Naivete

I'm naive, sometimes. Actually, a lot of the time. On matters big and small.

Matters small: the Writers' Guild strike still all but paralyzing television. It's hardly affected my viewing habits (the Leafs still lose two or three times a week, and news still happens), but many people are missing their favourite shows. Including, until recently, all those late-night shows airing long after I've retired: Letterman, Leno, and the like.
That surprised me. These people have writers?
The Sunday edition of the Toronto SUN prints what purports to be the funniest excepts of the week from each of these shows. They rarely elicit more than a chuckle (if that) from me, and I think my wife has laughed once in seven years of Sundays. Now I find out that Letterman, Leno, Colbert et al can't even claim this dreck as their own intellectual property; it rightly belongs to writers the names of which you never hear. What I want to know is: if none of these late-night hosts are smart enough to write their own material, why are they being paid millions of dollars?
(Because they're actors, Ken. Just actors.) Yeah, but people are actually tuning in to these shows to find out what's going on in the world. I find it actually rather frightening that at some point, somebody had a brainwave. "You know what newscasts need? More cynicism!" And that other people agreed.

Naive. I have this naive belief that honesty is the best policy. Having been a chronic liar in my childhood and having had every last lie of mine found out eventually, I've come around to thinking that the truth shall set you free.
Except when it doesn't. I naively put all my cards on the table when we went to adopt kids and the table collapsed. I watch in election after election as people do everything possible to avoid telling the truth, even if it means telling blatant lies. And these people get elected. It's the people who speak straight that get punished for it.
Why is that? Because people don't want to hear the truth if it's bad. See, I don't think like that, myself. I'd rather hear the worst possible news than no news at all, and I certainly don't want it sugar-coated. It doesn't take long for the underlying bitter taste to register, all the more bitter for the ersatz sweetness.

Honesty may make the best policy, but it makes the worst politics.

Matters large: At work the other day, I got into a rather heated three-sided debate on privacy issues specifically RFID microchipping. I found it hard to keep an even keel. On one side, I was facing a man who seems to believe in every last conspiracy theory out there ("The Illuminati caused 9/11! I saw it on the Web!") On the other side was a person whom until that point, had never revealed her fundamentalist Christian beliefs. (At one point, she blurted out "oh, why should we listen to you? You don't even believe in the Bible!")
Anyone who's read more than, say, ten posts of this blog can just guess my internal reaction to that.
My position is quite simple, really. Some would probably call it naive. It's this: we microchip our pets because we care about them. We don't microchip our kids because...why, exactly?
("Because our kids have souls!" shouted the fundamentalist. "It's in Revelations! It's the Mark of the Beast!")
("Because the government can track your kids everywhere they go!" shouted the Conspiracy Theorist.)
Knee jerk reaction: It's Revelation, no "s", and why should I believe anyone who doesn't get that simple fact right? And...if there is such a thing as a "soul" (something I personally do believe, but I can argue both sides at will), who says animals don't have 'em? You? Oh, then it must be true.

Ken, beset on both sides, really needed a few extra hours and a captive audience. Because I have read Revelation, and researched it extensively. As I said not too long ago, the Christian people I hung around with when I professed that faith were obsessed with three things: Genesis, Revelation, and sex, especially gay sex. (And no, smartass: I didn't research all three of those things, only what the Bible said about them.)
A quick and dirty summary of theories about the Mark of the Beast can be found here, for those who are interested. You'll note that a RFID chip is merely one theory of a great many, and one of the more recent theories to boot. The fact is nobody really knows for sure what's being referred to here...which puts it on a par with much of the rest of Scripture, incidentally. I wouldn't put my money on the interpretation of the Left Behind folks, myself.
As for the government tracking my kids, if I had any: well, yeah, that's kind of the point. Should they become lost or kidnapped, it would certainly be nice if agents of the government (also known as "police officers") could track them down. As I said, we do it to our pets without a second thought.

"But what gives somebody the right to spy on you?" said the Conspiracy Theorist the next day, after tempers had cooled.
Now this I had (naively) never considered, and I told him so. I've thought hard about it since, though, and now see the source of my blind spot: I've never framed this as a "rights" issue--perhaps because I've never recognized "privacy" as a right...didn't your parents ever barge into your bedroom when you were a kid? "Privacy", to me, is merely a courtesy...and courtesies are not obligatory, particularly when there is a larger issue (such as safety) at stake.

"But the media work hard to engender a culture of fear, so that people can be controlled!"

On this you'll get no argument from me. (Man, do people in a debate ever hate it when you agree with them. It throws them right off stride.) I have no doubt that people are living in fear, and most of their fears are practically baseless. But not all of them. You can't possibly tell me pedophiles are a media invention, for example. If there's a pedophile living in your neighbourhood (and I'm sad to say it: no matter where you live, there probably is), does that mean you shouldn't leave the house? Of course not. But it does mean you should be aware of your surroundings, you should be streetproofed...and, should the unthinkable happen, you should be protected, say by means of a simple RFID chip.

If that makes me naive, I'm glad to be.

What if God was...all of us?

I promised an entry on the 'seven deadly sins' early in the new year and now find myself asking, 'is March still considered early in the new year'? For life has taken a turn for the harried lately, sleep is hard to come by, and the topic, now that I get a look at it from this side of a blank screen, is daunting, to say the least.
For before I even begin to express my thoughts on those seven deadlies, I must first attempt some definition of 'sin'. And before I can do that, since the concept of sin is so intertwined with the concept of 'god', it seems I must attempt to define 'god'--something I find difficult to do using mere words.
Oh, I can tell you what god is not, at least not to me. God is not some heavenly Father sitting on a cloud someplace, listening to an endless litany of prayers and saying 'yes' to some, 'no' to others, and 'maybe, but not yet' to still others. In short, god is most definitely not a celestial Magic 8-ball. To illustrate why, imagine two opposing basketball teams about to take the court, each praying for a victory. Both teams are convinced 'God' is listening, and both teams fervently believe 'God' is on their side. Yet only one team will emerge victorious. Is that a function of faith? How can it be, if both sides believe equally?
If you find the above illustration silly, change the basketball teams into armies. You might still find the whole thing rather a joke, but rest assured a great many real-life armies do not. There exists an army of born-again Christians who assume they are God's Chosen; there exists an army of Muslims who have a different name for God, but are absolutely convinced they are on a divine mission.
The god I believe in, as I have alluded time and time again in this blog over the years, does not judge anyone, ever. There are two reasons for this. One, he/she/it (pick your pronoun: it really makes no difference) loves unconditionally, which makes the entire idea of 'judgment' a contradiction in terms. More importantly, though, there is nothing to judge.

There is nothing to judge. How can there be? For a judgment to be necessary, a crime must have occurred. Damage must have been done, somehow. And how, pray tell (pun intended) would one go about damaging something as big, as all-encompassing, as god? We damage each other, of course, and commit crimes large and small, but we never do it without what we think of as a damned good reason. We humans never get out of bed in the morning and say to ourselves, 'I'm going to be as evil as possible today'. No, whatever 'evil' we do is usually motivated by misguided self-interest. It feels good, or it gets me something I want, and so on.
Okay, I hear somebody saying, but God sees our crimes against others, and punishes us for them.
Really? Using what standard? Which Holy Scripture? The Koran commands believers to murder unbelievers. So is murder okay if a devout Muslim commits it?
It's time we humans face facts. We're in control here. Us. Not some fairytale Our-Father-Who-Art-In-Heaven. We're all making it up as we go along. This is a scary thought for many, if not most, people on this planet. They want desperately to know what to think, what to believe, what to have faith in. Couple that with a crushing sense of inferiority felt by most of us...an almost total inability to think for ourselves, believe in ourselves, and have faith in each other, and it becomes easy to understand why the world is in the state it's in.
So does that mean there is no god? Yes...and no. There is no god as many of us have imagined 'Him'. That God is far too limited in scope, far too petty, far too...human.
I believe, though, that there is a god, a god that doesn't give two shits whether you believe in god or not. You could use other words instead, with no loss of meaning. Nature. The Universe. Love. Joy. Freedom.
You.
That's right: thou art God. While you're trying to wrap your head around that, take great pains not to single yourself out, because the girl down the street from you is also God, and so is that mother-in-law you can't stand. That 'stranger on the bus' is God. So's your lover, your boss, your worst enemy.
We all of us--every last one--are God-bits. We have within us the ability to create, which is the defining characteristic of a creator. Do we not create our experience here on Earth, individually and collectively? Can we not create matter--by which I mean, does not what we create matter? We're all making it up as we go along.
We have the ability to love unconditionally, though many of us have forgotten just how that's done. There's nothing we can't do if we put our minds, hearts, and spirits into it.

Umm, Ken, this is all very esoteric and all that, but we can hurt each other. If we're all this big God-thing, how is that possible?
It isn't.
We can choose to experience hurt, but it is not necessary. It is possible--easy, with practice--to choose to be happy in the face of what some would consider monstrous. We're all making it up as we go along.

MORE TO BE MADE UP SOON....

Michael Coren just doesn't get it.

The following is Michael Coren's column from today's Toronto SUN, pasted and posted verbatim. (I could have furnished the link, but I'm afraid it might expire.) Without further ado:

TORONTO -- As we prepare to celebrate the birthday of Jesus Christ there is surely nobody who seriously believes that Christianity is not under attack in North America. It was the author and critic Michael Medved, an Orthodox Jew, who pretty much summed it all up.
He made the point that even in a film as banal and forgettable as Alien 3, the secular establishment and its poodle that is media and entertainment managed to throw a few punches. In the movie, one of the violent sexual maniacs on a futuristic penal colony explains, "You know, we're all fundamentalist Christians here."
This, of course, is in outer space.
One would have thought the eternal struggle against man-eating aliens had little to do with organized religion, but apparently not.
Out of context, out of place and just dumb, it nevertheless enabled another group of Hollywood types to bash their favourite foe.
And let us be specific here. Organized religion invariably means Christianity. To attack an Eastern faith or even Judaism would be seen as being politically insensitive.
As for Islam, nobody in Hollywood or the Canadian movie and television business has the courage to risk a fatwa or two.
But in the final analysis it doesn't really matter. Tearing down Christmas trees, banning nativity scenes, mumbling happy holidays, preventing prayer in schools and council chambers - all the dying spasms of the liberal culture.
Now this is important. Never think that the attack upon Christianity is a sign of the decline of the victim. On the contrary. These attacks are evidence of the decline of the perpetrator. So insecure in their ideology are the atheist hordes that they try to destroy anything and everyone that reflects and exposes their weakness.
Every little victory for the secular culture is a major triumph for the Messiah whose birthday we are about to commemorate. Just as the Church was persecuted most harshly by a Rome in massive decline. The darkness before the new dawn.
The attacks also mean that the weak and watery ones fall away, leaving the faith to serious Christians who understand they are here not to edit but to follow Christ. So the culture-friendly types, who submit to every whim of decadence and materialism in their pathetic effort to remain popular, become irrelevant.
It's why the United Church will effectively disappear within 20 years, why the Anglicans will split and their liberal wing evaporate, why the attempt to hijack genuine Catholicism is now stone dead and why solid, orthodox churches are growing in all corners of the world.
It's not about socialism, recycling, sexual licence, climate change, group hugs, self-esteem or never offending anyone. It's about truth, unchanging Scriptural absolutes, church teaching, the undeniable facts of the virgin birth and bodily resurrection, speaking God's message even when it hurts the speaker as well as the hearer and unending love and forgiveness.
It's about doing what is right but never blurring the lines of what is wrong. About exposing sin but offering salvation. It comes at a cost but it is worth more than the world.
Have a wonderful, faithful and prayerful Christmas. Oh, and look forward to Alien 12, in which a sad group of once influential people will announce, "You know, we're all secular fundamentalists here." Then be eaten by an enormous spider from Neptune.

About once a year, I find myself agreeing with something Michael Coren writes. This is SO not one of those times.
First of all, as I have noted recently, we're NOT about to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, but rather an arbitrary date, selected for purely political reasons; the actual date of the "messiah" is unknown by even the most devout of his followers.
That little quibble aside, this column of Coren's goes on to intentionally offend all of us who do not share his views on God...way to convert people, Michael! Any question as to why a certain breed of Christian is held in such ill regard is answered in the smug, holier-than-thou tone of this article.
In Coren's words, Christianity is "under attack". He really ought to talk to a Jew or two: that particular faith has been under attack for generations beyond counting. No matter; the "attacks" he cites are inevitable byproducts of exclusion. Denying heaven to people who dare to think differently tends to rankle. Inflicting hell solely on the basis of an ancient book, translated and mistranslated again and again down through the ages, rankles even more.

It is true that evangelical, fundycostal churches (which Coren tellingly calls 'solid and orthodox') are growing in many areas of the world, while attempts to weaken religion into something more friendly to broader society have largely failed. There's no real surprise here: lamentably, people like to feel superior to each other, and when you remove that from religion you're left with weak wine indeed. The thought "God loves everyone, all the time" doesn't quite have the same heft as "God loves us". And it's a very short step from "God loves us" to "God hates them".

When Coren enumerates what his brand of Christianity is about, above, every last thing he writes details a flaw in the faith:

It's about truth

Okay, I'll play Pilate. What is truth, Mr. Coren?

unchanging Scriptural absolutes, church teaching

Oh, yeah, that truth. Well, it doesn't take long to question that "truth". There are two entirely separate creation stories in the first part of Genesis, with a different order of creation and, most notably, in one of them we have the presence of more than one God. As for church teaching, it's like shooting fish in a barrel. Every Christian is taught to ask God to deliver them from evil...a vague concept never defined. I know, evil is supposed to be like pornography, you'll know it when you see it. So: is war evil? More to the point, how about "holy" war? Truth, please, and don't tarry.

the undeniable facts of the virgin birth and bodily resurrection

Uh-huh, yup, virgin birth, yes, bodily resurrection...y'know, it'd really help if somebody could explain either of those concepts without resorting to some variant of "it's a mystery". Memo to Mr. Coren: an "undeniable fact" is one for which there is a vast pile of incontrovertible evidence. I'd love to see evidence for, especially, a virgin birth that could stand up in a court of law. (I'll suspend my disbelief on the bodily resurrection; there are far too many cases of the dead come back to life in the annals of medicine).

speaking God's message even when it hurts the speaker as well as the hearer

Ah, yes, the ol' "this hurts me more than it hurts you" angle, used by bullying parents everywhere. I'd like to ask Mr. Coren the following:

(a) If, Mr. Coren, as your faith suggests, God is so much bigger than humanity, His creation, how dare you speak for Him?
(b) How can any message from an all-loving God hurt anyone at all, ever? I suppose it could if it was delivered improperly--something I'm quite sure has been done a few times in the past--but the message itself being intrinsically hurtful?
(c) How can you reconcile hurting someone with

unending love and forgiveness...?

It's about doing what is right but never blurring the lines of what is wrong.

And which is which? Do you honestly claim to know the answer to that one, Mr. Coren? And is it an answer every member of your Godly clique shares?

About exposing sin but offering salvation.

It is impossible to sin against something as large and powerful as God. It is possible to sin against each other--sin is merely error, after all, borne of wrong thinking. What do you do with an error? You correct it. What do you do with wrong thinking? You heal it. You certainly don't punish the sinner, as the Christian God is rather famous for doing.

It is all too easy for Christians to define sin however they choose. If you are a Catholic, attending a church, other than a Catholic church, was long held to be a mortal sin. Die with that stain on your soul, by Catholic doctrine, and you're headed straight for hell.

If that's Coren's idea of God, I'll pass, thanks. I won't defend the excesses of what is undoubtedly a sick society, although Coren's and my definitions of excess doubtless differ. I, for instance, see nothing at all wrong with a homosexual couple being married in the eyes of God, and I know Coren feels this is nothing short of an abomination. But I reject utterly the idea, nuanced above, that you're either with us or ag'in' us. That kind of simplistic Dubyaism has got the world into no end of trouble. Is it any wonder Bush is an evangelical?

Merry whatever.

Every day for the last five, I've come home fully intending to blog something. And every day for the last five, I've sat down at the computer, composed my thoughts over a game of air hockey, and abruptly decided I'm too friggin' tired to blog anything. My brain's turned to sludge.
And it's only about to get worse.
Every year, the Christmas ad is a bitch for those of a dairy persuasion. It seems like they put every third item on sale, with no conception of display space, to say nothing of backshop storage.
So work life is about to go squirrelly, yet again.
Around this time of year, it has become fashionable to lament the deChristification of the season. You can't open a paper without reading an article decrying the use of 'Happy Holidays' and 'Season's Greetings'. "It's called CHRISTMAS", we're told.
I used to be among the throngs of people taking offense at the people who take offense at 'Merry Christmas'. I've had a mild change of brain over the past few years as I've watched a theocracy struggling to birth itself to our south.
Oh, I still have no problem with 'Merry Christmas'. But I'm beginning to have a real problem with that sort of bleating Christian (hey, they even refer to themselves as sheep; who am I to argue?) who seems to forget their Messiah is something of a Jesus-come-lately.

If you read your Bible closely, you'll find no mention of the calendar date of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. Various calculations have been done suggesting a birth date in spring or early summer; I've also seen September suggested. It's not really surprising we don't have a date for the birth of Jesus Christ considering nobody even knows what year he was born.
So why December 25th? Like everything else, it was a political decision. Basically, the Roman Catholic Church said "worship our God, and you can still have your old festival!"

At any rate, it often seems to be forgotten that Jesus himself was Jewish and would have thus celebrated Hanukkah, if anything. (Jesus always struck me as a man not beholden to anyone's calendar; I think he was one who celebrated life every day.) And there are far older faiths than either Christianity or Judaism: Hinduism, for example, whose winter festival Diwali falls a month or two earlier; or take the pagan faith of the Druids, still held by some today, and its winter solstice festival. The Chinese celebrate a solstice festival, too (Dong Zhi), ditto the Persians (Yalda). All of these predate Christianity, mostly by millennia.

None of this is to belittle people's celebration of Christmas. But it would behoove us to remember that not all of us (and, given our birth rates, indeed, fewer and fewer of us) are Christian. Perhaps the shrillness I've heard of late simply mirrors that fact: maybe Christians are afraid their voices will be lost.

Well I'll be a SAP-sucker...

We did it.
We went live without going dead. Only a few glitches--for a while we had no way to enter or send orders to our warehouse, for one thing. All three warehouse loads that were slated to arrive yesterday afternoon showed up early this morning instead, back to back to back. I had anticipated this, but I could have done without the three separate emails telling me all was fine, all manner of things were fine, and that all loads would arrive on time. Sure, guys, pull the other one, wouldja?
In the manner of all upgrades everywhere, they've managed to introduce a few "features" of dubious value, things that create more work with little perceived benefit--at least at store level. I do hope my company is growing its own forests, because the stream of paper coming down to the stores has suddenly become a torrent. On the other hand, there are nice handy-dandy things like the ability to change dozens of prices at once. The invoices from the warehouse are a lot more readable.
Today was (hopefully) my last day dealing pretty much exclusively with SAP (have you ever head a more vague company name than Systems, Applications, Processes?). Now to get back down there and sniff my dairy air.

Crunch time

Y'know, if I hadn't just got back from holidays...I'd need a holiday right about now. Our entire company, all banners, is undergoing a major computer system transformation and "go live" is this weekend. The final two training sessions took place while I was away, so I've had to glean what I can from the training manuals. I have a reasonable idea what's going on, but the sheer volume of information is a bit intimidating. Emails from head office come in seemingly every few minutes. Do this! Don't do that! Stand on your head and meow like a kitten!

"Go Live"...one only hopes it doesn't mean we're all about to get zotted.

I've had to let my dairy department slide, as this other has been almost a full-time proposition. I have an assistant down there holding things together with spit and baling wire, but it's touch and go. Thankfully, we are getting a part-time administrative assistant to take some of the heat off. Once I've got her trained, I can go back to being a full time Dairy Co-ordinator.

Part of me will miss the paperwork. I know, I'm weird, but I enjoy paperwork. I find I can get right into the nuts and bolts of the business, and the responsibility to get it right is one that sits well on my shoulders. Down on the floor, well, it's an endless cycle: stock this, order that, clean the other, and repeat. It's not that I don't enjoy my job--I do--but it is undeniably tedious at times.

Meanwhile, I work all weekend--if things go well, I won't be in there long on Sunday, but any glitches will have me there for the day, meaning I'll be working twelve days straight. Luckily, my stress level started somewhere well below zero, so I'm still game. Pile it on, baby!

Shopping...

I'm not your typical man in oh so many ways.
I don't ogle women's boobs. Cars to me have four wheels and go places and that's all. I couldn't care less if I lose all my hair--actually, I think I'd like to: one less thing to do in the morning.
Let's see: my jealousy gene was never installed; I don't hog the remote (actually, my wife does that in our house); I actually have to love somebody--or at least like them a lot--to have sex with them; my job is what I do, not who I am. If you ask me the date of my anniversary or my wife's birthday, I don't have to hesitate.
Oh, there are plenty of ways I do resemble your stereotypical man...I derive an insane amount of pleasure from farting; I love several sports, especially hockey; unlike most women, I don't register dirt until it can support agriculture. I have selective hearing. Sexual thoughts enter my brain without knocking, kick around in there for a while, and then leave, only to come back later, say, in the next minute or two.
But by and large, I'm different. Abnormal. For instance, I don't mind shopping with my wife. Even for clothes.
In fact, I've picked out almost half her wardrobe over the years.
It helps that Eva's not your typical woman, either. She hates shopping when it's crowded. She won't spend her life's savings for a designer label. Nor does she agonize, either in the store or daily at home, over what to wear. We both share the conviction that clothes exist largely to cover nakedness, and any other function they have is largely irrelevant. Sure, you can't wear your comfies out to a fancy dinner, but beyond that...clothes are clothes.
I find it disgusting, in this rapidly obesifying society, that decent clothes for fat women are so hard to find. I know I just got finished saying that clothes are pretty much just to keep you covered, but why would anyone want to be covered in the dress their great-grandma was buried in? And just who was it that decided fat people are always cold? Eva for one is hot at any temperature much above absolute zero...which renders at least three quarters of Pennington's stock way too heavy for her. I can't begin to tell you how many times I've spotted a beautiful looking dress/skirt/what have you, only to dart to it, heft it, and think my God, she'd be reduced to a puddle within half an hour.

Eva does have her little pet obsession: purses.
I've never really understood purses. You don't see men carrying anything analogous--but then, women's wear typically doesn't have pockets. Men do have them--and most of us don't stuff them to anywhere near the degree women cram their purses. It's almost as if they expect Monty Hall from Let's Make A Deal to step out from behind that bush and say "I'll give $50 to the first person who gives me a...hard boiled egg!"
Really, gals, how much of the stuff you carry around day after day do you actually need?
Anyway, my wife is on a lifelong search for the IDEAL PURSE. She doesn't spend her every waking moment thinking about it, by any means, but whenever we're out shopping and we go past a purse place, Eva will sweep the room with her gaze and say "nope, this place doesn't stock the IDEAL PURSE either. You ask her what the ideal purse is and she'll say "I don't know, I'll know it when I see it."
"Oh, come on. When you see it, what will it look like?"
"Well, it must have a long, adjustable strap. It must be roomy but not bulky. It needs a lot of compartments but it can't look like it has a lot of compartments. It needs a hideaway for personal items like tampons and such. (Ken intrudes...uck, I'm a typical man in that just typing the word 'tampons' makes me vaguely ill.) Don't know about the material, probably leather. Oh yeah, and it needs at least one sleeve on the outside for a work passcard, so that the card doesn't dangle."
"Shit, no wonder you can't find the IDEAL PURSE. You've set the bar impossibly high."
"Exactly. But someday I'll find it, and I'll buy ten of them."

Now, I'll readily admit there's some places I will not shop in. Michael's is one. I don't think men are allowed in there--they certainly don't make any concession to the male persuasion. Everywhere you look there are frilly little doomoms, thingamawigs and whatchamagirlies. Any man you find in Michael's invariably trails his partner by at least fifteen feet, walking warily and wearily, head down, hoping against hope that no other male will catch him in there.
But book shopping? I can do that all day. My wife who loves me also loves to shop for books, so we often end up in Coles or Chapters soon after a Pennington's run. It makes the clothes shopping even easier to get through.

(Any hints on the IDEAL PURSE should be forwarded to my email...)

Reason 4,852,971 why I am not a Catholic

My father has told all and sundry that there will be no tears at his funeral. He once mentioned that he wanted one of those remote-control laughing boxes to be placed in the coffin with him whereupon somebody would trigger it at a particularly dramatic moment in the sermon. Knowing Dad, I suspect he'll go further: a fart machine, perhaps, maybe his recorded voice informing the congregation that although he's been sent to hell, he luckily brought a fire hose with him and now it's one big party down there.
My personal attitude towards death is that it's just another part of life. I'm not afraid of it in the slightest and do not understand why so many are. Why fear something that every single human being is sure to experience? It's like being afraid of eating.
At my funeral, whenever it comes, I hope people find good things to say about me. I hope there will be joy and laughter. I'd like a musical collage of my life played for everyone, perhaps starting with Music Box Dancer (one of the first piano pieces I ever learned how to play). Somewhere in there I'd like this song inserted:

I'm still young, but I know my days are numbered
1234567 and so on
But a time will come when these numbers have all ended
And all I've ever seen will be forgotten

[CHORUS]Won't you come
To my funeral when my days are done
Life's not long
And so I hope when I am finally dead and gone
That you'll gather round when I am lowered into the ground

When my coffin is sealed and I'm safely 6 feet under
Perhaps my friends will see fit then to judge me
Oh when they pause to consider all my blunders
I hope they won't be too quick to begrudge me
If I should die before I wake up
I pray that the Lord my soul will take but
My body, my body - that's your job

I can't be sure where I'm headed after death
To heaven, hell, or beyond to that Great Vast
But if I can I would like to meet my Maker
There's one or two things I'd sure like to ask

--"At My Funeral", the Crash Test Dummies

If I was still a member in good standing of the Holy Roman Catholic Church, there'd be little chance of frivolity at my funeral. Or secular music. Or eulogies. According to the Vatican, "When Christians gather for the funeral Mass, we do so to praise God the Father. We gather not to praise the deceased but to pray for them. For this reason, eulogies are not given."

Move along, folks, nothing to see here, just another High Mass praising God the Father. Never mind that body up there: just a common sinner. God's judging him as we speak: he'll get his, never you worry.

This is wrongheaded on so many levels I don't even know where to begin.

IT DENIES A VITAL PART OF THE GRIEVING PROCESS. Publically enumerating the virtues of the deceased (even if, especially if, those virtues were somewhat. shall we say, "hidden" in life) is a wonderful tribute and a way to recognize our common bonds as humans. Ever been to a funeral for someone you weren't, let's be honest, particularly fond of, only to hear a collection of eulogies that completely changes your understanding?
'PRAISING GOD' IS DONE EVERY SUNDAY. Just how needy is this Deity, anyway? Besides, it is well beyond the spiritual capacity of most people to praise the Lord when, according to their understanding, the Lord has just taken their mother, daughter, sister, friend. (I believe that on some level--not always a conscious level--we select the day of our death, not God, but that's just me.)
THE EMOTIONAL TONE OF THE FUNERAL IS RUINED. Even the most devout are unlikely to appreciate High Mass in the midst of their grief. Oh, I get the subtext, the "let go and let God" I used to hear so often when I was a Christian. And I understand that there can be comfort in ritual. But when that ritual is not allowed to be personalized--when every funeral is as cookie-cutter as every other--well, to my mind at least, the whole point is lost.
WE NEED TO 'PRAY' FOR THE DECEASED? What possible good could that do? They're dead. I thought God judged people based on what they did when they were alive, not what a bunch of worthless sinners said about them afterwards.
Actually, not to put too fine a point on it, but I know...I don't believe, I know...that God does not judge anyone, the quick or the dead. Something that is described as all-loving does not judge, by definition. I don't care what your Bibles say--only a God that Man invented would judge people, judgment being one of the things we humans are so very good at. I've said this before, and I will keep saying it, because to my mind it's one of the biggest stumbling blocks we have thrown in front of ourselves. 'God-fearing', indeed. I thought we were supposed to fear "the Devil", not God. See? I'm just not cut out for this stuff.
THIS CAME FROM THE VATICAN. You know, that place where the Pope dwells. The same Pope who speaks with the authority of God...but only when he's in church.
Unlike many, I don't think it's the height of arrogance to suggest that somebody speaks for God. What I find arrogant is the belief that God only communicates through one vessel--the Pope--ultimately with only one group of people, the Holy Roman Catholic Church.
The voice of God can come from anywhere. I've heard it in music. I've heard it in silence. I've heard it from the mouth of an enemy. I've heard it from many people I love dearly.
I've routinely heard it at every funeral I've ever attended...during the eulogies...

O.J. WAS The Real Killer!

"Excuse me...where is the Tropicana orange juice that's on sale?"
Sigh. "I'm sorry, it's all gone. We sold out this morning."
"Where do I get a raincheck?"
Umm, try the Weather Network? "I'm sorry, we don't give rainchecks; it's one of the ways we keep our prices down."
"What are you substituting then? [grabs a 1.89-litre carton] I want this for $2.00."
And I want you to GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE..."Once again I apologize. The Tropicana you're looking for has been on sale since last Saturday. We've sold through nearly 10,800 units. And we ran out of stock--for the first time!--about ten minutes after we opened this morning. And there was a limit of four per family per day on it for most of the ad. We don't substitute products, for the same reason we don't give rainchecks." In other words, lady, you're shit outta luck.
"Well, do the other stores in town have any? Can you call them?"
Let's see, I'm alone here, there are three skids of product to be worked, our system upgrade is belching up glitches requiring my attention every so often--like right now!--and...CUSTOMER SERVICE...CUSTOMER SERVICE...put a smile in your voice, Ken!
"Sure I can, but I'm pretty sure they ran out before we did." Damn, that smile was more like gritted teeth.
And sure enough, both stores were out of stock. So that customer went away disappointed, leaving me in peace for about twenty seconds before the next person said
"Excuse me...do you have any Tropicana orange juice?"
Work me into a lather. Rinse out my brain with soap. And repeat. And repeat. And repeat...

I understand. I do. When something's advertised in the flyer, it really should be there until the end of the sale. And there should be world peace, and a chicken--on second thought, make that a turkey--in every pot.
Every grocery store flyer I've ever seen, from every chain, states somewhere "all items while supplies last". Right next to "we reserve the right to limit purchases to reasonable family requirements" or something similar. It seems like either (a) nobody else bothers to read those parts or (b) they think that edicts like that only apply to other shoppers.

I know customers don't care--nor should they, really--but those Tropicana orange juices that were on sale for $1.00? Each one of them cost us $1.90. A little quick math will tell you we're losing our shirts on this item. In my heart of hearts, I'm actually rather glad it's finally gone. Aside from the fact I can't walk six paces without somebody accosting me on the last day of the sale.

Disclaimer to the above: At my particular store, we make every effort to remain in stock as long as possible, nothwithstanding our warehouse: if they are out of stock, so are we, and there's not a damn thing I can do about it. My customers are at the very end of a supply chain that extends for many links and, often, thousands of kilometers. That chain is only as strong as its weakest link--which you can be assured is rarely ME.

---------------------------------------------

Whew. Now that that's out of the way...
We had a system upgrade overnight last night. As an In-Store-Trainer, it fell to me to make sure the new system was backwards-compatible...that everything functioned properly before we opened the doors for business this morning. Which means I had to get out of bed at 4:10 this morning. Stipulated: I have always been a morning person. But 4:10 bears a suspicious resemblance to the middle of the night.
As it turned out, I almost didn't need to be there this morning. Thanks to the excellent team we have in place, much of my work was completed before I got there. I spot checked all manner of items, corrected several minor glitches, and then remained "on call" all day, scurrying hither and yon, making sure people knew their new responsibilities, fixing minor scan errors, and telling the multitudes that no, we don't have any Tropicana orange juice.
A fun day. A fun week.
Tomorrow, we have minigolf with our friends Mindy and Jamie--I've taken to calling it "Mindy-golf". On Sunday, Eva's bro is coming to help erect a fence. The slow but steady transformation of our backyard continues apace.
And I'm sleeping in. Until at least six if I can help it.

High volume...

I'm about to enter one of those hectic weeks.
At work, a major upgrade of our computer system is slated for Thursday overnight. This necessitates all manner of work beforehand, only a fraction of which I currently know how to do. Luckily, I have resources upon which to draw...
Also at work, we are currently running what is billed as the biggest sale of the year, featuring--you guessed it--turkeys at $1.00 a pound. Turkeys, in August? Apparently so. There were over fifty people waiting for the doors to open Saturday morning...it was the busiest day I've seen since Easter.
There is a limit of two turkeys stated clearly in the flyer, so of course that just meant families split up and went through separate tills. (What in the holy hell do people need with four or more turkeys, anyway? In August?)
This wasn't the only item flying out the door, not by a long shot...we also had Tropicana juices on sale for $1.00 (the 946 ml size--and don't ask how many people thought they could get a 1.89-litre carton for $1.00!) Then, of course, chocolate milk and buttermilk on for $1.00. This item turns people into ravening monsters no matter what time of year it's on. Neilson Dairy didn't exactly help me out on this sale. I was shorted all my low-fat chocolate milk on Saturday...what's more, nearly every single one of the 1440 units of regular chocolate milk were half full. I had to arrange for a second delivery, which arrived early Saturday evening. I take nothing for granted when it comes to this tinpot dairy, so I was able to rely on the stock I had brought in Thursday for most of the day. Still, I had run out of saleable stock by the time the truck came.
Want more? Our store brand waffles were on for $1.00/pack...Head Office advised us to order heavy, which was a joke: our walk-in freezer was stuffed wall to wall to wall to wall and floor to ceiling with turkeys.
Add in the chaos in other departments: three pounds of clementines or five pounds of new potatoes for $1.00; Kraft Dinner at 2/$1.00, and on and on and on, and it made for one hellish day.
It's shaping up to be a hard slog. This blog will probably fall by the wayside somewhat. My apologies in advance to my faithful readers.

ONE case frozen peas, ah-hah-hah-hah-hah!

It's been a week.
My store has gone corporate, which is supposed to mean nothing to me now that the changeover has happened, but it sure meant something in the lead-up. Sobeys required a full inventory, and it was supervised by what seemed like battalions of Head Office personnel.
The inventory was scheduled for Friday night at 6:00. If there's a worse time to hold an inventory, I can't imagine what it might be.
Like most grocery stores, our flyers run Saturday to Friday. Whenever possible, I try to start setting up the next ad on Wednesday or Thursday to save myself a brutal Friday night. In this case, I had little choice: the ad had to be fully set up before the inventory.
The grocery store freezes while inventory is taking place. Customers can still shop the store; a reading is done before and after to determine sales. But all stocking of shelves comes to a halt: you can't run the risk of something being counted twice or not counted at all.
I had to make Friday's warehouse order as small as possible--not an easy thing to do, when it has to last through your busiest day, Saturday, and well into Sunday afternoon. The reason this order had to be so small is simple: I had no guarantees when it would arrive. Normally it comes in around one in the afternoon, but it has shown up as late as seven in the evening on occasion. My problem: depending on its arrival time, it either had to be fully worked...or remain untouched until after the inventory was completed (in other words, Saturday morning)--so that I could "count" it by referring to the invoice rather than tearing it apart piece by piece.
As it turned out, the warehouse truck pulled in at four o'clock, which gave me nowhere near enough time to work even a small order. Especially since I was so far behind...
I mentioned that the inventory team counts the shelves. They leave the walk-in cooler and freezer to us...to me.
The dairy cooler presents few challenges: I can usually count it in less than an hour, all told. The freezer is a different story.

Before I tell you why, let me tell you this: I'm pretty good at my job. Not great, but pretty good. I can usually estimate sales on ad items with reasonable accuracy. Especially when it comes to dairy products. Rarely do I get "hung" with vast quantities of sale products come the end of an ad. When I do, though, it's almost invariably a frozen item.
I'm not sure why this is. But about every third ad, I'll find myself with six or eight weeks' worth of something. And occasionally, I really overestimate demand on a product and find myself waiting impatiently for the next time it's advertised.
So my freezer can get pretty jammed.
Having known this inventory was coming, my team was able to get quite a lot to shelf. Even better, we had worked together to "mark" the inventory in there so that my "counting" consisted of writing down what had already been counted (for the most part). Yet I was still in there over two hours. The temperature in my walk-in freezer averages 0 F or -18 C; add in the two fans and it feels considerably colder (my acutely developed temperature sense would suggest a windchill factor approaching -40...which is the same on either scale.)
It's cold, in other words.
I'm not bitching--really, I'm not. Clad in only pants and a sweater, with no gloves (the better to write with), I only needed a few quick breaks. I handle cold with aplomb; it's heat I can't stand.
But the mechanics of writing in a freezer can get frustrating. Pens freeze almost instantly, of course, and I find markers difficult to write with, so I'm reduced to using pencils--the lead in which I snap effortlessly, several times an hour.
Once the cooler and freezer are counted, I have to go around my department with a pad of Post-It notes, writing the regular price of all sale items and affixing it over the sale price tags. This confuses most of our customers, but it has to be done: everything must be counted at regular retail. It gets especially aggravating for customers when I come to what are called "competitive match" items"...in my department, this means milk, butter and eggs. These are items on which we match the price of our competitors (and they match ours, too: the price of milk is the same wherever you go in this city, at least among the big chains.)
Although we sell our bagged 1% milk at $4.19, that's not the regular retail. The regular retail on four litres of 1% milk is $5.09. (And that's nowhere near our cost...we lose a lot of money on bagged milk.) But customers get very upset because they think they're going to pay $5.09 for their milk and you have to defuse dozens of them in the course of an evening. Posting signs asking customers to "disregard Post-It notes" doesn't help. This may come out wrong, but it's heartfelt and true: posting any signs, saying anything, never helps. People absolutely and steadfastly refuse to read signs. They'll notice price tags, oh, sure--an error of two cents is often treated like a Mideast flare-up--but words? Fuhgeddaboudit. And it's not as if our clientele is mostly immigrants, either: they speak English perfectly well. They just don't read it.

So it's over, now. All that's left is the aftermath. Our store number changed, so the Sobeys warehouse--who you'd think knew this was coming--suddenly has no record of our orders. You know, that kind of thing.

ARRRRRRRRRRGHHHHHHHHH!!!

There. I feel better.

Both sides of the turnstile

"I want to mention one of the obvious symptoms [of a sick culture]: Violence. Muggings. Sniping. Arson. Bombing. Terrorism of any sort. Riots of course--but I suspect that little incidents of violence, pecking away at people day after day, damage a culture even more than riots that flare up and then die down..."
"I think you have missed the most alarming symptom of all...Sick cultures show a complex of symptoms such as you have named... but a dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot...This symptom is especially serious in that an individual displaying it never thinks of it as a sign of ill health but as proof of his/her strength."
--Friday (written 1982), by Robert Heinlein

The Toronto Transit Commission went on strike this past Monday, for the fourth time since 1989. This time, there was no warning. People who neglected to listen to the morning news were treated to locked subway stations and busses that never arrived.
Needless to say, this is illegal.
I started in with my standard anti-union rhetoric, which by now I've worn to a threadbare line of patter. They knew how much the job paid when they took it...this holding the public hostage is an outrage. They should fire 'em all and let EI sort 'em out.
Then I heard the union's justification for the wildcat strike, and it kind of rocked me on my heels. TTC drivers and fare collectors, they argued, are unsafe. They are routinely threatened with assault, spit on, called filthy names, and increasingly punched and kicked. Last week, it was announced that drivers would no longer insist on the correct fare being paid, as every fare dispute had the potential to boil over into violence. This was helpfully plastered all over the Toronto Sun, essentially informing the public that they could ride for free. Must have pissed off the people who had bought Metropasses.
A driver wrote in to that very paper today, asking a very good question:

As for the "wildcat strike" and walking off the job: If every time you went to work you risked aggression and brutality and your bosses repeatedly refused to protect you or act to prevent the attacks, would you still come back to work day after day?

Well, no, I wouldn't.

We're living in Heinlein's Crazy Years, and many public service jobs ought to have "risk of aggression and brutality" written into their descriptions. When I worked nights at 7-Eleven (itself no island of calm and serenity, let me tell you), I used to shake my head at the thought of driving a cab through the wee hours of the morning. I had security cameras, a panic button, space to maneuver. A cabbie, at that time, might have had a panic button of some sort, but (s)he had precious little ability to avoid attack, and cameras in taxis were unheard of.
No, you couldn't pay me enough money to undertake that particular profession.

The same goes for bus driver, at this point. Nearly everywhere in Canada, public transit is stigmatized. (Vancouver being a notable exception: in that city, even lawyers take the bus without complaint.) People tend to reinforce whatever beliefs are held about them, and so many patrons of public transit are ignorant and potentially aggressive. I have witnessed many fare disputes, some of which have gotten quite ugly, and somewhere in the back of my mind I dread the day a knife--or a gun--is pulled and used. Given the deterioration of the culture around me, I figure this is only a matter of time, and I hope to God I'm invisible when it happens.

You see this deterioration everywhere. I deal with the public day in and day out and I hardly ever hear the words "please" and "thank you" any more. Much less "you're welcome", which has all but dropped out of the English language, to be replaced by "no problem" or an incoherent grunt. Store employees are treated as walking directories, not human beings, and cashiers are lambasted with all manner of rude behaviour. In the retail world, the customer is always right...and he knows it and exploits it ruthlessly.

So it turns out I have some measure of sympathy for TTC employees, and I understand why they felt they had to walk off the job.

I still can't condone the action, mind you. Notwithstanding the cost to the economy and the monstrous inconvenience to some 800,000 riders, a wildcat strike in protest of unsafe working conditions is just plain illogical. Consider: you're living in fear of the public whom you serve. So you go out of your way to piss every one of your customers off? How does that make sense?

The sad thing is, although an illegal strike is the wrong answer, I'm not sure what the right one is. The safety concerns are well-founded, but the measures the union insist on are ultimately pointless. Cameras? They might help identify a thug after he's hurt or killed somebody. Or they could be shot out. Hell, given the gang culture that rules the streets in some parts of Toronto, you might actually see a killer mugging gleefully for the camera. After all, what's a life worth? According to our judges, as little as three years of probation.
Barriers around drivers? A horrendous cost, plus they'd just isolate the driver from the passengers and only encourage a laissez-fare--pun definitely intended--attitude.
So-called "smart cards" simply exchange one form of currency for another and do nothing for driver safety.

The sheerest irony was that this wildcat strike occurred on a day when there was a heat alert, a smog advisory, and a humidex warning...just the sort of day you'd think we'd be encouraging transit use. Perhaps that was the point. But forcing people to walk or bike through soupy air isn't just inconvenient: it could be life-threatening.

Just like driving a bus?

Now the city's talking about suing the union to recover lost revenue, the union's talking about doing this again, and the Toronto bus-riding public is caught in the middle.

As usual.

What the...heaven?

Faint stirrings of something unidentifiable...

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where it would be possible to commit murder--or suicide--and just for the merest instant, thought about doing it? Don't be shy, speak up. I believe nearly everybody has had this experience at some point in their lives. I'm not talking about depression or psychosis that leads to brooding about killing yourself or somebody else. I'm talking about some kind of random rogue neuron firing in your brain as you're walking along minding your own business, perfectly happy and content and all of a sudden you're thinking Mortal Thoughts. And in the next instant, you've swept them free of your brain, maybe thinking (if you think of it at all), where the hell did that come from?

I'm thinking of joining a church.

I have repeatedly and with increasing irritation swept this alien thought out of my head and the damn thing keeps blowing back in on the breeze. It hasn't exactly rooted itself amongst the dendrites and synapses; I'm certain that, with determined effort, I could eradicate all traces. It becomes a question of whether or not I have the will. And oh, yeah, before I resolve to blow this thought to, ahem, Kingdom Come, I should probably figure out where the hell it's coming from.

You have to understand: my feeling about churches has long been less than salutory. I was forced into attending for a short time in my childhood and thereafter became something a little less than an Easter-and-Christmas Christian. This is possibly the worst soil in which to grow an abiding love of all things churchy: if I had been coerced to attend much longer, chances are excellent I might have found my own reasons to continue the practice; if I had subsequently attended more often, I might have come up with a reason why I was doing so. But it's easy to resist an implacable parental edict to go to church and it's pretty hard to justify going to church twice a year over not bothering at all.

Being in a church always seems to activate an ugly side of my nature. I feel very much like the outsider I am. I'll sit there analyzing every word I hear, looking for logic holes to drive entire fleets of trucks through, and often finding cause to wonder if people actually believe this stuff. The invariable "fellowship" afterwards also rings sour. I'm sure everyone else is sincere about it, which just adds guilt to the already potent mixture of standoffishness, boredom and uneasiness I'm feeling...what's WRONG with me???!!!

So to someone with this mindset, the recurring thought of "hey! Maybe you should think about finding a church to go to!" really does cause a reflexive reach for the mental broom, not to mention the mental bleach.

Because of the tradition I come from, the Christian church is what I know best, and what I run hardest away from. There are certain underlying assumptions in every branch of Christianity I've encountered that cause system crashes in my mind. Specifically, I have trouble with the following:

(a) Why would the Christian God, being all-powerful, insist on being worshipped at all? To what purpose?
(b)* Why would the Christian God, being all-loving, insist on throwing people in some kind of Hell, literal or metaphorical (or allowing people to place themselves there, which is really the same thing)?
(c) What kind of God would reject, tacitly or otherwise, people who come to Him (and "Him" is another problem) because they haven't followed certain proscribed steps? What kind of human monsters speaking in God's name would perpetuate such slander against the Almighty?
(d) Does faith in God really disallow critical thought (using faculties which, supposedly, God gave us) and insist on blind devotion to a creed?

I've come to my own answers to these questions, ones that make sense to me, and I've found it quite telling that I've had to pretty much abandon the Christian tradition in order to do it. The short form of my answers is (a) It doesn't; (b) It doesn't; (c) It doesn't; and (d) it doesn't, or at least, it shouldn't.

So I long ago rejected the religion I knew as far too implausible and strict. Despite this, or maybe because of it, I found myself trolling through a wide variety of spiritual tomes, from A Course in Miracles to, most notably, Neale Donald Walsch's Conversations with God series. I meant that quite literally, by the way: I really "found myself" reading these books. I found things in each one that resonated strongly with what I had always believed. I built my own personal theology piecemeal and am pretty happy, all things considered, with the construction.

But something's missing.

The egotistical side of me is sure I'm missing the opportunity to hear my own beliefs spoken from a pulpit. Certainly not to convert others to my way of thinking--I'm not that much of an egotist, and "Mine is not a better way, mine is merely another way."
A test I took on Beliefnet classed me as an "old-fashioned seeker" and defined that as someone who is "happy with their construct of relgion, but always looking for a better way to express it." That really rang true.

Also, I'm beginning to feel this compulsion to join with something greater than myself, that I might do some good in the world. That means joining some kind of group, some sort of churchlike thing.

I'm going to go about this slowly and cautiously, because I really would like to find a place I feel comfortable with. Something neither too Christian--a world I always seem to pair with "judgmental"--nor too New-Age, read-the-aura-fondle-the-crystal-become-one-with-your-astral-projection.

Updates as they happen.

Beliefnet.com

Check out this site if you've a mind to. It covers every sort of religion/spirtuality, including the lack of either: chances are you will find something that resonates with you on this colossal site. They have a "Belief-O-Matic" quiz that attempts to match your spiritual/religious beliefs to established traditions. I was astonished to discover that my beliefs are supposedly very close to those of Christian Scientists...considering the negative viewpoint I have of same. As it turns out (and as I could have predicted), I'm also a fit with Unitarianism and the New Thought Movement. Apparently I would be somewhat at home at a Quaker meeting. And I can still call myself a liberal Protestant, if I want to. (Not sure I really want to, although the United Church doesn't turn me off entirely.)
Interestingly, the belief system that least matched my answers is Roman Catholicism...the faith I was baptized into...twice.
Anyway, there are interviews and essays and discussion boards on every conceivable faith. It's amazing the stuff people believe. What's even more amazing is that on this site, at least, you're welcome to believe anything or nothing.

Consumer interlude..."But Wait, There's More!"

Because there's a word for things that don't consume. That word is "dead".


Back when I was single, I used to avoid infomercials like the plague.
Didn't matter what the product was, or how enthusiastically it was being huckstered. My attitude was pretty simple: if traditional retailers refused to stock it, it was ipso crapto a waste of time and money.
I felt the same way, truth be told, about things like Avon (despite the fact my mom was a rep for a time), Regal (for no reason whatever except it seemed sleazy to me) and Mary Kay (because, obviously, I have a penis).
Ditto anything else sold door-to-door or at house parties. If the product's that good, why can't you buy it somewhere, uh, reputable?
One ex-girlfriend was involved for a short time with something called Vector Marketing. She sold CUTCO knives...one month, she was the number 3 salesperson in Canada. (Didn't take much: I think she sold four sets that month.) I was quite hesitant to endorse this choice of occupation, but the quality of the product spoke for itself--at least, the training manual, from which I could quote at length after seeing a few of her presentations, spoke for itself. These knives purport to be better than Henckels at half the price.
Of course, back in those ancient days, a consumer resource like Google didn't exist. If you Google CUTCO knives, one of the first things you find is this site, which pretty much shreds the training manual, the company, the product, and anything else connected to Vector Marketing.
That's not to say, necessarily, that the products are craptacular. Since it was my fiancee selling these things, people in my family felt some obligation to buy them. Still uneasy despite the glowing presentation, I continually checked in with these family members in the ensuing months and years, especially after the engagement and relationship went up in smoke: was your money well spent? Nobody ever said boo. Did they think boo, and were too polite to say it aloud? No idea. But here's a quick digression to illustrate my point:
My first piano was made by New Scale Williams, Toronto, in 1904. It had glass feet and weighed the better part of a ton. That thing accompanied us through three moves, one of them a real slog down a flight of stairs in freezing rain, and never needed so much as a tuning. Imagine my shock when I read, online, that the quality of that particular model was supposed to be iffy at best.
Even stranger: we owned a black Hyundai Stellar for quite a while. Dubbed the "poor man's rich car", it was made long, long before Hyundai became a paragon of quality. We started to hear horror stories about Stellar not long after we bought the thing. Never had a problem with it.

So it's not beyond the realm of possibility that some individual sets of CUTCO knives are pretty good.

My wife has a fascination with many things television-related, among them infomercials. And damned if I haven't been sucked in to a few of them, especially now that you can actually go to any decent sized mall, find a store called Showcase, and fondle these products yourself.
There are a few items that have particularly caught my eye: the Little Giant Ladder, the Swivel Sweeper, and the Pet Groom Pro. I'm not sure about the reliability or value of any of these things, but they really look good, don't they? Like things that might actually be useful.

Regal went bankrupt a few months back, to my dismay. I've found over the past few years that Regal was the one place I could find a plethora of little products that served a real purpose, stuff traditional retailers didn't bother with. Every time a catalogue landed in our mailbox, I'd be champing at the bit to get a look at it. If only kid Kenny could see me now. He'd probably shake his head in disgust.
So Regal's back and better than ever: among their new, more upscale, and expanded product offering are a number of things "as seen on TV", among them the Swivel Sweeper which was previously only available by shelling out Yankee greenbacks. There's something on nearly every page that passes muster, at least in this house.

Buy! Buy! Buy!
Because, as George Carlin says, a house is nothing but a big pile of stuff with a roof over it.

A little something with your groceries?

I am currently watching a rather alarmist Marketplace on CBC. Its subject: food safety in supermarkets. The overwhelming impression you get from this program is that shopping at your local supermarket will make you ill and maybe kill you. There is a litany of mouse droppings, unwashed hands, improper handling and storage of food. Store after store, province after province, coast to coast, they document a truly astounding number of health violations.

I'm eighteen minutes in, and they haven't named one supermarket yet. I've watched very carefully, but they've screened their show even more carefully. I can't identify a single chain, either from decor cues or glimpses of store-brand products. Rather gutless, don't you think? To make all these accusations without naming names? It's like asserting that one-third of all NHL players dope up.

The show did clue me in to Toronto's rating system, which I had thought only applied to restaurants. It is mandatory in Toronto (and Peel Region) to prominently display a colour-coded card at the front door. Green means the place has passed; yellow means there are problems currently being fixed, and red means the store has been closed due to health violations.

Armed with this information, I searched the database for all Price Choppers in the area. Green across the board.
To be honest, this surprised me a little. I've heard some horror stories, you see. I reviewed the history of each individual Price Chopper and did find four yellow cards issued in the past two years. When an establishment is issued a yellow card, they get one week to bring themselves up to code. These PC stores had done so: there were no repeats.

I wondered if perhaps our competitors had fared any worse. I sure hoped so. But no: all Food Basics and No Frills show green, and only a few stores have ever seen a yellow card.

Many customers have remarked on the cleanliness of our store. And well they should: we take great pride in it. Are we perfect? Of course not. Things come in with the products. I've had a mouse run out from the middle of a pallet of eggs. Spiders have crawled out from banana boxes...once, something that looked awfully like a black widow (but probably wasn't). Birds occasionally come in to shop...once they get in, it's beastly hard to get them out.

I'd actually like to see Toronto's rating system expanded to cover the country. I feel pretty confident in saying we'd pass easily.

The Great $1.00 Sale

That should be "g-r-a-t-e", as in what our teeth do every time we hear there's one of these suckers coming.

Look, people. They're chickens. That's all they are. And just because we have whole chickens on for $1 a pound doesn't give you the right to (a) snatch them out of other customers' hands; (b) run your cart into displays or customers out of sheer frustration that they got a chicken and you didn't; (c) engage in fisticuffs to the point where the police must be summoned.

I LOATHE these sales, the ones they put on every six to eight weeks or so, the ones that have some variant of "$1.00" in their titles. (The ones that have titles!) They draw new people into our store--which you'd think would be a good thing--but these new people are usually what we call 'cherry-pickers': customers who buy nothing but flyer items and thus cost, rather than make, the store money.
Even the cherry-pickers would be tolerable if they weren't so effing RUDE.

This was billed as the sale to end all sales. In fact, we extended our hours of operation for this one: we opened at 7 a.m. last Saturday. Head office, in its infinite wisdom, put this information on the back of the flyer, where very few people would find it (not that putting it on the front page would have done much better...in this postliterate world, we get at least one person a week walking right through the sign that says EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY ALARM WILL SOUND). Nobody reads anymore. They read numbers, to be sure: I keep a pocket full of pennies to dispense to the customers who are so very quick to notice when they're being overcharged by two cents. But words? Strung together in sentences like

"WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO LIMIT PURCHASE QUANTITIES TO REASONABLE FAMILY REQUIREMENTS"

--naw. Too many syllables. Wanna look at pictures instead.

Okay, so here's one: a picture of a cart loaded down with Fruitopia chilled 1.89-litre juice cartons--at least 40 of them. Circle the cart. Now put a BIG RED LINE through it.

Look, I don't care what size "family" (store) you're buying this for. They don't MAKE refrigerators that big for domestic use, okay? I've got a fridge over there that'll hold what you think you're going to be allowed to buy. It's a walk-in. We're not that stupid here. And this is not a warehouse. Bitch all you want, it won't change anything.

I don't get people. I know, I've said this before. But really. Our frozen Fruitopia retails for 97 cents...every day. Yet people routinely go apeshit when the chilled stuff is on for $1.00. Convenience, they say, looking at me as if I'm a moron. Oh really. But you have to freeze the chilled cartons if you're going to buy them in bulk like that. How convenient is that, hmm?

Over in dry grocery, one of the specials is Scooby-Doo "cereal" for $1.00. The regular price on this "cereal" is $4.17. Now, head office didn't do us any favours here--for some reason, the damn stuff was out of stock on the second delivery of the ad, meaning we got none beyond our initial set-up until after the weekend's business was over. The chain newsletter resounded with cries of "Scooby-Doo, where are you?" Beyond the first couple of hours on Saturday, we had to constantly remind customers that if we had a choice, we'd have all the breakfast candy in the world for them to feed to their already hyperactive children. (Well, we cleaned that up a bit, but the sentiment holds.) Unfortunately for all concerned, the choice is not ours.

People don't understand this. They think that everything is always within our control, when in the real world, very little is. The retail model has shifted over the past decade or so to "just in time" inventory control. In the name of efficiency, you're supposed to order just enough stock to make it to your next delivery. Everything is built with this in mind: the backroom is just so big, the damned dairy cooler is just so SMALL! If you build in too much of a buffer, you're going to have to deal with the logistics of where to put it all--or you might not get all you ordered, on the basis that head office knows better than you what you're going to sell. If other stores increase their orders beyond what the warehouse has in stock, then the warehouse has to procure more product and find a cost-efficient way to get it to that store--something easier bitched about than done.
By and large, this system works...if everything falls together just right, and if we all know what we're doing. I pride myself on knowing what I'm doing, but I'm human and fallible and I'm really sorry we're out of Eggo waffles for $1.00. More will be in at 2:07 today--at least that's what we're told--but anything can hold that up. Weather. Traffic. Waiting for deliveries at other stores. Improper loading by unionized warehouse workers who don't care whether your product arrives in one piece or not...so it arrives all over the trailer and has to be picked up and repiled. Stuff like that.

We've been circling around the meat department here, stealing glances at the mayhem. Now we'll just wade on in, okay? Don your jock...you're gonna need it.

The chain reserved a whack of chickens for this sale several months ago. The sale was known about only at the highest levels until August 12th or so. The secrecy was so pervasive, you'd think our lead item was the final installment of Harry Potter at $1.00 a pound, but no--it was whole chickens. To better ensure the competition didn't get hold of this and pre-empt us somehow, head office did all the pre-books...and they woefully underestimated how crazy Ontarians are for their chickens.
I'll give you some stats that don't breach confidentiality: one, our store alone has sold 12% of what was budgeted for an 80-plus store chain; two, we've sold not much more than 12% of what we could have sold if we'd had an unlimited supply. To have the kind of unlimited supply we'd need, however, we would have to back a tractor-trailer loaded with chickens up to our receiving door and run it day and night to keep the chickens cold. Of course, receiving anything else (milk, bread, eggs, etc) would be out of the question for a week.
To put it another way, we sold 400 chickens in less than 20 minutes. A middle-aged cunt (sorry, ladies, "cunt" is really le mot juste in this case) grabbed a bag of chicken from an elderly lady's hands--right out of her hands!--whereupon the elderly lady turned and spat "I hope you choke on it!" A deadly serious game of bumper carts ensued whenever a load of chickens arrived. Seriously, your jaws just drop watching this. And the store across town had to call the police when an all-out brawl broke out in their meat department. Over chickens. You're not sure whether you should laugh or cry. Or scream.
Or maybe just sigh in relief as Friday passes and the ad is over. Now we've got...oh-oh, Pizza Premiers at $2.97.

Here we go again.

How to save the world.

So the G-8's meeting...again...and there's riots...again. Ho-hum, how utterly, utterly predictable.
Also insane.
You may have noticed the mob, swinging their senseless placards, throwing things at cops as if the cops were the source of all the evils in the world. Nary an economic degree amongst these dolts, I'd wager, yet they presume to lecture world leaders on how to run their economies.
Leaving aside the old axiom that one must not negotiate with terrorists--and what else would you call people who deliberately set out to injure police officers?--let's examine what these people (who claim to have good intentions) are trying to accomplish, shall we?
Well, they call themselves 'anti-globalists'. I think of them as the Flat Earth Society, since they are ignorant of some pretty basic global truths.
For instance, they want aid to Africa immediately tripled. Since 1948, over $500,000,000,000 in aid has been given to Africa, making for some amazingly rich dictators and, well, not much else. It's pretty clear to anyone with so much as one functioning brain cell that money alone won't save Africa.
They want rich countries to cancel the debt owed by poor countries. In and of itself, I have no problem with this...it's not as if anyone at all expected any of that debt to ever be paid, anyway. But it won't help anything. All the interest being paid on all that debt will simply be redirected into a few Swiss bank accounts, and the debt will start its upward spiral all over again.
The anticapitalist zealots direct most of their ire towards multinational corporations--you know, those things whence come all the jobs. While some of their accusations are legitimate--many of these companies are not exactly paragons of social or environmental responsibility--the protestors seem to believe the multinationals can be forced to accept their utopian vision if they only...throw enough rocks at enough police officers. I don't see the logic. Do you?

Unlike the rioters, I have some possible solutions that just...might...work. I don't know how exactly to implement them, because they involve quite a few paradigm shifts that as of right now seem unlikely, to say the least, but I would like to throw them out there for your consideration. Be warned, these are radical.

1) WE NEED A ONE-WORLD GOVERNMENT.

I might as well start off with the most radical assertion of all.
By "one-world government", I most emphatically do not mean any sort of United Nations. No, this would be a truly global undertaking, modelled on some hybrid of the Canadian and American governmental systems. To wit, each present-day country would be a state/province/territory in the Global Federation. The same sorts of checks and balances we see in federal systems of government would be in place to ensure some semblance of fair governance for all. And this government would have teeth: the decisions of its world court (whose judges would come from divergent backgrounds) would be final and binding...there would be a global army to back them up, if need be.
A one-world government would have the following advantages:

• It would eventually eliminate nationalism, which is one of the common ingredients in warfare, by virtue of elevating perspectives.

For instance, back in the days before 1776, the 'United States' was anything but united. It was a collection of colonies that were forever at odds with each other, mostly over trade. Through some democratic miracle, an overarching country was formed, gathering all these disparate colonies into itself and adding new ones as the years progressed. People soon realized the inherent advantages of living in a federation. Their pride in their little corner of the world may never have wavered--Virginians are still proud of being Virginians--but they're also proud to be American. Their perspectives have been elevated.

Or think of Europe. A Frenchman is no less a Frenchman for belonging to the European Union and spending euros instead of francs and centimes. His perspective is being elevated.

• The one-world government could act to standardize the world economy and economically 'liberate' poor countries, without force of arms, in a way all but impossible otherwise.

For instance, such a government could set a minimum wage (and a maximum wage, a concept I strongly believe in). Multinationals would have no escape, because there would be no country exempt from world law. More: we could have global environmental laws and global human rights statutes.

• Dictators, tyrants, and despots would be consigned to the dustbin of history.

The one-world government, acting on advice from its Security Council, could freeze their assets--all of them--if they persisted in human rights abuses. An empty stomach is a powerful persuader.

• Armed conflict would be, eventually, all but eliminated.

Disputes between nations would be settled at the World Court, whose mandate would be to ensure win-win solutions whenever possible.

I really don't see a single downside that wouldn't in time prove itself to be very positive.

2) WE NEED A NEW DEFINITION OF "WEALTH".

(Thanks to Neale Walsch for clarifying this point in my mind.)

Right now, the wealthy are those who have the most. In my future ideal dreamworld, the welathy would be those who share the most. And they wouldn't share because it was required of them...they'd share because they saw how sharing was in their best interest.

This would totally revamp the economy. Consider something as banal as lawnmowers. How often do you use your lawnmower? Once a week? Once a fortnight? What does it do the rest of the time? Just sit there, right, being useless--oh, it's helping to feed that idea you have of yourself as a wealthy person in some tiny way..."I have a lawnmower!"

What if you shared that lawnmower with everyone on your block?

Well, that would free up a hell of a lot of lawnmowers, to be distributed among the poorer people who presently have no lawnmower. It would also force lawnmower manufacturers to upgrade their quality control considerably. It would bring people together. And disputes between neighbours over who broke the lawnmower, or whose turn it was to use it, could be resolved by little neighbourhood councils.

Again, given a few paradigm shifts, nothing but upside.

3) WE NEED A TOTALLY TRANSPARENT ECONOMIC SYSTEM.

By this I mean openness in nearly every detail concerning money. Neale Walsch had a great idea in his Conversations with God books: that all price tags bear two prices: the price you pay and the price the retailer paid. "Your Cost" and "Our Cost", as it were. This would drastically reduce gouging.

If Susan saw that Steve got twice as much remuneration for doing the same job, what do you think would happen?

If Mbusa saw--actually saw--that his employer was paying him one ten thousandth of what the company president made--what do you think would happen?

If ABC Company's books showed that they gave nothing to the environment, or to the poor, over the past year--and everyone could see that and then immediately compare it with XYZ Company, who donated ten percent of their profits--what do you think would happen?

These three suggestions--which do not originate with me, but which certainly resonate with me--would change the world. In a good way.