night. The reference to the judge “patting the sheriff on the back with a smile” even recalls one of the most infamous photos in civil rights trial history, of Longdale, Mississippi Sheriff Lawrence Rainey – who had been charged with conspiracy in the 1964 case of three murdered US civil rights workers – grinning and plugging a wad of Red Man chewing tobacco into his mouth during the trial proceedings. (Rainey must have known the system – he was eventually acquitted of all charges. The case became the basis of the Hollywood movie, “Mississippi Burning”. While the song is not about that case, its references are very much of the period.)

The Rainey photo.

4. “I Wanna Be In the Cavalry” by Corb Lund and the Hurtin’ Albertans

With its infectious drumbeat and unusually literate lyrics for a country song, this all-Canadian song – despite the fact that its accompanying video places it among the US horse soldiers of the 19th Century – also has a real resonance among members of modern units of the helicopter-borne US Air Cavalry. Even though it has only been out for a relatively short time, it already is frequently cited, along with the US 7th Cavalry theme, “Garry Owen”, at or near the top of lists of the most popular cavalry-related songs. (Which, it might surprise you to know, is not as short a list as you might imagine, but I digress.)

5. “Billy Don’t be a Hero” by Paper Lace

An anti-war song that many people in its 1974 release year took to mean the Vietnam War. The band had actually intended it to refer to the US Civil War, even going so far as to perform it live in period Federal blue uniforms, and posed for the album cover art around a smoking campfire while wearing the same (a lyric also refers to the “soldier blues”). But because it was released as the Vietnam War was winding down, it struck a chord with wives and girlfriends who, as they had been for almost a decade, were still saying good bye to their “soldier blues” as they left for the Asian War.

6. “Ruby Don’t Take Your Love To Town” by Kenny Rogers and the First Edition

As movies like “Coming Home”, “Heroes” and “Born on the Fourth of July” began to cast a sharp spotlight on the psychological and physical damage inflicted by the Vietnam War, some of the songs took a similar tack with their own messages. This song is sung by a severely wounded Vietnam veteran pleading with his wife not to go out and presumably cruise the bars looking for what he is no longer able to provide for her. The extent of both his physical and mental wounds are summed up in the song’s one shocking line, “If I could move, I’d take my gun and put you in the ground”.

7. “Billy I’ve Got to Go to Town” by Geraldine (Dodie) Stevens

“Ruby Don’t Take Your Love to Town” made such an impact that it actually led to an “answer song” delivered from the wounded vet’s wife’s point of view in which she expresses deep hurt at his accusations of cheating, and says she has to get out of the house just to get away from his rage and jealousy. “Have some faith in me,” she pleads.

8. “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” by Gordon Lightfoot

A song that really “needs no introduction”, this is the quintessential Canadian storytelling song about a catastrophic November 1975 Lake Superior storm so violent it smashed the hatch covers of a fully loaded Great Lakes ore carrier and sent her to the bottom like a rock, taking the entire crew of 29 to their deaths. Like many profound tragedies, however, the loss of the Edmund Fitzgerald led to some positive regulation changes for Great Lakes shipping, including carrying mandatory survival suits for Laker crew members, and more frequent structural inspection of vessels.

9. “Ringo” by Lorne Greene

Keeping with Canadian content, “Pa Cartwright” released this song, or more accurately a spoken-word story set to music, while at the height of his television fame as the head of the Ponderosa ranch family on “Bonanza”. "Ringo" has the universal theme of a bad character who shows a spark of good at a pivotal moment in the story. There was a real western outlaw named Johnny Ringo but this song’s narrative has nothing in common with his life and death. Johnny Ringo ran for a time with Ike Clanton but was not present at the famous Gunfight at the OK Corral, where Ike’s brother Billy and two others of his gang were shot and killed by Wyatt Earp, his brothers and Doc Holliday. Ringo’s death wasn’t anywhere near so dramatic and, in fact, was eventually ruled a suicide when his body was discovered “in the crotch of a tree” with a single gunshot wound to the head.

10. “New York Mining Disaster 1941” by the Bee Gees

The May 2012 death of Robin Gibb saw a resurgence in airplay of several of the Bee Gees’ classic songs, including this one set amid the underground ruins of a collapsed coal mine in which a pair of trapped miners are swapping stories and sentiments that seem to indicate neither is holding out much hope for rescue. Although the song’s title refers to a 1941 “mining disaster” in New York State, no such cave-in occurred and notes for the 1990 box set release of re-mastered Bee Gee hits said the song had actually been inspired by a 1966 disaster when, after several days of heavy rain, a catastrophic landslip on a mountain of coal mine debris slammed into the village of Aberfan, Wales and killed 116 adults and 28 children.

11. “Snoopy vs the Red Baron” by The Royal Guardsmen

The “Red Baron” was Germany’s most famous flying ace of World War I. Baron Manfred von Richtofen’s Flying Circus, led by him and his signature brilliant red Fokker Dr1 triplane, dominated the Western Front’s skies from 1916 right up until almost the end of the War. He personally was credited with shooting down no fewer than 80 British and French aircraft. His own death in April 1918 has been the subject of dispute ever since over whether he was brought down by Canadian pilot Roy Brown, a native of Carleton Place, Ontario, or an extremely lucky shot fired from the ground by an Australian infantryman. Charles Schulz, the creator of the comic strip "Peanuts", was inspired one day to draw an old leather flying helmet on the head of his famous cartoon dog, Snoopy, setting off a years-long storyline whose frequent punch line, “Curse you, Red Baron!” has entered the world’s slang. The Royal Guardsmen parleyed it into two successful songs, this one and a Christmas-themed follow-up, “Snoopy’s Christmas”, in which the Red Baron spares his canine foe’s life in the “true spirit of Christmas”.

12. “I Don’t Like Mondays” by the Boomtown Rats

In January 1979, 16-year old Brenda Anne Spencer opened fire on an elementary school playground in San Diego, California, killing two adults, and wounding eight children and a police officer. She was reported to have offered as an excuse, “I don’t like Mondays; this livens up the day.” Wire service reports of the story resonated with the Boomtown Rats’ lead singer, Bob Geldof, who penned this song and its unforgettable opening line, “And the silicon chip inside her head gets switched to overload”. The song was a hit everywhere but, out of respect for the shooting’s victims, was not played on a single San Diego radio station until years later.

13. “Indian Reservation” by The Raiders

In 1830, the United States government passed something called the Indian Removal Act. Eight years later, the entire Cherokee Nation was forcibly yanked from its ancestral home in the southeastern US (where coincidentally, gold had been discovered a decade earlier) and marched to a desolate and dehydrated section of land in present day Oklahoma called the “Indian Territory”. Some historians estimate that as many as 4,000 of the 15,000 relocated Cherokees died during the march along what today has come to be called The Trail of Tears. The ancestry of The Raiders’ lead singer, Mark Lindsay, is part Cherokee and that march and those deaths are what the band is commemorating in “Indian Reservation”, a song that ends with the somewhat ominous warning, “Maybe someday when we learn, Cherokee Nation will return.”

14. “Smoke on the Water” by Deep Purple

A lot of people credit Deep Purple’s “Machine Head” as being the first-ever “heavy metal” album. And the opening guitar notes of “Smoke on the Water”, which progressively swell with bass and organ rolling in, are among rock music’s most famous song openings ever. The fire described in the song was a real event, and it happened pretty much as described in the lyrics. During the 1971 Jazz Festival on the shores of Lake Geneva in Montreux, Switzerland, during a theatre concert at the Montreux Casino featuring Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, someone in the crowd fired a flare gun into the ceiling, which was covered in rattan. The entire casino complex was completely destroyed in the resulting fire, and no doubt many lives were saved by festival organizer Claude Nobs (the “funky Claude... running in and out” in the song), who helped steer many audience members to the exits.

15. “Abraham, Martin and John” by Dion

The 1960s saw no fewer than three political assassinations collectively burned into North Americans’ psyches with the shooting deaths of US President John F Kennedy on November 22, 1963 in Dallas, Texas, the Reverend Martin Luther King on April 4, 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee and John Kennedy’s brother Bobby just two months later in the early morning hours of June 6, 1968 during a campaign stop in Los Angeles. Singer Dion DiMucci’s gentle lament for the three links their collective loss with the death of another prominent agent for social change – US President Abraham Lincoln, who was assassinated in Washington DC on April 15, 1865 just days after the end of the US Civil War.

16. “Ohio” by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young

On May 4, 1970, in the course of confronting student anti-Vietnam War demonstrators at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, a unit of the Ohio National Guard opened fire with live ammunition. Over the span of just 13 seconds, 67 rounds were fired and when the shooting stopped, four students – Jeffrey Miller, Sandy Schueur, Alison Krause and Bill Schroeder – lay dead on the ground, while nine others were wounded, including one victim who was left permanently paralyzed. The shootings sparked a nationwide wave of anti-war protests and, just days later, a massive demonstration by over 100,000 people in Washington, DC who condemned the shooting of unarmed protestors, none of whom was closer than 250 feet to the Guardsmen. Then-US President Richard Nixon was blasted for characterizing the anti-war protesters as “bums” and this song began receiving airplay across the US just two and a half weeks after the shooting.

17. “For What It’s Worth” by Buffalo Springfield

“For What It’s Worth” is a song that became far more of a “message” song than was originally intended by Steven Stills when he wrote it in 1966. Buffalo Springfield had been the house band for the Whiskey-a-Go-Go nightclub on LA’s Sunset Strip. Their increasing popularity had led to the nightly assembly of crowds of noisy would-be patrons seeking to get in – who became even louder after they poured out of the club at closing time – leading to noise complaints from nearby residents. When the City passed a strict 10 pm curfew and anti-loitering laws, a protest by a large group of youths against the vigour with which the LA police enforced the new rules became a demonstration that was serious enough to be called a riot. It was that eruption that prompted Stills to write the song. For no clear reason, it became a generalized protest anthem and eventually came to be seen as an indictment against the war in Vietnam. Its place in the soundtrack of Vietnam War films like “Coming Home”, “Tropic Thunder” and “Forrest Gump” has only served to bolster that impression. Nowadays, it resonates with many children of the sixties as a symbol for that whole era and the clear divide between “rebellious” youth and the many forms of authority figures who were the targets of their protests during that decade.

18. “Ain’t Gonna Play Sun City” by Artists United Against Apartheid

In 1985, Steven Van Zandt had just left Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band to work on his own music. He travelled to South Africa because he had an idea for an album that would draw parallels between the black experience under apartheid and the social divide between native Americans living on reservations and the larger US population. While there, he discovered the Sun City resort, a lavish, albeit inter-racial gambling complex, but which had been built in the middle of a deeply impoverished “homeland”, a part of South Africa that was supposed to be ruled by black Africans. He was so upset he persuaded his producer to go along with creating a musical artists’ collective – much like the hugely successful “We Are the World” group created for famine relief – whose members vowed never to play at the casino complex because to do so would have been to give tacit approval to apartheid. A lot of prominent musicians at the time, including U2, Miles Davis, Pat Benatar, Peter Gabriel, The Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood, and Bruce Springsteen and his E Street Band saxman Clarence Clemens, joined the protest. “Ain’t Gonna Play Sun City” went on to become a major success in many countries including Canada (although not so much in the US where its message was deemed to be critical of President Ronald Reagan’s policies towards South Africa at the time), eventually anchoring an entire album called “Sun City”.

19. “American Pie” by Don McLean

When this song first came out in 1971, its enigmatic lyrics were the focus of everything from bar talk to entire university seminars. For a time, “the day the music died” was thought to be the November 22, 1963 date of US President John F Kennedy’s assassination, but eventually it was revealed to be referencing the aircraft crash on February 3, 1959 that killed rock and roll musicians Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper. Now, thanks to the internet, the lyrics’ meanings – both subtle and crystal clear – have been explained for all to read by the simple step of entering the song’s title into Google. But in 1971, throwing a conversational bone into the room in the middle of a Friday night bar session or a Saturday night house party like, “So who are the Father, Son and Holy Ghost?” could trigger an hour-long discussion.

20. “Rasputin” by Boney M

In 1916, Alexandra, Czarina of Russia and wife of Czar Nicholas, had fallen under the strange spell of a bizarre figure who has come to be known as the Mad Monk – Grigori Rasputin. The Russian Royal family had a son who was a haemophiliac and Rasputin’s ministrations had on several occasions appeared to have stopped the child’s bleeding when nothing else in medical practice of the day worked. During WWI, while the Czar was away at the front, Rasputin’s influence over the Czarina increased to such an alarming extent that a group of court nobles are alleged to have crafted a plot to kill him on December 29, 1916. The man was not easy to kill, however. A subsequent autopsy when his body showed up a couple days later showed that he had been poisoned, shot and badly beaten but the presence of water in his lungs suggested that he had still been alive when dumped into the nearly frozen Neva River and had actually died by drowning! The 1978 song was almost as quirky as the man. Set to a thumping disco beat, Boney M’s celebration of “Russia’s greatest love machine” went to Number 1 in Germany and Austria and Number 2 in the UK.

21. “Hurricane” by Bob Dylan

Rubin (Hurricane) Carter was a powerfully built boxer in the 1960s, rising to become the number 3 contender for the World Middleweight title in 1964. It all fell apart for Hurricane in June 1966 when two men were murdered in a bar in Paterson, New Jersey by “two African American males”. A badly wounded customer died a month later. Despite very little physical evidence linking Carter to the murders beyond owning a car that looked the car driven by one of the suspects, Carter was “identified” by two witnesses (who later recanted) and convicted in a trial that, on later examination, raised a great many more questions than it answered. A series of appeals followed, and Carter’s case drew support from the likes of Muhammed Ali and the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted. Bob Dylan wrote “Hurricane” in 1975 with songwriter and theatre dance director Jacques Levy. Eventually, the US Supreme Court refused to hear the case after Carter was freed by the US Federal Court of New Jersey in 1985 and no further action was prosecuted. Carter moved to Toronto and became Executive Director of the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted from 1993 to 2005. Besides the song, his story was the basis for 1999’s “The Hurricane”, a successful movie treatment starring Denzel Washington in the title role and directed by Canadian Norman Jewison.

22. “The Band’s Still Playing” by Lennie Gallant

April 2012 saw wide coverage of all things Titanic, marking the 100th anniversary of the ship’s sinking on its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York. The Canadian connections were also featured – everything from the wireless SOS calls being relayed through the receiving station at Cape Race, Newfoundland, to the dispatching of a Canadian ship and crew, the Mackey-Bennett, out of Halifax to recover as many bodies as possible, to the eventual laying to rest of 150 of the victims in three Halifax cemeteries. Without exception, the members of the ship’s small orchestra – who played almost to the very end – have been portrayed as heroes in the many movie and television versions of the story. Not one of them survived the sinking. In 1997, PEI’s Lennie Gallant penned this rocking tribute to the Titanic’s band. It was included on his album, “Lifeline”.

23. “Strange Fruit” by Billie Holiday

To sing a song like “Strange Fruit” in 1939 was a remarkable act of courage. It is, after all, a powerful indictment of racism and, in particular, the lynchings that even then were still happening in the old South. Almost from the moment of its release, the song took on a life of its own and has become almost as much of a controversy as its subject matter. It was the subject of a 2001 book (“Strange Fruit: the Biography of a Song”) and while Lady Day claimed she co-wrote the song, the book’s author shreds that claim. Whatever its provenance, however, there is no denying its impact. An online search of its influences, uses in popular culture and covers goes on for dozens of lines; Holiday’s version was inducted into the Grammy Awards Hall of Fame in 1978 and the Recording Industry of America and National Endowment for the Arts included it on their lists of “Songs of the Century” for 1900 – 2000.

24. “Dixieland” by Steve Earle

In most histories of the US Civil War, the Battle of Gettysburg is characterized as the “high water mark of the Confederacy”. And most accounts of the battle portray the fight for a tree-covered knob of land called Little Round Top and the heroic stand there by the federal 20th Maine regiment as the turning point of the battle. Earle’s toe-tapping song makes a fictional member of that regiment (an Irishman named Kilrain) its storyteller. Kilrain describes with unabashed pride the honour of serving under Colonel Joshua Chamberlain, a real historical figure who began the Civil War as a professor of rhetoric at a Maine College and finished it as one of its greatest heroes. According to Kilrain, the regiment is one that would follow Chamberlain to hell and back again – which most accounts of Gettysburg’s fight for Little Round Top pretty much agree summarizes the battle.

25. “Candle in the Wind” by Elton John

Two different generations know this song for two completely different reasons. In September 1997, just days after the August 31 car crash that killed Diana, Princess of Wales in Paris, Elton John released it as “Candle in the Wind 1997”, with the opening line, “Goodbye England’s Rose”, a tribute to the Princess. The song was a re-working of the original “Candle in the Wind”, which he wrote with Bernie Taupin and which first appeared on his 1973 “Good Bye Yellow Brick Road” double album. The original “Candle”, with the opening line “Goodbye Norma Jean”, was a moving tribute to another sort of “princess”, screen legend Marilyn Monroe, who died on August 5, 1962, also long before her time, the result of a drug overdose at the age of 36. “And I would have liked to know you, but I was just a kid. The candle burned out long before the legend ever did.”

26. “Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde” by Georgie Fame and The Blue Flames

Returning to the “Dirty 30s” of Depression-era America, this song builds on the almost heroic images that were crafted around some pretty nasty people – the gangsters of the day. Perhaps because there were so few women who achieved fame for a life of crime, Bonnie Parker and her partner Clyde Barrow quickly became fodder for wide media coverage of their “exploits” as they rampaged across the southwestern part of the country, including Missouri, Texas and Louisiana, robbing banks and leaving a trail of dead and wounded victims behind them, including nine police officers believed to have been shot to death in gunfights with the Barrow gang. The two were finally ambushed and killed on a Louisiana country road on May 23, 1934 by a six-man posse of officers. Their story, and exceedingly violent death, was the subject of a hugely successful 1967 movie directed by Arthur Penn and starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway in the title roles. "The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde", complete with siren and gunfire sound effects, was a 1968 hit for British R&B singer Georgie Fame, reaching number 1 in the UK.

27. “Blue Sky Mine” by Midnight Oil

The Blue Sky Mine was the single-industry core of an Australian town called Wittenoom. The town is now a ghost town, but for more than 20 years it served the mine, the source of a product known as blue asbestos. Not surprisingly, the widening knowledge of the detrimental health effects of asbestos drove the mine – and the town – to close in 1966. Today, eight people are resident in Wittenoom. Since the mine closed, many of the thousands of workers who passed through its harsh job sites have been tested and were determined to be suffering from mesothelioma, a variety of asbestos-related illness. Midnight Oil’s hard-driving “Blue Sky Mine” is a slam at Australia’s asbestos industry and its push for profits at the expense of worker safety. Midnight Oil has often made powerful cases for social issues in its music and it is no coincidence that the band’s highly visible lead singer, Peter Garrett, ran for and won election as a Member of Australia’s Labour Parliament in an October 2004 by-election, eventually becoming Minister of the Environment and later, Minister of Education.

28. “Tears in Heaven” by Eric Clapton

In March 1991, Eric Clapton’s four-year old son, Conor, died when he fell from a 53rd floor New York City apartment window. Just seven months earlier, Clapton's manager had died in the same helicopter crash that killed Texas blues guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan. “Tears in Heaven”, which he co-wrote with US songwriter Will Jennings, proved to be tremendously cathartic for Clapton; he credits the emotion of writing it with helping to pull him back from the depths of grief into which he sank after his son’s death. He stopped playing it in 2004, with the explanation that he has put the intensity of his sense of loss behind him and to try to perform it now would require him to reconnect with all that pain.

29A. “Woodstock” by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young

Or

29B. “Woodstock” by Joni Mitchell

Or

29C. “Woodstock” by Matthews Southern Comfort

Regardless of which version feels best for you, the song celebrates a seminal event in the history of rock music, one that to this day is widely recalled as the single concert that best represents the 60s music scene, indeed the whole so-called youth “counterculture” – with all its impromptu onstage happenings, the "free love" taking place in the fields all around the concert site, the free availability of just about every known form of recreational drug to be had at the time, and the chaos weathered by the crowds as food, water, medicine, and sleeping space all dissolved into short supply, then into crisis. When a pelting rain, thunder and lightning storm pounded the site in mid-concert and the crowds came up grinning after it was over, well, that was Woodstock. It is a tough choice deciding which version of this song best represents the “three days of peace and love” that took place at Max Yazgur’s Bethel, New York farm in August of 1969. The CSNY version is certainly the grittiest and rings more closely to a rock version than does either of the other two. But the MSC version is the one that got most of the Top 40 airplay when it came out, probably because it feels the “safest” and is more in tune with what Top 40 sounded like on mainstream radio at the time – lots of gentle harmonies and, once you’ve heard a verse and chorus, a predictable tune to the end. And Joni gives us the flower child version. As you listen to it, you can almost see the sunlight streaming through the fabric of her summer dress as she sways with the tune. That, too, was Woodstock.

I know; I know. It’s been a hell of a gap between updates and for that I apologize most sincerely. If you read my last post, you’ll understand part of the reason why. Working through the death of a parent is, as many people my age have already discovered, an all-consuming combination of intensities both emotional and the more mundane but no less affective administrative.

When that process envelops the death of both parents within a matter of months, and is capped with a major life change that is taking me from a 36-year long status of working for someone else into retirement (I say “is” because that process is happening as I write this), then sitting down and writing has been the last thing on my mind since Dad died.

However, I have also found the process to be surprisingly cathartic whenever I do sit down at the keyboard (much to the chagrin of people to whom I have sent e-mails that started out with a simple “Hi, what’s new?” and wound up being book-length chapters of everything from reflection to ranting. Which kind of sounds like the reason I started “Baby Duck” in the first place all those years ago.)

All of which is to say I am going to turn to its cyber-pages again. In the weeks to come (if I can drag my web-designer daughter away from her video games), you’ll see a masthead change of name – I’m going to call it “Triumph-Ant”, to reflect both the great enjoyment I get from saddling up on my motorcycle and taking day trips out and about, but also to trumpet the simple joy of getting this far in life. (And in a self-deprecating note, my admittedly tiny blip in the universe. Or as someone lots wiser once described it: “You want to see what kind of impression you make? Fill a sink with water; plunge your hand in; remove it. See the impression you leave behind?”)

Other than that, the way I let you know there’s been an update will remain the same – I’ll send an e-mailed note to my legions of loyal readers. (Which you all must be; because even after huge gaps like this, I get no mail bouncebacks to indicate that anyone has gone away!)

What will also be the same is the content of the blog. It’ll be text-heavy; it’ll continue to be a mix of funny and angry – hopefully less angry and more funny, but Lord knows one never went broke underestimating the stupidity of people or organizations.

Finally, and this scares me a bit, I’ve enabled “Comments” on the blog. (Don’t look for a deeply philosophical reason for why it’s taken so long – I just found out that “Blogger” has this feature. Who knew? I don’t plan to embed any restrictions, so feel free to have at it. (That said, I reserve the right to censure and censor if things start to get ugly. And yes, I get to decide what’s “ugly”. My blog; my rules, as the saying goes.)

So while the fresh paint is drying on the walls and the front door is being re-modelled, you’re still welcome here anytime. I am astonished at the size of the archive – and the amount of sheer bullshit it contains. Feel free to click a random date as a reminder of what goes on here before deciding if you want to keep reading.

See you soon!

Mike