Also why I tend to steer well clear of anything that's won a major literary prize. And why the stuff I write may well be popular (I can but dare to dream), but will never be critically acclaimed. At least not by the Critics Who Matter. The ones that expel flatus instead of farting, in other words. AND why the stuff I like to write (and read) is pejoratively labelled "genre fiction".
Long article here:
I came to this essay after reading THE ROAD, by Cormac McCarthy, an Oprah-endorsed, Pulitzer-Prize-winning postapocalyptic novel I had extremely high hopes for. I'd forgotten, of course, that Pulitzer Prize winning fiction must be literary above all else.
THE ROAD is a work of undeniable power. It's a crying shame its author chose to write it the way he did: in complete ignorance of the laws of English grammar, and that's just for starters. The story is chock-full of sentence fragments, there are next to no apostrophes, and none of the quotations are attributed. The pace is glacial, despite McCarthy's stuttering, rapid-fire prose. I was repeatedly lifted out of the story, wondering why a certain word was used, or why the author had abandoned any semblance of sentence structure.
Story, damnit, story!
I want to see people I care about doing things I'm interested in. I want to see people talking in a language I'd use myself. I want action. Not necessarily a roller-coaster ride from start to finish--a crisis on every other page gets mighty boring, mighty fast--but something. I don't want to have to hack through thickets of pointless verbiage, or dig through metaphorical strata until my arms get so tired the book falls shut of its own accord.
And most of all, I don't want author intrusion. Look at me, look at these fine sentences I've painstakingly crafted! I THINK DEEP THOUGHTS! REWARD ME! BOW DOWN BEFORE ME!
Oh, go take your Pulitzer and shove it so far up that you cramp yourself, you pretentious, elitist snob.
This is also what I couldn't stand about Honours English Language and Literature (HELL)...the endless search for "meaning". Why is it that everything has got to "mean" something? In the words of Stephen King, why can't a story just be a story?
Friday, February 29, 2008
CadScam?
I admit it: I've given Stephen Harper and his Conservatives something of a free ride.
It's not that I'm "Steve"'s biggest fan. It's just that I have this severe allergic reaction any time I'm told what to think, and over the past few years there's been no shortage of Liberallissimos trying to convince me that Stephen Joseph Harper is the walking, talking Antichrist. Or at least "Antichrist Lite"--Big Daddy being, of course, one George "Dubya" Bush.
Whatever. I don't like George W. Bush at all, but I'd stop well short of suggesting he's evil: merely misguided, in my opinion. And Harper is nobody's "little Bushie". If he was, we'd probably be in Iraq instead of Afghanistan and our economy would be in a tailspin.
I've been neutral tending towards positive on Harper's government. After eleven years of Chretien's government by inaction and almost three years of Paul Martin trying to do everything at once and spinning like a top, Harper's steady, measured approach has been more than welcome...especially since he's had to balance getting stuff done with keeping in power. And stuff has been getting done. There are areas where Harper and I disagree...I'd like to see him craft some real environmental initiatives, and his drug policy is, quite simply, insane. But overall...not bad.
And I might as well admit to a little racism, or whatever it is: it sure is nice to have a PM who can speak English coherently. Note to American readers: if you think Bush's malapropisms are bad, get a load of this:
I haven't been alone in giving Harper a free pass. The blogosphere lit up over the Chalk River incident, but the mainstream media virtually ignored the story, and it didn't affect Harper's polling numbers.
Nothing does seem to affect Harper's polling numbers, for better or worse. Maybe it has something to do with the results of this Nanos Research/Sun Media study, suggesting that Liberal supporters tend to vote by rote regardless of leader, while Conservative voters tend to value policy, regardless of leader.
I can state that in my case, at least, this holds true. I've voted Conservative my whole life, up until the last provincial election...not because I like words that begin with "C", or because Mommy always voted that way (I don't even know if that's true; politics has always been a private subject in my family). No, I voted Conservative because, on balance, I liked their policies on the same three things Greg Weston cited: taxes, crime, and defense. Also because I have this libertarian streak in me that says those are among the very few things government should concern itself with in the first place, whereas Liberal supporters tend to want government to be everywhere all the time. Yecch.
If neither side cares particularly who the leader is, then Stephen Harper's unrelenting emphasis on himself isn't just arrogant, it's pointless.
Getting back on track: Harper's Conservatives have been largely scandal-free; the few things that have flared up have been mostly political, not at all the sordid mess that did in Martin's Liberals.
Until yesterday. And by God, it's as if Harper's making up for lost time. L'affaire Cadman has the makings of a government-killer.
The story is here. In a nutshell, it appears as if (a) money was offered to a dying Independant MP (Cadman) in exchange for his vote on a matter of confidence and that (b) Harper knew about it, condoned it and possibly authorized it. That money may have been in the form of a million-dollar life insurance policy, as Cadman's widow alleges, or not: no matter, it's illegal and unethical.
Cadman did not vote the way he was allegedly bribed to, which proves either there was no bribe or he couldn't be bought.
I do feel compelled to mention, for whatever it's worth, that Chuck Cadman had terminal cancer. There is no way an insurance company would issue a million-dollar policy on someone in his condition. Also that Cadman himself appeared on national television shortly after this offer is supposed to have taken place and denied any offer had been made. However, it certainly appears as if some sort of money was on the table. Even if this can be explained away, the rank stench will linger.
At this point--and I'm avidly watching this story develop--I have just one question:
Why now? This would have had maximum bombshell effect sometime in mid-December, 2005...in the middle of the election campaign. Had this story broken then, we could well have a different government in power right now. Not to mention if I'm Dona Cadman, I'd be outraged somebody was trying to buy my husband's support, and so crassly: I'm running to the media the second I find out about this alleged life insurance policy. That would have been May, 2005...almost three years ago. Why sit on this information this long? To what purpose?
In the meantime, my image of Stephen Harper as a man of no small integrity is taking a serious beating.
It's not that I'm "Steve"'s biggest fan. It's just that I have this severe allergic reaction any time I'm told what to think, and over the past few years there's been no shortage of Liberallissimos trying to convince me that Stephen Joseph Harper is the walking, talking Antichrist. Or at least "Antichrist Lite"--Big Daddy being, of course, one George "Dubya" Bush.
Whatever. I don't like George W. Bush at all, but I'd stop well short of suggesting he's evil: merely misguided, in my opinion. And Harper is nobody's "little Bushie". If he was, we'd probably be in Iraq instead of Afghanistan and our economy would be in a tailspin.
I've been neutral tending towards positive on Harper's government. After eleven years of Chretien's government by inaction and almost three years of Paul Martin trying to do everything at once and spinning like a top, Harper's steady, measured approach has been more than welcome...especially since he's had to balance getting stuff done with keeping in power. And stuff has been getting done. There are areas where Harper and I disagree...I'd like to see him craft some real environmental initiatives, and his drug policy is, quite simply, insane. But overall...not bad.
And I might as well admit to a little racism, or whatever it is: it sure is nice to have a PM who can speak English coherently. Note to American readers: if you think Bush's malapropisms are bad, get a load of this:
I haven't been alone in giving Harper a free pass. The blogosphere lit up over the Chalk River incident, but the mainstream media virtually ignored the story, and it didn't affect Harper's polling numbers.
Nothing does seem to affect Harper's polling numbers, for better or worse. Maybe it has something to do with the results of this Nanos Research/Sun Media study, suggesting that Liberal supporters tend to vote by rote regardless of leader, while Conservative voters tend to value policy, regardless of leader.
I can state that in my case, at least, this holds true. I've voted Conservative my whole life, up until the last provincial election...not because I like words that begin with "C", or because Mommy always voted that way (I don't even know if that's true; politics has always been a private subject in my family). No, I voted Conservative because, on balance, I liked their policies on the same three things Greg Weston cited: taxes, crime, and defense. Also because I have this libertarian streak in me that says those are among the very few things government should concern itself with in the first place, whereas Liberal supporters tend to want government to be everywhere all the time. Yecch.
If neither side cares particularly who the leader is, then Stephen Harper's unrelenting emphasis on himself isn't just arrogant, it's pointless.
Getting back on track: Harper's Conservatives have been largely scandal-free; the few things that have flared up have been mostly political, not at all the sordid mess that did in Martin's Liberals.
Until yesterday. And by God, it's as if Harper's making up for lost time. L'affaire Cadman has the makings of a government-killer.
The story is here. In a nutshell, it appears as if (a) money was offered to a dying Independant MP (Cadman) in exchange for his vote on a matter of confidence and that (b) Harper knew about it, condoned it and possibly authorized it. That money may have been in the form of a million-dollar life insurance policy, as Cadman's widow alleges, or not: no matter, it's illegal and unethical.
Cadman did not vote the way he was allegedly bribed to, which proves either there was no bribe or he couldn't be bought.
I do feel compelled to mention, for whatever it's worth, that Chuck Cadman had terminal cancer. There is no way an insurance company would issue a million-dollar policy on someone in his condition. Also that Cadman himself appeared on national television shortly after this offer is supposed to have taken place and denied any offer had been made. However, it certainly appears as if some sort of money was on the table. Even if this can be explained away, the rank stench will linger.
At this point--and I'm avidly watching this story develop--I have just one question:
Why now? This would have had maximum bombshell effect sometime in mid-December, 2005...in the middle of the election campaign. Had this story broken then, we could well have a different government in power right now. Not to mention if I'm Dona Cadman, I'd be outraged somebody was trying to buy my husband's support, and so crassly: I'm running to the media the second I find out about this alleged life insurance policy. That would have been May, 2005...almost three years ago. Why sit on this information this long? To what purpose?
In the meantime, my image of Stephen Harper as a man of no small integrity is taking a serious beating.
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
The World is Going To Hell
Part 576 in a never-ending series
Sore throat, what feels like a fever (if I could find the damn thermometer I'd confirm that), racking dry cough (easily the worst thing, for my money, about having a cold), and general mind-sludge preventing me from expanding on the sixty or so manuscript pages of my ongoing apocalyptic novel.
My world meets its end at the hands of a hellish virus that amps up aggression. It's a far-fetched scenario (I hope), especially versus the "little deaths" I'm seeing in the news each and every day.
For instance, today's roundup:
Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, signalled today that he will act to lower interest rates further. He has little choice, having backed himself into a thorny corner. If rates jig up even slightly, the economy will simply nosedive. But lowering interest rates is no small part of what got the States into this trouble in the first place...and making money cheaper is something akin to handing out free crack to addicts.
It would help, of course, if money meant anything anymore. Since the world abandoned the gold standard (there being simply not enough gold to suit the legions of fat cats), the concept of "money" has become more and more abstract. Sure, you and I use money to buy and sell things, because we agree on its worth. But suppose you offered me $100 and I said "that's just a rectangular piece of paper, signifying nothing?" What then, friends and neighbours?
There is a real danger of something like this happening on a global scale as the U.S. dollar continues to tank. Gold edges ever higher, scaling towards $1000 an ounce. Scary to think that just forty years ago, you could walk into a bank with $35 and, by law, walk out with one troy ounce of gold.
Just one U.S. Presidential candidate has noticed this...and of course, Ron Paul is dismissed as a freak. Reinstating the gold standard (or indeed any standard) would be incredibly painful, as it would expose the utter worthlessness of vast sums of "money", but at least whatever was left would have some tangible value. The writedown of billions upon billions is exposing the worthlessness of vast sums of "money", but the object here is to keep playing the game. The U.S. is rather like that poor sap who juggles ten credit cards, using each one to pay off the balance owing on another...and adding more cards whenever possible. As any juggler knows, there comes a point when it all must come crashing down.
--------------------------------------------------
From Statistics Canada, we read that Canadians are spending just ten percent of their household income to food. This sounds like a good thing on the surface--hey, less money devoted to keeping myself alive means more money to play with, right?--until you stop and consider that cheap food is almost invariably unhealthy, laden with sodium, sugar, a surfeit of carbohydrates, and a veritable pharmacy of chemicals. And we wonder why we're all getting fat.
------------------------------------------------------
It's looking more and more like Obama will become The Name on the Democrat ticket. If any Republican can beat him (and I think it unlikely) it'd be John McCain, by far the most moderate of the bunch.
I like Obama...it seems like almost everybody does. And the fact he's a Democrat bodes well for Canada; historically, we get along much better with Presidents from that party. But there's one thing that scares me. Barack (and Hillary, too) are protectionist. They both want to at least rip open NAFTA, if not rip it up entirely. The Canadian dollar (which could almost be said to have a standard of its own, tied as it is to commodities) currently sits above par, a level unthinkable ten short years ago. Between the high dollar and the quicksand of the U.S. economy, our exports are taking a serious beating. New trade tariffs would probably finish us but good. If there are any wise heads in Ottawa, they are frantically seeking new trading partners on other continents. If not...well...
Sore throat, what feels like a fever (if I could find the damn thermometer I'd confirm that), racking dry cough (easily the worst thing, for my money, about having a cold), and general mind-sludge preventing me from expanding on the sixty or so manuscript pages of my ongoing apocalyptic novel.
My world meets its end at the hands of a hellish virus that amps up aggression. It's a far-fetched scenario (I hope), especially versus the "little deaths" I'm seeing in the news each and every day.
For instance, today's roundup:
Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, signalled today that he will act to lower interest rates further. He has little choice, having backed himself into a thorny corner. If rates jig up even slightly, the economy will simply nosedive. But lowering interest rates is no small part of what got the States into this trouble in the first place...and making money cheaper is something akin to handing out free crack to addicts.
It would help, of course, if money meant anything anymore. Since the world abandoned the gold standard (there being simply not enough gold to suit the legions of fat cats), the concept of "money" has become more and more abstract. Sure, you and I use money to buy and sell things, because we agree on its worth. But suppose you offered me $100 and I said "that's just a rectangular piece of paper, signifying nothing?" What then, friends and neighbours?
There is a real danger of something like this happening on a global scale as the U.S. dollar continues to tank. Gold edges ever higher, scaling towards $1000 an ounce. Scary to think that just forty years ago, you could walk into a bank with $35 and, by law, walk out with one troy ounce of gold.
Just one U.S. Presidential candidate has noticed this...and of course, Ron Paul is dismissed as a freak. Reinstating the gold standard (or indeed any standard) would be incredibly painful, as it would expose the utter worthlessness of vast sums of "money", but at least whatever was left would have some tangible value. The writedown of billions upon billions is exposing the worthlessness of vast sums of "money", but the object here is to keep playing the game. The U.S. is rather like that poor sap who juggles ten credit cards, using each one to pay off the balance owing on another...and adding more cards whenever possible. As any juggler knows, there comes a point when it all must come crashing down.
--------------------------------------------------
From Statistics Canada, we read that Canadians are spending just ten percent of their household income to food. This sounds like a good thing on the surface--hey, less money devoted to keeping myself alive means more money to play with, right?--until you stop and consider that cheap food is almost invariably unhealthy, laden with sodium, sugar, a surfeit of carbohydrates, and a veritable pharmacy of chemicals. And we wonder why we're all getting fat.
------------------------------------------------------
It's looking more and more like Obama will become The Name on the Democrat ticket. If any Republican can beat him (and I think it unlikely) it'd be John McCain, by far the most moderate of the bunch.
I like Obama...it seems like almost everybody does. And the fact he's a Democrat bodes well for Canada; historically, we get along much better with Presidents from that party. But there's one thing that scares me. Barack (and Hillary, too) are protectionist. They both want to at least rip open NAFTA, if not rip it up entirely. The Canadian dollar (which could almost be said to have a standard of its own, tied as it is to commodities) currently sits above par, a level unthinkable ten short years ago. Between the high dollar and the quicksand of the U.S. economy, our exports are taking a serious beating. New trade tariffs would probably finish us but good. If there are any wise heads in Ottawa, they are frantically seeking new trading partners on other continents. If not...well...
Leaf Talk
Sicker than the proverbial dog, lately. (Why "dog", I wonder?) I don't get sick near as often as I used to, thanks (I'm sure) in no small part to the flu shot I get every year. It also helps that I'm not on a rotating schedule--working at 7-Eleven probably shaved years off my life.
------------------------
Hockey non-fans will want to skip this.
NHL trade deadline
There has been a small forest sacrificed to try and get inside the head of Mats Sundin, who refused to waive the no-trade clause in his contract and go to a contender. He says he doesn't believe in the "rent-a-player" concept and that Toronto is where his heart is.
The opinions are all over the map. Some people say Sundin is simply exercising his contractual right, and that as a long-serving captain (and, incidentally, the leading scorer in franchise history), he's earned the right to control his destiny. Some admire the man for what they perceive is team loyalty. Others, noting the return Mats surely would have brought had he waived, and considering he could have signed back with the improved Leafs in the summer, believe he's being selfish, and question his will to win. Some have even suggested he be stripped of his captaincy, which would ensure nobody of any worth signed on with Toronto for a generation or so.
About the only opinion I haven't seen written is mine: that Mats is politely extending a huge middle finger to Leafs management. He's reported to have said he's not responsible for fixing management's mistakes (although he vehemently denies ever having said such a thing). If he didn't say that, he should have: the Leafs management has been nothing short of a joke for years. Sundin, who is a sure-fire Hall of Famer, has been saddled with soup cans for wingers nearly every year he's been in a Leafs jersey. He has quietly produced at a point per game clip while the team around him has deteriorated to the point they're within shouting distance of last place overall. No, not Mats' fault. But he could have done something about it yesterday, jetting off to Detroit or Anaheim or San Jose and possibly pushing the team he joined over the top. And he chose not to.
I get it: the man's near retirement...in fact it wouldn't surprise me overmuch to see him retire the summer. Given his burning desire to remain a Toronto Maple Leaf, he will retire without ever having won a Stanley Cup. I'd question the man's will to win if I hadn't seen him pick the entire team up and carry it on his back for long stretches. He's almost the only man on the team this year performing at or above expectations. No, I don't think you can say he likes losing. Maybe you can take his words at face value: that after thirteen years as a Leaf, donning another team's jersey and winning a Cup would feel cheap to him.
I'm less willing to forgive the other members of the no-trade, no-movement club, particularly whichever one of them it was who waived his no-trade clause late Monday night only to change his mind on Tuesday. At this point, nobody's sure which one of Tucker, Kaberle, Kubina or McCabe it was, although conjecture suggests one of the latter two. Kubina's no-trade clause expires at the end of this regular season and I'm thinking he'll be on the first flight out of town.
It's unlikely anyone will take McCabe at his bloated salary; Tucker, who is also grossly overpaid, is likewise unattractive. Kaberle's a keeper anyway, and maybe the only player aside from Sundin who has earned the no-trade clause included in his latest contract.
Ultimately the blame for handcuffing this team goes to John Ferguson Jr, who handed out all these no-trade, no-movement clauses like so much candy. I'm with Brian Burke, the GM of the Anaheim Ducks, when it comes to no-trade clauses. He calls them coach-killers. "Well," says the player, "you can bench me if you want. But I'll still be here next year, unlike you. You can't trade me, neener-neener-neener."
Given the fact Cliff Fletcher went into trade deadline day with both hands tied behind his back, I think he came out rather well. He made three trades, all for picks:
--Wade Belak to Florida for a fifth rounder
I'll miss Wade. He hardly ever played, but when he did, he gave his all and injected a touch of toughness and swagger into perhaps the softest, most passionless team in the league. He got a standing ovation a couple of months ago for scoring a goal. The fifth round pick doesn't sound like much, but it's a good return on a guy who's almost never used.
--Chad Kilger to Florida for a third round pick
Kilger's another guy who tries. Unlike Wade, he's been in the lineup pretty much every night. He hits anything that moves, almost the only man on the team who does. Has a bullet shot but limited accuracy. Swift skater, fairly soft hands, but never seemed to put it all together and live up to the hype of being a first round pick. Kilger and Belak will make Florida a tougher team to play against.
--Hal Gill to Pittsburgh for picks in the second and fifth rounds
Leaf fans have a propensity to single out a guy, usually on the blueline, and boo him mercilessly for no reason. Yes, he's slow, but Gill is positionally pretty sound and he has the wingspan of an Airbus. Pretty handy on the penalty kill and a mentor to our young D. I think he'll be missed. He was the only stay-at-home defenseman on the Leafs this year. He'll be an asset in Pittsburgh.
Fletcher has made his team worse for the rest of this season...by design. I'm sure he would have done more yesterday were there any takers for the likes of Antropov, White, or Stajan. The idea is to nip this winning-when-the-pressure's-off thing in the bud. The last thing this team needs is a heroic march to ninth or tenth place in the conference. Bring on the lottery pick.
Besides, Fletcher has said he's not done: there will be more moves in the summer. It appears as if the Toronto Maple Leafs are finally going to rebuild properly.
Hope springs eternal in the hearts of Leaf fans everywhere: our motto for four decades has been "maybe next year." That hope is, of course, dashed every season. Well, at last I see signs of genuine hope around this team, not for next year, perhaps, but it's coming.
Around the league, I think Pittsburgh and Washington made off like bandits, and Dallas and San Jose both strengthened already strong teams. Hossa to the Pens was a shocker, and it illustrates the kind of return the Leafs might have gotten for Sundin...two legitimate NHL front-line players, a good prospect, and a first round pick. Damn you and your loyalty, Mats!
------------------------
Hockey non-fans will want to skip this.
NHL trade deadline
There has been a small forest sacrificed to try and get inside the head of Mats Sundin, who refused to waive the no-trade clause in his contract and go to a contender. He says he doesn't believe in the "rent-a-player" concept and that Toronto is where his heart is.
The opinions are all over the map. Some people say Sundin is simply exercising his contractual right, and that as a long-serving captain (and, incidentally, the leading scorer in franchise history), he's earned the right to control his destiny. Some admire the man for what they perceive is team loyalty. Others, noting the return Mats surely would have brought had he waived, and considering he could have signed back with the improved Leafs in the summer, believe he's being selfish, and question his will to win. Some have even suggested he be stripped of his captaincy, which would ensure nobody of any worth signed on with Toronto for a generation or so.
About the only opinion I haven't seen written is mine: that Mats is politely extending a huge middle finger to Leafs management. He's reported to have said he's not responsible for fixing management's mistakes (although he vehemently denies ever having said such a thing). If he didn't say that, he should have: the Leafs management has been nothing short of a joke for years. Sundin, who is a sure-fire Hall of Famer, has been saddled with soup cans for wingers nearly every year he's been in a Leafs jersey. He has quietly produced at a point per game clip while the team around him has deteriorated to the point they're within shouting distance of last place overall. No, not Mats' fault. But he could have done something about it yesterday, jetting off to Detroit or Anaheim or San Jose and possibly pushing the team he joined over the top. And he chose not to.
I get it: the man's near retirement...in fact it wouldn't surprise me overmuch to see him retire the summer. Given his burning desire to remain a Toronto Maple Leaf, he will retire without ever having won a Stanley Cup. I'd question the man's will to win if I hadn't seen him pick the entire team up and carry it on his back for long stretches. He's almost the only man on the team this year performing at or above expectations. No, I don't think you can say he likes losing. Maybe you can take his words at face value: that after thirteen years as a Leaf, donning another team's jersey and winning a Cup would feel cheap to him.
I'm less willing to forgive the other members of the no-trade, no-movement club, particularly whichever one of them it was who waived his no-trade clause late Monday night only to change his mind on Tuesday. At this point, nobody's sure which one of Tucker, Kaberle, Kubina or McCabe it was, although conjecture suggests one of the latter two. Kubina's no-trade clause expires at the end of this regular season and I'm thinking he'll be on the first flight out of town.
It's unlikely anyone will take McCabe at his bloated salary; Tucker, who is also grossly overpaid, is likewise unattractive. Kaberle's a keeper anyway, and maybe the only player aside from Sundin who has earned the no-trade clause included in his latest contract.
Ultimately the blame for handcuffing this team goes to John Ferguson Jr, who handed out all these no-trade, no-movement clauses like so much candy. I'm with Brian Burke, the GM of the Anaheim Ducks, when it comes to no-trade clauses. He calls them coach-killers. "Well," says the player, "you can bench me if you want. But I'll still be here next year, unlike you. You can't trade me, neener-neener-neener."
Given the fact Cliff Fletcher went into trade deadline day with both hands tied behind his back, I think he came out rather well. He made three trades, all for picks:
--Wade Belak to Florida for a fifth rounder
I'll miss Wade. He hardly ever played, but when he did, he gave his all and injected a touch of toughness and swagger into perhaps the softest, most passionless team in the league. He got a standing ovation a couple of months ago for scoring a goal. The fifth round pick doesn't sound like much, but it's a good return on a guy who's almost never used.
--Chad Kilger to Florida for a third round pick
Kilger's another guy who tries. Unlike Wade, he's been in the lineup pretty much every night. He hits anything that moves, almost the only man on the team who does. Has a bullet shot but limited accuracy. Swift skater, fairly soft hands, but never seemed to put it all together and live up to the hype of being a first round pick. Kilger and Belak will make Florida a tougher team to play against.
--Hal Gill to Pittsburgh for picks in the second and fifth rounds
Leaf fans have a propensity to single out a guy, usually on the blueline, and boo him mercilessly for no reason. Yes, he's slow, but Gill is positionally pretty sound and he has the wingspan of an Airbus. Pretty handy on the penalty kill and a mentor to our young D. I think he'll be missed. He was the only stay-at-home defenseman on the Leafs this year. He'll be an asset in Pittsburgh.
Fletcher has made his team worse for the rest of this season...by design. I'm sure he would have done more yesterday were there any takers for the likes of Antropov, White, or Stajan. The idea is to nip this winning-when-the-pressure's-off thing in the bud. The last thing this team needs is a heroic march to ninth or tenth place in the conference. Bring on the lottery pick.
Besides, Fletcher has said he's not done: there will be more moves in the summer. It appears as if the Toronto Maple Leafs are finally going to rebuild properly.
Hope springs eternal in the hearts of Leaf fans everywhere: our motto for four decades has been "maybe next year." That hope is, of course, dashed every season. Well, at last I see signs of genuine hope around this team, not for next year, perhaps, but it's coming.
Around the league, I think Pittsburgh and Washington made off like bandits, and Dallas and San Jose both strengthened already strong teams. Hossa to the Pens was a shocker, and it illustrates the kind of return the Leafs might have gotten for Sundin...two legitimate NHL front-line players, a good prospect, and a first round pick. Damn you and your loyalty, Mats!
Monday, February 18, 2008
Winter Break
Barring world-shattering events, I will not be posting for a little while.
Longtime readers will recall a little hiatus I took last July, wherein I promised I'd get something done with my writing. Oh, I wrote, all right. But not as much as I should have. When I ran up against a brick wall in my short story, I banged my head against it for a little while and then gave up.
Well, I've long had a novel incubating on a mental back burner. Unlike the short story, I have a pretty good idea where it's going. Nothing so tangible as an outline--I don't do outlines--but a sort of mental map.
I've doubled its length in the last few days, editing as I go, and it's now sitting at nearly eleven thousand words. What's more, I've barely started...and this time that's a good thing. My mind is fully engaged with teasing out little nuggets of story (I just had a delicious plot twist exfoliate itself in the shower this morning) and I don't think this one's going to peter out on me.
I've resolved to treat this story the way I used to treat my daily diary back when I was a teenager. Back then, it was imperative that I wrote something every day.
That's a start, anyway, and marks a hell of a lot more discipline than I've brought to bear so far. The truth is, writing's the only real ticket I've got out of a dead-end career, and if it takes a little work to cash it, so be it.
I'm not abandoning the Breadbin, but I expect it'll go down to a once-weekly thing for a little while. Have fun and play fair, folks.
Longtime readers will recall a little hiatus I took last July, wherein I promised I'd get something done with my writing. Oh, I wrote, all right. But not as much as I should have. When I ran up against a brick wall in my short story, I banged my head against it for a little while and then gave up.
Well, I've long had a novel incubating on a mental back burner. Unlike the short story, I have a pretty good idea where it's going. Nothing so tangible as an outline--I don't do outlines--but a sort of mental map.
I've doubled its length in the last few days, editing as I go, and it's now sitting at nearly eleven thousand words. What's more, I've barely started...and this time that's a good thing. My mind is fully engaged with teasing out little nuggets of story (I just had a delicious plot twist exfoliate itself in the shower this morning) and I don't think this one's going to peter out on me.
I've resolved to treat this story the way I used to treat my daily diary back when I was a teenager. Back then, it was imperative that I wrote something every day.
That's a start, anyway, and marks a hell of a lot more discipline than I've brought to bear so far. The truth is, writing's the only real ticket I've got out of a dead-end career, and if it takes a little work to cash it, so be it.
I'm not abandoning the Breadbin, but I expect it'll go down to a once-weekly thing for a little while. Have fun and play fair, folks.
Thursday, February 14, 2008
The Evolution of Godwin's Law
"As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."--Mike Godwin, 1990
Godwin's Law originally applied to USENET, but now it's seen anywhere three or more people gather to discuss anything that could possibly be controversial. The argument grows warm, then hot, and before you know it Nazis are jackbooting across your screen.
Some online forums have a rule to the effect that whenever Adolf appears, the debate is over, and whoever brought him up is declared the loser. It's a good rule.
Of course, by the time Hitler comes up, I'm long out of the room with the door shut. Arguing's great, but arguing with a fanatic is pointless.
Ask my parents: I used to be about the most closed-minded, black/white, I'm-right-you're-wrong person on the face of the earth. It dawned on me one day that many other people are just as closed-minded, black/white, I'm-right-you're-wrong...and they see things differently than I do. From there it was a short (albeit painful) step to admitting that sometimes I'm wrong, and damned if I'm not wrong a lot these days. I'm a husband; it comes with the territory.
Anyway, I like to argue politics or philosophy or what have you: it exposes me to different ideas and ways of seeing the world, and that's always a good thing. I don't mind different thoughts, but I have a real problem with different thought processes. Which is why I distrust radicals of any stripe: you can't trust them to keep the argument rational. Sooner or later you're being compared with Hitler.
Or being threatened with jail for your "intergenerational crimes".
I lost what little respect I had for David Suzuki when he came out with that the other day.
Oh, I know how blasphemous that is, for a Canadian to suggest that David Suzuki is full of greenhouse gas...almost as blasphemous as suggesting that our health care system could use a major overhaul, come to think of it. Suzuki's everywhere these days, fancying himself some sort of expert on climate change. As if anybody is. Memo to Dr. Suzuki: you're a zoologist.
I SAY THIS THREE TIMES I SAY THIS THREE TIMES I SAY THIS THREE TIMES: I consider myself environmentally aware; I believe in global warming; and I also believe that we're causing this latest go-round with it to at least some degree. What I do not believe is that anybody can reliably predict the climate fifty or a hundred years out. Feed all the data you want into all the computers you can find: I contend there are way too many variables and things we simply don't understand right now for the output to be worth anything more than sheer kaka. Computer modelling looks like science, but it's just a bunch of people playing with very expensive toys.
"They" know this, too. Almost all climate change predictions are for a date so far in the future as to absolve their predictors from any responsibility.
For Suzuki the zoologist (Ph.D: University of Chicago, 1961) to suggest we should be jailing people who disagree with him on something as monstrously complex as climate borders on criminal itself, as far as I'm concerned. It's certainly un-Canadian.
But I won't say he's a Nazi. I won't.
Godwin's Law originally applied to USENET, but now it's seen anywhere three or more people gather to discuss anything that could possibly be controversial. The argument grows warm, then hot, and before you know it Nazis are jackbooting across your screen.
Some online forums have a rule to the effect that whenever Adolf appears, the debate is over, and whoever brought him up is declared the loser. It's a good rule.
Of course, by the time Hitler comes up, I'm long out of the room with the door shut. Arguing's great, but arguing with a fanatic is pointless.
Ask my parents: I used to be about the most closed-minded, black/white, I'm-right-you're-wrong person on the face of the earth. It dawned on me one day that many other people are just as closed-minded, black/white, I'm-right-you're-wrong...and they see things differently than I do. From there it was a short (albeit painful) step to admitting that sometimes I'm wrong, and damned if I'm not wrong a lot these days. I'm a husband; it comes with the territory.
Anyway, I like to argue politics or philosophy or what have you: it exposes me to different ideas and ways of seeing the world, and that's always a good thing. I don't mind different thoughts, but I have a real problem with different thought processes. Which is why I distrust radicals of any stripe: you can't trust them to keep the argument rational. Sooner or later you're being compared with Hitler.
Or being threatened with jail for your "intergenerational crimes".
I lost what little respect I had for David Suzuki when he came out with that the other day.
Oh, I know how blasphemous that is, for a Canadian to suggest that David Suzuki is full of greenhouse gas...almost as blasphemous as suggesting that our health care system could use a major overhaul, come to think of it. Suzuki's everywhere these days, fancying himself some sort of expert on climate change. As if anybody is. Memo to Dr. Suzuki: you're a zoologist.
I SAY THIS THREE TIMES I SAY THIS THREE TIMES I SAY THIS THREE TIMES: I consider myself environmentally aware; I believe in global warming; and I also believe that we're causing this latest go-round with it to at least some degree. What I do not believe is that anybody can reliably predict the climate fifty or a hundred years out. Feed all the data you want into all the computers you can find: I contend there are way too many variables and things we simply don't understand right now for the output to be worth anything more than sheer kaka. Computer modelling looks like science, but it's just a bunch of people playing with very expensive toys.
"They" know this, too. Almost all climate change predictions are for a date so far in the future as to absolve their predictors from any responsibility.
For Suzuki the zoologist (Ph.D: University of Chicago, 1961) to suggest we should be jailing people who disagree with him on something as monstrously complex as climate borders on criminal itself, as far as I'm concerned. It's certainly un-Canadian.
But I won't say he's a Nazi. I won't.
Sunday, February 10, 2008
To Your Health
Finally got around to watching Sicko today (thanks, Mom) whilst recovering (still) from my little operation the other day.
Michael Moore paints an idyllic picture of the Canadian health care system. And why wouldn't he? From the outside, particularly from a country like America that seems to discard anybody who can't afford the outlandish sums demanded for simple operations, Canada's government-pay system seems almost perfect. From the outside.
Moore visits a hospital waiting room, one I'm pretty sure I've been in myself at some point--and surveys the population. Nobody, it seems, has been waiting any more than 45 minutes for care. Given my experiences in hospital waiting rooms over the years, that strikes me as rosy to the point of impossibility.
The few times I've been really sick or hurt, I've had to weigh my pain level against what is almost certain to be at least four or six hours sitting in a waiting room--only to quite possibly be given aspirin I could get myself from any drugstore. And that's just the emergency rooms: waiting for the attentions of a specialist, or a specialist's machine, routinely stretches into months, sometimes many months. You could die, waiting. People have.
Then again, the opening scene of Sicko brought to mind an ex-girlfriend of mine and her lettuce-shredder-induced visit to hospital one day in 1991.
We were working, the both of us, at a Wendy's on Highway 401 just outside Woodstock, Ontario. I was on one side of the kitchen, doing some sort of prep work, I forget just what, and she was feeding lettuces into a shredder. All of a sudden I heard her say "uh-oh".
That was it. "Uh-oh."
I turned around and beheld her walking quickly across to a sink. The blood was not immediately discernable. Nothing was, really, until she had her hand under running water. Then something was discernable, all right, screams were discernable, all the way from in town they were as discernable as hell. One of the managers took over, escorting her out of the kitchen, stopping just long enough to tell me to throw out the batch of lettuce Lynne had just shredded.
Gee, d'ya THINK?
Nobody tried to retrieve the two fingertips Lynne had lost--her ring and middle fingertips, just like the guy in the opening frames of Sicko. Wouldn't have mattered if they had--by the time Lynne got to the hospital and was seen and treated, a couple of hours had passed; they couldn't have re-attached anything after that long a delay. So they patched her up somehow and her fingers were ever so slightly truncated and misshapen, ever after.
What they did not do was ask her to pay $12,000 or $60,000. She didn't have to pay a dime, and that would have held true no matter what she'd done to herself.
So that's an unabashed positive point. The negatives, as I mentioned above, have to do with scarcity: not enough doctors, not enough nurses, not enough beds, not enough machines. Not enough money for any of these things. Never enough money. The Canadian health care system is a voracious beast, consuming up to fifty percent of government budgets, and costs are always rising.
I live in a city of half a million people, midway between the capital of the province (Toronto, a metropolis of over four million) and London, Ontario (seen in Sicko and renowned for its medical facililities). You would think a city this size in this area would have doctors aplenty. Not so. In fact, finding a family doctor who's able to take on new patients is something akin to winning a lottery. And that's here in Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge. In the remote parts of Ontario (and most of this sprawling province is remote), finding a family doctor taking on new patients is more like winning the lottery despite the fact you never bought a ticket. It would actually be a good thing--from the point of view of long-suffering townspeople--if the American myth was true and the Canadian government dictated where a doctor could practice.
The Canadian system is nowhere near as ideal as Moore paints it. Nor, I suspect, are the systems in Britain, France, and Cuba. But that doesn't lessen his attack on the American health care system one cc.
The trouble is not that one system is flawed. The trouble is that both systems are flawed.
There are, as Moore so eloquently points out, vested interests keeping Americans shackled to a broken system. Likewise, there are vested interests up here in Canuckistan doing their utmost to keep our system exactly as it is: one level of mediocrity for all. The merest whisper of privatized health care here is political suicide...despite the fact it already exists. About thirty percent of our system is open to private involvement: it's an open secret. The government doesn't pay for everything.
But to even acknowledge the serious issues in our health care system is to brand yourself a damnyankeebastard. It is, of course, patently unfair that poverty should prevent medical treatment; to my admittedly un-Canadian way of thinking it's also patently unfair to prevent me from spending my own money on my own health care, or that of someone I love, should I choose to.
There is obviously a happy medium to be found here, if only people would look for it. Unfortunately, both sides are far too entrenched in their own positions. Americans will point northward with wagging fingers and cite any number of horror stories concerning Canadians waiting unconscionable lengths of time for surgeries; Canadians will look down their noses at thousands of American families bankrupted by mere illness or injury.
Should a Democrat win the White House in November--a prospect that, barring terrorist attack, seems all but certain from this side of the 49th parallel--it looks as if Americans will be taking their first tentative steps towards socialized medicine. To my American readers regarding that prospect with some trepidation: don't. You need not make all our mistakes, and the hybrid system you really ought to consider would meld the best of both worlds.
Michael Moore paints an idyllic picture of the Canadian health care system. And why wouldn't he? From the outside, particularly from a country like America that seems to discard anybody who can't afford the outlandish sums demanded for simple operations, Canada's government-pay system seems almost perfect. From the outside.
Moore visits a hospital waiting room, one I'm pretty sure I've been in myself at some point--and surveys the population. Nobody, it seems, has been waiting any more than 45 minutes for care. Given my experiences in hospital waiting rooms over the years, that strikes me as rosy to the point of impossibility.
The few times I've been really sick or hurt, I've had to weigh my pain level against what is almost certain to be at least four or six hours sitting in a waiting room--only to quite possibly be given aspirin I could get myself from any drugstore. And that's just the emergency rooms: waiting for the attentions of a specialist, or a specialist's machine, routinely stretches into months, sometimes many months. You could die, waiting. People have.
Then again, the opening scene of Sicko brought to mind an ex-girlfriend of mine and her lettuce-shredder-induced visit to hospital one day in 1991.
We were working, the both of us, at a Wendy's on Highway 401 just outside Woodstock, Ontario. I was on one side of the kitchen, doing some sort of prep work, I forget just what, and she was feeding lettuces into a shredder. All of a sudden I heard her say "uh-oh".
That was it. "Uh-oh."
I turned around and beheld her walking quickly across to a sink. The blood was not immediately discernable. Nothing was, really, until she had her hand under running water. Then something was discernable, all right, screams were discernable, all the way from in town they were as discernable as hell. One of the managers took over, escorting her out of the kitchen, stopping just long enough to tell me to throw out the batch of lettuce Lynne had just shredded.
Gee, d'ya THINK?
Nobody tried to retrieve the two fingertips Lynne had lost--her ring and middle fingertips, just like the guy in the opening frames of Sicko. Wouldn't have mattered if they had--by the time Lynne got to the hospital and was seen and treated, a couple of hours had passed; they couldn't have re-attached anything after that long a delay. So they patched her up somehow and her fingers were ever so slightly truncated and misshapen, ever after.
What they did not do was ask her to pay $12,000 or $60,000. She didn't have to pay a dime, and that would have held true no matter what she'd done to herself.
So that's an unabashed positive point. The negatives, as I mentioned above, have to do with scarcity: not enough doctors, not enough nurses, not enough beds, not enough machines. Not enough money for any of these things. Never enough money. The Canadian health care system is a voracious beast, consuming up to fifty percent of government budgets, and costs are always rising.
I live in a city of half a million people, midway between the capital of the province (Toronto, a metropolis of over four million) and London, Ontario (seen in Sicko and renowned for its medical facililities). You would think a city this size in this area would have doctors aplenty. Not so. In fact, finding a family doctor who's able to take on new patients is something akin to winning a lottery. And that's here in Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge. In the remote parts of Ontario (and most of this sprawling province is remote), finding a family doctor taking on new patients is more like winning the lottery despite the fact you never bought a ticket. It would actually be a good thing--from the point of view of long-suffering townspeople--if the American myth was true and the Canadian government dictated where a doctor could practice.
The Canadian system is nowhere near as ideal as Moore paints it. Nor, I suspect, are the systems in Britain, France, and Cuba. But that doesn't lessen his attack on the American health care system one cc.
The trouble is not that one system is flawed. The trouble is that both systems are flawed.
There are, as Moore so eloquently points out, vested interests keeping Americans shackled to a broken system. Likewise, there are vested interests up here in Canuckistan doing their utmost to keep our system exactly as it is: one level of mediocrity for all. The merest whisper of privatized health care here is political suicide...despite the fact it already exists. About thirty percent of our system is open to private involvement: it's an open secret. The government doesn't pay for everything.
But to even acknowledge the serious issues in our health care system is to brand yourself a damnyankeebastard. It is, of course, patently unfair that poverty should prevent medical treatment; to my admittedly un-Canadian way of thinking it's also patently unfair to prevent me from spending my own money on my own health care, or that of someone I love, should I choose to.
There is obviously a happy medium to be found here, if only people would look for it. Unfortunately, both sides are far too entrenched in their own positions. Americans will point northward with wagging fingers and cite any number of horror stories concerning Canadians waiting unconscionable lengths of time for surgeries; Canadians will look down their noses at thousands of American families bankrupted by mere illness or injury.
Should a Democrat win the White House in November--a prospect that, barring terrorist attack, seems all but certain from this side of the 49th parallel--it looks as if Americans will be taking their first tentative steps towards socialized medicine. To my American readers regarding that prospect with some trepidation: don't. You need not make all our mistakes, and the hybrid system you really ought to consider would meld the best of both worlds.
Friday, February 08, 2008
I'm An Adult Now...
I've all my wisdom teeth
Two up top, two beneath
And yet, I'll recognize
My mouth says things that aren't so wise...
The Crash Test Dummies, "Comin' Back Soon" (The Bereft Man's Song)
Well, actually, all I ever had was the one wisdom tooth, on the lower right. And it came out yesterday. Which is when I meant to do this blog, but between the aftermath of the knockout drugs they pumped in and (ahem) the pain, all I felt like doing was sleeping.
Two up top, two beneath
And yet, I'll recognize
My mouth says things that aren't so wise...
The Crash Test Dummies, "Comin' Back Soon" (The Bereft Man's Song)
Well, actually, all I ever had was the one wisdom tooth, on the lower right. And it came out yesterday. Which is when I meant to do this blog, but between the aftermath of the knockout drugs they pumped in and (ahem) the pain, all I felt like doing was sleeping.
I'll spare you the details, since odds are near certain you've either had it done yourself--up to four times--or at least know someone who's been through it. I will say this, however: we need to bring back capital punishment. Not just for cop-killers, mass murdering scumbags and telemarketers, but for those people who, upon hearing you're going in for an operation no matter how comparatively trivial, proceed to shout out every horror story they've ever heard, or God forbid experienced.
My sister had her wisdom teeth out and her jaw got infected. She missed work for a week and a half.
I was wondering why my jaw was so damn sore...turns out the teeth crumbled and they had to hammer 'em out. Split the gums and everything.
My cousin--Gregor Samsa, have you heard of him?--had his wisdom teeth out. The next morning, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug.
I had to run the same gauntlet when I had my vasectomy. At least this time the effing anaesthetic took.
I could also do without the people who go the other way. Yeah, I had my wisdom teeth out at ten and was back to work by eleven. Of course, I only realized at noon they'd also removed all my insides and replaced them with cybernetic components. Pain? We doan NEED no steekin' pain, seenhor.
Hey, they told me take two days off. What was I supposed to do, say no? Besides, I've been required to be at work every Saturday since the start of the year (and every fourth Sunday, to boot). Getting a weekend off...it's like pulling tooth.
So now I'm sitting here wisdomless, having just finished gumming some scrambled eggs to death, and coping with the pain of it all. Oh, I won't lie and say it's agony. But put it this way: I'm glad there was only one of those things to come out. I don't know how I'd cope with four.
I used to think that if my wisdom teeth were still around in my mid-to-late twenties, they weren't coming out at all. That was until Eva had hers out last year...and she was older then than I am now. Regardless, I long looked upon that operation as the final gateway between the land of children and grownups. And now, I'm through it: three days after my 36th birthday.
Birthdays--they're like straws on a camel's back, you know? I've never felt their accumulating weight until the last couple of years. This year, I must confess to having gone through a wee funk ahead of time, a mini-depressive episode that lasted about a week and, in hindsight, surprised the hell out of me. I mean, for many years I've been lambasting the culture of youth that pervades the world, and insisting I'm not afraid of growing old. It beats the alternative, right?
So it was something of a shock to have found myself obsessively examining my mental age-markers. These things didn't just suddenly appear...even as a young child I always felt much more comfortable with adults, and easily twenty years older than my calendar age. My musical tastes (some of them, anyway) mirror those of your grandfather and like a true old fogey, I've cultivated an ignorance of popular culture that has served me well.
But over the past ten years or so, it's not just that I'm getting older: it's that the world around me seems to be getting younger. I honestly believe my generation was the last (at least for some time) that was in a hurry to grow up. These days, it seems as if more and more people are living with their parents into their twenties (or even longer); hopping from job to job and relationship to relationship, lacking direction, lacking commitment. Indeed, commitment and its twin term responsibility are now baaaaad words.
"Kidults" or "adultescents" rationalize their behaviour (and have it rationalized for them by parent-enablers and social workers). They say I've got to find myself and marriage is a trap and it takes money, lots of money, to start a family. Also what's the hurry? Maybe...someday...
Of course, they'll rarely acknowledge the truth and say things like I'm afraid. Or I'm gonna live for me as long as possible before I start living for someone else.
Oh, I'm not putting myself on any kind of pedestal: I was incredibly immature when I was a teenager and I still exhibit traces of that immaturity even today. The difference is, I'm ashamed of it. "Kidults" revel in it.
I should add here that I know many teens who are more adult than most adults--the cult of "kidult" doesn't look like it will claim everyone. But still, I find it a tad worrisome that so many people run from the very things my generation used to run towards.
Anyway, I kind of digressed there...I imagine there's a blog post, or a whole series of them, that I could write on "Peter Pan Syndrome" if I didn't find it so depressing.
You know when I first realized how old I really am? When the Paris Hilton sex video was suddenly all over the Internet. 2003, that would have been. Suddenly, seemingly overnight, practically everybody I know had seen it or was at least very interested in seeing it and knew where to find it. Me, I wouldn't have known Paris Hilton from the Hilton in Paris. (I still wouldn't, by the way, and consider this to be but one emblem of my sanity.) Furthermore, the idea of watching some bootleg sex tape held zero interest for me.
This phenomenon has repeated itself countless times in the ensuing years. It seems there's a new Internet craze every day, and despite being on the Internet every day, I never hear about any of them until six or eight months have passed. It makes me wonder what sites people are trolling. Am I missing something on my Google homepage, perhaps? Some line at the bottom that says "click here for today's pointless excrescence of pop culture"?
Back in the long ago 80s, before most of the people I work with were born (yike, there's an ageist thought), I used to listen to American Top 40 with Casey Kasem every week without fail. (Now it's the Vinyl Cafe with Stewart McLean on CBC Radio: like the Pursuit of Happiness says, I'm an adult now). These days, I look at the music charts in the newspapers and find I don't know at least three quarters of the artists and have never heard, oh, ninety percent of the songs. I remember the first time I saw "f." in front of some artist's name on the charts, as in
#6. Kill All Tha Muhfuhs M.C. Gangsta Baggypantz f. Lil' Skank
It took me weeks to figure out the "f." stood for "featuring", and when that revelation burst upon me, I reacted with contempt. Christ, I thought. Not only do these songs have no melody whatsoever, they're laced with profanity and they degrade women first and the rest of humanity second, women are lining up to be "featured" in them. And, Lil' Skank, I thought, if you're trying to abbreviate "little", the apostrophe goes after the first l.
It all makes me think Pink...
I still look in the mirror now and again and wonder what I'm going to do when I grow up. Then I reflect that I haven't been growing up for some time now; I've been growing out instead. By which I mean my perspectives have been broadening. (Yeah, so has my gut, smartass.) Still a long ways to go, of course: I intend to keep living until I'm dead, and who knows, maybe even after that.
Monday, February 04, 2008
Sunday, February 03, 2008
I Gotta Get This On Tape
Everybody thinks they have the smartest pets in the world. Or the dumbest.
We have both.
Okay, I'm exaggerating: there are undoubtedly smarter dogs than Tux out there and Georgia's not exactly stupid, just...challenged.
Georgia's a scaredy-dog. We have no idea whence this came: we've owned her since she was knee-high to a chew toy and if there's a calmer, more sedate household than ours around here, you'd call it the morgue. If anything, I'd expect Tux to be the skittish one; he was abused as a young puppy and spent months in the pound waiting for us to find him.
But no, Tux is almost fearless...he'll even let a vacuum cleaner get within two feet of him before moving. Georgia, on the other hand, will refuse to come in the house if there's something on the landing she doesn't like. A bag of cat food, for instance. Or a leaf that blew in.
And she's utterly terrified of the baby gate we put up to keep the dogs out of the basement while we're gone. That one, at least, I understand. It's fallen a few times and it makes an awful clattling racket when it hits the hardwood floor.
Like most puppies, Georgia's favourite game is Daddy-throw-the-toy-so-I-can-slobber-all-over-it-and-bring-it-back. She's very good at it, scoring points in and every time for promptness and accuracy of retrieval (often placing the toy directly into your hand) and quantity of drool, which is exceptional. (That said, she's a Boxer/Bulldog cross...any dog playing with her has an automatic three-liter handicap.) Tux, who used to fetch and retrieve with the best of them, now indulgently regards all this horseplay from his dignified position on the couch, reading his canine Scriptures. When I was a puppy, I spake as a puppy, I understood as a puppy, I thought as a puppy: but when I became a dog, I put away puppy things.
Until Daddy whizzes the bedrooled puppy-toy out into the kitchen, where it might bounce around and land perilously close to the Baby Gate of Doom.
Peach (we call her that, she's a Georgia-peach) will tiptoe out into the kitchen, sizing up the situation. Is the BGOD within striking distance of my Georgia-ball? You can actually see her performing the calculations in her head. Carry the six...I think I can...just...get it. She'll mince out there, approaching the Georgia ball from as wide an angle as possible, gingerly extending a paw and ever so cautiously dragging it back. If I do this slowly enough the BGOD won't notice me. Mission accomplished, she'll grab the Georgia-ball in her mouth and trot back in to Daddy, tail a-waggin' and spit a-poolin'.
But what if the Georgia-ball is actually within the shadow of the BGOD? Well, then we have a problem. Peach will tiptoe out, perform her calculations, and not like the results. She'll sit out there and whine...just little whines, the whines of a child who can't seem to solve the equation to her satisfaction no matter how hard she tries. This used to be the cue for Daddy to get up off his arse, subdue the BGOD and restore the Georgia-ball to its rightful owner.
Until one day Daddy's and Peach's calculations didn't match. I felt certain our drooly-Peach could get that Georgia-ball safely; drooly-Peach most emphatically felt otherwise. Stalemate; standoff.
Unbeknownst to any of us, Tux had been watching all this develop. He let Georgia mewl for a little while. Then, with a huge sigh, he uncurled himself and stepped off the couch and strode forward into the kitchen, recovering the Georgia-ball and placing it directly in front of her. With a pointed look at his Peach ("see? That wasn't so hard, was it?"), a look at Mommy ("I'm a good Tux, aren't I?") and a final withering glare at Daddy ("That was a mean thing to do to my Peach! Bad Daddy!"), he then retreated to his couch and went to sleep.
Eva and I looked at each other. Did he just do what I just saw him do? I couldn't have been more dumbstruck if Tux had donned glasses and started reading that canine Scripture aloud.
He has since performed this exact routine several times. We, alas, do not own a camcorder, or you would have seen it by now on Animal Planet.
Tux, again like most dogs, absolutely adores car rides. Peach could take or leave them, mostly leave them. She'll go in the car, most times, if you insist a bit, and then she'll sit there with a look on her squashed Boxer/Bulldog face that says when will this misery be over?
One day, Georgia decided she did not want to join Tux for a car ride, no matter what, end of story, full stop. She stared at the car, and Tux in the car, as if whole regiments of baby-gates were about to march out and surround her. Peach is normally pretty obediant, and she does know "COME", but when she's worked up like that I'm sure she's thinking Come? COME?!! Go arf yourself, I ain't comin'!
We managed to herd her into the house--which she went into quite willingly since it wasn't the car--and took Tux on his own little car ride, stopping at Timmy's for treats (pull into a drive-through and Tux starts licking his chops). The car ride was completely uneventful until we were just drawing back up to Tux's house. As we were about to back the car up into the driveway, a man came jogging by with his dog on a leash beside him. Normally, Tux looks with interest at other dogs, but he keeps his opinions to himself: I've never heard a peep out of him in the car.
But this dog looked just like Georgia.
Somebody was running away with his Peach. Tux started barking fit to split and were it not for our calming words I do believe he would have chewed his way through the window to go get his sister back. We actually left Tux in the backseat while we opened the side door of the house and let the Peach come out where Tux could see her. Then, of course, everything was just fine.
Excuse me. I gotta go love up my puppies.
We have both.
Okay, I'm exaggerating: there are undoubtedly smarter dogs than Tux out there and Georgia's not exactly stupid, just...challenged.
Georgia's a scaredy-dog. We have no idea whence this came: we've owned her since she was knee-high to a chew toy and if there's a calmer, more sedate household than ours around here, you'd call it the morgue. If anything, I'd expect Tux to be the skittish one; he was abused as a young puppy and spent months in the pound waiting for us to find him.
But no, Tux is almost fearless...he'll even let a vacuum cleaner get within two feet of him before moving. Georgia, on the other hand, will refuse to come in the house if there's something on the landing she doesn't like. A bag of cat food, for instance. Or a leaf that blew in.
And she's utterly terrified of the baby gate we put up to keep the dogs out of the basement while we're gone. That one, at least, I understand. It's fallen a few times and it makes an awful clattling racket when it hits the hardwood floor.
Like most puppies, Georgia's favourite game is Daddy-throw-the-toy-so-I-can-slobber-all-over-it-and-bring-it-back. She's very good at it, scoring points in and every time for promptness and accuracy of retrieval (often placing the toy directly into your hand) and quantity of drool, which is exceptional. (That said, she's a Boxer/Bulldog cross...any dog playing with her has an automatic three-liter handicap.) Tux, who used to fetch and retrieve with the best of them, now indulgently regards all this horseplay from his dignified position on the couch, reading his canine Scriptures. When I was a puppy, I spake as a puppy, I understood as a puppy, I thought as a puppy: but when I became a dog, I put away puppy things.
Until Daddy whizzes the bedrooled puppy-toy out into the kitchen, where it might bounce around and land perilously close to the Baby Gate of Doom.
Peach (we call her that, she's a Georgia-peach) will tiptoe out into the kitchen, sizing up the situation. Is the BGOD within striking distance of my Georgia-ball? You can actually see her performing the calculations in her head. Carry the six...I think I can...just...get it. She'll mince out there, approaching the Georgia ball from as wide an angle as possible, gingerly extending a paw and ever so cautiously dragging it back. If I do this slowly enough the BGOD won't notice me. Mission accomplished, she'll grab the Georgia-ball in her mouth and trot back in to Daddy, tail a-waggin' and spit a-poolin'.
But what if the Georgia-ball is actually within the shadow of the BGOD? Well, then we have a problem. Peach will tiptoe out, perform her calculations, and not like the results. She'll sit out there and whine...just little whines, the whines of a child who can't seem to solve the equation to her satisfaction no matter how hard she tries. This used to be the cue for Daddy to get up off his arse, subdue the BGOD and restore the Georgia-ball to its rightful owner.
Until one day Daddy's and Peach's calculations didn't match. I felt certain our drooly-Peach could get that Georgia-ball safely; drooly-Peach most emphatically felt otherwise. Stalemate; standoff.
Unbeknownst to any of us, Tux had been watching all this develop. He let Georgia mewl for a little while. Then, with a huge sigh, he uncurled himself and stepped off the couch and strode forward into the kitchen, recovering the Georgia-ball and placing it directly in front of her. With a pointed look at his Peach ("see? That wasn't so hard, was it?"), a look at Mommy ("I'm a good Tux, aren't I?") and a final withering glare at Daddy ("That was a mean thing to do to my Peach! Bad Daddy!"), he then retreated to his couch and went to sleep.
Eva and I looked at each other. Did he just do what I just saw him do? I couldn't have been more dumbstruck if Tux had donned glasses and started reading that canine Scripture aloud.
He has since performed this exact routine several times. We, alas, do not own a camcorder, or you would have seen it by now on Animal Planet.
Tux, again like most dogs, absolutely adores car rides. Peach could take or leave them, mostly leave them. She'll go in the car, most times, if you insist a bit, and then she'll sit there with a look on her squashed Boxer/Bulldog face that says when will this misery be over?
One day, Georgia decided she did not want to join Tux for a car ride, no matter what, end of story, full stop. She stared at the car, and Tux in the car, as if whole regiments of baby-gates were about to march out and surround her. Peach is normally pretty obediant, and she does know "COME", but when she's worked up like that I'm sure she's thinking Come? COME?!! Go arf yourself, I ain't comin'!
We managed to herd her into the house--which she went into quite willingly since it wasn't the car--and took Tux on his own little car ride, stopping at Timmy's for treats (pull into a drive-through and Tux starts licking his chops). The car ride was completely uneventful until we were just drawing back up to Tux's house. As we were about to back the car up into the driveway, a man came jogging by with his dog on a leash beside him. Normally, Tux looks with interest at other dogs, but he keeps his opinions to himself: I've never heard a peep out of him in the car.
But this dog looked just like Georgia.
Somebody was running away with his Peach. Tux started barking fit to split and were it not for our calming words I do believe he would have chewed his way through the window to go get his sister back. We actually left Tux in the backseat while we opened the side door of the house and let the Peach come out where Tux could see her. Then, of course, everything was just fine.
Excuse me. I gotta go love up my puppies.
Friday, February 01, 2008
Morning rant
Forgive me, I'm a little bit snarky today.
I'm not sure why. Perhaps it's the hockey game I watched last night. If I've ever seen a game more incompetently refereed, I've blocked it from memory.
I don't mind the Leafs losing: indeed, if they're going to miss the playoffs (and they're going to miss the playoffs), I'd much rather they miss by a whole lot and net a great draft pick thereby. But it was how they lost last night that really irks me.
I'm an impartial hockey fan: the reffing was brutal last night for both sides. There were five or six clear Leaf penalties that were not called. That said,
* A Leaf goal was called back because the puck didn't cross the goal line...when repeated television replays clearly showed the puck over the line
* A Carolina goal was allowed despite just as clear evidence it was knocked in with a high stick
* A Hurricane player smothered the puck in the crease, which should have led to a Leaf penalty shot and didn't
* Nik Antropov was called for "hooking" in overtime. He must have solicited a ref for the purposes of prostitution...or maybe he was seen on the Leaf bench fashioning a rug...because he sure didn't hook a Carolina player
* On the ensuing power play, Hal Gill tried to clear a puck and was slashed. No call...and a Carolina game-winning goal resulted.
It's just a game...but last night was a joke. And not a funny one.
On a much more serious note, I'm still seething at all the stories lately concerning kids left to die. I just want to scream. What kind of subhuman does that, anyway? Why aren't we allowed to bury the so-called parents in snowbanks, once we find out who they are?
And then, of course, the bilious aftertaste that I don't think I'll ever lose entirely:
and they thought we weren't fit to parent? That's a selfish thought, and one I'd dearly like to disown...but I can't. I'm entirely comfortable without kids in my life at this point, but that rejection will rankle forever, I guess.
Then I wake up this morning to hear that all schools in my city, including two universities and a college, are closed up tight today thanks to the 10-15 cm (4" to 6") of snow. Cue the repeat post. If they'd done this in the 1970s and '80s, I wouldn't have received much of an education.
On the radio they're debating whether bosses should give their employees a paid snow day when the weather's bad. Ha. I can assure you no matter how bad the weather gets, I'm expected at work at noon sharp. And that's as it should be. Businesses aren't subject to the whims of Mother Nature.
As far as I'm concerned, the protocol for school closures should be as follows: school board functionary calls up city transit. Good morning. Are your busses running today? They are? Okay, then schools are open.
Four to six inches of snow. Ridiculous.
I'm not sure why. Perhaps it's the hockey game I watched last night. If I've ever seen a game more incompetently refereed, I've blocked it from memory.
I don't mind the Leafs losing: indeed, if they're going to miss the playoffs (and they're going to miss the playoffs), I'd much rather they miss by a whole lot and net a great draft pick thereby. But it was how they lost last night that really irks me.
I'm an impartial hockey fan: the reffing was brutal last night for both sides. There were five or six clear Leaf penalties that were not called. That said,
* A Leaf goal was called back because the puck didn't cross the goal line...when repeated television replays clearly showed the puck over the line
* A Carolina goal was allowed despite just as clear evidence it was knocked in with a high stick
* A Hurricane player smothered the puck in the crease, which should have led to a Leaf penalty shot and didn't
* Nik Antropov was called for "hooking" in overtime. He must have solicited a ref for the purposes of prostitution...or maybe he was seen on the Leaf bench fashioning a rug...because he sure didn't hook a Carolina player
* On the ensuing power play, Hal Gill tried to clear a puck and was slashed. No call...and a Carolina game-winning goal resulted.
It's just a game...but last night was a joke. And not a funny one.
On a much more serious note, I'm still seething at all the stories lately concerning kids left to die. I just want to scream. What kind of subhuman does that, anyway? Why aren't we allowed to bury the so-called parents in snowbanks, once we find out who they are?
And then, of course, the bilious aftertaste that I don't think I'll ever lose entirely:
and they thought we weren't fit to parent? That's a selfish thought, and one I'd dearly like to disown...but I can't. I'm entirely comfortable without kids in my life at this point, but that rejection will rankle forever, I guess.
Then I wake up this morning to hear that all schools in my city, including two universities and a college, are closed up tight today thanks to the 10-15 cm (4" to 6") of snow. Cue the repeat post. If they'd done this in the 1970s and '80s, I wouldn't have received much of an education.
On the radio they're debating whether bosses should give their employees a paid snow day when the weather's bad. Ha. I can assure you no matter how bad the weather gets, I'm expected at work at noon sharp. And that's as it should be. Businesses aren't subject to the whims of Mother Nature.
As far as I'm concerned, the protocol for school closures should be as follows: school board functionary calls up city transit. Good morning. Are your busses running today? They are? Okay, then schools are open.
Four to six inches of snow. Ridiculous.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Adjectives
One of life's little epiphanies gave me a good wallop a while back, reading about adjectives.
Adjectives are kind of neat. You can take two different adjectives that mean exactly the same thing, insert one or the other into a sentence, and completely change the flavour:
My Uncle Paul is spendthrift. My Uncle Paul is cheap.
My boss is opinionated. My boss is bullheaded.
My wife is conscientious. My wife is fussy.
Sure, it can be argued that each pair of adjectives has distinctly different meanings, but every last one of us goes around with preconceived notions of what each word means. Cheap's a great example. Being cheap, in the sense of being a tightwad, is usually perceived as a bad quality in this consumerist society, but who hasn't admired frugality at some point? Still, you hear "cheap" and a whole list of complimentary or not-so-complimentary meanings floods into your head. Usually mostly one or the other.It's all in how you look at things, how your life experience has shaped you to look at things. Events you paid attention to, songs you listened to, lessons you learned, all influence you later, while all around you, everyone's being influenced by their own markedly different experiences. For instance, somebody throws the word liberal at me and the very first thing I think of is AdScam. Then I think of that ditty by Supertramp, "The Logical Song" (itself a treasure trove of conflicting adjectives), part of which goes
Now watch what you say
Or they´ll be calling you a radical
A liberal, oh fanatical, criminal
It's only after all that negative detritus is out of the way that I remember how socially liberal I am; how liberal I once was with my money (to a fault!); how being liberal is usually, in my world, a good thing so long as the L's not capitalized.
The adjective life lessons go further. Take your best qualities, describe them with adjectives, and turn them up ten notches and suddenly they're not so good any more. Then try to remember that other people operate on different scales, and your spendthriftiness might make you cheap, your conscientiousness might seem fussy.
Would that all that wisdom came to me much earlier.
Adjectives are kind of neat. You can take two different adjectives that mean exactly the same thing, insert one or the other into a sentence, and completely change the flavour:
My Uncle Paul is spendthrift. My Uncle Paul is cheap.
My boss is opinionated. My boss is bullheaded.
My wife is conscientious. My wife is fussy.
Sure, it can be argued that each pair of adjectives has distinctly different meanings, but every last one of us goes around with preconceived notions of what each word means. Cheap's a great example. Being cheap, in the sense of being a tightwad, is usually perceived as a bad quality in this consumerist society, but who hasn't admired frugality at some point? Still, you hear "cheap" and a whole list of complimentary or not-so-complimentary meanings floods into your head. Usually mostly one or the other.It's all in how you look at things, how your life experience has shaped you to look at things. Events you paid attention to, songs you listened to, lessons you learned, all influence you later, while all around you, everyone's being influenced by their own markedly different experiences. For instance, somebody throws the word liberal at me and the very first thing I think of is AdScam. Then I think of that ditty by Supertramp, "The Logical Song" (itself a treasure trove of conflicting adjectives), part of which goes
Now watch what you say
Or they´ll be calling you a radical
A liberal, oh fanatical, criminal
It's only after all that negative detritus is out of the way that I remember how socially liberal I am; how liberal I once was with my money (to a fault!); how being liberal is usually, in my world, a good thing so long as the L's not capitalized.
The adjective life lessons go further. Take your best qualities, describe them with adjectives, and turn them up ten notches and suddenly they're not so good any more. Then try to remember that other people operate on different scales, and your spendthriftiness might make you cheap, your conscientiousness might seem fussy.
Would that all that wisdom came to me much earlier.
Limerick of the Day
A man with the surname of Beebee
Wished to marry a woman named Phoebe.
But he said "I must see
What the minister's fee
Be before Phoebe be Phoebe Beebee."
Wished to marry a woman named Phoebe.
But he said "I must see
What the minister's fee
Be before Phoebe be Phoebe Beebee."
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
What does it mean to be Canadian?
We Canadians live in a blind spot about our identity. We have very strong feelings about who we aren't but only weak ones about who we are. We're passionate about what we don't want to become but oddly passive about what we should be.--John Cruickshank
This question's been vexing me a little more than usual of late. It's always in the back of my mind; one of the stock definitions of a Canadian is someone who frets about his national identity. When's the last time you heard a resident of Spain musing on what it means to be Spanish?
Complicating matters, I belong to that tribe of people known as "proud Canadians". Many people, including many Canadians, believe my tribe doesn't exist...or if it does, it shouldn't. National pride is seen as a quintessentially American, and therefore distasteful, trait. Meanwhile, my tribe numbers in the millions. I'd suspect most people who hold Canadian citizenship are, on some level, proud to. Our pride is a quiet, measured thing. It lacks Yankee exuberance; it need not be shown publically to be deeply felt.
This bout of navel-gazing was first triggered by this weekend's NHL All-Star Game, or more specifically, the "SuperSkills" competition the night before. Eva, who doesn't particularly enjoy hockey, likes to watch this competition, and I've tuned in every year it's been held. This year, for the first time, they concluded the night with a "Breakaway Challenge": a quasi-shootout in which each attempt at a goal was judged for style and creativity. Basically, it was a license to show off.
I say "quasi-shootout" because, while hockey players are certainly encouraged to be creative, one thing they are never encouraged to do is show off, or show up other players. In this as in much else, hockey perfectly mirrors the Canadian character: we are an exceptionally tolerant nation, but something about showboating rubs us the wrong way.
And so we saw player after player break down the ice, most of them staying within the bounds of accepted shootout protocol. It finally dawned on the final two players that the whole point of this exercise was to hot-dog, and so they tried it. You could read their discomfort just below the goofy smile on their faces. It got me to thinking: the Canadian character isn't as modest as it appears to an outsider. We consider ourselves damned special, thank you very much. What makes us virtually unique in terms of national character is that we don't think ourselves any more special than anyone else.
As proof, we invite the world to come share the Canadian experience. Your colour, class or creed means nothing: all that matters is your willingness to accept that basic tenet: you're special, damned special...but no more special than anyone else.
We judge our celebrities harshly if they act like celebrities, if they bask in their fame and good fortune. We hated Brian Mulroney in no small part because of his perceived arrogance; most of us accepted or even adored Jean Chretien because he was so successful at keeping his arrogance (of which he had at least a Mulroneyful) so thoroughly masked, so utterly submerged beneath the facade of le p'tit gars de Shawinigan.
There's a Crown Royal commercial extolling "the noble spirit": long live the player who knows that an assist is worth as much as a goal. That's as Canadian as it gets.
As I write, the Toronto public school board is considering the establishment of an "Afrocentric" high school. This initiative has been dogged by controversy at every turn. Proponents note that fully half of black students in Toronto either fail or drop out, and surveys show they would be more engaged with an Afrocentric curriculum. Those against say that this is exactly the sort of thing Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, among many others, fought long and hard to abolish.
I see both sides of this...sort of. Actually, after a great deal of thought, I see one side and credit good intentions on the other.
What exactly is an Afrocentric curriculum? I can see how that term would apply in history class and in the literature component of an English course...and that's about it. How "Afrocentric science" differs from "Eurocentric science" mystifies me. Is phys. ed. any different if the students have more melatonin in their skin? How about mathematics? Does 2+2 equal something else in certain parts of the world?
Okay, history and literature. I'd be the first to admit both were whiter than sour cream when I went to high school. By the logic of those surveys, the overwhelmingly white students in my classes should have been fully engaged.
They weren't. Not unless they found the material intrinsically interesting. And when they did, it sure as hell didn't have anything to do with the race of the people under discussion. (In fact, one of the few novels I can remember many of my fellow students really enjoying was To Kill a Mockingbird.)
I understand the objective here: to get more black students succeeding in school. I'm just not sure an Afrocentric curriculum would achieve that goal. Certainly having more black teachers to serve as role models would help. But an all-black student body? Isn't the whole idea to get the kid out of the ghetto?
A particularly Canadian compromise I'd suggest would be to broaden the curriculum for everyone. Certainly our geography and history courses could do with a little reality injection: the world is, after all, round. As for literature, I know of no better way to get into someone's head than through a well-written book. Interesting plots and characters have universal appeal.
Bringing people together. That's what education is about. And that's what being Canadian is about, too.
This question's been vexing me a little more than usual of late. It's always in the back of my mind; one of the stock definitions of a Canadian is someone who frets about his national identity. When's the last time you heard a resident of Spain musing on what it means to be Spanish?
Complicating matters, I belong to that tribe of people known as "proud Canadians". Many people, including many Canadians, believe my tribe doesn't exist...or if it does, it shouldn't. National pride is seen as a quintessentially American, and therefore distasteful, trait. Meanwhile, my tribe numbers in the millions. I'd suspect most people who hold Canadian citizenship are, on some level, proud to. Our pride is a quiet, measured thing. It lacks Yankee exuberance; it need not be shown publically to be deeply felt.
This bout of navel-gazing was first triggered by this weekend's NHL All-Star Game, or more specifically, the "SuperSkills" competition the night before. Eva, who doesn't particularly enjoy hockey, likes to watch this competition, and I've tuned in every year it's been held. This year, for the first time, they concluded the night with a "Breakaway Challenge": a quasi-shootout in which each attempt at a goal was judged for style and creativity. Basically, it was a license to show off.
I say "quasi-shootout" because, while hockey players are certainly encouraged to be creative, one thing they are never encouraged to do is show off, or show up other players. In this as in much else, hockey perfectly mirrors the Canadian character: we are an exceptionally tolerant nation, but something about showboating rubs us the wrong way.
And so we saw player after player break down the ice, most of them staying within the bounds of accepted shootout protocol. It finally dawned on the final two players that the whole point of this exercise was to hot-dog, and so they tried it. You could read their discomfort just below the goofy smile on their faces. It got me to thinking: the Canadian character isn't as modest as it appears to an outsider. We consider ourselves damned special, thank you very much. What makes us virtually unique in terms of national character is that we don't think ourselves any more special than anyone else.
As proof, we invite the world to come share the Canadian experience. Your colour, class or creed means nothing: all that matters is your willingness to accept that basic tenet: you're special, damned special...but no more special than anyone else.
We judge our celebrities harshly if they act like celebrities, if they bask in their fame and good fortune. We hated Brian Mulroney in no small part because of his perceived arrogance; most of us accepted or even adored Jean Chretien because he was so successful at keeping his arrogance (of which he had at least a Mulroneyful) so thoroughly masked, so utterly submerged beneath the facade of le p'tit gars de Shawinigan.
There's a Crown Royal commercial extolling "the noble spirit": long live the player who knows that an assist is worth as much as a goal. That's as Canadian as it gets.
As I write, the Toronto public school board is considering the establishment of an "Afrocentric" high school. This initiative has been dogged by controversy at every turn. Proponents note that fully half of black students in Toronto either fail or drop out, and surveys show they would be more engaged with an Afrocentric curriculum. Those against say that this is exactly the sort of thing Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, among many others, fought long and hard to abolish.
I see both sides of this...sort of. Actually, after a great deal of thought, I see one side and credit good intentions on the other.
What exactly is an Afrocentric curriculum? I can see how that term would apply in history class and in the literature component of an English course...and that's about it. How "Afrocentric science" differs from "Eurocentric science" mystifies me. Is phys. ed. any different if the students have more melatonin in their skin? How about mathematics? Does 2+2 equal something else in certain parts of the world?
Okay, history and literature. I'd be the first to admit both were whiter than sour cream when I went to high school. By the logic of those surveys, the overwhelmingly white students in my classes should have been fully engaged.
They weren't. Not unless they found the material intrinsically interesting. And when they did, it sure as hell didn't have anything to do with the race of the people under discussion. (In fact, one of the few novels I can remember many of my fellow students really enjoying was To Kill a Mockingbird.)
I understand the objective here: to get more black students succeeding in school. I'm just not sure an Afrocentric curriculum would achieve that goal. Certainly having more black teachers to serve as role models would help. But an all-black student body? Isn't the whole idea to get the kid out of the ghetto?
A particularly Canadian compromise I'd suggest would be to broaden the curriculum for everyone. Certainly our geography and history courses could do with a little reality injection: the world is, after all, round. As for literature, I know of no better way to get into someone's head than through a well-written book. Interesting plots and characters have universal appeal.
Bringing people together. That's what education is about. And that's what being Canadian is about, too.
Sunday, January 27, 2008
The Joys of Retail (Tales from Aisle 10, Part III)
My work life has been some kind of interesting lately.
Our flyers have taken a turn for the heated, with a real emphasis on my dairy and frozen departments. Items I've rarely or never seen on sale in seven years have been promoted with great fanfare, leaving me utterly clueless as to how much stock to bring in.
Some examples:
Delissio Pizzas, $3.77: These regularly retail for $7.27 at our store and up to $8.99 elsewhere...you can imagine the stampede. To make matters more interesting, I had to book my stock five weeks in advance. At that point, we had just had Delissio on sale for $5 and I'd been amazed at the demand. So I ordered lots.
Nowhere near enough, as it turned out.
Luckily, Head Office had let it be known there was additional stock available, and I took full advantage, doubling and tripling my initial allocation for each delivery. Accordingly, I never...quite...ran out of pizza until late on the last day of the flyer. (At one point I was down to six cases in the store, which is considerably more tight than I like to cut things, but at least I wasn't entirely out for a length of time like, ahem, every other store in the Tri-Cities.)
Of course, I cheated: I put a limit of four pizzas per family per day on right early, after customers were seen grabbing cartsful of pizza, and left it on through most of the weekend.
I don't like to put limits on things, for several reasons. People think they're unfair--at least once an hour you have to explain to somebody that "four per family" applies even if you have fourteen kids, and we won't accept your claim that you're shopping for six different families in your neighbourhood, and we're so sorry, but the limit also applies if you don't understand written or spoken English. (It is really amazing how many people will talk to you in perfectly fluent English until you try to tell them why they have to leave some pizza for other people, at which point they don't understand a word you say.)
And despite our best efforts, the limits don't work very well. Husbands and wives split up and
go through different tills. Mothers send each of their kids around at intervals to garther four pizzas apiece. I've known people who will actually drive from store to store getting the limit from each...which is a great argument for gas at $4 a litre, as far as I'm concerned.
Last time these pizzas were on sale, at $5.00, I was hung with several cases of the Roasted Vegetable variety. So I didn't order quite as many of them this time around, relative to, say, Pepperoni, Deluxe, or Hawaiian. Big mistake: every vegetarian came in from miles around, and when the Roasted Vegetable was sold out (hey, I never said I was in stock on all kinds the whole time), the customers got right ornery. We were threatened with lawsuits ("you people don't care for those of your customers who eat properly!", one elderly man said rather haughtily). Another customer claimed to have been in four times looking for Roasted Vegetable, including the day before the flyer broke. This on Saturday, about half an hour after I ran out of stock for the first time. This, too, is typical.
2L carton milk, $1.88:
Before I detail this little fiasco, let me explain the peculiarities of the dairy industry in Southern Ontario.
Unlike everywhere else on the North American continent, our milk comes, by and large, in two formats: cardboard cartons, for any size under 4L (Americans: think of 1L = 1 qt.), and bagged 4L (roughly a gallon) milk. The latter, a format that so far as I know is unique to Ontario south and east of Thunder Bay, is hard to explain to someone who's never seen it before. Every year we get freshman university students arriving from out of province who regard my milk counter with a completely bewildered eye, looking for jugs that are almost impossible to find outside certain convenience stores. Instead, we have milk bags. Think of the kind of thing bread is wrapped in, including the little bread tie with the expiry date stamped on it...only instead of slices of bread, put three plastic baggies full of milk in there.
This is, of course, patently ridiculous. It requires the purchase of a dedicated milk pitcher to hold each individual plastic baggie; also required is a pair of scissors, a knife, or a dedicated tool to rip the bag open. And then, of course, the bag is open, exposed to the air. Most elderly people who shop in our store refuse to buy a 4L bag of milk despite a significant cost-savings for that very reason. They prefer cartons with screw-tops.
Jugs have screw-tops. But for reasons unfathomable, I doubt you'll see milk jugs in Southern Ontario grocery stores anytime soon. It's a mystery.
Anyway, back to the 2L cartons for $1.88.
We've never ran this before. We did run a 1L sale (99 cents) the last time I went on holidays, and I used those numbers as a rough guide.
Sales like this bring out the mathematically challenged in hordes and in droves. They even put the math on the flyer...prominently displayed: "equal to $3.76 for a 4L bag". (A four litre bag retails for $4.49 in our store...$5.29 if it's homogenized --whole--milk.)
They need not have bothered printing anything on the flyer. I can't begin to tell you how many people insisted the bag was still cheaper. There being three baggies inside a single 4L bag of milk, it seems people believe each baggie somehow contains 2L. Mathematically impossible, but there you go.
I didn't bring in very many milk bags to start this sale, stupidly forgetting people are stupid. Accordingly, I ran out of bags--something my boss was perfectly okay with, because even at the sale retail we were making money on the 2L cartons, whereas we lose a lot of money on every bag we sell.
If the definition of insanity is doing something the same way over and over again and expecting a different result, then besides being stupid I must also be insane. I kept thinking people would eventually twig to the fact they were saving money by purchasing two 2L cartons. Some did, but not many.
I cut my display space for bags right down and put all kinds of crates full of cartons where my bags normally go. It didn't help, confirming once again my suspicion that most people shop on autopilot.
Just to explain the sort of thinking I put into these promotions....
What kind of milk do you drink? I drink 1%, myself (or filtered skim, which tastes the same). In this I am not alone: 1% is almost equal to 2% in sales. Skim sells about half what 2% and 1% do and homo (3.25%) about half of skim. Homo milk is generally bought only by mothers with small children...and Asians, for some reason.
So when we ran the 1L at 99 cents sale, those were the ratios I followed...and was promptly out of homogenized milk. I'd thought people's taste in milk to be pretty static...that they wouldn't buy homo just because it represented a better deal--and I was wrong. Oh, well. I've been wrong before, and will be again.
And was again, I mean. This time, with homo 2L at $1.88 representing an even better deal, I brought in quite a bit of homo. And got hung with it. Not to mention the skim milk, which hardly sold at all. I give up.
Then there's this week's special.
Ristorante Pizzas: buy 2 at $4.00 each and get a Casa di Mama Pizza FREE
This is another thing new to my department: a buy two, get one free event. Total crapshoot. On the one hand, you have to spend $8 to get that free pizza...will people want to do that? On the other, that's $2.67 a pizza. When we ran the Ristorantes at $2.77 a few weeks back, we sold thousands of them...and the number one complaint from that ad was that the Casa di Mamas (which are the only pizzas with meat on them) weren't included.
As it turns out, I got lucky and properly gauged demand. This time. That said, it's been amusing to watch people misunderstanding that bolded line of text. People have been buying three Ristorantes expecting one of them to be free. Or three Casa di Mamas. Or two Casa di Mamas and a Ristorante. Or--my favourite--three Ristorantes and three Casa di Mamas (which are all free...right?)
Apropos of nothing at all, for the second time in just three months we had a customer take a crap on the floor in my frozen department. Or to be more accurate, leave a crap. I thought I'd seen the last of that when I left 7-Eleven. Apparantly not. New Price Chopper slogan: Our prices are so low, you'll shit yourself!
Our flyers have taken a turn for the heated, with a real emphasis on my dairy and frozen departments. Items I've rarely or never seen on sale in seven years have been promoted with great fanfare, leaving me utterly clueless as to how much stock to bring in.
Some examples:
Delissio Pizzas, $3.77: These regularly retail for $7.27 at our store and up to $8.99 elsewhere...you can imagine the stampede. To make matters more interesting, I had to book my stock five weeks in advance. At that point, we had just had Delissio on sale for $5 and I'd been amazed at the demand. So I ordered lots.
Nowhere near enough, as it turned out.
Luckily, Head Office had let it be known there was additional stock available, and I took full advantage, doubling and tripling my initial allocation for each delivery. Accordingly, I never...quite...ran out of pizza until late on the last day of the flyer. (At one point I was down to six cases in the store, which is considerably more tight than I like to cut things, but at least I wasn't entirely out for a length of time like, ahem, every other store in the Tri-Cities.)
Of course, I cheated: I put a limit of four pizzas per family per day on right early, after customers were seen grabbing cartsful of pizza, and left it on through most of the weekend.
I don't like to put limits on things, for several reasons. People think they're unfair--at least once an hour you have to explain to somebody that "four per family" applies even if you have fourteen kids, and we won't accept your claim that you're shopping for six different families in your neighbourhood, and we're so sorry, but the limit also applies if you don't understand written or spoken English. (It is really amazing how many people will talk to you in perfectly fluent English until you try to tell them why they have to leave some pizza for other people, at which point they don't understand a word you say.)
And despite our best efforts, the limits don't work very well. Husbands and wives split up and
go through different tills. Mothers send each of their kids around at intervals to garther four pizzas apiece. I've known people who will actually drive from store to store getting the limit from each...which is a great argument for gas at $4 a litre, as far as I'm concerned.
Last time these pizzas were on sale, at $5.00, I was hung with several cases of the Roasted Vegetable variety. So I didn't order quite as many of them this time around, relative to, say, Pepperoni, Deluxe, or Hawaiian. Big mistake: every vegetarian came in from miles around, and when the Roasted Vegetable was sold out (hey, I never said I was in stock on all kinds the whole time), the customers got right ornery. We were threatened with lawsuits ("you people don't care for those of your customers who eat properly!", one elderly man said rather haughtily). Another customer claimed to have been in four times looking for Roasted Vegetable, including the day before the flyer broke. This on Saturday, about half an hour after I ran out of stock for the first time. This, too, is typical.
2L carton milk, $1.88:
Before I detail this little fiasco, let me explain the peculiarities of the dairy industry in Southern Ontario.
Unlike everywhere else on the North American continent, our milk comes, by and large, in two formats: cardboard cartons, for any size under 4L (Americans: think of 1L = 1 qt.), and bagged 4L (roughly a gallon) milk. The latter, a format that so far as I know is unique to Ontario south and east of Thunder Bay, is hard to explain to someone who's never seen it before. Every year we get freshman university students arriving from out of province who regard my milk counter with a completely bewildered eye, looking for jugs that are almost impossible to find outside certain convenience stores. Instead, we have milk bags. Think of the kind of thing bread is wrapped in, including the little bread tie with the expiry date stamped on it...only instead of slices of bread, put three plastic baggies full of milk in there.
This is, of course, patently ridiculous. It requires the purchase of a dedicated milk pitcher to hold each individual plastic baggie; also required is a pair of scissors, a knife, or a dedicated tool to rip the bag open. And then, of course, the bag is open, exposed to the air. Most elderly people who shop in our store refuse to buy a 4L bag of milk despite a significant cost-savings for that very reason. They prefer cartons with screw-tops.
Jugs have screw-tops. But for reasons unfathomable, I doubt you'll see milk jugs in Southern Ontario grocery stores anytime soon. It's a mystery.
Anyway, back to the 2L cartons for $1.88.
We've never ran this before. We did run a 1L sale (99 cents) the last time I went on holidays, and I used those numbers as a rough guide.
Sales like this bring out the mathematically challenged in hordes and in droves. They even put the math on the flyer...prominently displayed: "equal to $3.76 for a 4L bag". (A four litre bag retails for $4.49 in our store...$5.29 if it's homogenized --whole--milk.)
They need not have bothered printing anything on the flyer. I can't begin to tell you how many people insisted the bag was still cheaper. There being three baggies inside a single 4L bag of milk, it seems people believe each baggie somehow contains 2L. Mathematically impossible, but there you go.
I didn't bring in very many milk bags to start this sale, stupidly forgetting people are stupid. Accordingly, I ran out of bags--something my boss was perfectly okay with, because even at the sale retail we were making money on the 2L cartons, whereas we lose a lot of money on every bag we sell.
If the definition of insanity is doing something the same way over and over again and expecting a different result, then besides being stupid I must also be insane. I kept thinking people would eventually twig to the fact they were saving money by purchasing two 2L cartons. Some did, but not many.
I cut my display space for bags right down and put all kinds of crates full of cartons where my bags normally go. It didn't help, confirming once again my suspicion that most people shop on autopilot.
Just to explain the sort of thinking I put into these promotions....
What kind of milk do you drink? I drink 1%, myself (or filtered skim, which tastes the same). In this I am not alone: 1% is almost equal to 2% in sales. Skim sells about half what 2% and 1% do and homo (3.25%) about half of skim. Homo milk is generally bought only by mothers with small children...and Asians, for some reason.
So when we ran the 1L at 99 cents sale, those were the ratios I followed...and was promptly out of homogenized milk. I'd thought people's taste in milk to be pretty static...that they wouldn't buy homo just because it represented a better deal--and I was wrong. Oh, well. I've been wrong before, and will be again.
And was again, I mean. This time, with homo 2L at $1.88 representing an even better deal, I brought in quite a bit of homo. And got hung with it. Not to mention the skim milk, which hardly sold at all. I give up.
Then there's this week's special.
Ristorante Pizzas: buy 2 at $4.00 each and get a Casa di Mama Pizza FREE
This is another thing new to my department: a buy two, get one free event. Total crapshoot. On the one hand, you have to spend $8 to get that free pizza...will people want to do that? On the other, that's $2.67 a pizza. When we ran the Ristorantes at $2.77 a few weeks back, we sold thousands of them...and the number one complaint from that ad was that the Casa di Mamas (which are the only pizzas with meat on them) weren't included.
As it turns out, I got lucky and properly gauged demand. This time. That said, it's been amusing to watch people misunderstanding that bolded line of text. People have been buying three Ristorantes expecting one of them to be free. Or three Casa di Mamas. Or two Casa di Mamas and a Ristorante. Or--my favourite--three Ristorantes and three Casa di Mamas (which are all free...right?)
Apropos of nothing at all, for the second time in just three months we had a customer take a crap on the floor in my frozen department. Or to be more accurate, leave a crap. I thought I'd seen the last of that when I left 7-Eleven. Apparantly not. New Price Chopper slogan: Our prices are so low, you'll shit yourself!
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Fletch Lives!
Q. How many Maple Leafs fans does it take to change a lightbulb?
A. Six. One to actually change the lightbulb, and five to talk about just how good the old lightbulb was.
Pity poor John Ferguson, Jr. Don't pity him too long, though: he'll land on his feet somewhere, and my bet is he'll guide some other franchise to the Stanley Cup while his old team, the Toronto Maple Leafs, is still and forever floundering in the seas of mediocrity.
I really do feel bad for the man, though. He's been so vilified for so long by so many that the disdain I used to feel for him gradually morphed into a perverse admiration. Because, you see, the state of the Leafs today is (mostly) not his fault.
To be sure, he's made mistakes, some of them doozies. Re-signing Ed Belfour; overpaying for role players; throwing around no-trade clauses like so much confetti. And then there's bad luck: hands up, all none of you who foresaw Jason Blake tanking like he has this season. For that matter, when Andrew Raycroft won the Calder as best rookie, who among us figured he'd turn into a sieve in short order?
But how many of John Ferguson's decisions were actually John Ferguson's decisions? Richard Peddie's blabbing all over the media that John had "full autonomy" to realize his vision of the team--on the principle that if you say something often enough, it becomes true. If you believe Peddie, I have a pair of Leafs platinum season tickets here for you. Three easy payments of $19.99. Or best offer.
The fact is, the Leafs are managed by a multi-headed monster. Each head thinks it knows something about hockey. Only a few do, and those heads are quickly devoured and spit up by the others. Peddiehead acknowledged--publically--that it was "a mistake" to hire Ferguson, but for the longest time didn't fire him. How does that feel? Hey, everybody. I screwed up: I never should have hired this putz. But he's such a convenient whipping boy, scapegoat, and, ahem, smokescreen for my own failings--I'm sorry, was that out loud?--anyway, I'll keep him dangling in the wind for awhile, because it makes me feel so powerful.
Now they've reached back into the past, as the Leafs are wont to do, and resurrected Trader Cliff.
I've got nothing against Cliff Fletcher. He was, after all, the architect of the Leafs' last period of respectability, and he orchestrated arguably the most one-sided trade in NHL history, to Toronto's immense benefit. He was certainly the right man for the job then. Is he now? I'm not sold. Frankly, I'm still miffed the Leafs turned down Scotty Bowman last year. Imagine Warren Buffett coming up to you and saying psst! I can help you make money! And you thinking about it for three weeks, coming back and saying ah, thanks but no thanks. You don't turn down a man like Bowman. Unless, that is, you're a man like Richard Peddie.
Fletcher's job is daunting. The first thing he's got to do is somehow convince Mats Sundin to scram for a few months--or longer. Sundin and Kaberle represent the only tradeable assets the Leafs possess...both of them sizeable assets, redeemable for the sort of wealth of young blue-chip prospects and picks this team desperately needs. The kicker is that both have no-trade clauses and are inclined to invoke them.
If I'm Cliff, I waive Raycroft and Wozniewski and throw the doors wide open. Make me an offer. Nobody's untouchable, though you're going to have to offer me a king's ransom for Kaberle.
Then I tell the fans all about the new attitude adjustment. "Making the playoffs and anything can happen" no longer cuts it. This team will contend for the Stanley Cup. Of course, we'll have to take a couple of steps backwards in order to put this team on a solid foundation...but look out for us in 2009-2010. In the meantime, you're going to see effort from every player every night...or they'll answer to me.
And my other priority is to procure six or seven rolls of duct tape and Wade Belak, waltz into Peddie's office, and cordially invite him to stay the hell out of my bailiwick. Inform him politely that if he so much as wiggles one eyelash over the line into hockey ops, I'll lay a Belak on him and then invent several new uses for this here duct tape.
Monday, January 21, 2008
Surprise, surprise.
If Hell isn't breaking loose yet, there's at least an ominous cracking sound...
The TSX fell over 600 points today, its largest one-day drop since 9/11. That's alarming enough, but when you consider the market has shed more than 12 percent in just fourteen business days, you start to wonder where rock bottom might be...and the downward momentum becomes great enough that we'll reach it and start tunnelling.
The official explanation: "fears that the United States may be entering a recession". Hello? May be entering? Mr. Obvious, please pick up a white courtesy phone...
I'm not in the market to speak of--I work in a grocery store, after all--so I can look at this from an outsider's perspective and...I'm sorry, folks, but I have to laugh. It's either laugh, cry, or scream.
Look, I know Jack Squat about the economy, still, but I know two things that it seems the majority of credentialled, highly-paid finaciers have forgotten. One, economies are cyclical. What goes up must come down, and all that. Two, you can't just create money out of thin air...well, you can, but sooner or later you're going to be found out. The finding out is well underway now, and the consequences speak for themselves, as consequences so often do.
But it's the reaction that really amazes me: the huge collective huh? followed by what certainly appears to be sheer, unadulterated panic.
Um, people? They've been forecasting this for years. Sure, maybe somebody cried wolf a few too many times, but once that sub-prime mess started to ooze into the light, once the cries of yonder circling wolfpacks became audible, it must have taken supreme effort to ignore the warning signs. You'd have to have your heads buried deep in the sand--or at least the latest copies of US Weekly and Hello!--to miss them. (Interesting: Hello!'s circulation's up 54% over the past year, and Time's is down 17%. Not that Time is necessarily the best source for news out there, but it's a damn sight better than celebrity rag-mags.)
As for the panic, once again I must quote Blood, Sweat and Tears: What goes up/ Must come down. Do you get into a tizzy every night at sunset?
Unless...
Unless maybe--just maybe--the reason everybody has lost their freakin' minds is because they've just realized they lost their freakin' minds there for awhile, thinking they could get something for nothing. Maybe the thought has crossed a few brains that staking your entire economy on a buttload of derivatives isn't the wisest thing to do. It mght be that the entire house of cards is about to be--whoosh!--blown over. If that's the case...
...well, go ahead and panic if it makes you feel better.
The TSX fell over 600 points today, its largest one-day drop since 9/11. That's alarming enough, but when you consider the market has shed more than 12 percent in just fourteen business days, you start to wonder where rock bottom might be...and the downward momentum becomes great enough that we'll reach it and start tunnelling.
The official explanation: "fears that the United States may be entering a recession". Hello? May be entering? Mr. Obvious, please pick up a white courtesy phone...
I'm not in the market to speak of--I work in a grocery store, after all--so I can look at this from an outsider's perspective and...I'm sorry, folks, but I have to laugh. It's either laugh, cry, or scream.
Look, I know Jack Squat about the economy, still, but I know two things that it seems the majority of credentialled, highly-paid finaciers have forgotten. One, economies are cyclical. What goes up must come down, and all that. Two, you can't just create money out of thin air...well, you can, but sooner or later you're going to be found out. The finding out is well underway now, and the consequences speak for themselves, as consequences so often do.
But it's the reaction that really amazes me: the huge collective huh? followed by what certainly appears to be sheer, unadulterated panic.
Um, people? They've been forecasting this for years. Sure, maybe somebody cried wolf a few too many times, but once that sub-prime mess started to ooze into the light, once the cries of yonder circling wolfpacks became audible, it must have taken supreme effort to ignore the warning signs. You'd have to have your heads buried deep in the sand--or at least the latest copies of US Weekly and Hello!--to miss them. (Interesting: Hello!'s circulation's up 54% over the past year, and Time's is down 17%. Not that Time is necessarily the best source for news out there, but it's a damn sight better than celebrity rag-mags.)
As for the panic, once again I must quote Blood, Sweat and Tears: What goes up/ Must come down. Do you get into a tizzy every night at sunset?
Unless...
Unless maybe--just maybe--the reason everybody has lost their freakin' minds is because they've just realized they lost their freakin' minds there for awhile, thinking they could get something for nothing. Maybe the thought has crossed a few brains that staking your entire economy on a buttload of derivatives isn't the wisest thing to do. It mght be that the entire house of cards is about to be--whoosh!--blown over. If that's the case...
...well, go ahead and panic if it makes you feel better.
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
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.
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.
Thursday, January 10, 2008
It Don't Matter if you're Barack or White
I'll revisit this topic at least twice over the next year...but I'd be remiss if I didn't comment now that the 2008 American presidential election is (sort of) underway.
Caveat lector: I am a deeply, deeply confused individual when it comes to this election. That'll change come November, when the multitudes are winnowed out and I'll have had time to examine the two remaining candidates and present an endorsement, hopefully a more ringing endorsement than last time. But as of now, all I can say is wow, I'm glad I don't have a vote in this thing.
There are a multitude of quizzes out there (Google "who should I vote for") that attempt to align you with a particular candidate. Great idea, for people whose politics are certain. Mine aren't. Depending on my mood on any given day, I'll be matched up with anyone from Dennis Kucinich to Ron Paul. Trust me, those two are worlds apart. Good thing neither of them has a snowball's chance.
Watching this 50-ring circus unfold from up here in Canuckistan, I confess myself fascinated. For one thing, there's the ungodly length of the campaign. The primaries alone run six months. In reality, of course, this thing's been going on for about a year now, and it won't stop 'til we've all had (more than) enough. Come November 4th, win or lose, I think just about everyone will be relieved the whole mess is over.
I like some aspects of the electoral method down there. Having the party leaders directly elected is a step I'd like to see taken in Canada: it sure beats our current system, in which only card-carrying Party members have a say. Although I find it well-nigh incredible that every last governmental position is so politicized in America. Everybody is affiliated with a political party, from the mayors to the dogcatchers. You just don't see that here.
Can one of my American readers enlighten me as to why the primaries drag out so long? Couldn't they all be held on the same day, say, in May sometime? The internecine warfare in these things is appalling. It's like a Liberal leadership convention weekend spread out over half a year.
Then there's the candidates. As with Canadian elections, the people overshadow the policy, and Exhibits #1 and #1A for that argument this time around rest in the persons of one Hillary Rodham Clinton and one Barack Hussein Obama. (Gee, I wonder why you never hear his middle name...)
The media are going nuts with these two. As Ezra Levant observed recently of Obama,"[h]e has a policy platform, but in the eyes of many media commentators being black is his platform."
>The same goes for Hillary Clinton's gender. Politicians are loath to bring up race or gender, of course, lest they be perceived as racist or sexist...and yet the media bring up both every chance they get. Michael Moore laments Clinton's unwavering support for the Iraq war and speculates
Hillary knows the sexist country we still live in and that one of the reasons the public, in the past, would never consider a woman as president is because she would also be commander in chief. The majority of Americans were concerned that a woman would not be as likely to go to war as a man (horror of horrors!). So, in order to placate that mindset, perhaps she believed she had to be as "tough" as a man, she had to be willing to push The Button if necessary, and give the generals whatever they wanted.
Maybe Hillary just plain supports the war in Iraq, and it has nothing to do with her being a woman. It's not a popular position, but it can be defended. It's entirely possible she voted for war (as many who have since recanted did), and continued to vote for war not because she liked the direction the war was heading but because she felt that withdrawing would lead to even greater troubles in that part of the world. If that's the case, I'd actually applaud her...because that's the sort of nuanced thinking that goes over the heads of most of America (and Canada)'s chattering class.
I'd love to see a President who is female. In my wildest dreams, I'd actually like to...hear me out...disenfranchise men for a century or so and see where that might lead. Somewhere better than here, likely. Here I go indulging in gender stereotypes, but anyone who's observed men and women for any length of time would probably agree: women are more likely to take a longer view of the world (particularly if they are mothers); their first recourse to any problem likely won't be to call in the troops, much less toss a nuke somewhere.
Men often say that women do nothing but yack. Have you seen Question Period? A bunch of mostly white males yacking endlessly. It's a miracle anything in government ever gets done. Let's give women the reins...if my wife and my mother are any indication at all, women will talk with the express goal of getting problems solved, not scoring political points.
And of course I'd bar men from voting until I could be certain they weren't going to vote for the woman with the biggest bust.
All that said...
I personally don't like Hillary Clinton. I never have. Maybe to be a powerful woman in politics, you've got to triple-armor-plate your ass and assume a bitchly manner everywhere you go...and maybe I'm Michael Moore. I'd respond a whole hell of a lot differently to Clinton if she were more authentic. You get the sense with Hillary that every word, every thought, is calculated for maximum political gain, that nothing of the real Hillary Clinton must ever be seen. I don't like that in a person.
Barack Obama, on the other hand, seems to radiate authenticity...which is also suspicious. I mean, when's the last time you met a genuine, sincere politician? They don't exist and never have...right?
A black president would be a great thing for America, if only because maybe, just maybe, after a year or three, people will actually forget he's black. Social change is like that: just look at gay marriage. The mere prospect of Jack and Gill tying the knot caused furrowed brows and anguished, angered cries all over Canada. Now that Jack and Gill have climbed that hill, the issue's all but dead. People saw gays getting married and their own marriages didn't magically dissolve. With Barack in charge, people would first see a black President...and then just a President. And that's as it should be.
I'll delve into policy as events unfold, and I should note there are still many races yet to be run before either Hillary or Barack can claim the Democratic nomination. Possibly neither of them will. We'll have a much better idea on my birthday, February 6. The day before, nearly half the States in the Union will have voted.
One further note: I've ignored the Republicans here, and hope to continue to ignore them right through November. With one exception: if Mike Huckabee is nominated, and somehow becomes President, I'm migrating off-planet, and anyone not interested in Armaggeddon would be wise to follow me.
Good luck, America. You're gonna need it.
Caveat lector: I am a deeply, deeply confused individual when it comes to this election. That'll change come November, when the multitudes are winnowed out and I'll have had time to examine the two remaining candidates and present an endorsement, hopefully a more ringing endorsement than last time. But as of now, all I can say is wow, I'm glad I don't have a vote in this thing.
There are a multitude of quizzes out there (Google "who should I vote for") that attempt to align you with a particular candidate. Great idea, for people whose politics are certain. Mine aren't. Depending on my mood on any given day, I'll be matched up with anyone from Dennis Kucinich to Ron Paul. Trust me, those two are worlds apart. Good thing neither of them has a snowball's chance.
Watching this 50-ring circus unfold from up here in Canuckistan, I confess myself fascinated. For one thing, there's the ungodly length of the campaign. The primaries alone run six months. In reality, of course, this thing's been going on for about a year now, and it won't stop 'til we've all had (more than) enough. Come November 4th, win or lose, I think just about everyone will be relieved the whole mess is over.
I like some aspects of the electoral method down there. Having the party leaders directly elected is a step I'd like to see taken in Canada: it sure beats our current system, in which only card-carrying Party members have a say. Although I find it well-nigh incredible that every last governmental position is so politicized in America. Everybody is affiliated with a political party, from the mayors to the dogcatchers. You just don't see that here.
Can one of my American readers enlighten me as to why the primaries drag out so long? Couldn't they all be held on the same day, say, in May sometime? The internecine warfare in these things is appalling. It's like a Liberal leadership convention weekend spread out over half a year.
Then there's the candidates. As with Canadian elections, the people overshadow the policy, and Exhibits #1 and #1A for that argument this time around rest in the persons of one Hillary Rodham Clinton and one Barack Hussein Obama. (Gee, I wonder why you never hear his middle name...)
The media are going nuts with these two. As Ezra Levant observed recently of Obama,"[h]e has a policy platform, but in the eyes of many media commentators being black is his platform."
>The same goes for Hillary Clinton's gender. Politicians are loath to bring up race or gender, of course, lest they be perceived as racist or sexist...and yet the media bring up both every chance they get. Michael Moore laments Clinton's unwavering support for the Iraq war and speculates
Hillary knows the sexist country we still live in and that one of the reasons the public, in the past, would never consider a woman as president is because she would also be commander in chief. The majority of Americans were concerned that a woman would not be as likely to go to war as a man (horror of horrors!). So, in order to placate that mindset, perhaps she believed she had to be as "tough" as a man, she had to be willing to push The Button if necessary, and give the generals whatever they wanted.
Maybe Hillary just plain supports the war in Iraq, and it has nothing to do with her being a woman. It's not a popular position, but it can be defended. It's entirely possible she voted for war (as many who have since recanted did), and continued to vote for war not because she liked the direction the war was heading but because she felt that withdrawing would lead to even greater troubles in that part of the world. If that's the case, I'd actually applaud her...because that's the sort of nuanced thinking that goes over the heads of most of America (and Canada)'s chattering class.
I'd love to see a President who is female. In my wildest dreams, I'd actually like to...hear me out...disenfranchise men for a century or so and see where that might lead. Somewhere better than here, likely. Here I go indulging in gender stereotypes, but anyone who's observed men and women for any length of time would probably agree: women are more likely to take a longer view of the world (particularly if they are mothers); their first recourse to any problem likely won't be to call in the troops, much less toss a nuke somewhere.
Men often say that women do nothing but yack. Have you seen Question Period? A bunch of mostly white males yacking endlessly. It's a miracle anything in government ever gets done. Let's give women the reins...if my wife and my mother are any indication at all, women will talk with the express goal of getting problems solved, not scoring political points.
And of course I'd bar men from voting until I could be certain they weren't going to vote for the woman with the biggest bust.
All that said...
I personally don't like Hillary Clinton. I never have. Maybe to be a powerful woman in politics, you've got to triple-armor-plate your ass and assume a bitchly manner everywhere you go...and maybe I'm Michael Moore. I'd respond a whole hell of a lot differently to Clinton if she were more authentic. You get the sense with Hillary that every word, every thought, is calculated for maximum political gain, that nothing of the real Hillary Clinton must ever be seen. I don't like that in a person.
Barack Obama, on the other hand, seems to radiate authenticity...which is also suspicious. I mean, when's the last time you met a genuine, sincere politician? They don't exist and never have...right?
A black president would be a great thing for America, if only because maybe, just maybe, after a year or three, people will actually forget he's black. Social change is like that: just look at gay marriage. The mere prospect of Jack and Gill tying the knot caused furrowed brows and anguished, angered cries all over Canada. Now that Jack and Gill have climbed that hill, the issue's all but dead. People saw gays getting married and their own marriages didn't magically dissolve. With Barack in charge, people would first see a black President...and then just a President. And that's as it should be.
I'll delve into policy as events unfold, and I should note there are still many races yet to be run before either Hillary or Barack can claim the Democratic nomination. Possibly neither of them will. We'll have a much better idea on my birthday, February 6. The day before, nearly half the States in the Union will have voted.
One further note: I've ignored the Republicans here, and hope to continue to ignore them right through November. With one exception: if Mike Huckabee is nominated, and somehow becomes President, I'm migrating off-planet, and anyone not interested in Armaggeddon would be wise to follow me.
Good luck, America. You're gonna need it.
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