Otte Rosenkrantz

Occupy Your Mind

2011-11-13T19:04:00.001-06:00

Occupy your mind

So they kicked the occupiers out of Victoria Park on the strength of a by-law. It doesn't seem right, somehow, does it? Not considering all the other by-laws that could use a little reinforcing from time to time. Still, there we are; the protesters were unceremoniously ousted and their belongings tossed, all without a violent retaliation or threats to occupy city hall or much of anything. It could well be that the London version of the Occupy movement has folded up and gone home.

What are we to make of this local experiment in civil disobedience? Did the activists achieve any of their goals? Hard to say, in part because it's a little difficult to tell exactly what the goals were. The Occupy movement is clearly an expression of the frustration felt by thousands around the western world that they have been excluded from the wealth of the super-rich. But aside from a sentiment that they want some of those riches too, there really seems to be very little focus to this movement.

We are a country at war - soldiers and civilians are dying, homes and lands destroyed, and the war is costing a fortune. The environment is collapsing, unemployment is rising and personal privacy is being invaded at every turn. Poverty is rampant and human rights are being eroded; children are abused and there is corruption and shocking dishonesty in the halls of power. There is, in other words, no shortage of things to be angry and outraged about; no lack of reasons to take to the streets in a show of protest, solidarity, and civil disobedience.

In order for any movement to have even the slightest chance of being noticed, much less taken seriously and drawing some favourable response from the great, silent majority, it must first win the hearts and minds of the people it’s trying to engage, and being unhappy because not everybody has the same amount of money is not doing it. Where are the songs, the poetry, the writers and the artists? Where are the great orators, the righteous, angry leaders and philosophers? How can we honestly expect a social movement without leaders and thinkers to drive any influence for significant change?

As things stand the Occupy movement is in danger of becoming silly - a camp-out for the wanna-be Starbucks generation. If this slide into insignificance is to be halted or even reversed, I recommend an immediate application of "Howl" by Allen Ginsberg, set to the music of Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, laced with several doses of "Steal this Book" by Abby Hoffman. Better still, cultivate your own prophets, artists, philosophers, and visionaries, pick a cause, then commit to it and make it stick.

None of this will be easy, but some day you may be able to say that you made a significant contribution to making the world a truly better, cleaner, more equitable, honest and harmonious place.

Good luck, and Peace.

M3 and the Royal Wedding

2011-05-18T11:03:00.004-05:00

Report to the Agency:
I must apologize for the long absence in my reporting, but I am confident that you will understand my reasons once I explain. As you know better than most, the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middelton has been one of the most important events to come to the Royal Family in many years, and one of the top concerns of their Majesties, MI5, Scotland Yard and Interpol has been the security of all concerned. When I received the call a few months ago that my service were needed, and that my mission would be top secret until after the ceremony I was, of course, immediately ready to serve. The problem was simple enough: While Her Majesty the Queen and Prince Phillip and their extensive staff were at the ceremony at Westminster Abby, somebody had to guard the Royal Corgies. I confess that at first I was not thrilled by an assignment that initially appeared to be glorifies puppy-sitting, but once it was explained to me by the head of the K9 unit – also known as the Alsatian Guard, even though the force is largely made up of English bulldogs - that I and C1 would be exclusively responsible for the safety of Her Majesty's favourite dogs, I accepted the assignment proudly.
More about this later. And next time I will detail my attempt to stop Princess Beatrice from wearing as a hat - or "fascinator" what was actually intended to be a toy treat for the Royal Corgies.
Yours, as always.
Facinated,

Reason and syntax

2009-10-21T10:07:00.002-05:00

In response to Jeff and Lindz at www.sagecomm.com

Ahem.
At the risk of sounding pedantic, I would offer up a gentle reminder that the purpose of syntax and the myriad of related rules and regulations is not intended to stifle creativity, communication, or any of the delightfully whimsical flights of verbal invention that pass for “dialogue” these days. The rules of syntax exist to enhance and clarify communication – verbal or written. The problem with sweeping away all the rules in an effort to remove the restraints of creativity is that without structure we have ignorance and chaos – as it is in politics, so it is in grammar.
You may have forgotten what happened to the literacy and numeracy skills of high school students in this country when the rules were removed in favour of creativity and in an effort to avoid harming the fragile egos of our nation’s students. The result of all this ego-friendly, non-restrictive creativity is that colleges and universities are having to roll out large and expensive remedial writing and math programs in order to bring high school graduates up to some sort of minimal standard that will enable then to at least begin to comprehend and engage their various curricula. The current trend in education and general language use takes away from students the ability to experience the pleasure of crafting a graceful sentence, which I think borders on the criminal.
Picasso and Vonnegut knew the rules of their respective arts so well and so intimately that they knew how and when to bend and break them to enchance their creativity – but they knew the rules. Breaking the rules is not for amateurs… don’t try this at home because havoc will ensue, and you won’t know from whence it came, nor what it means.

Eschew the Cliche

2009-09-11T15:04:00.001-05:00

Business writing; plain and simple.

On September 1st of this year, Canadian journalist Robert Fulford published in the National Post a column called The Most Irritating Phrases in the English Language. The column is an erudite rant against the use of banal phrases and exhausted clichés currently so much in vogue among political pundits, business writers and far too many journalists who should know better.
Quoting British writer Jeremy Butterfield's book: “Damp Squid: The English Language Laid Bare,” Fulford places the expression "at the end of the day" right at the head of the "Top 10 Most Irritating Expressions in the English Language." Damp squid, by the way, comes, according to Fulford, from the mistake people make when they want to describe something as a failure and use the term “damp squib,” meaning a firework that fails to go off. Misunderstanding the root of the metaphor, they pronounce or spell it “squid.”
Along with “the bottom line” and “going forward,” surely “at the end of the day” has to be one of the most overused and, as a result, almost meaningless, expressions in common currency in business communication. But these dregs fished from what Fulford refers to as "… a tiny and stagnant pool of stock expressions," are not the only offenders to dog the long-suffering copy editor. “At a team, moving forward together, into the future,” marries three others exhausted business clichés, and the expression “sea change” has got to be close to the top of my personal list of expressions I love to hate. “Sea change” is used by business communicators who want to suggest a dramatic new change in a company’s direction, often from imminent failure to sudden success. The fact that the expression has found its way into business English from Shakespeare’s play “The Tempest,” where Prospero uses it to refer to decomposition caused by the sea, confers a nice ironic twist to the current, intended meaning of “sea change.”
As someone who has spent most of his career either writing, editing or teaching business writing, Fulford’s column and Jeremy Butterfield's book are among some rare and wonderful reminders that the language of business and politics does not have to be irritatingly hackneyed, predictable and, far too often, incorrect.

Heroes

2008-08-27T20:18:00.001-05:00

London Free Press, August 12, 2008

Shortly before the opening of the Beijing Olympics, the headline “Our Olympic heroes” appeared in an Ontario newspaper over a story that profiled some local athletes who were preparing to compete in the Olympics.
No-one can argue that the athletes who compete in the Olympic Games don’t put forth enormous effort in order to reach the goal of competing in the Games. Many of the athletes make great personal investments in their goal in terms of physical training, finances, delayed educational opportunities and relationships that are put on hold. But are they really heroes?
Since the 9/11attacks on the Twin Towers in New York, it seems that North American society has taken to calling people working in all sorts of professions “heroes.” From firefighters who respond to emergency calls every day, and police officers who patrol Canada’s cities and highways, to Canadian soldiers serving in Afghanistan and now to Olympic athletes, people in any number of professions are being called heroes. The term “heroes” is being used so often to describe people who are doing what some might consider little more than their jobs, that it’s becoming easy to forget what the word “hero” really means, and how a person might earn that title.
The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that a hero is “A man, now also a woman, distinguished by the performance of extraordinarily brave or noble deeds…” also “[Someone] admired or venerated for his or her achievements and noble qualities in any field.”
It’s perhaps the phrase “distinguished by the performance of extraordinarily brave or noble deeds…” that make it a little difficult to think of people who go about the day-to-day performance of their duties as “heroes.” There is unquestionably a very large element of courage involved in serving as a police officer, soldier or firefighter, or indeed even in nursing or farming or construction work, and many other fields of endeavour. But surely being courageous is not the same as being heroic.
When Canadian climber Andrew Brash, for instance, tossed aside his dream of summiting Mount Everest in 2006, just some 200 metres from his goal, in order to rescue climber Lincoln Hall who was discovered half-clothed, sitting on the edge of a cliff in the Death Zone of the mountain, and just days after climber David Sharp was left to die by others, Brash surely performed “an extraordinarily brave and noble deed” - a heroic deed - and earned the right to be called a hero and to receive the medals and commendations given to heroes. Being a mountain climber made him courageous, but it was sacrificing his dream and risking his life to save another climber that made him a hero.
If we’re going to refer to athletes getting ready to compete at the Olympic Games as heroes, then what are we going to call people like Andrew Brash?
The indiscriminate use of the term “hero” to describe someone whose job entails some degree of risk or exceptional dedication – a coal miner, for instance, or an athlete – diminishes the ability of the word to honour those who go far beyond the call of duty to perform an extraordinary feat of self-sacrifice in the service on humankind, and indeed diminishes the acts of those who performed heroic deeds before the word entered into such common currency.
Take, for example the story of Sergeant Thomas (Tommy) Ricketts. Born in Newfoundland, Ricketts was only seventeen, and a private soldier in the Royal Newfoundland Regiment in the First World War when, On October 14, 1918, he and the rest of his machine gun crew were pinned down and out of ammunition in a battle near Ledgehem, Belgium. Ricketts volunteered to run across 100 yards of open field to gather more ammunition for his crew’s Lewis gun. Returning over the same dangerous ground, Ricketts and a fellow soldier captured a number of German weapons and prisoners. For his uncommon valour, Ricketts was promoted to sergeant, and awarded the Victoria Cross, the youngest soldier ever to receive this important military honour.
Sergeant Ricketts, like Andrew Brash, performed “an extraordinarily brave and noble deed,” and was a hero.
It may be true that we live in a time that needs new heroes, but misusing the word is not going to meet that need.

– 30 -

For the Sunday Edition

2008-05-04T09:05:00.002-05:00

Hello Michael,
I was listening to the iPod version of your story about the plastic bag in the tree outside your house, and your observations about the need for people to cut back on their use of plastic bags. For several years my wife and I have used cloth bags when we shop for groceries. In fact, I can’t recall the last time groceries or other shopping purchases were brought home in a plastic bag, and as we have no dog, there is no need for us to have plastic bags on hand for scooping purposes although I will confess to using them for cleaning out the cat litter used by our two cats. All things being equal, we really ought to be a household pretty much devoid of plastic bags. And yet. On the inside of the pantry door we have one of those tube-shaped containers sold by IKEA designed to store plastic bags, and that tube is always crammed full to over-flowing. Every time I take a bag out to clean the cat litter, or on rare occasions to dispose of wet garbage, I expect to see the level of bags in the tube drop. But it doesn’t. Like the storied magic purse that produces an unlimited amount of coins, this tube apparently generates its own endless supply of plastic bags, mocking our attempts at eliminating the wicked things from our lives. Perhaps – as with the question of where do all the vanished socks go when they disappear from the clothes dryer - the answer to the question of where do plastic bags go when they are blow down the street or out of people’s trees is that they mysteriously wind up in tubes such as ours all over the country to continue their malignant presence in our consumer driven world. I would love to get rid of the tube, but I confess I’m a little afraid of it now. If I didn’t have the tube, where else in my house would all those plastic bags show up?Please help. The cats are doing the best they can, but it’s not enough.
Otte Rosenkrantz
London, Ontario

The Muffin Man and Canadian Road Rage

2008-04-12T14:47:00.001-05:00

[The soundtrack for this blog, BTW, is "Good Day" by Luce.]

I take some pride in my driving record. It’s not perfect by any stretch, but I have – touch wood – so far managed to avoid serious accidents and ruinous speeding tickets. But it’s also true that there are times when I could perhaps be a little more attentive to my driving than I am. This was brought home to me a few days ago when I encountered what felt like a quintessential case of Canadian road rage on my way to work.
After an early morning fill-up at a gas station I had to pull back into two-lane traffic close to an intersection. An Urban Assault Vehicle (SUV) had stopped to let my little Saturn in, and I nosed into traffic, unable to see very much because of the looming vehicle blocking my view. As I eased into the left turn lane, thinking I was free and clear, I heard the squeal of tires. I glanced up in the rear-view, and saw a rusted out old Chev slide up behind me. In the split second that can seem an eternity before an accident I thought for sure he was going to hit me, and braced myself for the impact. But it didn’t come. Fortunately the young man in the black toque at the wheel had hit the brakes just in time.
Much relieved, I waved to him to show my gratitude and by way of an apology, but he wasn’t having it. He was seriously pissed, and while I watched in amazement he rolled down his window and lobbed… a muffin… at me. Having apparently just come from the Tim Horton’s up the street he had, in his moment of road rage, reached for the first thing he could use to vent his frustration at me, and that thing was a Tim’s frosted something-or-other. I know it was frosted because of the streak it left on my back window.
When I told the story to an American friend later in the day he doubled up in laughter and pointed out how very Canadian the experience had been: road rage Canadian style, with a breakfast muffin as the weapon of retaliation. “Had that happened in Los Angeles or Texas, you might be having bullet holes in your car plugged, instead of cleaning whipped cream off your windshield.”
All I can say is that I’m just happy it wasn’t a “fruit explosion”.

To tell the truth.

2008-02-16T15:35:00.002-06:00

In rebuttal to Paul Berton’s editorial. “This Paper is not a Promotions Vehicle.” Saturday, February 9th, 2008.

Paul Berton’s editorial in last Saturday’s Free Press was very thought-provoking, and answered a question that has been on my mind for a long time: to what degree, if any, is The London Free Press a vehicle to be used by the city and by local businesses and organizations to promote themselves?
The headline to Berton’s column suggests the answer: “This paper is not a promotions vehicle.” And yet in his opening paragraph Berton says: “Is it the job of this newspaper to be a booster for London? Many journalists would say no; I would say yes, but we can only go so far.” Although Berton does go on to qualify his statement, the very fact that he would suggest that it is the newspaper’s responsibility to, in any degree, act as an vehicle of what used to be called “boosterism” is unsettling.
To be sure, the nature of journalism has undergone some significant changes in the last couple of decades, especially since the advent of the Internet and what is being called “citizen journalism.” Print journalism – the oldest medium - like all media outlets, is finding itself having to compete for advertising dollars with not only the more traditional media such as radio and television, but with the Internet, which is increasingly replacing all these forms of media, as consumers of news turn to online sources for everything from breaking news and quick updates, to in-depth backgrounders and analysis.
But one hopes that these changes will not engender a complete departure from the role of journalists as reporters of truth, no matter how unpleasant it may occasionally be for those who buy the advertisements or who are in positions of political power and influence. The Canadian Association of Journalists’ Statement of Principles makes a point of noting, in its preamble, that, among other things, “It is our privilege and duty to seek and report the truth as we understand it… speak for the voiceless and encourage civic debate to build our communities and serve the public interest.” Under the section “The Public Interest” the Principles expand on the latter point by clearly stating that “The right to freedom of expression and of the press must be defended against encroachment from any quarter, public or private, because we serve democracy and the public interest.”
Codes of ethics and statements of principles are lofty and often seem almost impossible to adhere to, but it’s especially important for journalists to maintain their impartiality precisely because they do serve the cause of democracy and the public interest. The CAJ Principles enlarge on this important aspect in the section “Act Independently” by pointing out that a journalist’s responsibility to democracy and the reporting of the truth sometimes “conflicts with the wishes of various public and private interests, including advertisers, governments, news sources, and, on occasion, with our duty and obligation to an employer.” The Principles, however, do not excuse any favourable treatment being given to any group, no matter how influential, and states in clear and unequivocal terms that “We will not give favoured treatment to advertisers and special interests. We must resist their efforts to influence the news.”
If a newspaper does not impartially and fairly report all the news that’s fit to print, regardless of who may withdraw their political support or advertising dollars, then it becomes reduced to being little more than a publisher of advertising flyers, propaganda and deliberately inflammatory and misleading rhetoric, and surely we already have enough of that.

In Search of a Soul Review

2007-06-19T20:19:00.000-05:00

In Search of a Soul: Designing and Realizing the New Canadian War Museum. By Raymond Moriyama. Douglas & McIntyre, Vancouver/Toronto. 2006.

Canadians have long been in some confusion about how they feel about war. We take a lot of pride in the performance and reputation of our troops in the First and Second World War, and we’re proud of our country’s international reputation as both brokers and keepers of peace. We are all in favour of supporting the UN, and we are also in favour of having our troops go to war-torn parts of the globe to help people restore order, set up schools, purify drinking water and so on.
We’re not, however, as keen on the part where our troops have to kill people or risk being killed themselves, and we are certainly not happy about incidents such as the behaviour of the Canadian Airborne Regiment in Somalia in March of 1993 when Shidane Arone, a 16-year-old Somali youth, was tortured and beaten to death by members of the Regiment which was subsequently disbanded. The current role of Canadian troops in Afghanistan and the casualties they have suffered are also not sitting easily with a lot of Canadians.
And yet we attend memorial services in record numbers, and feel a very deep, national desire to remember and honour the history of our armed forces.
Our national ambivalence about war, and – Somalia notwithstanding - our pride in the history of our armed forces, is reflected in the creation of the new Canadian War Museum that was completed in Ottawa in May, 2005, in time for the sixtieth anniversary of VE Day.
In the introduction to his book, In Search of a Soul: Designing and Realizing the new Canadian War Museum, architect and author Raymond Moriyama reflects on this sense of, if not discomfort, then uncertainty, that Canadians often feel when contemplating Canada at war as he described his feelings about taking on the task of designing and creating the museum:
“I struggled between happiness and frustration. In the process, memories of my first foray into architecture… emerged from the deep crevices of my mind. Seeking solace from the degradation of life in an [Canadian] internment camp, I designed and secretly built a tree house on the side of Little Mountain, an elongated hill next to the Slocan River in the shadow of the Rockies. Remarkably, this spot shares many similarities with the war museum site in Ottawa. However, my tree house was not a museum – it became my sanctuary during wartime.”

What a fine, Canadian irony it is that a child of a wartime internment camp of Japanese Canadians should eventually create what is both museum and monument to Canada at war.
All Canadians would do well to visit this remarkable structure, and to reflect on its meaning. The building emerges eastward from the ground, with textured concrete that makes it look both like a bunker, and like the prow of a battleship clad in copper to match the rooftops of other public buildings in the area. The small windows on the bow spell out lest we forget in both English and French using Morse code. The copper used on the interior of the building is from the roof of the Library of Parliament which was refurbished in 2004.
As he remembers the journey from the government’s decision to replace the old museum on Sussex Drive in Ottawa and the invitation sent out to architects to submit a proposal, to the completion of the project in 2003, Moriyama takes the reader on a detailed and often emotional journey of this important and lasting project. The book is gratifyingly filled with colour photographs that enhance the detailed and fascinating account of every meticulous step in the building of the museum.
Included in these colour plates are images of some of the exhibits, and images of landscape features and war images that supplied much of the inspiration for the highly unusual design of the museum. Some of the innumerable challenges faced by Moriyama and his large team is summed up in his observation that
“This vitally important content [the exhibits] requires safe storage, strict environmental controls and protection from vandalism and flooding. At the same time, the museum that houses it must be able to display this content in an accessible, appropriate, enjoyable and educational manner. The heavy artefacts – artillery, vehicles, airplanes and a fifty-four tonne Centurion tank – require not only a substantial volume of space, but also special floor loading and ceiling supports. The design of appropriate displays that respected the unique and precious qualities of every artefact, from paintings and medals to love letters and uniforms, was one of the most challenging tasks.”

The result of Moriyama’s experiences, genius, and clear understanding of the importance of his work are carefully detailed in this insightful and fascinating book of the creation of the Canadian War Museum. Most of all, of course, the building itself stands as a monument to not only Moriyama’s vision, but to his country’s struggle to come to terms with its own military place in the world.

OK, so I buried the lead in this one – sue me.

2007-06-03T14:09:00.000-05:00

It’s Saturday, and I am once again hurtling down the bicycle path on my rollerblades, cruising along by the river in my usual near suicidal out-of-control fashion, arms flailing, people leaping out of my way iPod ear buds firmly screwed into my ears, pumping out the kind of motivational music I tend to think of as road trip music – ZZ Top, CCR, Rolling Stones, BB King, that sort of thing.
I spent the morning at yard sales looking for more useless junk to clutter up the garage, when I saw a cd, and not just any cd. No, this was Family Style by the Vaughan Brothers from 1990. The minute I get home, and before I headed out on my rollerblades I loaded it up on my iPod. The album includes the song Tick Tock, one of my absolute favourites.
So as I swing onto the path, past the soccer games and the long line of parked minivans, I have Tick Tock blaring in my head… remember?

“Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock people, time's tickin' awayRemember thatTick tock, tick tock, tick tock people, time's tickin' away”

Still sends a shiver up my spine.

“One night while sleeping in my bed I had a beautiful dreamThat all the people of the world got together on the same wavelength,and began helping one anotherNow in this dream, universal love was the theme of the dayPeace and understanding and it happened this way.”

Well, we didn’t do so well with that, we Babyboomers, did we? We had great ideas about bringing peace and understanding to the people of the world and of helping others. But other things got in the way, didn’t they? The paradigm changed, as so many of us loved to say… What became important was not so much peace in the world as gated neighbourhoods, lots of technology, and SUV’s to ferry the kids to the mall. We got derailed, and things have gone from bad to worse.

“The sick, the hungry, had smiles on their faces,the tired and the homeless had family all aroundThe streets and the cities were all beautiful places,and the walls came tumblin' down.”

Well, not so much – what we did was put up a lot of walls, physical and otherwise, rather than tearing them down – and don’t throw the Berlin Wall at me – that was just good economics.

And the environment? We were going to do something about that too… All those environmental movements and the organic food co-ops and the local produce farmers’ markets were all started in the 1960, for the love of monkeys! These movements are more than 40 years old!! And we still insist on having fresh fruit in our grocery stores in January, and damn the environmental costs of shipping it half way around the world so it can get to our tables in a perfectly ripe, spotless condition.

“I had a vision of blue skies from sea to shining sea,all the trees in the forest stood strong and tall againEverything was clean and pretty and safe for you and me,the worst of enemies became the best of friends.”

It’s embarrassing, isn’t it? And we’re all patting ourselves on our backs for changing light bulbs and “recycling” plastic shopping back by using them to pick up our dog’s poop… future generations will be so grateful.

“Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock people, time's tickin' awayRemember thatTick tock, tick tock, tick tock people, time's tickin' away”

But, as I ricochet under the overpass and narrowly miss a couple of bicyclists and a tree, I wonder if there is any chance our kids will do better. Although we failed miserably in our own promises and pious proclamations, perhaps we did at least plant a seed with our kids that the time has come to do better. It’s too late to stop the coming damage, but if our kids will do even half of what we said we were going to do, there may be some hope still for a better world for their children.

“People of the world all had it together,had it together for the boys and the girlsChildren of the world look forward to a future.”

Then I remember a picture and story in a recent edition if the Toronto Star. The photograph shows my son in a small crowd at a farmer’s market, one Canada’s first two certified local farmers’ markets dedicated to selling locally grown produce only, and not reselling food from around the world in the guise of being locally grown. Seeing my son there, obviously keen on being part of this vitally important concept gives me some hope that maybe the promise of the future will be better in the hands of his generation than it was in mine.

“Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock people, time's tickin' awayRemember thatTick tock, tick tock, tick tock people, time's tickin' away”

I land in the grass… safe and only a little bruised… happy that this patch of natural green hasn’t been paved over yet – the pavement really bites.

Postcard From the City

2007-05-16T17:25:00.000-05:00

Postcard From the City

There she sits, in the seat across from me on the train to Toronto. She’s of an indeterminate age: anywhere between 35 and 50, I would think – maybe even a little older. She got on the train the station after mine, carrying only a large shoulder bag, and without looking around sat down in the seat opposite me. She looked out the window for a few minutes as the train pulled out of the station, then reached into her purse, pulled out a Styrofoam bowl of some sort of pasta salad for which she, according to the label, had paid $2.50 as some local farmers’ market, and proceeded to eat a little of it with a plastic fork. After a while she replaced the bowl in her purse, zipped closed the bag, arranged herself in the seat, carefully avoiding crowding those around her, put her head back and fell almost instantly into a deep sleep.
She is not a large woman, but she looks strong, compact and solid. Her clothes – a pair of khaki Capri pants, running shoes and a dark green polo shirt – are clean, but worn. Both the pants and shirt show the early signs of fraying a little at the edges. Her arms are crossed over her chest, showing the muscled forearms and hands. The skin on the arms is still firm, but starting to show some wrinkles close to the elbows; there are a few white marks here and there that look like small scars or scratches.
Her hands are clean, but clearly use to hard work: the finger nails are very short and unpainted. She wears no rings. Her knuckles are large, but not red as one might expect from hands that spend a lot of time in water, cleaning or doing dishes. These are more the hands of someone who might work with tools of some kind.
The sleeping body radiates exhaustion. Her head rests on the back of the seat in a position that looks awkward and uncomfortable, yet she sleeps soundly through the various stops, the rolling and jerking of the train, the coming and going of passengers. There are lines on her face, but they are not pronounced yet. Her skin is sallow as of someone who spends a lot of time indoors and who is not getting much sleep. She wears no makeup, yet her hair, brittle and dry though it is, has been dyed a dark auburn, but it is surely only a cover for what is almost certainly grey or greying hair.
In the depth of her sleep, her mouth has fallen open a little, and she breathes regularly and slowly without any fitful moves or sounds. She remains in almost exactly the same position for the nearly two hours she’s on the train.
As we roll into our final destination, she awakens without any of the startled and somewhat self-conscious behaviour so common to people who have fallen asleep in public. She merely sits up, runs her hand over her face, collects her hand bag, and with a look out the window as if double-checking that we have, in fact, arrived, she stands up, joins the line to get off the train, and disappears into the crown on the platform, and into the rest of her life.

Riding the bus

2007-04-16T19:13:00.000-05:00

I wonder why it is that people riding the bus try so incredibly hard to as appear mean and solitary creatures. The world is surely a grim and unpleasant enough place without making it worse by appearing to hate those around us.

Today, I was lucky enough to be part of a brief moment on the bus when that shell of petulant, sullen resentment that seems to radiate from most of the passengers was briefly dispelled. There was a young man with very little mobility in a motorized wheelchair who was on the bus, and when it came time for him to get ready to get off, he turned as best he could to me and asked me to put the hood on his jacket up for him to protect him from the rain that was starting to fall outside.

I had my briefcase and umbrella with me, and was reading a book at the time, and didn’t want to leave it all on my seat while I got up to help him, knowing that the lurching of the bus would send it all over the place. So I handed the book to the young lady on one side of me, and the umbrella to the woman on my other side, and went to tie up the guy’s hood.

When I was done and went to sit down again, collecting my book and umbrella, there was a moment when I noticed that several people around me were smiling, some at the guy in the chair, some at me, and others at the people who had been pressed into service to help me. The spell of gloom and irritability was briefly dispelled.

Then the guy in the chair left, the seat, which has been put out of the way to make room for him, was put back, the bus moved on, and as the usual pall of sulky antipathy settled back over the passenger, I reflected with regret that things had returned to normal.

But for a moment there, we had, in fact, all smiled at one another.

The Dance is a Poem

2007-04-07T19:54:00.000-05:00

So I went to watch my daughter perform with her dance company. On the train there I thought about how many times I have seen her is a dance performance. For more than a decade I have watched her go from looking like a frothy little cake decoration twirling slowly, uncertainly, on the stage during her dance school’s end-of-year performance, to being an athletic and self-assured young woman driving herself to deliver as perfect a performance as possible, and it has been delightful to watch the transformation.

But truth be told, I have not always enjoyed every show. I have, of course, been completely enthralled every time my daughter’s on stage, but over the years she has been part of dance recitals that went on for upward of three hours and ran to some thirty or forty numbers. Getting all the children from the dance studio involved in the performances sometimes required great creativity on the part of the dance instructors and the director. I can remember, for instance, on one occasion being amazed to discover that “The Little Mermaid” had performances by children in traditional Tyrolean peasant clothing, Spanish tap dancers, and chimney sweeps – I don’t recall reading that in the original. Still, every child had several parts, and all the parents got to reflect how much more talented their child was than all the rest.

Over the years the themes of the performances matured along with the dancers. Through high school and into university the performances also became shorter and more sophisticated, and they have now become something to which I look forward, rather like I might look forward to an entertaining evening at the theatre.

But this year there was something very different. This year I found myself caught up in the performances like I have not been before. The infamous 1st World War era dancer and courtesan, Mata Hari, is quoted as having said that “The dance is a poem of which each movement is a word.” At this performance, I felt the truth of that on a visceral, rather than just cognitive, level. The combination of the music the group had selected, as interpreted by, and put to, dance, was extraordinarily powerful. Effective, compelling, poignant and cathartic, the performances drove home all the emotions they explored with a force that was almost physical. It was an extraordinary, transforming, experience.

I must have seen almost a hundred dance performances over the past 13 or 14 years. But this was the first time I began to understand what dance can really communicate.

Visiting Second Life

2007-03-18T11:08:00.000-05:00

I’m not sure what to make of the Second Life phenomenon. On the one hand, I like the idea of having this virtual environment where participants can create a separate reality.

It’s actually a lot of fun – a game of make-believe of sorts. The opportunities for meeting people – real people, not just computer-generated entities – are everywhere, and make for interesting insights into human nature – or at least into the nature of the humans who participate in these 3-D virtual environments such as Second Life.

There are, I think, also some interesting opportunities for educational institutions to deliver programs and courses having to do with communications and design, especially for the purpose of delivering distance learning content. There are a number of colleges and universities that have set up shop in SL, as it’s called, and the listservs that deal with education in SL are filled with research proposals and commentaries that indicate the enthusiasm with which some educators and students are embracing the SL environment and opportunities.

I too see opportunities for delivering education in SL, to the point where I have formed a small group of like-minded people at the college to act as a project exploration group, and we have applied for a small research grant.

And yet. There is something – unsettling – about the phenomenon. On the one hand the technology is making it possible for people who have difficulties interacting with others for reason of distance or disability to interact with others in this delightful, highly interactive and constantly growing environment. On the other hand, life is SL is a lot easier than life in the real world (RL). Unpleasant environments or people can be changed or avoided; everybody is young and healthy, the environment can be made beautiful, predictable and safe; the cost of living is very small, nobody breathes or eats or has to be concerned with unpleasant bodily functions; people are never too hot or too cold. It is, in other words, a kind of virtual utopia.

Carlos Castaneda might recognize it, and so might Timothy Leary: SL is RL on acid – or grass. What would Aldous Huxley make of, I wonder?

SL is opening the doors of perception, as Huxley called it, to both heaven and hell. Like any mind-altering drug, SL is both beneficial and dangerous – it depends on how it’s used. SL can facilitate communication and entertain and educate. It can also become intensely addictive, and I fear that we will soon hear of people sitting in their decaying apartments, locked into Second Life – Matrix-like - while their real world crumbles around them.

More later…

The Third Wave in Feminism

2006-12-26T22:17:00.000-06:00

Last month we had a quick overview of the state of modern feminism. This month we are going to take a closer look at what has been referred to as Third-wave feminism, and some of the associated writings.
As Michelle Doege, Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Fanshawe College, pointed out last month, it’s generally thought that there are three waves of feminism: “The first takes us back to the turn of the last century and is concerned primarily with access issues such as getting women the vote, property rights, and access to education. The second runs through the 1950s to the 1980s, and includes the acceptance of women in the workplace and in positions of authority in government and society.”
The beginnings of the notion of a third wave of feminism can probably be traced to the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court of the United States by President George Bush Sr. in the fall of 1991. During the subsequent Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, Anita Hill, an African-American law professor, claimed she was sexually harassed by Thomas a decade earlier while in his employment. In response to the Thomas hearings, Rebecca Walker, a leading American feminist and writer, published an article titled “Becoming the Third Wave” in a 1992 issue of Ms. magazine in which she wrote, “I am not a postfeminism feminist. I am the Third wave,” and thus coined the term.
According to the Wikipedia entry dealing with Third-wave feminism, Third-wave feminism seeks to “challenge or avoid what it deems the second wave's ‘essentialist’ definitions of femininity, which (according to the third wave) often assumed a universal female identity and over-emphasized the experiences of upper middle class white women... Third wave theory usually encompasses queer theory, women-of-color consciousness, post-colonial theory, critical theory, transnationalism, ecofeminism, and new feminist theory.” The entry goes on to note that Third wave feminists often focus on "micropolitics," writing about forms of gender expression and representation that are less explicitly political than their predecessors. They also challenged the second wave's ideas of what is, and is not, good for females.
But there seems to be very little awareness of, and literature related to, this new wave of feminism. In 2000, Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards wrote Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a book that argues for the continued importance of feminism in politics, education and culture. The authors, both established journalists and Third-wave leaders, had spent five years examining the state of the women's movement, trying to define the controversial ascendance of "girlie culture," a phenomenon of female self-empowerment that emerged in the 1990s with movies such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the all-girl, punk rock, musical groups such as Riot Grrrl – a name that would evolve to encompass a female, do-it-yourself punk subculture - and books like Elizabeth Wurtzel's Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women (Anchor Books, 1998).
Baumgardner and Richards advocated so-called “girlie culture” because they felt that Second Wave feminists, and especially Second Wave politicians and journalists, were largely against their idea of a the Third-wave feminist movement. According to Tamara Straus, writer and senior editor of AlterNet.org from 1999-2002, in her article, A manifesto for Third-wave Feminism on AlterNet.org, women such as former New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen have argued that “equating lipstick with empowerment, however playful or ironic, and reclaiming such words as bitch and slut, makes a mockery of feminism's longtime and still unachieved goals of social and economic equality. Second Wavers bemoan girlie culture's focus on the personal and the cultural over the political.”
But what else did they have six years ago, and what else is there now? A quick look at a brief bibliography of Third Wave literature would indicate that there has not been much truly seminal written on the subject since the turn of the century. The Web site Thirdwavefoundation.org, for instance. is a “feminist, activist foundation that works nationally to support young women and transgender youth ages 15 to 30.” By raising money and working in leadership development, and philanthropic advocacy, this organization support groups and individuals “working towards gender, racial, economic, and social justice.” The organization does have a newsletter called change it!, but the groups seems more dedicated to fundraising and social justice, than large-scale societal consciousness-raising.
As Professor Doege mentioned last month, “The Third wave is what we’re in now, and what I am seeing is young women who do want some change, but who experience their sphere of influence more locally… They use poetry and music, or they think about how they can publish their thoughts in small college and university publications, but their sense of power is very localized.”
Is it possible that Third wave feminism, and feminism in general, has become so localized that it’s in danger of losing its political and social relevance?

A bibliographical sampling:
Alfonso, Rita and Jo Triglio1997 Surfing the Thrid Wave: A Dialogue Between Two Third Wave Feminists. Hypatia 12(3):7-16, Summer.

Bailey, Cathryn1997 Making Waves and Drawing Lines: The Politics of Defining the Vicissitudes of Feminism. Hypatia 12(3):22-28, Summer.

Baumgardner, Jennifer and Amy Richards2000 Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Drake, Jennifer1997 Book Review of Listen Up: Voices from the Next 1998 Feminist Generation and Listen Up: Voices from the Next Feminist Generation. Feminist Studies 23(2):97+, Spring.

Finlen, Barbara
1995 Listen Up: Voices from the Next Feminist Generation. Seattle: Seal Press.

Higginbotham, Anastasia2000 Book Review of Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future. Women's Review of Books XVIII(1):1+, October.

Orr, Catherine1996 Charting the Currents of the Third Wave. Hypatia 12(3):29-45, Summer.

Shah, Sonia
1996 Book Review of Listen Up: Voices from the Next Feminist Generation. Sojourner 21(9):43, May.

Siegel, Deborah L.1997 The Legacy of the Personal: Generating Theory in Feminism's Third Wave. Hypatia 12(3):46-75, Summer.

Straus, Tamara1999 A Manifesto for Third Wave Feminism (interview with
Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards). In Independent News and Information <www.alternet.org>
Wingfoot, Alana1998 Abortion: Beyond Legality. In The 3rd WWWave: Feminism for the New Millennium <www.io.com/~wwwave>

Feminism: the third wave?

2006-12-06T20:02:00.000-06:00

Part one of two.

Given that the feminist movement has been around for decades, and that so much progress was made by society through the 1960s and 1970s towards establishing equality of women and men in Western society, it seems strange that issues of concern to feminists have fallen way from the public’s attention over the past few years. There doesn’t seem to be much literature produced by great feminist leaders these days, nor, if we are to believe the media, do young men and women of today seem particularly with the topic.
Michelle Doege is a Professor of English and Women’s studies at Fanshawe College where she teaches the university level course: Introduction to Women’s Studies. Doege says the suggestion that feminism is either dead or dying is not correct; it’s merely changing form. “When I think of the younger generation of women’s attitude towards feminism, I think of two things: One is that they believe that everything is OK between the genders, and the other is that some are very aware that whatever activism they want to engage in will be very different from that of the older feminist movements.”
Doege points out, for instance, that even a basic issue such as whether or not a woman should take her husband’s name in marriage is not one that seems to be very troubling to her class of almost exclusively female students. “It’s not even that I would ask them to consider changing a societal norm. That there might be a problem at all doesn’t seem to occur to many of them.”
According to Doege, it’s is generally thought that there are three waves of feminism: “The first takes us back to the turn of the last century and is concerned primarily with access issues such as getting women the vote, property rights, and access to education. The second runs through the 1950s to the 1980s, and includes the acceptance of women in the workplace and in positions of authority in government and society.
“The third wave is what we’re in now, and what I am seeing is young women who do want some change, but who experience their sphere of influence more locally. How this group expresses itself is very creative. They use poetry and music, or they think about how they can publish their thoughts in small college and university publications, but their sense of power is very localized.”
One problem is that there is still a real stigma attached to the term “feminist.” The old notion so familiar in the 1970s - that feminists were a bunch of man-hating lesbians - is still surprisingly prevalent today. “For some of my students, even taking my course and showing up for class takes courage. This is even more true for the few young men who take the course.”
Another part of the problem is that there appears to be little awareness of feminist issues in society at large. There are more women graduating from post-secondary institutions than men, for instance, yet women are still paid less, and they are still hampered by institutional glass ceilings. “My concern is that people are considered these things non-issues these days, as though the problems have gone away.”
Young people of both genders are also up against an almost insurmountable obstacle in the form of popular media. “The central issue for young women is body and beauty. They may be critical of the idea that beauty is important, but they buy into it. They are perhaps not strong enough within themselves to take a stand against it – not confident enough. They are aware and critical, but societal expectations of femininity are so strong, they often feel unable to address it within themselves.”
And the demands and restrictions of popular culture do not affect only young women; young men are also swayed by the same influences, and hold the same notions that the issues related to feminist thinking have passed into history.
In all of this, the question remains: Where are the leaders? Where are the great thinkers and writers who did so much to lay out the path towards true equality between the sexes, and to set the example?
“Perhaps this generation doesn’t really need the kind of leaders we identified with in the past. I know that out of a group of some 60 students, most of them female, only a small handful will have even a passing familiarity with the writings of the first and second wave of feminists, usually from a course they took in high school. Perhaps there is power in that individuality and the need to start over again on some level, but I’m not convinced that’s true.”
It would seem self-evident that the messages of feminism are still needed, and that these messages needs to reach both young women and young men. But how? Through high school courses? Through poetry and music of pop artists? Where will the third wave of feminism go from here?

Next month, we will take a look at trends in third wave feminist writing.

Comments welcome - sort of

2006-10-21T10:35:00.000-05:00

So after much commenting unpleasantness following the posting of the column "There May be Some Profanity" a few weeks ago, I decided to disable the comments feature on the blog. Some of the comments were obviously posted by someone who needed professional assistance, and I'm in the wrong profession to provide the necessary help...
Anyway, I have reinstated the comments feature, so post away. I am, however, moderating the comments before they are posted now so I can re-route the "unusual" ones to the proper psychiatric, law-enforcement agencies or trash.
Compliments are, or course, always welcomed... :-)

The English Language: Part Deux

2006-10-01T15:41:00.000-05:00

“If those who have studied the art of writing are in accord on any one point, it is on this: the surest way to arouse and hold the attention of the reader is by being specific, definite, and concrete.”
- Strunk and White: The Elements of Style

Last time we had a look at the state of the English language, and what many think of as its deterioration in the hands - or perhaps more correctly – in the mouths, of modern users as the language evolves in what seems to be uncontrollable patterns. This month we consider how we might shape some of those patterns.
Following the influence of the women’s movement in the 1970s and 1980s, and aided by the work of many multicultural groups, society has become more aware of, and sensitive to, language that might be offensive to members of various identifiable groups.
There is no question that the language journalists use shape the thoughts of their audiences, and by inference, shape the thoughts of society. The English language has always been dominated by the use of the male pronoun, for instance, with the result that for decades it was almost automatic to think of people in positions of power and authority, and those working in the professions, as male.
In addition, there have been distinct differences in the way women and men are described in the media. We might, for instance, see something like: “The communications consultant, a petite, blonde in her early twenties, arrived at the meeting…” Well, unless the facts that the communications consultant is a petite, blonde female are somehow central to the information being shared, they have no business being included in the story. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to find a comparable descriptor saying: “The communications consultant, a balding, middle-aged white male, arrived at the meeting…” Both descriptors are unnecessary, and both impart a sex-role stereotype to the minds of the readers. It would be a special circumstance indeed that could warrant the inclusion of the age, sex, racial background and overall appearance of a person in a piece of journalism.
Writers – and speakers - must make special efforts to be sensitive to the language they use in order to avoid alienating members of their audience, and to avoid raising stereotypes and triggering bias in the readers.
The problem of how to avoid the generalized male pronoun – the so-called pseudo-generic pronoun – is a thorny one. “A new student at college must be aware that he is responsible for his own success” implies that college students are male. Some writers have suggested mixing up the pronouns to indicate equality: “A new student at college must be aware that she is responsible for his own success,” but that’s just nonsense and confuses the reader. Other writers have suggested combining the pronouns: “A new student at college must be aware that s/he is responsible for his/her own success.” While that does work, and may possibly catch on in time, it’s still too awkward and clumsy.
The best of bad solutions is probably to simply pluralize the pronouns: “New students at college must be aware that they are responsible for their own success.” This works pretty well in almost all cases, and does not “readjust” the facts.
One of my favourite “fuzzy” words that is much used in everyday language, yet has no really clear meaning, is the word “manmade.” If something is “manmade,’ is it hand-made? Machine-made? Simulated? Artificial? Made by men only? The temptation might be to say “all of the above,” but clearly something can’t be both hand-made and machine-made. I would suggest it is clearer and more accurate to say what the item is. If a machine made it, it is machine-made, if a person made it by hand, it is hand-made, if it is made out of synthetic fibres, it’s synthetic, and so on.
To think of all this bias-free, gender-neutral language as political correctness gone mad would be to miss the point. Language really does shape and influence the way we think of others and of ourselves. Since we need everybody to be involved in our society in order to make it work, we need to make sure everybody is included in the language, and we need to make sure we don’t belittle anybody and make them feel less than they are.
Look at the way people who disagree with one other use language to help make their case: For people who support abortions, it’s a matter of “choice.” For people who don’t, abortion is “murder.” One scientist’s unborn baby is “foetal tissue,” while to those who oppose the use of foetal tissue for scientific research, it is an “unborn baby.”
Words clearly shape how we think of ourselves, how we establish relationships with others, and our place in society. Language that is accurate, inclusive and bias-free will go a long way towards breaking down barriers in communication.
And let’s put a quick stop to those who object to the use of bias-free, gender-neutral language because it “changes the English language” by reminding them that one of the things that makes English such a delightful language is precisely the fact that it is in a constant state of change and adaptation. The English we use now is idiomatically very different from the language our parents and grandparents used, and heaven knows it’s being changed yet again by our own children.
People and the language they used cannot be judged out of their time – that would be an anachronistic fallacy. What we can do, however, is look at their language, and then look at our own, and see if we are any better at getting the communication across clearly.

There will be some profanity

2006-08-31T08:03:00.000-05:00

English is a fascinating and complex language which, to those who speak it as their first language, seems fairly straightforward and uncomplicated. To those who have to learn it as a second language, however, it’s a bewildering morass of double meanings, hidden allusions and words and expressions from other languages. The rules of spelling are hopelessly complex and contradictory, and the grammatical structure of English seems to have been created by someone who didn’t like people much.
Depending on what source you refer to, there are about a million words in the English language. Maybe about half of those are words specific to the various professions in science, the law, and the arcane world of technology. That still leaves us some 500,000 words from which to build our vocabulary. Again, depending on sources, it’s estimated that an average five-year-old might know some 5000 words, and someone with a basic university education might have access to a mental lexicon of about 20,000. You can more than double that figure if you are a voracious reader, and triple it if you teach at the university level. Let’s not talk about what watching television will do to someone’s ability to express themselves clearly – it’s too depressing.
What matters in all this, of course, is how you string together whatever words you know in order to make yourself understood. It’s usually at this point that that people will sigh in exasperation and start to mutter darkly about the younger generation’s frightful abuse of the Queen’s English. References to the fall of Rome usually follow. But what has enabled English to not only survive but to thrive since a fairly recognizable version of the language was finally cobbled together out of Celtic, Latin, Scandinavian dialects, French and other languages into what scholars think of as the Later Middle English period around 1500, has been its ability to adopt and adapt.
Unlike the French who have The foundation of the Académie française (French Academy) which was created in 1634 by Cardinal Richelieu as an official organization whose goal was the purification and preservation of the French language, the English have allowed their language to evolve willy-nilly (which, incidentally, is an expression that dates to about 1608, and is a contraction of will he, nill he, or will ye, nill ye, meaning with or without the will of the person concerned). The Académie française still exists, by the way, and looks after the policing of the language and the adaptation of foreign words and expressions. There’ll be no donne moi un hot dog in Paris, but in London it is de rigeur to include French words and expressions in everyday language, as indeed it’s all right to toss in a little ad hoc Latin just to impress.
But what about profanities? And all those other awful words and expressions use by rap musicians and rock and roll singers? And what about the incursions of spellings employed by kids who use their cell phones to text one another? Surely none of that should be allowed into the Queen’s English, otherwise we’ll all be writing “OmGd C u l8r,” and surely that won’t do.
Well, like it or not, English is a very democratic language, and as in any working democracy (from Greek demokratia, from demos meaning common people, and kratos" meaning rule or strength), the majority rules. In other words, once enough people use a word that it can be considered as being in the common parlance, it enters the standard lexicon.
For many people who care about these things, one of the most standard of standard lexicons is the venerable Oxford English Dictionary (OED). In 1992 Canada got its own Canadian Oxford Dictionary, and the lexicographers who work on these tomes are the ultimate arbiters of what constitutes “proper English”, remembering always that they draw their information from the words in common use.
So, for better or worse, the OED includes “hassle” and “dweeb” (“A person who is boringly conventional, puny or studious,” and yes, I’ll take that as a compliment), and any number of other words many people who worry about the state of the language would consider too colloquial to be appropriate.
The OED also includes – brace yourselves - the word “fuck” which to anyone over the age of, say, forty, is a profanity of such magnitude that it can’t be included in even informal conversations, but which to younger people is, as the OED describes it, merely “… a meaningless intensifier.” And by the way, the OED, which includes etymologies in its definitions, says nothing about “Filed Under Carnal Knowledge” or anything like that. It refers to the word as coarse slang of unknown origin. So there.
The fact remains that fuck, which I, being much older than forty, can barely make myself type out, has become so pervasive in the parlance of young people as to all but completely remove its original, coarse, meaning. The ubiquity of the word is even earning it a dialect descriptor of its own as “fuck patois” (from Fr. Patois meaning "native or local speech," and may have referred to a clumsy manner of speaking). The word still has some power to shock, but once that power is lost, it may fall out of fashion as have so many slang words, only to make way for something even more egregious – perhaps even something that will shock the linguistic sensibilities of today’s younger generation.
What those who care about the state of the English language are faced with is a choice between trying to rein it in, which would be like trying to rein in the Internet, and letting the language evolve as it will, even if that means losing much loved words and expressions to the vagaries of fashion. But after all, nobody speaks like Shakespeare anymore. Does that make English any less vibrant or useful? Methinks not.

Next month: to the rescue of the language: insisting on clarity in communication, if not politeness.

Yet another reason to grown your own vegetables...

2006-06-08T11:34:00.000-05:00

"If those stimulants to exertion which arise from the wants of the body, were removed from the mass of mankind, we have much reason to think that they would be sunk to the level of brutes from a deficiency of excitements, than that they would be raised to the level of philosophers by the possession of leisure."

-- Thomas Malthus, 1766-1834

The State of Things – So Far.

2006-06-01T08:09:00.000-05:00

Now that the school year has come to an end for college and university students, it’s time once again to have a look at what I’ve learned from my students. The following “state of things” report is collected from selected passages of student writings containing errors that have resulted in, one hopes, unintended, and often humorous meanings.
So, for instance, on the world stage, there are questions to be asked: “Every day there is hunger and suffering in the world. Millions of people are dying. What’s really going on with the war? Where is Osama?” Where indeed. All we know is that he was “boring into a very large family,” and that the attacks on the Americans “were followed by the Osama Bin Laden decree to kill … any person who had ties and followed the Americans.” Clearly “We are not living up to the rules and guile lines.” Then again, “The need for a black and white world leaves no room for a medium.”
The war in Iraq has dominated the news, especially since “the region was taken over by Islamic surgeons,” after “The war was brought about by what the Muslims call G-Had.” They will “…continue in a violent manor until their goal is achieved,” although “Neither Hamas not Jihad clammed responsibility.” In the end, “Terrorism is not a reason to rage war on terror,” although it “is a problem and is running ramped through the world!” It’s important to note, however, that “Terrorism has gone through changes under many people, one of the largest being Vladimir Illich Lenin.” Hitler, on the other hand “started small, as any other person in the world.” But clearly, “When planes start crashing into buildings, something is obviously wrong.” Remember, though, that “They were not all westerners in that building, out to oppress the world, some were just janitors.”
Closer to home, “The house fire embellished most of the appliances and furniture,” but happily, “Within minutes of the accident, the fire station arrived!” Sadly though, “Obese children are on the rise,” and in the second to last election, “Prime Minister Cretien behaved with extinction.” Bullying continues to be a problem in our schools, and the “Consequences for students who bully will be one day suspension or explosion.” So behave, is clearly the message. Not all politicians understand the importance of behaving well, as a few got into hot water because “There was a problem with a minor miss communication.”
Also, “Today’s society dictates that a beautiful woman is one who is 110 pounds tall…” and “Martha Stewart has broken out into a line of bed linens.” Poor woman – as though things weren’t bad enough. Remember how her trial “…brought Martha Stewart a deformation of character”? On her show, “She watched members of the audience multiply,” perhaps in an effort to increase the number of people watching.
In sports, “The parent was upset about an elbow his son received from another player in a game,” suggesting that some athletes are clearly generous to a fault. Still, “It’s up to high ranking officials to drop the axe on violence in sports.” Perhaps if they weren’t high, they’d come up with a better metaphor. But because the player is a local favourite, “…the Free Press will give him a good clipping in the paper,” which will, almost certainly, do little to reduce the violence.
The real question for our nation is: “In order for our country to advance we need everyone to advance. But how can we when so many are behind?” Whatever the reason for our troubles, there are many who think that “Most of the trouble originated in the Untied States of America because “Canada has had relations with the US for decades…”
Solutions are being sought everywhere, except perhaps, among the “intellectually combatable who tend to coagulate.” The trick this past year was is to maintain an optimistic outlook when listening to politicians, and note that “The speaker used a good mix of self-defecating humour” while the speech was “defiantly full of fact and opinion.” Remember: “If we on this plant don’t work together…” we will continue to be in trouble.
What has been the role of the media in all this? We’ve discovered, for instance, that “Newspapers run just as businesses do: with the bottom line on the table,” which sounds terribly uncomfortable, and may explain all the grumpy editors. The media also “… absorbs people twenty-four hours a day,” and “…has shown a hunger for drowning celebrities in the public eye…” Very small celebrities, one assumes.
Unfortunately, “The news, and the journalists who write it, can’t help but become slanted.” As a result we find that “The words spilled over the page like a bowl of alphabet soup. This makes the reading a little sloppier than it needs to be.” Truer words were never spoken. Keep in mind that “When your life is affected because you are fallowed by reporters, you will change.” Well, who wouldn’t?
All of this can only leave us to ask: “Are we no mare than this?” and most importantly: “Terrorism: Will there never be peas??”
“Have a great weak end!”
The ned.

Media barred from covering soldiers' return.

2006-05-17T14:42:00.000-05:00

Media barred from covering soldiers' return.

Otte Rosenkrantz

May 3, London, Ont. The decision by the Harper government to bar the media, and through them, the public, from the Canadian Forces Base in Trenton, Ontario, where planes carrying the remains of Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan arrive, comes at the same time as Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor’s policy to not lower flags on government buildings to half-mast every time a Canadian soldier is killed.
Both decisions echo the attempt in 2003 by the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush to keep the reality of the casualties of war from the American people by imposing a publication ban on images of coffins carrying the bodies of American soldiers coming home.
The successful muzzling of the American media grew out of the Americans’ experience in the war in Vietnam where the media had unfettered access to soldiers in the field. The uncensored and often quite gruesome images of the death war invariably brings to combatants and civilians alike shocked an American population out of its complacency, and did much to stir up the massive anti-war protests across the country that eventually forced President Nixon to reconsider his country’s role in Vietnam, and led to the ignominious retreat from Saigon in April, 1975.
Both the American government and military learned that lesson very well. Never again would the media have that kind of access to things military. In subsequent overseas military adventures the media would be strictly controlled and censored. This was especially evident in the first and second wars on Iraq where access was granted only to members of the media either selected from a carefully chosen pool of journalists or “embedded” with specific military units, and only censored reports from those unit reporters were released to the public.
The images from the wars in Iraq seen on American and, in most cases Canadian, television, were “sanitized” to remove images of dead or wounded US soldiers, and to make sure that no images of the almost 2400 flag-draped caskets that have arrived at Andrew’s Air Force Base near Washington, D.C. so far are seen by the public at large.
For the most part, the American media has acquiesced to these restrictions on their reporting. No such restrictions, however, have been applied to the images of dead Iraqi soldiers, of which there have been some 35,000 to date, although it is impossible to get an exact count. Seeing “the enemy’s” dead will not, apparently, shock the delicate sensibilities of the American public. Seeing dead American soldiers, however, either on the battle field, or coming home in caskets, is, so the reasoning goes, bad for national morale, and might undermine the war effort – Vietnam has not been forgotten.
Now that Canada is at war in Afghanistan, with a Canadian population about evenly divided on the whether or not we should be there as combatants, Harper’s Conservative government has decided to follow the unfortunate example set by the Americans by restricting media access, and by refusing to recognize the death of Canadian combatants by lowering the Canadian flag on government buildings every time a soldier is killed.
The attempt by the Harper government to screen the Canadian public from the realities of war is both transparent and clumsy, Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor’s protestations about trying to protect the families of the dead soldiers “during this emotional time” notwithstanding. And the policy is not nationally accepted. Alberta Premier Ralph Klein, for instance, says that flags at the Alberta legislature will be lowered to half-mast as an act of respect for fallen soldiers on the day of the funeral.
The fact is that Canada is a country at war, and as long as that state of affairs continues, there will be casualties. To imagine that Canadians don’t know about the grim realities of war, or somehow need to be sheltered from those realities, is patronizing at best, and state-sponsored censorship at worst. Canadians are surely mature enough to make up their own minds about the value of this war, and the price the country is willing to pay for being part of it.
Fifteen Canadian soldiers and one diplomat have died so far. Their deaths were not gentle; their deaths should not be ignored or hidden. Respect should be paid, and the Canadian public should be encouraged to pay attention.

When is enough enough?

2006-02-28T18:45:00.000-06:00

There are some huge guys at the gym. I mean these guys are enormous! They look like large bundles of thick rope walking around. How do these guys find suits to fit them? How do they turn over in bed? Who ties their shoes for them? And it's not just the guys. There are women too who sculpt and tone until they look like they've been poured from plastic. All of which begs the question: when is enough enough?
I go to the gym three or four times a week. Becaue of my schedule I can't always go at the same time, but no matter when I show up, there are about half a dozen or eight people who are always there, pumping iron or running on treadmills like they were trying to get away from something. How do they find the time? Don't they have work - or homes - to go to? They don't look particularly stressed about their apparent unemployment, nor do they strike me as lottery winners. But there they are, sometimes at noon, or in the morning, or in the evening, and apparently all weekend long. They lift weights the size of volkswagens. Their shoulders are like cliff ledges, their legs - well, truth be told, their legs are often very spindly. The bundles of ropes totter around on sticks. I blame the condition of their legs on the height of the mirrors. These guys like to look at themselves when they hoist the iron, but most of the mirrors extend just to the point where you can only see yourself from the waist up.
Anyway. How do these people know when they are done? When will they look in the mirror and say, "That's it! I'm exactly how I want to be. I can stop now." Can they tell that some of them are getting over-done? That they are starting to look like caricatures of themselves? Telling them seems like a bad idea, but I feel that someone ought to come along, tap one of them on their massive shoulders and say: "That's it, pal. You're done. You're perfect the way you are. One more curl or bench press, and you'll have crossed the line from athelete to freak. Go home. Have a beer. Watch a little TV. Or better yet, go for a walk if you still can."

The Fun of The Winter Olympics

2006-02-20T09:09:00.000-06:00

The Winter Olympic Gamers are very exciting, aren't they? The Canadian hockey team has been doing very poorly though, still, their defeats so far have been off-set by Cindy Klassen's silver medal win in the 1,00 metre... what? You've stopped reading? Why? Don't you care about how well our athletes are doing? Doesn't their performance in Turin somehow reflect on our national pride? Given the amount of coverage devoted to the games by our national media, you'd think the war in Afghanistan was over, the bird-flu in Europe cured, and the victims of the mud-slide in the Philippines recovered. Are you suggesting that the news about a tyrant who is about the be re-elected in Uganda is more important, or that Osama bin Laden is accusing, fairly accurately, as it appears, the Americans of perpetrating the same crimes on the people of Iraq as did Saddam Hussein should be discussed in the news? Well, all these stories are having a very hard time squeezing Gretzky off the front pages, or supplanting the deliriously ecstatic news about Canada's silver medal in the two-man bobsled because… well… I really don’t know.
I like watching the games – it’s all very diverting entertainment, like watching the PGA or international rugby. But it’s not really news, or if it is news, it’s entertainment or sports news, and shouldn’t be on the front pages of the papers or running as the lead stories on radio and TV.
Other than being entertaining to watch, and a lot of fun for the athletes, the point of these sporting events completely escapes me. Yes, there was a time when the Olympic Games had a political purpose in that the very apolitical nature of the games made them important. But those quaint old days are long behind us. Now the games represent sponsorship opportunities for the winning athletes and the corporations that back them, and humbling ignominy for the losers. And that’s about it. The public is exhorted to fork out stacks of money for clothing like the athletes wear, and even larger stacks of money for Olympic Games venues – Quebeckers – and by extension, all Canadians - are still paying for the dome that was built for the 1976 Montreal Olympics.
And what for? A quick tour of the Internet will show you what has happened to other Olympic venues, and the amazing amount of corruption that has been associated with the biding procedures over the years. The money seems to be there for these peculiar sporting events, but not for things like health care, education, housing and job training, to say nothing of protecting the environment. The British Columbia government’s commitment to the 2010 Winter Games is $600 million, including $139 million in contingency funding; let’s call is a billion and be done with it. Overall spending for the Turin Games is expected to be more than US$3.6 billion.
I hope the athletes appreciate it – it seems a lot of taxpayer money to host a party and some sporting events..

Great quote about the flag controversy

2006-02-10T22:44:00.000-06:00

"And where are the Danish flags all coming from? I couldn't get my hands on one if I was in a scavenger hunt and the prize was a Ferrari, but suddenly, they're all over the Middle East..." -- -Seth Greenland
[Sorry, I don't know who Seth Greenland is, but you've got to wonder about that last name, given that Greenland belongs to Denmark...]

Burning the Danish flag

2006-02-05T12:06:00.000-06:00

Odd times
I never thought I would live to see the day when the Danish flag would be burned by angry mobs. I grew up in Denmark, and can speak from personal experience when I say that the Danes are about as offensive a people as, oh, I don't know, the Swiss? The Finns? Icelanders, Canadians?

Denmark is a lovely, ancient nation, famous for its cheese, fish, open-faced sandwiches, intelligent drinking laws, great beer, Tivoli Gardens and Hans Christian Andersen. The country looks a bit like Prince Edward Island: green, flat and deeply charming and bucolic in a The Cotswolds sort of way. What could these inoffensive, gentle and socialist-to-the-core people have done to deserve the wrath of vast crowds of angry Muslims across the eastern world? What could engender nations to rise up in cold fury to storm the consulates and embassies of Denmark and, if a Danish consulate is not available, the Norwegians?

Well, bad art. While Denmark has a rich and flourishing artistic community and tradition, they are not, truth be told now, famous for producing great cartoonists. The Danes do have a sense of humour, sort of like the Swiss in that - you have to be there to get it - way, but newspaper cartoons lampooning politicians, or making social commentary, has never been their forte. Yet that is exactly what has led poor, old Dannebrog to being torched - for the first time it its long and honourable history, as far as I know.

The slightly befuddled Danish editors and politicians who are suddenly finding themselves in the international limelight, being interviewed by the likes of CNN, stare into the glare of publicity like owls caught out in an open field on a sunny day, and mumble things about freedom of the press and the right to free speech - both essentially American precepts - but you have to say something, don't you? And they clearly don't get it. Insulting people who already have lots of grievances with the rest of the world is like poking a hornet's nest with a stick. And don't give me that business about the people "over there" relaxing a little. There are large parts of the Muslim world that don't feel much like relaxing these days - it's been a tough seventy or eighty years for them, largely because of European and American political and military tinkering - and having a nation of cheese rollers and herring picklers poke fun at the Prophet - and, in fact, drawing a picture of him at all - is not helping matters; hence the burning flag and the storming of consulates.

Still, what odd times we live in. Seeing the Danish flag being burned and stomped on is like, well, seeing the Canadian flag on the shoulders of combat troops in Afghanistan.... no, wait, bad example...

Basement archaeology.

2006-01-31T19:37:00.000-06:00

I’ve decided to celebrate the new year by unpacking the basement.
Not the everyday stuff which we put into use as soon as we arrived. No, I'm talking about that huge pile of boxes that has followed me around since university back in what my kids refer to as "back in the day."
Back in the day - right after I finished scratching my Master's Thesis into a piece of sheepskin with a hunk of charcoal - I packed everything I owned into liquor-store boxes and carefully wrote my name on each one. Then the boxes followed me around for the next hundred years or so, mixing along the way with my wife's cardboard boxes, multiplying, and producing a large number of smaller cardboard boxes along the way.
Back then I hated throwing anything associated with school and learning away, partly because it had all cost so much - which also explains why my parents hated to see me throw any of this stuff away - and partly because I had this sense that one day, I would need to look up something I had written about Attila the Hun in second year history. I envisioned sitting around the dinner table some Sunday evening, and having one of my children suddenly turn to and asks: "gee, Dad, I sure wish I knew who was leader of the Huns in 411 AD"
"Funny you should ask," I would be able to say, "Hang on a sec." And then I would scoot downstairs, find the correct box, pull out my brilliant term paper, and quote extensively from it to a rapt audience.
Or, I thought, perhaps one day I'd be writing, say, a magazine column about how I have a whole bunch of unpacked boxes in my basement, and I would find that I needed to know how to spell "Attila", and when Attila lived, and I would be able to scoot downstairs etc., etc.
But of course, in all these years, I have never once had occasion to open any of those old boxes. So finally the time came to bring up those boxes, and see what it was we thought was valuable enough to pay movers hundreds of dollars every few year to shift from house to house.
Here's some of what I’ve found.
A box full of albums by The Monkees, Strawberry Alarm Clock and The Archies; several boxes of high-school textbooks dating back to when the earth was still flat; two broken lava-lamps; a bag of kitty-litter; a toaster-oven (remember those? They were a kind of microwave oven without the microwave: too big to toast bread, too small to toast anything else, and people always got six when they married); several unfinished macramé wall-hangings and, of course, at least a thousand boxes of term papers.
I also located the lid to the Mr. Coffee machine we sold in a yard-sale five years ago, a left-handed glove (the right hand of which I threw out in '86), and what I think is a bag of sandwiches I made sometime during the Nixon years.
The whole experience has been like being on a kind of archaeological expedition, sifting through the detritus of a lost culture, finding ancient tools (one-armed nutcrackers) and lost art-forms (empty bottles of wine covered with multi-coloured candle wax), and wondering what it all means.
Of course, it turned that I couldn’t bring ourselves to toss any of the stuff away. Some day the kids - or other future students of "back in the day" - may want to know what our lives were like, and who Atilla was. So in the interest of posterity, I’ve packed everything back up and labelled it all with my kids' names.
I know they'll thank me for it some day.

The Franchise.

2006-01-16T20:53:00.000-06:00

Ever wondered what it would be like to be your own boss? If you were your own boss, you'd be able to take as much time off as you wanted, and you'd be able to give yourself a raise whenever you felt like it. All things considered, doesn’t it make sense for anyone with any ambition to quit their job and start their own business?
Question is, what kind of business? Obviously it has to be one with next to no start-up costs, as little paperwork as possible, and absolutely staggering returns on a minimum of investment and effort. But where does a Canadian entrepreneurial go-getter go to get such a business?
They go to the London Franchise and Business Opportunities Expo, that's where.
Every year, Prestige Promotions brings this event to the city. This year it was held at the London Convention Centre, and I was there.
There were 28 exhibitors at the exposition, all of them brimming with enthusiasm and optimism. Even the guy selling financial planning businesses could barely contain his excitement over the riches to be harvested from this "anything but dull" field of endeavour.
After a few minutes at the event, it became clear that the only thing that stands between a Canadian self-starter and unlimited success is lack of imagination. The expression that was heard more than any other was "Each transaction will bring around 25 per cent profit!" Next to that was "This is the most incredible business opportunity you will ever encounter!" followed by: "There is absolutely no risk!"
So what kinds of businesses are no risk, have 25 per cent return on investment, and are the most incredible business opportunities you will ever see? Well, there were more coffee-vending franchises than you could shake Juan Valdez's donkey's tail at. And there were machines that would print on anything. One exhibitor was printing pictures and words on the shells of walnuts! Who wouldn't want a machine that can do that?
Yuk Yuk's was there - you know, the stand-up comedy people. They weren't selling stand-up comics, exactly. What they wanted people to buy were little machines about the size and shape of a condom dispenser, only these machines dispense jokes. Slip a loonie into one of these devices, and it will tell you four jokes. There are jokes for kids and jokes that are triple X rated. The idea, apparently, is that these machines will be located in bars and restaurants. Then, when conversation starts to run dry, somebody could scoot off to the machine, memorize a couple of ice-breakers, come back to the table and become the life of the party by telling these jokes - provided he could remember them.
This is how it might work:
You’re sitting at the table, and the conversation dries up. "scuze me,” you say, “I'll be right back..."
Minutes pass. You return.
"Say, have you heard the one about the Canada goose and the squirrel?"
The people at the table all turn to look at you expectantly "No, gosh, please tell us!"
"Well, it appears that this Canada goose goes into a bar and orders a glass of... no, wait, that was the squirrel... Yeah, that's it. A squirrel goes into a bar and orders a Canada goose, which is a kind of drink, and the bartender says.... Shoot. Now I've forgotten. Hang on a sec, I'll be right back. Anybody got a loonie?"
OK, so maybe the joke machine franchise needs some getting used to. But if none of this years’ franchise ideas caught the visitor’s fancy, there is always next year. Maybe they will bring in the lady who will show you how to make coffee tables out of caskets – I think she calls them coffin tables. Surely that franchise would get you out of your dead-end job.
Still working on the Canadian Dream, I’m Otte Rosenkrantz.

Christmas Lessons

2005-12-23T10:57:00.000-06:00

OK, Christmas is over. Let's see what we've learned.
First off, we've learned that it is a bad idea to purchase presents for the kids that are sold as educational toys. The give-away here is that "educational toys" is an oxymoron on par with "family vacation" and "computer literate." The only thing educational about most educational toys is that they teach parents not to buy them more than once.
This year I bought my daughter a machine which promised it would grind coarse, semi-precious stones (read: gravel) into beautifully finished, smooth jewellery which can be made into ear rings, necklaces, key-chains and such. The picture on the box shows a little girl gleefully gluing what appears to be a gorgeous tear-drop piece of polished amethyst into a necklace setting which will go perfectly with her new ear rings. On the table next to the child is the educational grinding thing which has apparently just produced a shimmering heap of precious, polished stones.
What an opportunity to teach our budding young scientist something about how nature works, I thought. I’ll get it for her. It'll be fun. The sketchy instructions on the box indicated that you just pop the rough stones (included) into the mill, add water and grinding powder, and voila! A little while later: gem stones!
Well, the little while later is 14 days - for the first grinding. Subsequent grindings will take at least a week each through increasingly finer grades of sand until the stones are finished and ready to be turned into jewellery, which I optimistically estimate may be by this time next year. Even the makers of the product admit sheepishly (in the six-language instruction booklet) that the person using this product has to keep in mind they are trying to accomplish in a short period of time what takes Mother Nature millions of years. Provided the little plastic "educational toy" has not burned out its little plastic educational electric motor before then, my daughter may be able to use the stones to make next year's Christmas presents.
Which brings us to games. There is a special place in Christmas present Hades for people who design board games requiring multi-paged booklets of instructions to play. This year my children received games with instructions that go something like: "Each player takes one token and places it on the board in opposition to the other team players. The first player on the left of the person sitting closest to the fireplace rolls the green set of dice first to indicate the beginning of the first 'Rune'. The last player to agree to be the 'Slider' or 'Big Snit' must cast the single yellow die while the other players use the egg-timer (enclosed) to time the length of the move. If the 'Scooter' does not roll a complete 'vortex' in the first three rolls, or before the egg timer runs out, he or she must move into the labyrinth and begin over. Except on every second Tuesday, in which case the 'Master of Midgaard' must shout 'Cork!' twice and..."
Well, you get the point. The games have names such as "Daunting", and according to their boxes, are suitable for children aged eight and up, but not, clearly, for their parents. My children received three such games this year.
So this year's educational toys and board games have taught me that next year it's baseball bats, soccer balls and wooden spinning tops. At least with those, you know what you are getting and how they work.

Dicing Men

2005-12-13T22:43:00.000-06:00

Well, here’s a piece of interesting news. According to research conducted by someone who obviously got a government grant, it would appear that droves of men are suddenly out there shopping for kitchen appliances. The people conducting the research are postulating that the male of the species must have started to take an interest in doing a little cooking, and as a result, he has also taken an interest in buying the kitchen gadgets needed to work some culinary magic.
This may be news to the general public, and it is certainly wonderful news for those who run kitchen gadget stores, but it is not news to men. For years guys have been slinking off to kitchen gadget stores to rummage around in the cappuccino maker and bread machine sections in the pretence of buying presents for their mates. This is all just hokum, of course. Men have not been going to kitchen stores to buy 12-speed blenders, smokeless indoor grills, and remote control meat grinders just because they’re trying to score points with their partners, or because they like to eat their own cooking. They have been going there because these places are just hardware stores for food.
If a guy wants spaghetti for dinner, he needs a large pot and that’s it. The spaghetti goes in the pot with lots of water. Once the spaghetti is cooked it goes on a plate. A jar of sauce is poured over the spaghetti which is still hot enough to warm the sauce, and presto Prego: dinner. And don’t give me that song-and-dance about men being fanatics about making their own spaghetti sauce, agonizing for hours about consistency, garlic content, and meat versus tofu. Sure, some men may do that to impress potential mates or new mother-in-laws, but most North American men couldn’t tell a strand of linguini from a lump of fettuccini. When they get really fancy, men will serve red wine, store-bought garlic bread and salad-in-a-bag with spaghetti dinner.
But tell a man that there are machines that will actually turn a sheet of dough into spaghetti, and he will suddenly approach the making of dinner with the same enthusiasm he brings to building a new deck. And of course before anything else can be done, the right tools have to be bought. This is really why men are disappearing into kitchen stores, and why they can be found in the machine section, perusing spaghetti machine users’ manuals.
After getting the machinery, a man will set about getting the ingredients for his food-building project in much the same way he buys nails, lag bolts, and lumber for a deck-building project: “A pound of meat, please, a yard of pasta dough, and a couple of quarts of stewed tomatoes – and toss in that electronic can opener. ” The beauty of building food is that you can eat the left-over parts.
The food they cook may be wonderful – men love to follow instructions for building anything, including homemade bread and stuffed mushroom caps, but it is the machines they lust after. A pasta maker comes with all sorts of blades that will, in time, hopefully, need to be sharpened, and will certainly need to be disassembled and cleaned on a regular basis. The male fantasy is to field strip, clean and reassemble a pasta maker in less than 10 minutes – 13 minutes in the dark. And what are automatic bread makers if not computers with a bucket? I mean, these devices have to be programmed in order to work – “programmed” being one of those trigger words that can set a man’s heart to pounding.
In addition to the machines, the kitchen hardware stores have an assortment of tools to make any handyman weak with desire. There are more knives in these stores than a woodworking shop. Knives for bread, meat, butter, grapefruits, escargot, and lobsters. Knives made with gorgeous wooden handles or exotic polymers. Knives that have to be cleaned, sharpened, and stored in special wooden blocks or on magnetic wall-mounted racks. And there are tools for mixing, blending, measuring, folding and stirring; tools that carve vegetables into swans and turn eggs into flowers, and tools that grind meat, squirt icing, and spread toppings. Compared to the assortment of scrapers, cutters, measuring devices and computerized implements in kitchen gadget stores, most hardware stores are woefully barren.
And storage devices! Everything used in a kitchen – especially the ingredients – has to be stored, each in its own, specially labeled container. That fact alone is enough to draw most men into the world of the culinary arts – or home food improvement as some men call it. With literally hundreds of things that have to be labeled and stored in special containers on specially constructed shelves, there are enough projects in the average kitchen to keep the average man purring with contentment without ever having to fire up the stove.
So while it is certainly true that men are hanging around kitchen gadget store in ever-increasing numbers and asking questions about things such as what cumin is used for, it is not necessarily because they are planning to cook with it; they are likely just looking for a really cool thing to store it in.

Blade Runner

2005-12-05T23:18:00.000-06:00

A tight knot of teens and pre-teens has gathered out in front of the mall. They are slouched together in that self-consciously arrogant kind of way that proclaims to the rest of the world that in the Darwinian scheme of things, they are already on the next rung of the evolutionary ladder. If only all those totally un-cool old people would just get out of the way, the next generation would finally be able to make the world run properly - free X-boxes for everyone!
And there is this to be said for a new world order where kids rule: we'd all be better dressed. These kids are dressed in clothes that a humble hack such as yours truly can only dream about. With a tailoring and shopping savvy usually associated only with the upper echelons of society, these youngsters saunter through the day with the studied indifference of the fashionably homeless.
Anyway, what these tremendously cool and beautiful young people don't realize as they cluster together, shielding themselves from the rest of the world in their hormonal fog, is that while they are busy being cool and beautiful out in front of the mall, they are also in real danger of colliding with the older generation.
Because here I come: a middle-aged ex-hippie and former member in proud good standing of the post Second World War you-can't-trust-anyone-over-thirty generation of revolutionaries, with an attitude...
...on my brand new, in-line Rollerblades.
Rollerblades, for those of you who have been living in a shelter for the tragically un-hip for the past couple of years, are genetically engineered skates which look just like regular hockey skates - only on wheels. The effect of strapping on a pair of roller blades and moving over a paved surface is that of skating on very slippery ice without the benefit of padded winter clothing.
The skates are new. In fact, I bought them earlier in the day, and I am trying them out for the first time. At the insistence of the young sales clerk - officially known as "sales dude" in the common parlance of the pre-pubescent - I also bought all the necessary appurtenances of the sport: gloves, elbow and knee pads, helmet and shin guards, with the result that I look like some ageing, out-of-control road warrior, bent on self-destruction.
As I come down the hill and through the underpass by the Canadian Tire store, I am approaching a speed of Mach II, and it feels great! The skates are humming; the wind is whistling in my helmet straps. And I think: this is easy!
"More power, Scotty! We need more power!"
"The engines won't stand for it, Captain. We'll lose the ship!!"
"I don't care! Bones, go help Scotty. We need warp nine!"
"Damn it, Jim. I'm a simple country doctor, not a warp coil engineer..."
Then, coming around the corner of the Canadian Tire, I see that I am targeting the group of kids, and I suddenly realize that there is no way to stop a pair of in-line skates - at least none that I have found. I begin a frantic search for some place to touch down that won't involve an extended stay in hospital. Roaring through the underpass like a runaway freight train, I catch a glimpse of some graffiti spray-painted on the limestone: “Jesus Saves!” It says. I sure hope so.
The kids hear me before they see me. Somehow the sound of my run-away train has managed to penetrate the icy fog of self-absorption shrouding the kids, and they look around with the puzzled expressions of a flock of ducks hearing the sound of shotguns being loaded.
Then they part before me like slender willows bending before the onslaught of a flash flood, leaning gracefully out of harm's way as I go careening down the side walk, arms wind-milling, skates smoking, eyes shut, mouth open. And as I burst through the group, my performance is rated by the experts: "Awesome," is the verdict. "Totally out of control!" which is intended as a compliment, but which is also an accurate description of my condition. Whatever else they say is lost in the growing distance between me and them, but they are clearly impressed.
Fortunately, the side walk has a slight upward slope before petering out at the mall parking lot, and I manage a safe, if not very graceful, landing on a small patch of grass.
Later, soaking in a bath of Epsom salts, I reflect that all in all, it has been a pretty good day. I gained a fundamental understanding of a new sport (learn how to stop), and I had a brief but meaningful interchange with members of the normally uncommunicative younger generation.
The moral of the story seems to be that there may not be as much of a difference between generations as we are sometimes led to believe, and that the difference may be in how we go about living our lives. Learning how to roller-blade may not get me a better job or establish me as some kind of pillar of the community, but it surely does make the heart beat a little faster, and it reminds me that the characterization "crazy" can sometimes be a compliment.

The People's Railroad

2005-11-26T10:08:00.000-06:00

When I have to come to Toronto, I usually take the train. I like taking the train because I can pretend I’m getting some work done while I travel.
The only problem with the train is that it’s – well – slow and boring. Compared to trains in Europe, for instance, riding on the Via rail is about as exciting an experience as riding in an elevator.
Which is why I was very excited last year to learn that Via was about to add a new super-duper train called "IC 3 Flexliner" to its fleet. Not only would the new train be much faster, what was especially thrilling was the news that the new train was made in Denmark, the country of my origin.
As those North Americans not from America will know, Denmark is in Europe. The reason why a lot of things are done the way they are around the world has to do with what has happened in Europe over the years. Mostly, it seems, Europeans spent a lot of their time trying to get from where they were to some place else. Columbus was from Europe, for instance, and so was Napoleon.
Anyway, if you look on a map of Europe, you will see a little tiny bit that sticks up from the northern coast of Germany like a tuft of hair on a bald head. That's Denmark. Denmark is about the size of Prince Edward Island. To put things in perspective, most of Denmark would fit inside the Skydome.
Denmark is a part of Europe known as "Scandinavia" which is Nordic for "no more pickled herring and schnapps for me, thanks," and has also had a hand in producing Scandinavian Surprise Furniture which comes in large cardboard boxes and can be assembled into desks, book shelves, beds, kitchens, bath rooms and two-story cottages using only an Allen key. Just about everything made in Denmark needs to be assembled before it can be put to use.
The Flexliner, by the way, is able to travel at 120 miles per hours, which is interesting when you stop to think that Denmark is barely 120 miles long end-to-end.
When Via took the media on a jaunt from London to Ingersoll last year, the Flexliner reached a speed of 90 miles per hour, which was terribly exciting for the passengers, but not so exciting for the livestock. Because the Danes live in such a small country, they have become very good at designing small things. Danish cars are very small. So are the horns that go into these cars, horns that make the same sound small dogs do when they get their tails caught in the door. Not surprisingly, this being a Danish train, the Flexliner has such a horn, only it is very loud and the driver of the train liked to hear it. Canadian cows and horses are used to Canadian trains with their Canadian train whistles, but they sure don't think much of the sound the Flexliner makes as it comes roaring down the track at 90 miles an hour making a sound like a small animal in distress. "Look at those cows run!" was the excited comment from one of the normally unflappable media people.
I thought the train was very nice, except for the horn, and it didn't fall off the track even at 90 miles an hour, which was very reassuring. But whether it will change the way VIA is operated remains to be seen: the train was 20 minutes late leaving the station on the day of the media tour, and I haven’t seen it since. Maybe the VIA Rail people are having trouble finding the Allan key.

Name your Food

2005-11-17T10:32:00.000-06:00

Who came up with the notion that the more exotic and unpronounceable the name of a food item, the more desirable it is? Whoever it was, they didn’t do the Canadian restaurant goers any service. Studies conducted by your humble correspondent through personal experiences have shown that trying to order shiitake mushrooms, for instance, can only result in public humiliation. There is no way a newcomer to the rarefied world of haute cuisine can encounter the word “shiitake” in a menu and not mispronounce it.
The popularity of exotic food names in restaurants is particularly bad news for Canadian restaurant-goers because Canadians hate having to ask questions about our food in public places – which, incidentally, explains the success of KFC’s “popcorn” chicken. A true Canadian will eat a piece of raw meat in a restaurant rather than complain about it being under-cooked. Now that patrons are opening their menus only to be confronted by a list of food items apparently written in Sanskrit, rather than risk appearing ignorant, or - heaven forbid – upsetting the waitperson, the customer is likely to order what sounds as harmless as possible, without first finding out what they are actually about to put in their mouths.
“Is the pomelo fresh?” Someone might ask, unaware that they are about to dine on a giant Malaysian grapefruit. Or “How’s the pfeffernuesse?” If you can pronounce it, you can have it, as long as you like lots of pepper with your cookies. You think that couple over there at that table in the corner really wanted a large bowl of parsley for lunch? No, they wanted pasta. But they saw “persillade” on the menu, and assumed they were going to get some kind of spaghetti. Will they complain? Not a chance.
If restaurants must insist on using exotic names in their menus, they should at least bracket some simple explanation next to it so we gustatory neophytes can know what we are ordering as we mangle the names. What is “Quenelle”, for instance. A bird? A spice? Five of something? Not at all, it is Vegetable dumplings. Or “mortadella.” The name of an Italian soprano? A Spanish expletive? A character in a Shakespearean play (“Oh, sweet Mortadella, I take thy brother for a codpiece…”)? Wrong again. Mortadella is the Italian sausage which was first saddled with the moniker “bologna”. (As for the codpiece, don’t ask. It has nothing whatsoever to do with fish).
Is there a reason why people encounter “boule” instead of bread in certain restaurants, and “shoga” instead of ginger? Well, sure. Who is going to fork over $6.00 for a loaf of bread? But a basket of boule fresh from the kitchen, that’s worth something! And if it is “ficelle”, we’ll even pay a little extra, unless we realize that this is just a thin loaf of bread. And $11:50 for a plate of noodles? I don’t think so. But for an order of fideos? You bet.
Finally, a few words of warning about exotically named foods: surimi is not sushi, and sushi is not cooked. Sunomono is not a disease, but it may have seaweed and spinach in it, and stromboli is not the name of a 1940s Hollywood director, but a sandwich invented in Philadelphia. A squidhound, by the way, is a kind of fish and not somebody’s exotic canine pet, so go ahead and order it if you want – it is actually very good. But stay away from the codpiece.
Bon Appetit

Koffee Kulture

2005-11-09T20:24:00.000-06:00

The latest news from the people who study the effects of coffee on human beings is that drinking coffee may or may not be good for you. This is very good news for those Canadians who drink coffee – which is every Canadian not actually being breast-fed. Unlike smoking, which every medical group not actually employed by the tobacco industry has determined is bad for people, the evidence regarding the effects of coffee is that it gives consumers more energy, making them smarter, taller, thinner, younger, stronger, richer, better dressed and resistant to mold and mildew.
This explains why all the people hanging out in posh (a Latin word meaning the opposite of “instant”), coffee shops are all young, smart, thin, etc.
The bad news is that coffee may also be bad for people, making them irritable and prone to fits of impulse shopping. This would explain Toronto. In a number of studies where rats were fed a steady diet of double-latte espresso for a month, the researchers found that the rats developed a tendency to quit their jobs because they felt they were under-appreciated, and to walk off movie sets in a huff because they thought the other rats were untalented, second-rate hacks. Some of the rats were also observed punching tow-truck operators in the snout when the rats’ BMWs were towed away from no-parking zones - what the researchers are referring to a rodent-like pre-psychotic rage.
Whether or not human beings are likely to develop the same symptoms is unknown, but researchers are concerned. Some of the early warning signs of coffee-induced pre-psychotic rages include the ability to list all the specialty coffees served at Starbucks, in spite of not actually being employed there, and an unreasonable desire to be able to distinguish by smell alone a coffee bean grown in the mountains of Rwanda from a bean grown in the foothills of the Andes. Anyone spotting their friends wandering around aimlessly, mumbling the ingredients for a extra long double orange mocha-chino regular latte with cinnamon and chocolate sprinkles with foam, in a mug, should call the nearest Gen-X coffee shop where the staff have been trained to immediately dispatch a courier with an emergency bag of chocolate-covered espresso beans.
Not surprisingly, the Tea-drinker’s Council of Canada has tried to launch a campaign against the so-called Koffee Kulture which has North America in its grip. Also not surprisingly, the effort has been a dismal failure, resulting in little more than groups of aging Yuppies sitting around in their Birkenstocks, listening to scratchy Peter, Paul and Mary albums, sipping cups of tepid Earl Grey tea, trying not to notice how much like their parents they have become. A recent press release issued by the Tea Council, written in a rather fruity British accent, extolled the virtues of tea as a health-giving drink, suggested that a daily dose of four infusions of green tea would restore hair loss and lift fallen arches. Much of impact of the press release was lost, however, because a picture of Patrick Stewart was included with it. Sadly, the press release was ultimately all but ignored after a number of newspaper editors used it as a coaster, leaving coffee rings all over it and rendering it all but unreadable.
When asked how they felt about switching from coffee to tea, patrons of a local up-scale coffee emporium (from the Greek “emporium” meaning “outrageously over-priced”) responded by punching the reporter in the nose, and then impulsively purchasing croissants for everybody in the establishment before dashing outside to see if their BMWs had been towed.

Personal Nagger

2005-10-31T10:06:00.000-06:00

Do you know what time it is? Do you know if you are late for an appointment? Do you remember the telephone number of the person you were supposed to call today?
Well, you would if you owned a Personal Digital Assistant or PDA as they are also called.
PDAs are the latest offering from a computer industry which is continually trying to find better ways to organize our lives. These little electronic organizers come in a variety of shapes and sizes, and can do everything from telling you how much money you have in the bank, to reminding you of your next dentist appointment. The promise of the PDA is that you will never be late or forgetful again.
I like the concept of a personal organizer a lot. When I look at my desk or flip through the ink-smeared pages of my scheduler, I realize that I am hopelessly organizationally challenged. These little organizers promise can finally make me orderly and efficient by tracking my appointments, recording phone numbers and storing more information. They won't make coffee or find my car in the mall parking lot, but they will whip up a schedule of all the things I'm going to be late for in a day or a week or a year, and they will keep track of all the people whose phone calls I forget to return, and they will beep at you when you are supposed to do something or go somewhere. Come to think of it, what these organizers are is not so much organizing devices as “personal naggers.”
The most publicized Personal Nagger was the Newton. Remember the Newton? Made by Apple Corporation, this little wonder was about the size of a paperback novel, and functioned much like the old-fashioned steno-pad in that you would write notes on the screen of the thing, and your notes would then be electronically stored until you needed them again.
What was so great about the Newton was that it would transform your illegible handwriting into equally indecipherable print, all for only about 800 bucks, or the price of roughly 592 steno pads.
I actually owned a Newton for awhile, and spent weeks trying to make it work properly.
The way the device was supposed to work was that I scribbled my notes on the screen of the Newton with a little plastic stick. Then, at the end of each line, my scribbles transformed magically into print, except that the machine could never figure out what I was writing, so I might write something like "Don't forget, or you'll be late for your meeting with Mr. Big at two this afternoon!" which the computer happily translated into "Down fool, or your flight will be leaving for Bangkok at two with aftershave!"
But wait, there's more: For a little extra, I could get a device that would let me fax my messages from the Newton to all my friends and co-workers. So instead of finding a fax with the message "You're still on for lunch today?" waiting for them in their office in the morning, my co-workers would get: "You're a bunch of goons, hooray!"
The Newton may not have lasted, but the industry promises that bigger and better hand-held Personal Naggers are on the way. These new devices will apparently have answering machines and telephones attached, but as far as I am concerned, if they aren't able to decipher my handwriting any better, all they will likely do is continue to provide people with hours of inter-office communications fun, just as the Newton did.
I still have my Newton, by the way, and I still use it. That’s it over there, an 800 dollar coaster for my coffee mug.
Still organizationally challenged, I’m Otte Rosenkrantz

Snow Job

2005-10-24T09:18:00.000-05:00

It was pretty exciting watching El Niño in the fall, wasn’t it?
I, and every other house-owner I know, watched the development of the 1997 El Niño with special interest because, along with everything else this peculiar weather pattern does, it is supposed to cut down on the amount of snow that falls in my part of The Great White North.
According to the people who know about these things, El Niño is an oceanic and atmospheric phenomenon in the Pacific Ocean along the western coast of Ecuador and Peru which causes climatic disturbances of varying severity around the world. El Niño comes along every three to seven years, which is, coincidentally, about how often I contemplate purchasing a snow-blower. But I didn’t this year because, once again, El Niño’s promise of a mild winter with minimal snowfall lulled me into a false sense of frugality.
The problem is that winter only lasts four, maybe five months in my part of the country, with only about three months of heavy snowfall. So the only time I really want a snow-blower is on February the 15th at 6:30 in the morning, when the world is as dead, dark and frozen as the inside of my car’s battery, and I am standing in three feet of freshly fallen slush, my house coat flapping around my knees, try to calculate how much weight I can shift with my bent, 10-pound aluminum snow shovel before I can expect getting either frostbite or some kind of nasty lower back injury.
It doesn’t help any that two doors away, my neighbour waves cheerfully at me, hot cup of coffee in hand, as he surges through the cement-like snow at the helm of his brand-new, self-propelled, fully automatic, self-starting SnowMeister which is effortlessly launching the frozen, gray-white slurry clogging his driveway in a graceful arch onto some other hapless neighbour’s driveway. In the time it takes me to clear a little space around my soggy feet, he has cleared his driveway and the sidewalk in front of three houses.
I bought the euphemistically named snow shovel at a yard sale in June for a buck and a half. Here is how my thinking went when I saw the thing: shoveling snow is good exercise. I really remember thinking those words. Standing there in my shorts and T-shirt under a brilliant summer sun, I actually felt that shoveling freezing rain out of my driveway in February would be something I should ENJOY! It would be an invigorating start to my day, and it would provide me with a good cardio-vascular workout without my having to join a health club, I thought, exhibiting the same short-term memory problem that causes me to plan summer canoe-trips involving me having to carry the canoe over portages.
Besides, I said to myself as I handed over my money to a disbelieving yard-sales person, we don’t really get that much snow, so why spend all that money on a snow-blower which will just wind up rusting in my garage anyway? And everybody knows how noisy they are, and how much they pollute. This, of course, is the same line of logic which, if followed, would lead me to forego buying a lawn mower in favor of cutting the grass with scissors.
By now I am possibly the only person on the street without a SnowMeister, and I can feel as morally and environmentally superior as I like while I scoop spoon-sized chunks of ice and snow out of the mountain of slag the snowplow just deposited in my driveway. The fact remains that starting with the very first yard sale in the spring - El Niño or no - I am going to be on the look-out for a good, used, SnowMeister of my very own!
I do have a pretty good snow shovel to trade, though, if anyone is interested. It is a lot cheaper than joining a health club!

Desk

2005-10-10T21:04:00.000-05:00

The reason people like myself want a home office is that they have home computers which help them run home-based businesses. Home computers come with big monitors, printers, scanners, telephones, fax machines, about a mile of wires and cables, and sometimes little TV cameras so that your clients can enjoy seeing what you look like in your underwear when they call you unexpectedly at 8:30 in the morning.
The problem with all this office paraphernalia is that there has to be some place to put it. For years I’ve been using the ancient oak desk which saw me through ten years of university, and upon which I used to change the diapers of both my children. The desk is about as big as a king-size bed, and has drawers in it I could rent out as apartments. Unfortunately the desk was designed at a time when the Underwood typewriter was the latest in word processing technology, meaning that the desk had lots of surface area, but no shelves. I could spread an entire library of books on its expansive, scarred surface, but by the time I stacked all my high-tech telephone and computer accoutrements on it, there was hardly enough room left to for me to scribble notes on pieces of scrap paper.
But after eight years of trying make do by adding side tables and stacking hardware on top of dictionaries on top of the desk, I finally gave up and went to an office supply store to see what was new in computer desks.
And I found the perfect solution! A combined corner desk and “computer unit” that had shelves and cubby-holes for all the hardware, monitors, disks, and reference manuals, all while tucking all those unsightly cables and wires neatly out of the way. True, it was fake oak on pressboard unlike my old desk which is as solid and heavy as the tree it came from, but who cared? With this unit, I could finally organize and tidy my home office and become the productive, creative “homepreneur” I know I can be.
“How much?” I asked the salesperson.
Surprisingly little, as it turned out for such an elaborate piece of furniture which, incidentally, is not called a computer “desk”, but a computer “console”. This particular unit was called “The Bridge”, presumably after the control center of the Starship Enterprise.
“There is one thing, though,” the salesguy added. “There is some assembly required.”
Some?
He looked sheepish. “Well, a lot, actually. The unit does not come assembled – at all. It is shipped in two large, flat cardboard boxes. You have to put the whole thing together yourself.”
I looked at The Bridge, at the drawers, cabinets, adjustable shelves, the ergonomically correct footrest, fully adjustable desktop, the slanted monitor shelf and the printer stand with the cute little built-in light.
“How much extra for you to put it together?” I asked
“A hundred and fifty bucks.”
Never mind. I mean how hard could it be to do it myself? A few screws, a little glue…
When The Bridge was delivered four weeks later, it came, as advertised, in two large, flat cardboard boxes each weighing approximately what I do. After wrestling them into the hallway, I started to unpack the contents. The first thing I found was a large plastic pillowcase filled with the most amazing assortment of screws, fasteners and nails, as well as a huge collection of plastic and metal bits and pieces the likes of which I have never encountered anywhere before.
And a book of instruction about the size of the average James Mitchener novel.
Step 1. “Sort and count contents of hardware package. If any parts are missing, please contact…” some remote place in Paulo Alto. The stuff in the plastic bag, in other words, might not all be there. At a guess, I would say there were about half a million little bits and pieces in the bag. I would also guess that at the end of the project, I would be more likely to have pieces left over than any missing.
Step 2. “Insert flanges 1AA (29) into pre-drilled anchors 2B and 15F (27) using a Grindstaff Lever (not supplied), and attach with the long Wilson Dowels. CAUTION: be sure to apply the glue AFTER the resin damper has evaporated completely. If you use the SHORT Wilson Dowels, you will damage the Doodads.”
It went on like that for some 15 chapters in the instruction book.
But, as The Bard almost said, all’s well that ends.” After only 10 hours of work, I am now writing this on “The Bridge” of my new computer console which hardly wobbles at all. Best of all, I have enough grommets, screws, spindles, nails and bits of wood left over to make myself a decent little coffee table to go with my new desk.

Foodsex

2005-09-30T18:28:00.000-05:00

Remember the commercial about the butter-basted turkey that used to come on television every year about this time? The commercial featured the plump, golden brown flesh on the firm body of a gracefully presented turkey, while the announcer described in sultry tones how warm butter had been made to melt and flow over the breasts and legs of the delicious creature. By the time the commercial was finished, viewers sat transfixed, staring at their televisions, unsure if the feelings that had been elicited by the ad had to do with hunger or lust. It is not clear what the ad did for the sale of turkeys, but demographics would undoubtedly show that the months following the appearance of the ad saw an increase in the population.
That commercial marks what may well have been the first flirtatious overtures in the love affair with food which aging baby-boomers have carried on over the past ten or fifteen years, a love affair which more recently has crosses the boundaries from a sweet courtship to a torrid love affair. Once in the forefront of the sexual revolution, survivors of the era that held a special reverence for that cook-book of love, the Kama Sutra, the Boomers are now realizing that their physical prowess is going to pot. Reluctant to give up the pleasures of the flesh, they have turned their prodigious appetites and need for physical satisfaction to the oral gratification of food. The craving for free love has become a craving for complimentary business lunches; clarified butter has replaced warmed patchouli oil. Whipped cream is now judged for its flavor and texture rather than for its spreadability.
Restaurants - those gastronomical erogenous zones of an insatiable generation - are especially guilty of having become culinary bordellos of comestible delights. Listen as we ask our server to tell us about the steamed asparagus: "They have been lovingly prepared," he murmurs, "until they are ready for your enjoyment; firm, yet tender, their tips delicately dipped in a tangy, lemon-butter sauce." And how do we eat the artichoke? "Peel away and suck each delicious leaf until the young, tender heart is revealed in all its luscious glory." And the olive oil which he sprinkles on the cool, crisp leaves of the side salad? Extra virgin, a futile pleonastic image if ever there was one.
But perhaps the most flagrant gustatory exhibitionism is to be found in the promotional literature that accompanies the savor fetish of the fading flower children. With suggestive titles such as "The Insider's Report", readers of these tempation tracts are treated to a virtual cornucopia of alluring foods and delicious recipes, all presented with a soft-porn flavour that promise "sumptuous cheesecakes", "wickedly wonderful" chocolate chip cookies, "luscious" banana cream fillings, and a instant hot white chocolate which is "silky, creamy and as white as the driven snow." Here is an ice cream which is "Sophisticated and seductive all at once." Should you eat it or marry it? And while to decide where to dip your spoon, the cheesecake will continue to tempt you away, promising that once you have involved yourself with it, you will be "drawn back, irresistibly, for more and more."
Gone is the anemic tofu, the gaseous bean, the celibate celery and the limp lentil, replaced by the warming embrace of chocolate fondues, the loving nibbles of cheddar cheese slices, and the amorous foreplay of chocolate-dipped strawberries served with an impertinent but feisty little white wine.
The sexual conquests of the sixties may be nothing more than fading memories now, but they have been replaced by the equally sensuous, all-encompassing intimacy of culinary orgies.
You’ve got to hand it to the Boomers: they still know how to get it on, even if it is only on buttery sourdough bread.

Drafted into the Cold War

2005-09-21T22:05:00.000-05:00

Well, there I was, sitting in my easy chair, reading the adventures of Captain Hornblower of His Royal Majesty’s Britannic Navy, feeling warm and content as I listened to the winter storm pile up the snow outside. My cat, Paws for Thought, was curled on a blanket on my lap, purring contentedly, and I had a mug of hot chocolate steaming on the table beside me. It doesn’t get any better than this, I thought, settling myself even further into the cushions. Then I asked myself that most dangerous of all questions: what could possibly spoil this perfect Saturday afternoon?
The answer, as it turned out, was blowing in the wind, or, more accurately, carried on the draft. The wind outside howled, and from somewhere, the house made an answering sigh, a sigh that wafted its chilly breath across my arm.
I had been drafted.
I waited. Maybe I had been mistaken. But no, there it was again: a tiny breath of frozen air infiltrating from the frozen heart of another Canadian winter.
The moment was spoiled. The cold gust of air was like money burning in the grate, and there was no way I would be able to settle down to join Captain Hornblower in his noble struggle against Bonaparte until I had located and plugged the leak.
A draft in a house is like a hole in the roof. Sometimes it IS a hole in the roof. With the temperature outside hovering at somewhere around cold enough to freeze the tires off your car, I was not about to let my hard-earned heating dollar be wafted out a crack in my walls. As my father used to say: “I am not paying to keep the sparrows warm!” Which was usually followed by the observation that contrary to what his family apparently thought, he was not made of money either.
Anyway, I cast off my blanket, put Paws for Thought on the couch, Hornblower next to the hot chocolate, and proceeded in good, Canadian fashion, to spend my Saturday in search of a daft.
I started by performing the familiar Frozen Homeowner Waltz: I removed my sweater and shirt, and stood in the middle of the living room in my undershirt, my bare arms stretched out on either side of my body to help me detect the errant breeze as I turned slowly in a complete circle. Nope, the daft was not here. A couple of quick hops, and I was back in my chair again, trying to recreate the moment when the draft and I had first encountered each other, my arms moving slowly around me like sensitive antennae, each hair alert for any sign of cold. The wind howled, and sure enough, there it was again: that soft, unmistakable, feathery feeling of a small but chilly zephyr travelling through the room.
I leapt from the chair and fell to my hands and knees. Drafts are know to try to sneak through a house by keeping close to the hardwood floors. Only by moving slowly along on all fours, close to the floor, can a draft sleuth hope to track these heat robbers to their lair. Keeping my skin finely attuned to the sensation of winter’s freezing finger probing my house, I started to trace the intruder to the source to plug up the breech in my home defenses. Hornblower himself could not have paid greater attention to detail as he tried to ferret out Napoleon and his minions.
By careful, slow movements, I tracked the puffs of cold to the back hallway, but lost them by the basement door. Now here was a conundrum. The laws of homeowner physics dictate that cold air slips into the basement, especially in the summer when the air conditioner is on and you really need the cold air upstairs. But this time there was no trace of cold air under the tightly sealed door.
I brought out the heavy artillery: I lit a cigar. Lying on my stomach on the linoleum in the back hall in my T-shirt, smoking, trying to track the origin of the draft from the direction of the smoke, I thought that I must have looked odd indeed to all but other Canadians. If one of my neighbours were to have walked in through the back door at that moment, they would have taken one look at me, and then gotten down on the floor next to me, squinting at the smoke to see which way it was blowing.
Well, about half a cigar later, I found the leak: loose mortar around a couple of bricks under the back door step, easily repaired with a little injectable, expandable insulation foam.
I returned to my chair, to my lukewarm hot chocolate and my Hornblower. Most of the afternoon was gone, but I was pleased to have scored a small victory in the never-ending Canadian Cold War.

Into the great, wide open.

2005-09-09T13:55:00.000-05:00

A friend of mine just bought a beautiful, brand new, gorgeous, open concept, fully landscaped home in a new development just outside of town. The house is breath-taking, with English ivy climbing all over the brick walls, and a fabulous, oversized porch framed by full, blooming lilacs. Lush, rolling hills of perfectly manicured British Empire lawns, shaded by towering oaks and maple trees, surround the building. And the view! That charming vista of the fertile river valley with that crystal-clear trout stream is stunning… You should see it!
Well, come to think of it, so should he, because the place isn’t actually built yet. What my friend has bought is really only a good-sized patch of semi-frozen mud, and a really excellent architectural rendering of a builder’s very pretty and ambitious dream. But does that deter my friend from carrying on about his new home like the only thing standing between him and his first house-warming party is a second coat of paint on the kitchen wall? Not a bit. He warbles on about perennial borders, wild-flower meadows, shaded hammocks, herb gardens, and Sunday brunches on the sun-drenched patio with the enthusiasm of a grounds-keeper at Balmoral castle.
He has obviously lost complete contact with reality, but in all fairness, isn’t it like that for all new homeowners? When we fall in love with an idea, don’t we all go blind to the reality? As I contemplate at my friend’s property, all I have visions of are my boots being sucked into the tundra-like mud if I were to walk around on it. He, on the other hand, sees children lawn-bowling in the sun on freshly cut putting-green grass that has yet to be seeded, or swinging on a tire suspended from the stout limb of the venerable maple tree that hasn’t been planted yet.
And it doesn’t make the slightest difference when I point out to him that the only thing even vaguely resembling a meandering river in a fertile valley is the trickle of muddy water draining through the tire track left by the cement truck pouring the foundation for the house on the neighbouring lot. Nor will he listen as I question him about how he plans to turn his field- of- muck into a rolling estate field-of-dreams.
“Look.” I tell him, waving the architect’s drawing under my friend’s nose. “In order for the builder to create something even vaguely resembling this picture, he would have to give you all the land in this entire subdivision! Not to mention make a river run through it!”
But he not only doesn’t see, he apparently can’t hear either. He is seeing truck-loads of topsoil sculpting his little slice of the Canadian dream into a golf course, tiny nursery seedlings miraculously taking root and transforming themselves into fully formed shrubs and trees, and pits of clay sprouting flowerbeds and herb gardens. And all he hears is the happy chirping of birds.
What he doesn’t realize, of course, is that the artist’s renderings is called artists’ renderings for a reason. Sure, in about sixty years there may indeed be stately maples and regal oaks spreading their sheltering branches over the house, and there may also be flower beds, ponds, and herb gardens. But unless we have another ice age in the next century, it is not likely that a riverbed will be carved through any valley. Still, with a little luck, lilac bushes and strategically placed shrubbery may some day hide the other houses in the development from view.
The problem is that when my friend first saw the building lots advertised, the ad promised that the lots would be “landscaped.” And in order to entice would-be buyers, the artist drew was what in his solvent-addled brain passed for a fair representation of what a landscaped lot might look like. To top it all off, in his euphoric new-home-owner state my poor friend has failed to realize that some of the other houses in the new development are already up and “landscaped,” and that this landscaping consists of some grass-covered mounds of dirt alongside the drive ways, a few tiny juniper bushes that look far too small to have been separated from their mothers, and a willowy little white birch too thin to support a sparrow.
But I am not worried about my friend. Having been through it myself, I know that the strength of his illusion is greater than any reality. It will be many months before he becomes even dimly aware that he is not exactly dealing with the Royal Botanical Gardens here. By then his trees will be at least as tall as he is, and he will have stopped running over his tiny shrubs with his lawnmower. And anyway, he will be spending most of his time surveying his estate from a kneeling position as he plants, transplants and weeds, and things will always look much larger from that vantage point. When it comes to landscaping, beauty - and proportion - will always be in the eye of the devoted beholder.

The guest room

2005-09-02T07:55:00.000-05:00

When we were looking for a new home, one of the things that got our real estate agent really excited was the fact that the house she was showing us had a guestroom.
“Look,” she said, opening the door to a very nice bedroom. “Here is a lovely little room where your guests can stay. Isn’t it nice?” Well, sure it was nice. In fact, it was nicer that some apartments I have lived in. The closet alone could have been rented out as a bachelor.
Anyway, apparently buying a house with a guest room meant that we had somehow “arrived,” never mind the fact that in some 20 years of living in houses without guest rooms, what few overnight guests we hosted were perfectly happy sleeping on the roll-out bed in the family room.
But now we were ready. The real estate agent had been so excited about the guest room that we were starting to feel as if we were opening a bed-and-breakfast for visiting foreign dignitaries. We bought a four-poster bed for the guest room, and had a designer come in to create something called a “window treatment,” which actually looked very much like what I used to think of as “curtains.” (Small joke: what’s the difference between a window treatment and a curtain? About 300 bucks). Then we went to an antique store and paid more for a “primitive” Quebec nightstand than I paid for my first car, after which we drove all the way to a lighting store in Toronto so we could take out a second mortgage in order to buy a lamp for the aforementioned nightstand. The wallpaper we imported from France at a price that allowed the child of the importer to attend university, and the throw rug we put on the floor next to the bed was hand made by a group of Shaker women at a small commune in New Hampshire. It was the only rug the women made all year, and the income from the sale of the rug bought the commune a new barn.
The painting we hung over the bed was the crowning touch, but by this time the bank was starting to make nervous noises using words such as “overdrawn” and “repossession,” so we had to settle for an original watercolour by someone who just paints an awful lot like one of the Group of Seven.
When the room was finally finished, it was just about the most perfect thing I have ever seen. Five star hotels in New York would have been envious. People would have paid to sleep in there. The duvet on the bed was as warm and fluffy as only the hand-picked down from 150 Avon swans could make it, and although no human head had yet rested on the pillows so lovingly enfolded in Italian linen, just looking at them was restful and calming.
With the room completed, ready to enfold any overnight guests in an embrace of soothing luxury, we closed the door as tenderly as one closed the bedroom door to the room of a newborn child. It was everything our real estate agent could have hoped for. We had even bought a leather-bound guest book.
Time passed. The children grew older. The guest room remained in its pristine condition since most of our friends live within easy driving distance and, with children of their own, are not inclined to stay overnight. Our children had plenty of friends for sleepovers, but the guestroom was absolutely out of bounds to small, chocolate-covered fingers and Play-Do stained pets.
Then one day we bought a new couch, and the inevitable happened. The question of what to do with the old couch was finally resolved by our reluctant decision to put it in what was suddenly no longer the “guest room,” but the “spare room.” I’m not when the demotion happened, but putting the ratty old couch into the “spare room” was not as painful as putting it in the “guest room” would have been.
The couch was the slippery slope. A few weeks after the couch it was the blanket box with the broken lid I hope to get around to repairing sometime after I retire. Then, a couple of months ago, we found the kids, their friends, our cat, and a dog we had never seen before, building a fort in the spare room.
That was the end of the guest room. After being a show-piece guest room, it became a sort of spare room/storage area/hobby room and children’s playground.
When we finally did have a guest come to spend night, he slept very comfortably on the fold-out bed in the family room.

Propagating the Exotic

2005-08-22T07:48:00.000-05:00

Spring is coming.
Well, Ok, so there's winter to go through yet, but next spring is just around the corner, and if you haven’t started planning your garden yet, it’s high time you got started.
But what are you going to grow next summer that will be different from this year? Got anything exciting lined up? Marigolds? Daisies? Pansies? More chrysanthemums? Boring, boring, boring. Why not try some jojoba this summer? Or some rauwolfia? And when was the last time you wandered through your garden and stopped to smell the camphor? Growing exotic plants may well become one of the hot gardening fads of the new millennium, and if it does, I will be on stem-cutting edge of it.
It started a few years ago when a friend of mine gave me a eucalyptus early in the spring. It was small and very pretty, and the leaves smelled like – well, like eucalyptus. And it grew. It grew very big, very quickly. To learn something about the care and feeding on my little plant, I looked up “eucalyptus” in an encyclopedia, and found the following: “Next to the Douglas fir and the giant redwoods of the American West, the tallest tree in the world is the giant gum (Eucalyptus regnans) of Australia, which grows to more than 300 feet (90 meters) high”
Tree?
Tallest tree in the world??
My friend hadn’t said anything about little eucalyptus plants turning into giant trees! I have eight foot ceilings! And at the rate the plant was growing, I’d be putting a tree-house in it before winter.
The encyclopedia also said something about koalas, and how they are attracted to these trees because the bears eat nothing by eucalyptus leaves. But I had already told the kids that more pets was out of the question.
As it turned out, I wouldn’t have to worry about cutting holes in my roof or picking up bags of koala chow or koala litter. What the encyclopedia unfortunately didn’t tell me was that big as the eucalyptus plant might become, it hates being transplanted. As soon as the “little” eucalyptus reached six feet – about a week after I got it – I decided to transplant it into a bigger pot, and the thing curled up and died faster than you can say “root shock”.
But in the course of rummaging around on the Internet searching for ways to look after eucalyptus trees, and what to feed visiting koalas, I came across a place that sent odd and exotic plants and seeds through the mail. I ordered myself a quinine plant.
The reason I ordered a quinine is not so much that I am afraid of getting malaria; the chances of me getting malaria while in-line skating on the bike paths down by the river are slim. But the plant name reminded me of my grandfather who had traveled the world, and had some first-hand experience with the disease. He once told me that quinine can cure malaria, which may have explained his inordinate fondness for gin and tonic, given that there is quinine in the tonic. What he didn’t tell me was exactly how to get the quinine out of the plant, but I guess it really doesn’t matter since, if I ever should get malaria, I plan to take my quinine as my grandfather did, rather than chew on bark.
But for now that doesn’t matter. What matters is that the quinine is a very slow grower and will neither need to be transplanted in the near future, nor is it likely to attract koala bears.
The upshot of all this is that I got the “exotic plant” bug. I have successfully grown bay laurel, failed miserably at cultivating Vietnamese rau om, and killed enough jasmine to keep me in potpourri for some time to come. My castor bean plant looks like a maple tree - I have no idea what it is supposed to look like - and there are seeds in my freezer which have to be frozen before they will germinate, although having lost the package they came in, I can’t remember what they are.
I am not sure what my new-found hobby has cost me so far – plants that grow in to the tallest trees in the world are not exactly cheap – but I am learning a lot about things such as scarifying seeds, grafting, budding, root division, stem layering, air layering, shoot cuttings, root cuttings, cloning, micro propagation, vegetative propagation, asexual propagation; sexual propagation; seed production, bulb production, sprig production, spore production, mycelium production, not to mention sowing, drilling, planting, replanting, transplanting, potting, etc.
So I can hardly wait for summer. It looks like it will be a particularly good year for moleplant.

Hans Across the Water

2005-08-11T07:40:00.000-05:00

Things are getting hot in the Arctic. Denmark, which claims to own a 1.3 square kilometre hunk of rock called Hans Island between the coast of Greenland and Ellesmere Island in the Nares Strait, has sent a warship to the region to protect the island from further incursions by the Canadian military. The fact that there would barely be room on the island for both Canadian and Danish personnel to engage in a rousing game of arm wrestling, much less actual fighting, is of no matter. The Danes claim the rock as their property, and Canada will be scuppered if it will conceded the land without a fight – or at least a good shoving match.
Comparisons have been sombrely drawn between the rising tensions around who owns Hans Island, and the war in the Falklands – also known as the Maldives – in 1982. But the comparison does not stand up. For one thing, the Falklands have sheep and grass and houses and people. Hans Island has lichen – and very little lichen at that. For another, the world powers that clashed over the Falklands were England and Argentina, both countries with attitude, and the military might to back that attitude. The countries locked in a diplomatic spat over an Arctic island that doesn’t even have guano on it are Canada and Denmark, countries better known for trying to get the rest of the world to calm down than for flexing their own military might.
Having Canada and Denmark sword rattling at each other over Hans Island is a bit like having a couple of eight-graders at computer camp challenging each other to a pillow fight over who gets the top bunk: it really doesn’t matter, and the other kids find the posturing funny.
There has, of course, been no lack of experts getting up on television to talk about the gravity of this situation, and why we should all stop snickering and take this seriously. Apparently, and get this, Hans Island is important because when global warming melts all that nasty ice up there and opens up the Northwest passage to commercial activity, whoever owns Hans Island will control the passage – a sort of Gibraltar of the far north, without the monkeys, of course.
What the experts have neglected to consider is that, for one thing, Hans is too small to allow either country to build a decent gun emplacement there, and for another, when global warming has melted all that ice, Hans Island, which is barely a rocky bubble over the ice as it is, will be in all likelihood be under several feet of water, and Canada and Denmark and all the other countries with people living along shorelines will have other things to worry about, such as how to pump the Atlantic out of their basements.
The Danes and their gunboat are planning to replace a Danish flag which had “fallen over” at about the same time Canadian Minister of Defence Graham Bill had himself helicoptered to the Island to place a Canadian flag there – possibly the island was not big enough for both flags. Of course, Minister Graham is not entirely to blame for igniting this latest round of tiffing over ownership of the island. In 1984, Denmark's minister of Greenland affairs raised a Danish flag on the island. He then buried a bottle of brandy at the base of the flagpole and left a note saying "Welcome to the Danish island." Presumably the bottle was intended as bait to lure Canadian government officials there, and render them incapable of fighting. Perhaps Minister Graham was there in search of ice cubes.
It makes you wonder what the Danes are planning to leave there during this, their latest visit. A large cask of blue cheese and herring? Have those people no sense of decency? Do they not know that the Canadian military is not prepared for biological warfare?
Meanwhile, tens of people around the globe are holding their collective breath, wondering how this will all turn out.
In a world which seems determined to drive itself to madness through violence and greed, we have to be grateful to the Danes and the Canadians for providing a little comic relief during such a long, hot and smoggy Canadian summer. Good for them.
Skol!

Otte Rosenkrantz is an independent journalist, and a proud Canadian of equally proud Danish heritage. He hopes to visit Hans Island before the ice melts.

Meeting Ed.

2005-08-04T08:35:00.000-05:00

In 1980 I was a young writer just starting out on a career as a journalist. An anthology of my observations about life in rural Ontario had just been published, and as part of the book promotional tour, I was scheduled to appear on an early morning news and variety show on the local television station in London, Ontario.
In addition to being a budding journalist I was also an amateur rock-climber with climbing experience in Ontario and Maine. Not surprisingly, I was a devoted fan of many of the famous and accomplished climbers and adventurers such as Jon Krakauer and Royal Robbins. But the man I admired most was Sir Edmund Hillary who, on May 29, 1953, along with the Nepalese Sherpa, Tenzing Norgay, set human foot for the first time on the summit of Mount Everest in the Himalayas.
I would have given just about anything to meet Sir Edmund, so imagine my surprise when, as I made my way back from the television studio to the “green room”, I saw the Great Man himself striding down the hallway towards me. I had only a few seconds to decide what to do – to think how I could have a few words with the him, but at that moment the journalist in me fell away, and I was reduced to stammering fan.
I stand about six feet tall, but Sir Edmund towered over me by at nearly a foot, and his great, craggy face hung above me like majestic cliff overhang.
“Excuse me,” I managed, as he came to a halt in front of me. “I am a great admirer. Could I have your autograph?”
Instead of simply walking around me, or having someone in his entourage deal with me, Sir Edmund looked down at me benignly. “I’d be happy to,” he said with a warm smile.
While he was signing the scrap of paper I had handed him, he said, “So, what do you do?”
I had forgotten all about my career, my book and everything else in my life. All I could think of was that here I was, having an actual conversation with my hero, and at that crucial moment, all I could blurt out was “Well, I climb too…”
Now, having scaled a few 150 foot cliff in Ontario did, technically, qualify me as an amateur rock-climber, but to try to put myself in the same category as the Conqueror of Everest was, well, ridiculous.
But Hillary looked at me with genuine interest. “Oh? And what do you climb?”
As he spoke, I could practically hear roar of the wind blowing thin air, snow and ice around the 29,000 foot summit of the mountain, and I thought by way of comparison of the sun-drenched afternoons I had spend leisurely making my way up a warm, southern Ontario cliff-face, and said the only appropriate thing: “Never mind.”
Sir Edmund shook my hand, gave me the paper with his autograph, and resumed his journey.
I still have the autograph. It reads simply “Ed Hillary” and it’s a wonderful memento of a moment spent with a great achiever, and a lesson learned about keeping my mouth shut.

The View from Table Six.

2005-07-29T13:33:00.000-05:00

You can tell a lot about people from what they eat, and how they eat it. Look around in any restaurant, and you could draw a pretty accurate personality profile of most of the patrons.
See that woman over there? The one ultra-slim one in the tight black business suit with the blood-red fingernails? She just sent her salad back – too many carrot shavings, and her stem of white wine was not “leggy” enough. How would you like to work for her? Think she is likely to get tense about deadlines? She orders for the man she is eating with even though he does not appear to be particularly hungry.
But now take that guy eating lunch by himself. He ordered his food by saying “the special” without even knowing what it is. And now he is eating it while reading an annual report. So far he has not even glanced at his plate. For all he knows he could be eating a big bowl of Purina Executive Chow. Over the years, he has probably consumed a number of Big Macs with the wrapper still on. This is what you’d call a “big picture” guy: don’t bother him with the details, just get the job done or get out of the way.
On the other hand, here comes a guy who is about to ruin the day for his server. Tall, thin, frowning slightly, he glances at his chair before sitting down to make sure there are no food stains, and then, while he waits for service, he polishes the cutlery and water glass with his handkerchief. His selections from the menu are comprised primarily of rice and vegetables, but he does not make his choices before having sent the server back to the kitchen half a dozen times to get accurate accounts of what ingredients actually go into the preparation of the food, and how fresh these ingredients are. This is the kind of guy who knows what cumin is, and can actually detect its presence in food. All through lunch, the slight frown never leaves his face, and you know he would rather die on the spot than have to use the public restaurant washroom. I’d like to see his condo – you know he lives in a condo. Do you think he has any pre-Columbian art?
Ah. Here come a happy young couple. They select a little table out of the way, and as soon as they sit down, they hold hands across the table and talk earnestly about whatever young lovers talk about. The server has trouble getting their attention, and they have trouble making out the print on the menus. Finally they order, but they order nothing that can drip, smear, stick or wind up as green patched between their teeth. Their appetites will not really perk up until the dessert cart is wheeled in, at which point they will select a single slice of something with a large strawberry on top, and two forks. They will look dreamily at each other as they slowly eat, and when she uses her fingers to feed him the strawberry, we look politely elsewhere lest we be thought voyeuristic. Hard to imagine that in a few years they will each be eating totally unrelated dishes in stony silence.
And finally, here is a family. Two tired looking adults and three perpetual motion children all under the age of ten. It has been a decade since the adults ate a quiet meal together, or contemplated a menu that didn’t have “kidz meals” on it. They wouldn’t recognize a dessert cart if they tripped over one, and strawberries stain. The children order grilled cheese sandwiches, French fries, hamburgers, a chilly dog, milkshakes and chocolate sundaes and large glasses of cokes, and they eat sugar packets and pour salt on the table while they wait. The parents order black coffee and ask for extra napkins. While the “kidz” inhale the cheese sandwiches, the parents poach French fries and look at their watches. When they are gone, the server will have to wash the ketchup and salt from the handful of coins left as a tip.
We are what we eat.

Closet Consultants.

2005-07-19T10:27:00.000-05:00

There is an old adage that says something to the effect that the amount of stuff we own is directly proportional to the amount of space we have to store it all. If you want proof of this, just go have a look in your garage. Remember when you didn’t have all that stuff? What did you do before you had a garage? Where did all that stuff come from? Would a larger garage solve the problem? No, it would just mean more stuff
The adage applies especially to closet space. Is there such a thing as too much closet space? That’s like asking if it’s possible to be too rich – the answer to both is no. There is a reason why one of the first questions out of the mouths of potential new homeowners is “how much closet space is there?” They know that even though they live in a small place now with very little closet space, as soon as they move into their bigger home with acres of closet space, the space will instantly fill up with stuff that apparently appeared out of thin air – either that or closets around the country are shrinking.
The problem of shrinking closet space has been addressed by a large number of design entrepreneurs who stake their futures and fortunes on the consumer’s desire for more closet space, and on their own abilities to fight the laws of quantum physics and create space where there isn’t any. Go to any home show and most mall openings, and you will find enthusiastic closet consultants eagerly trying to sell you on the latest in closet space makers – an oxymoron if ever there was one!
Closet space makers are essentially organizing systems, and the people who come up with these designs want to do for your closets what time management consultants want to do for your life: create more space. The organizing systems are both very elaborate and very expensive. The pictures the manufacturers use to display the versatility of their products are an obsessive-compulsive’s delight: rows upon rows of neatly sorted shoes; sweaters stacked with military precision; and shirts, pants, dresses and blouses neatly organized on hangers, ready to be instantly matched and worn. And look! There, up on top! Even MORE SPACE for hat boxes (do people still have hat boxes?) Christmas presents, equipment for sports long since abandoned (where else are you going to store your riding hat and scuba gear?) and summer (or winter) clothes! Amazing! How do they do it?
Well, the answer is simple: they stack all the stuff, take pictures of it, and then never use it again! As anybody with real clothes and real closets will tell you, there is no force on Earth that can keep anything organized in a closet for any significant length of time. And those of us who have tried installing closet organizers have quickly learned that all those wire shelves, drawers and racks take up more space than eight boxes of shoes and three suits.
The sad reality is that the time has come for us to abandon our dreams of creating more space for our clothes and shoes by filling our closet space with wire contraptions, and accept the fact that the only solution is to either move to a still larger house with even more shrinking closet space, or have a yard sale (although those contemplating a yard sale may want to see the column entitled “What Happened to the Space in our Garage?” in a later issue of the magazine).
But don’t despair. If you – like I – have bought a closet organizer, remember that the one truly wonderful thing about closet organizers is that they are eminently suitable for holding tools and gardening equipment in the backyard shed.
And getting them out of the closet will open up a ton of space.

2005-07-07T08:27:00.000-05:00

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Hello? Is that you?

2005-07-07T08:10:00.000-05:00

All right people, new rule. When you telephone those of us who have chosen not to enrich the phone companies by subscribing to call display, you have to identify yourself – right away. I don’t know where or how or why it started, but this habit of calling people up and then simply launching in on the conversation in the assumption that the person on the receiving end knows who you are is a recipe for disaster and has got to stop.
For instance: Phone rings.
Me: Hello?
Female caller: Hi Otte. Listen, I talked to your wife a couple of days ago, and I told her I was OK to meet her sometime this week, but now I can’t ‘cause I’ll be away. Could you let her know? Thanks. Bye. (Click… Brrrrr).
Well, I have no idea who just called, do I? One of my wife’s co-workers? The wife of a friend? One of her nieces? One of her sisters? An old school friend? It could be anybody. So now I’m left having to tell my wife that “somebody called today, and she can’t meet you this week because she’ll be away,” in the hope that my wife will somehow be able to guess what on earth I’m talking about.
And it’s no good telling me that I should just interrupt the caller and ask who it is. This has all sorts of negative implications and can lead to hard feelings. For instance:
Phone rings.
Me: Hello?
Female caller: Hi Otte, I was wondering if you would have some time today to have a look at a project I…
Me: ‘Scuse me. Who’s calling, please?
Female caller: YOUR WIFE!
See? All this could so easily have been avoided with the simple, old-fashioned act of courtesy of self-identification at the beginning of the conversation.
The response I usually get when I ask the caller to identify him or herself is: “You don’t know who this is?” asked in such a tone of hurt incredulity that I feel almost embarrassed by my ignorance. This is followed by: “It’s me!” which I’m sorry to say is not help at all, but leaves me feeling that it should be. “Oh, of course. It’s you…”
And I’m no further ahead.
This problem is of special concern to people who marry into large families, and whose spouse has a fairly large circle of friends, many of whom are married. It can be difficult to tell voices apart when you start work in a large places of employment; it’s impossible when what may be a new relative calls you at home.
A partial identification is helpful, but not enough.
“Hello Otte?”
“Yes?”
“Hi. It’s Paul.”
Ok. Paul from work? Paul who is married to my wife’s sister? Paul the guy I met at the dinner party hosted by my friend Paul? Paul, the radio talk-show host? Saint Paul?
I know I’m supposed to know who it is, but I don’t. So I have to play along, fishing for clues at to the rest of the identity, and this fishing expedition is fraught with hazards because it is so easy to say the wrong thing.
For example: “So Paul. How are the kids?” This is a bad idea because this might be unmarried Paul – or worse, Paul who has several cats but no family, and who hates it when people refer to the cats as “the kids.”
Questions implying the existence of a wife, life partner, children, job, recent travel, interest in a certain sport or preference for single malt whiskey are all out of the question. The conversation has to be completely neutral until Paul drops a workable hint.
“So Paul… How are things?”
“Things are good.”
That’s no help. “What’s new?”
“Well, we closed the deal.”
OK, that helps a little. This could be Paul who is buying a house, Paul who has been angling for a promotion, or Paul who wants to marry Karen.
“So what happens next?
“I guess we pick a church.”
Gotcha. I know which Paul, but it was way too much effort to get there, and far too many opportunities to have one of any number of Pauls mad at me.
So please. A little help here. It’s great to hear from you, I want to know what’s going on in your life. But you’ve got to tell me who you are!

Appliances

2005-06-24T08:32:00.000-05:00

I was wandering through a kitchen appliance store in a mall the other day, when a very enthusiastic young salesperson asked me if I would be interested in having a look at their new Cappuccinotoasterbroiler-as-seen-on-TV. “It mounts right up under your kitchen cabinets,” he said with the same excitement he might have displayed had he been announcing a cure for a major disease. “That way your kitchen countertop won’t be cluttered!” What was more, this fabulous device came in a dozen designer colours, with more attachments than the Columbia space shuttle. It was self-cleaning, odour-free, ran quietly, had a remote control, and I could pay for it in several years’ worth of easy monthly payments.
“What does it do?” I asked the earnest young man.
“Do?”
“Yes. If I am going install one of these Cappuccinotoasterbroiler-as-seen-on-TV in my kitchen, I’d like to know what it actually will do for me.”
Well, the explanation that followed is far too long and complicated to repeat here, but clearly the impression I was intended to get was that this extraordinary device would make me a huge success in the kitchen, more popular with my friends and family, healthier, and possibly even younger – I think there was a separate attachment for that.
I did not buy the Cappuccinotoasterbroiler as-seen-on-TV. I don’t need an appliance that will turn me in to a younger, more popular, kitchen whiz. What I do need are some appliances that have practicable applications. A self-cleaning refrigerator, for instance, would be nice. The kids have a tendency to store science projects in the fridge and then forgetting about them, just as I seem to have a talent for not remembering bags of spinach I had every intention of making the kids eat, and which turn to slurry in the back of the “crisper.” Whoever comes up with a fridge that will sort out and dispose of my collection of liquid cucumbers, moldy yogurts and brittle ham slices will have my undying gratitude – and my money.
A few years ago, I could also have used some sort of diaper changing device – with a long-range remote control. Although I did manage to become something of an expert in the art of the rapid-fire diaper change, while at the same time learning how to hold my breath for several minutes, these are skills I could have done without; there are many ways for a parent to bond with his child, but I don’t believe this particular avenue is essential. Some sort of changing, disposing, cleaning and powdering appliance which would deliver my smiling, sweet-smelling child into my waiting arms would have been worth any number of Cappuccinotoasterbroiler-as-seen-on-TV.
I would also like to see the following appliances created: a machine that will bring a mug of hot coffee to my bedroom every morning, while at the same time waking me as gently as a summer breeze through an open window; a vacuum cleaner that will get the hair of my cat, Paws for Thought, out of my wool rug and then empty itself; something – anything, that will sort out the content of my garage and find my box of router bits which I haven’t seen since Kim Campbell was Prime Minister, but which I am certain is still in there somewhere; and finally some sort of extremely sturdy mobile unit I can send into my teenage son’s room to A: find him and bring him out before noon on Saturdays, and B: clean the place up, by which I mean returning the household plates and glasses to the kitchen, putting the lizard back in its cage, taking the melted wax out of the carpet and locating the three English assignments which have, apparently, been completed but have gone missing.
And oh yes, a dog washer would also be very much appreciated; some kind of machine that would be set up in the back yard, and which would lure Dimbulb into it, wash, dry and de-flea him all in one fell swoop, all without the bathroom having to be re-decorated, which is what tends to happen now.
Free Cappuccinotoasterbroiler as-seen-on-TV will be awarded to those who create any of these appliances.

Sweat Equity

2005-06-16T19:05:00.000-05:00

I am sitting in my sauna, contemplating the events of an unhappy afternoon.
I had to make a presentation to the executive suite of a large company, and my presentation did not go well. Having to get up to talk in front of a lot of people is not something I enjoy at the best of times. When I have to stand up in an executive boardroom full of tight faces, blues suits, and God knows how many cattle's worth of Italian leather shoes, I get the willies - which is a psychiatric term for deep blushing, nervous stammering, and generally making a public fool of yourself.
The Vikings and the North American First Nations peoples had it right, you know: you shouldn't do business with anyone until you've had a sauna - or sweat-lodge - with them. The First Nations people believe that the cleansing of the soul and body is essential if people are to talk and negotiate in good faith.
The Vikings believed that if they didn't like you, they wouldn't let you out of the sauna until you were done to a medium rare.
After this afternoon, I think the Vikings may have been on to something.
Anyway, one of the best things about saunas, and what ought to make taking a communal sauna a pre-conference requirement in boardrooms across the country, is that participants have to be in the nude - or at least in the near-nude.
It is not hard to look impressive and be intimidating when you are wearing a blue Armani suit, a red tie and a pair of Italian, calf-skin slip-ons, lounging in a boardroom, sipping cappuccino, watching a presenter squirm in the spotlight.
But get out of the suit, and sit in the nude in a sauna with a bunch of strangers, and you'll find that being imposing is much more difficult. Get people out of their corporate uniforms, and they suddenly become very conscious of their mid-riff jelly roll, and as they sit sweating bullets, swigging luke-warm water out of the sauna bucket, the corporate playing-field suddenly levels itself out very nicely.
Ideally, of course, the sauna experience should include a nude roll in the snow. The descendants of the Vikings believe this is good for the circulation - by which they may mean that the shock "circulates" people from this world into the next - and the Japanese know the value of a chilling dip after a steam bath in restoring business acumen.
The bottom line - if you'll pardon the expression - is that it seems unlikely that the chief executive officer of a multinational corporation will seem quite as frightening and aloof once you have seen him or her dashing naked through a snowstorm, luffa sponge and towel in hand.
Now there may, of course, be some concern in the business community that having saunas with the corporately inferior will lead to disrespect and unwarranted familiarity. This is not necessarily so. What is far more likely to happen is that we will all develop a shared meaning of the ridiculous. It is surely impossible for just about anyone to look at themselves - much less their boss - in the nude in a public sauna without almost instantly developing a sense of humour. And there is no question that during these tough economic times, we could all use a good laugh.
If there is a down-side to this whole sauna approach to "taking a meeting," it would be in the area of the potential for lost productivity. Having grown comfortable with the idea of a pre-meeting sauna, how long before the entire meeting is conducted in the nude in the sauna, interrupted only by a refreshing dip in the snow/company pool? And are we then far from tele-saunaing? Corporate Saunas around the world could be linked electronically to allow business people to "do meetings" without having to actually travel anywhere - or even get dressed.
This, of course, would open up a huge market for the entrepreneurs who first develop water and heat proof fax machines, portable computers and telephones - the possibilities are mind-boggling.
But you can forget about the sauna franchise. As soon as I find my pants, I'm going to corner that myself.

BBQ Season

2005-06-09T09:14:00.000-05:00

Due largely to the pervasive influence of television commercials promoting beer and soft drinks, barbecues have become an integral part of how Canadians define summer.
The idea behind the barbecue experience is that it’s supposed to return the participants to a simpler time, a time before mircowavable popcorn and instant coffee; a time when meat actually had to hunted and killed before it could be eaten, and coffee beans were ground by hand. According to aficionados, the barbecue event is a direct link to a more "natural" epoch in human existence when our cave-dwelling ancestors would get together with their extended families out behind the cave on Sunday afternoons to roast thick slabs of mastodons, and drink far too much fermented honey.
These primitive events were immensely popular, and the preparation of the food would often last until late into the night - although where they got the propane is not clear. Paleontologists disagree on how often these feasts were held, and what they were called at the time. The word "barbecue" is apparently a derivative of an ancient Germanic word for food poisoning. But researchers do agree that primitive barbecues were largely responsible for the slowed intellectual development of certain societies. Instead of being concerned with creating art and culture, the participants of these gatherings discussed little besides bragging about what great hunters they were, and betting on who would win the next game of kick-the-armadillo.
The Neanderthals apparently spent most of their time roasting meat, drinking fermented yak butter and watching armadillo games, activities that eventually drove them into extinction.
Anyway, although the concept of the backcave meat-fry hasn't evolved much, the equipment people use definitely has. "We don't do much cookin' in the kitchen during the summer," a friend told me recently. His tone of voice suggesting that anybody who would cook food indoors during the summer is a bit of a wimp and somehow un-Canadian. Then, to show how tough he is, he added that even when it rains, he just moves the barbecue into the garage and cooks there.
And because he does all this meat scorching, he has purchased a new barbecue system.
"You could do up a whole pig on this little beauty," he said, patting the beautifully gleaming black top of his New MeatMaster Thor 6000. "Give me a couple hours an' a case of beer, and I could cook enough meat in an afternoon to feed a army." He exaggerates, of course. It would take him at least the whole day to drink all that beer.
Looking at the Thor 6000, it’s no wonder my friend would rather cook outside than in his kitchen. With its four-tier, three-tank, forced-air, self-igniting, fully automatic flame adjusted, computer-controlled, touch-screen self-cleaning cooking "environment", the Thor 6000 is actually more efficient and more ergonomically functional than just about any kitchen. "Look here," my friend waved his spatula at the sun-sparkled chrome and steel. "It has a warmer oven and four fully adjustable gas burners where the wife can cook her rice and make coffee." Apparently rice is one of the very few foods that cannot be barbecued.
"The wife," meanwhile, is in the kitchen, making a caesar salad. Because she is a woman, she is not allowed to touch the Thor 6000 except to clean it periodically. This is for her own safety because it is a well-established myth in male society that women can only handle cooking when it is contained to stoves. Anthropologists point to this as an example of how the barbecue retards social evolution.
What "the wife" thought of the Thor 6000, by the way, was never discussed beyond the fact that the new barbecue system apparently cost about the same as it would have cost to have her kitchen remodeled. But 'nuff said about that, we're talking summer tradition here.
So, sated by pig meat and beer, I join all true Canadians in raising a glass of whichever of the most heavily advertised liquid refreshment we currently consider our favourite, and saluting that wonderful summer tradition that is the backyard barbecue. Were it not for the Thor 6000 and all similar primitive wonders, we wouldn't have these opportunities to get back to the basics of natural living at all.
Trying not to confuse the sun-screen with the meat sauce, I’m Otte Rosenkrantz.

Call Circling

2005-06-02T10:32:00.000-05:00

My home town is a favourite place for companies to test out new services and products, and the telephone industry is no exception. Over the past few months, we have been swamped by offers by a dizzying array of telephone company deals.
For reasons which remain a mystery, the telephone system in this country went completely bananas a few years ago. Due to the damaging impact of solar flares or the ozone hole or government deregulation or some other such disaster, the people who operate the country's telephone systems apparently lost their collective minds one day, and started to invent telephone services and deals clearly intended to drive the rest of us nuts too.
How else do you explain the concept of what I think is referred to as "Long-distance Happy Hour Calling Circles?" This peculiar marketing ploy was explained to me by an extremely cheerful voice over the telephone one afternoon, and it went something like this:
Cheerful Voice (explaining patiently for the second time): "...so if you call two people on your pre-selected Happy Hour Calling Circle list between the hours of five and eight on alternate Tuesday afternoons for the next six months and on one weekend of your choice as long as it is not a holiday, then your next non-business, person-to-person overseas' long-distance call placed on a Friday morning during the off-peak tourist season will be free. Unless, of course, the call is placed from one of your most frequently called numbers other than your home, in which case two of your best friends who are not related to you but living in a another province will receive twelve non-weekend local calls for free in exchange!"
To counter this enticing offer, a competing telephone company has cleverly developed a similar deal, except for the bit about free Tuesdays, which they have changed to Sundays, during which time all non-family long-distance calls are charged to your relatives in Moose Jaw who may or may not be eligible for a free cell phone which they can exchange for an oil and lube job at a service station of their choice.
And if all that isn't alluring enough to make us want to sign the various phone companies have also developed a whole battery of special services to lure consumers who had absolutely no idea they needed any of these services in the first place. Call Waiting, for instance, which is a service designed to alienate as many of your family, friends and business associates as possible by making them feel less important than the person calling you on another line. And Call Forwarding which allows people you don't want to speak with to track you wherever you are, a service not to be confused with Call Circling which is a method by which a call you are making never actually reaches anyone, but is continuously passed on from voice-mail box to voice-mail box in a never-ending version of a kind of communications perpetual motion machine.
And if you throw a cell phone into this witches brew of products and service plans, you can forget about ever trying to figure who pays what, what phone company you are with, and which services apply to you and which don't. Cell phone owners have come to take for granted the cryptic telephone messages they sometimes receive from cheerful, disembodied voices that say things like "Roam service charges now apply in Michigan," and "Long-distance charges will apply to all cell phones currently not in operation outside your area," and "Elvis has left the Continuum."
The upshot of all this is that many people are now afraid to pick up the telephone when it rings. People are learning that the only thing that is for certain in the uncertain world of modern telephone communications is that every time you use the phone it will cost somebody somewhere money. And the odds are good that the somebody forking out the dough to cover the monthly phone bills is either you, or an irate relative in Moose Jaw who will be calling you - collect - to find out what you think you are doing getting him involved in "Happy Hour Long-distance Call Circling" when you can't even be bothered sending him a Christmas card.
So please don't call us; we'll write you.
I’m Otte Rosenkrantz

Internet CB

2005-05-27T15:30:00.000-05:00

I was cleaning out my garage the other day, and I came across my old CB radio.
Remember CB radios?
Originally these two-way-radios served the purpose of letting truck drivers talk to one another about the pretty waitress in the last truck stop, and to pass along reports about where the police were hiding. Country and Western songs such as "My Woman's Bought a CB (And Left me Talking to Myself)," made CB radios very popular in the early 1980s and pretty soon everybody had them installed in their cars.
The CB phenomena opened up a whole new era of pretend alternate lifestyles for those people - mostly men - who were stuck in hopeless, meaningless, dead-end jobs and relationships. With a CB radio in their car, all they had to do to become larger-than-life, macho, free-wheeling, devil-may-care, truck driving cowboys was pick up their microphone and go on the air. Never mind the fact that they were really stuck behind the wheel of a K-car in a traffic jam. Through the miracle of CB radios, everybody could become a Knight of the Open Road.
At the height of the CB radio frenzy, it was all but impossible to get an airborne word in edge-wise, and then suddenly, the airwaves were as deserted as the stretch of highway between Wawa and Thunder Bay at 2:30 in the morning. What happened to all those white-collared, gear-jammin' K-car drivin' pretenders? They went to the chat-lines of the Internet, that's what.
That's right. Boo-boo Kitty, Wild Turkey, Big Bertha, Ugly Duckling and High, Wide and Handsome have all left the citizen's band airwaves behind in favor of the equally anonymous if far more crowded meeting rooms of the World-Wide Web chat lines.
Chat lines are to computers and the Internet what CB radios were to the lonely and the ineffectual: a place to meet kindred spirits and exchange incredibly boring conversation.
There must be hundreds of thousands chat-lines on the World-wide Web, and many more thousands of people filling these chat lines with information about how they are doing ("great! How are you doing?"), the weather ("Boy, it's cold up here. How's the weather where you are?") and locations. ("I'm in Kittimat. Where are you?").
But of course, the exchange of information is not what matters here - it is the exchange of pretense, which leads to conversations such as "Hi! I'm a 24-year-old gorgeous woman interested in 'chatting' with someone. Anybody wanna to talk?”
"Sure, I am a 30-year old successful investment banker with abs like a washboard, a full head of hair and a Lamborghini in my three car garage. I'd love to chat with you..."
Millions - if not billions - of dollars of technological research and development has been spent to put the Internet in every computer and satellites in orbit around the planet, all so that we no longer have to go out and sit in our cars to pretend we are somebody else - we can do it right in the comfort of our own homes.
As for me, I’m Otte Rosenkrantz, 25-year-old, six-foot-three, 190 pound muscle-bound wild-life photographer on assignment in Kenya.

Right again

2005-05-18T17:11:00.000-05:00

Have you noticed how grumpy people seem to be these days? It’s getting so we can hardly go anywhere without being scowled at, or have people make certain expressive gestures. Drivers are angry, people waiting in line are irritable and voicemail messages are downright hostile.
Part of the problem is that no-one ever tells us who is right to be angry, and who is wrong. So in an effort to defuse some of all the anger out there, I will now clear up who is on the right and wrong side of certain issues.
For instance, people who like nice, quiet summer evenings are angry at the people who like to listen to loud music. The people who like quiet evenings are right, and the people who like loud music are wrong. There is too much noise in our world as it is. We need quiet, especially in the summer which is a season for relaxation. Those who like loud music should go to bars or keep their noise indoors. By the same token, those who like to relax in canoes or while fishing off the dock are angry at those who like water skiing and jet skiing. The people who like jet skiing and water skiing are wrong. Our lakes and rivers are being punished enough as it is. Water is peaceful and calming, and should be kept that way. Besides, the fish bite better in quiet waters. Those people who like noisy water sports should go to theme parks.
People who don’t smoke dislike people who do. Both groups are right, and there will never be a peaceful resolution to their differences. It would be better if they stopped talking to each other altogether.
Then there are the people who drive big sports utility vehicles. Lots of people don’t like them. There is something overtly aggressive about SUVs, something that just incites a kind of hostile defensiveness in those who drive smaller vehicles. Both of these groups of people should just unclench a little. Life is too short to waste energy being angry about car sizes – and the argument is a little too Freudian to take seriously.
People who drive cars – any car – are angry at people on bicycles who are angry at pedestrians who are angry at in-line skaters and skateboarders who in turn are angry at people who drive cars. All this anger is very circular and can go nowhere. If all these groups would develop a little patience and tolerance, they would all get along much better – there is room enough out there for everybody. But pedestrians are always right because they are the most vulnerable. Everybody should leave the pedestrians alone.
Bird watchers are angry at mountain bikers. The bird watchers are right. Mountain biking is hard on the trails and scares the wildlife. Mountain bikers should stick to the areas that have been set aside just for them, and bird watchers should stay out of those areas.
Old people are too often angry at young people. That’s silly. It is not the young people’s fault that the old people grew old. Besides, from what I hear, being young is no walk in the park these days.
People who care about grammar often get angry at those people who use poor grammar in their speech. The people who know grammar are wrong to be angry at those who do not. Our language is in a constant state of growth and development, and the fact that people are playing lose and fast with the grammatical rules is exactly what keeps the language vibrant and growing. Those who care about grammar should develop their interest as a hobby or scholarly pursuit, but should stop nagging everybody else.
Small dogs should be kept quiet. Their yapping makes everybody angry. Small dogs are sometimes cute, and they are wonderful companions, but their barking is as irritating as nails scraping on a blackboard, and it should not be allowed.
Finally, those who are angry at politicians, teachers, unions and hospital workers should keep in mind that these people, like people everywhere, are doing the best they can with what they’ve got, and that a pat on the back brings about far better results than a kick in the butt.
There is no point in getting angry at me, by the way: I happen to know I'm right.
Feeling very correct, I'm Otte Rosenkrantz.

The Path to Wisdom

2005-05-11T10:24:00.000-05:00

It’s summer, and I know what you're thinking; you're thinking you would like to do some home renovations. And you’d probably like to renovate the bathroom. Well, don't even think about it. For one thing, you can't afford it. That quote you got from the contractor is underestimated by about twice your yearly salary. This not the contractor's fault, you understand. It’s just that you just asked for an estimate to renovate your bathroom, not rebuild your entire house, which is what you will have to do if you start tinkering with the pipes and drains in your home.
The trouble with bathroom renovations is that the process involves water. Not many people realize just how tricky water is, nor do they realize that in spite of what scientists say, water is actually thinner than air. You can take a length of plastic pipe, join it properly to another length with lots of pipe goop, check it for leaks by blowing compressed air into it until no air escapes, and think you have a water-tight seal. But run water through it, and it will drip. Water will drip through wood floors, linoleum, solid concrete and bullet-proof glass.
But it’s important to note that this dripping will not start until after the drywall has been put up and painted or wallpapered. Water knows this. You can leave the drywall off as long as you like. As long as you have direct access to the pipes and drains, they will not leak. But the minute the drywallers and painters have packed up and left, you will wake up in the middle of the night to the nerve-shredding sound of water dripping somewhere in the walls of your home.
And don't get me started on toilets. Do you have any idea what is involved in attaching a toilet to the house drain? Well, let me just say that it involves wax rings; that should give you some idea of what kind of trouble you are in for here. If you think about it for a minute, you'll see what I mean. Here you have a large water container with a hole in the bottom, right in the middle of your house, a container capable of pushing hundreds of litres of water through your floor every day. If that is not a recipe for disaster, I don't know what is.
And if you are planning on putting a commode in the basement, just keep in mind what your grade six science teacher told you: water does NOT flow uphill! I don't care what the evidence may be, nobody can tell me that when you flush that thing the water is flowing up to the sewer line at street level. And I don't want to know where it’s really going.
So what’s the answer? Live with that mildewed and cracked old bathroom you've got now? Not at all. Renovate by all means, but do it right. Do it outside. The only leak-proof, fool-proof and totally benign kind of washroom ever invented is the Great Canadian Outhouse. No septic tanks, to chemical toilets, no exploding water pipes in the middle of winter or after the drywallers have presented you with their bill.
The outhouse has a long and honourable history in this great country of ours, and it is time the tradition of walking the path to the backyard House of Quiet Contemplation was revived. Renovating the outhouse involves no greater expense than a coat of paint and possibly new curtains. Every decade or so, you can have the pleasure of digging a new hole and shifting the building over a few yards for a different view. If you plant Petunias where the outhouse used to be, you’d be surprised how well they’ll do.
So not only will the construction of one of these pioneer privies save you a bundle in renovation cash, and quite possibly a nervous breakdown, you will have the added pleasure of knowing that you are also contributing to the back-to-the-earth movement.
Ready to follow the path to wisdom… I’m Otte Rosenkrantz.

Needful things

2005-05-04T21:54:00.000-05:00

There is a curious contradiction in the observation that the modern, two-income, over-worked, over-stressed, up-scale nuclear family is being sold on the notion that they need Martha Stewart-sized kitchens in order to be happy. Given that these families rarely have time to sit down to eat, much less fire up their twelve-burner gas ranges to prepare five-course dinners, one would have thought that such families would be far more content if kitchen designers and builders would install the culinary accoutrements needed for the creation of “Happy Meals,” tacos, and buckets of fried chicken.
The fantasy being sold is that once the family moves into their new monster home, it will be able to cook gourmet meals for friends, and host the annual corporate soirée in their industrial strength kitchens. But the unpalatable reality remains that these dinners have to be catered because no one in the family has the energy at the end of the week to do much beyond nuke a frozen pizza.
That’s not to say that the concept of the kitchen-as-validation-of-success is not selling well with up-scale home buyers; it is. Every time they pick up a publication devoted to the home-style gastronomic arts, the new home-owners are bombarded by an assortment of food preparation devices and appliances that would put the kitchens of the average five star hotel to shame. Not only that, but with fifty different kinds of herbs draped artistically from the overhead racks, and more pots, pans, skillets, and crepe pans dangling from copper brackets than you can shake a $50 spatula at, these kitchens are obviously the domain of people who make their own sausages, bake herb and cheese bread without having to look at the recipe, and who know what a compote is.
But does that describe the gastronomic leanings of the average North American family? Hardly. Ours is, after all, is a continent more famous for inventing instant coffee than café latte, and for creating hotdog buns rather than croissants, and where people still labour under the misapprehension that French fries have anything to do with France, that Chinese food comes from China, or that take-out pizza in any way resembles an Italian pizza-pie. Turned loose in one of those alarmingly well equipped kitchens, we would make a beeline for the microwave oven as the only recognizable appliance in the place.
But this in no way prevents homeowners from ponying up the several thousands of dollars it takes to create the physical environment of the gastronomic savant. Built-in pasta makers and floor-to-ceiling solid brass cappuccino machines, along with Italian tile countertops and Corinthian leather-handled utensils used exclusively in copper-bottomed sauce pans, the price of each of which could send a child through college, are but the beginning. Bedroom-sized copper hoods for the exhaust fans are a must, as are solid Ethiopian burled, polished black walnut cupboards, and built-into-the-reclaimed-brick-wall six-tiered ovens.
Still, when faced with all this kitchen glory it’s hard to imagine what the average North American homeowner, who has to read the instructions before using a four-slice bagel toaster, would make of an eight-burner, self-cleaning, smoke-free, greaseless copper and nickel-plated cast-iron remote controlled two-oven gas range. We would probably use it to make toast.
Asking you to pass the ketchup, I’m Otte Rosenkrantz

SUV '05

2005-04-28T09:40:00.000-05:00

A reader recently e-mailed me to ask: “So. What’s the deal with all those SUVs?”
What this person wanted to know is why people all over south-western Ontario – and everywhere else, for that matter – are buying vehicles designed to carry troops and supplies into war zones in Eastern Europe or Central Africa, but then using them to drive around suburbia, carting plants home from the plant nursery, or idling their 200,000 horsepower waterproof engines in rush-hour gridlock. SUV, by the way, doesn’t stand for Stupid, Ugly Vehicles, as the reader suggested, but Sport Utility Vehicles.
Well, it’s a good question. For reasons completely beyond the comprehension of those who don't watch Arnold Schwarzenegger movies or own Hummer dealerships, SUVs have become more popular than Viagra, and they apparently have much the same effects on their owners. People who look down their radiator grilles at those unfortunate enough to drive Gremlins and Pintos because those poor slobs can only dream of driving up Mount Everest or cross the Mississippi underwater, think nothing of shelling out more for one of these gated-communities-on-wheels than they did for their first house. Their thinking apparently goes something like this: Do I pay off the mortgage, or do I buy a car that will carry me safely across the Gobi desert? Do I send my kids to medical school, or do I buy a vehicle with an optional machine gun mount? Do I age gracefully, or am I so desperate to appear young and virile that I actually believe anything with the word “sport” in it will somehow make me athletic?
I am just guessing about this, of course, because all attempts to interview owners of these tanks in limousine’s clothing were met with locked doors, darkened windows and rumbling engines.
It’s difficult not to think there must be some connection between the popularity of SUVs and life in the new millennium. Perhaps owners of these urban assault vehicles reason that if the doomsayers are right, and the world is going to resolve itself into chaos any day now, they at least will be able to get away to the cottage in air-conditioned comfort with their barbecues and bottled water, towing their jet skis, leaving the rest of us to fend for ourselves in our K cars and Ladas.
So gentle reader, I don’t know what’s up with all those SUVs. But my advise would be to make friends with someone who owns one in case you get a hankering to drive up Everest, or an earthquake suddenly levels the city and you just have to get to the mall anyway. Just don’t get in front of one.
Struggling along with only a safari rack on my hatchback, I’m Otte Rosenkrantz.

Soul Chips

2005-04-13T11:24:00.000-05:00

Soul Chips
I have been receiving a lot of interesting information about the possibility of having a computer chip implanted in my brain. Apparently a number of scientists with far too much time on their hands have been noodling with the notion of slipping computer chips into people’s heads. While there are all sorts of medical benefits to be derived from these chips, what makes me excited is the suggestion that the chips will eventually help us do things like remember where we left our car keys, and what the name of our boss’ youngest nephew is.
I want to publicly throw my support behind this vital research, primarily because I'm tired of having to call a cab every time I lose my car keys, and because I am continually forgetting the names of people who have an irritating habit of remembering mine.
What could apparently happen with these brain chips is that the people sporting them would have a small access port installed in their heads to let the scientists program the computers. This sounds like trouble. The potential problem here is that computer programmers will eventually control the world even more than they already do. As a result, people with chips in their heads would constantly have to reboot themselves, and trade their chips in for upgrades. Parents would wake up in the morning unable to remember their children’s names because those memory files had been mysteriously lost, and of course, depending on the chip, some people would only be able to do one or two things at a time because their chips didn’t have the ability to multi-task.
By the same token, powerful enough chips would allow people to pretend to carry on a conversation with a boring person while really checking and responding to their e-mail in their heads.
The possibilities are limitless. Those of us prone to forgetting where we are supposed to be at any given time could have our memories expanded. Children could have their read-only memories programmed with rules for proper behaviour and directions for finding their clothes in the morning.
Best of all, the suggestion is that eventually these chips will be so refined that they will allow direct connection to the World-wide Web. In this way, people can surf the net and do a little shopping when they are pretending to be listening to lectures or watching reality TV. And when it comes time to go to their eternal reward, people could, if they so wished, upload their souls to the Internet, to surf the Web in perpetuity. The drawback here, of course, is that parents would be able to nag their adult children forever, showing up on computer screens at the most inopportune times.
By now, most of you are no doubt champing at the bit to rush out and have one of these micro wonders drilled into your heads. Unfortunately, you may want to wait a little. Researchers are estimating the chips’ current value to be around $300,000 a piece. But they are also suggesting that the chip could eventually be mass-produced and sold at 50 bucks a hit.
So pretty soon, the question consumers have to worry about is not whether they should want to OWN a PC or a Mac, but whether they want to BE a PC or a Mac.
Ready for my upgrade, I’m Otte Rosenkrantz.

A (Brave?) new World

2005-04-05T09:20:00.000-05:00

Here’s a little tidbit that came across my desk a short while ago; the kind of news McNugget that either makes you say, “Hmmm, that’s interesting,” or makes you gag. Apparently some medical researchers in England (national motto: if it isn’t eccentric, it’s not British) have figured out a way to let men carry babies to term.
The way this male pregnancy thing works is way too gross to describe to an audience of people wearing expensive clothes. Suffice it to say that according to the researchers, once the doctors have done some really nasty things to a man’s stomach with scalpels, plungers, airbags and corkscrews, they can put a foetus in there until it is done, so to speak, when they can take it back out. Voila! Instant child with major sexual identity issues.
A few things need to be mentioned here. For one thing, I’m not making this up. After extensive research, I was able to verify the accuracy of this story by reading about it in several Sun Media newspapers (Corporate motto: “Are you kidding? We couldn’t make up stuff like this!”).
The other thought to keep in mind is that the men who have this done to them don’t actually have to deliver the baby in anything resembling the way women do. If they did, there would be no more babies since there is not a man born who could stand the pain of childbirth, even under total anaesthesia. Even suggesting to a man that he has to pass something the size of a watermelon will make him faint. In fact, that sentence just caused several male listeners to suddenly stand up very quickly. And finally, remember that these researchers are working in the same country that cloned a sheep. Coincidence? Not likely.
All of this should raise some important questions. For one thing, why are the British getting the funding to do this kind of terribly interesting and bizarre research? Don’t we have Canadian scientists who can figure out some way of giving legs to cod, or how to put wings on pigs or something? We ought to be looking to the skies in anticipation of seeing migrating herds of flying pigs by now, instead of having to rely on the British to come up with all this useful scientific stuff. What exactly are our scientists doing?
And of course, as entrepreneurial free enterprise types, we should also be asking ourselves what are the business opportunities associated with a scientific breakthrough such as this? Well, clearly there is going to be a major market for painkillers. Men, who traditionally faint when they get splinters, are not likely to take well to the idea of having a foetus popped into their bellies.
Then there is the business of maternity clothes. If our society has a tendency to dress pregnant women up as baby-dolls, what is the fashion industry likely to do to pregnant men entering their final trimester? (Boy, there is a sentence we never thought I’d say…). It stands to reason that pregnant men are going to need clothing that will affirm their sense of masculinity while still making it comfortable to carry the baby – something in a very roomy leather jacket, perhaps, and faded, elastic jeans with a Velcro fly so the guys can go to the bathroom every four or five minutes. They might also like some cowboy boots with zippers so the boots can be removed when the feet start to swell.
So even though North Americans scientists may not be able to clone sheep or impregnate men the way the English can, when the time comes, our entrepreneurs should at least be ready with a line of products for every expectant father-about-to-be-mother. The time to get these businesses started is now, before England’s scientists get their next government research grant!
More than happy with the number of kids I’ve got, I’m Otte Rosenkrantz

Surfing for Money

2005-03-30T09:16:00.000-06:00

This being spring, I’m preparing to go surfing. Not surfing the combers off Baja, but something just as exciting: surfing the electronic pulses of the World Wide Web. So wax up your keyboards, kids, slip some Bob Marley in the CD drive, and come along as we cruise down the electronic highway to the virtual beach where all the pretty URLs hang out.
Why bother learning to navigate the Web? Because the Internet is the most important development in the history of human endeavor since the invention of moveable type which made it possible for people to mass-reproduce printed material such as The National Enquirer and junk mail flyers. The Internet is even as important to the expansion of human knowledge as the perfection of indoor plumbing which allowed people to read the National Enquirer in undisturbed privacy. When they come up with a computer that can provide people with access to the World Wide Web from the bathroom, they will finally have created the perfect learning environment!
The fact is that there is literally something for everybody on the Web. No matter your interest or field of professional endeavor, you will find masses of information relating to it on the Web. Body piercing? You bet - complete with photographs (not for the weak of stomach...). Information about how to raise earth worms in your basement for fun and profit? Piles. Want to know how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Or whether there is life after death? Or how many people have been abducted by aliens in the last week? Or how it is possible for bumblebees to fly? The answers are on the Web. So are the answers to questions of whether California wine is equal to French wine, how deep the oceans are, how high the mountains, and what love has got to do with it.
Is there a God? The Web knows.
But while the Web is obviously a great place to learn stuff, what does the Internet mean to the business community? Well, for one thing, it means that those of us working at computer stations now have ready access to about a trillion new electronic games which we can play while looking as if we were working on crunching numbers for the annual report, or writing columns for radio programs. We can also chat with several million people around the world, spreading untraceable rumours about people we don’t like. The Internet also provides a place for the lovelorn to meet others who are single - or like to pretend they are - and conduct virtual electronic office romances in cyberspace (all the steam with none of the heat).
Business can also sell things on the Web, and the potential for profit is this arena is not to be underestimated. For instance: given that nothing on the Web is "real" in the conventional use of the word – which is why it is called “virtual” - doesn't it stand to reason that pretty soon consumers are going to be clamoring for virtual products? What we have here is a world-wide market for products that never actually have to be manufactured! The arm-chair extreme skier will need the latest in virtual skis for his next virtual skiing trip, right? In the "real" world such a pair of skis might set the consumer back hundreds of dollars, but in the virtual world of the Web, the latest in high tech downhill skis could be made available at a fraction of the cost. The first company not to manufacture the best in virtual skis will make a killing! The same goes for just about any consumer good imaginable. Whoever is the first to make these non-existent products available to the denizens of cyberspace will reap fortunes to rival those of Bill Gates.
And of course, it will just grow from there as virtual yard sales become common on the net as imaginary products become obsolete and have to be replaced by newer, better and ever-more hypothetical non-products.
Somebody will be making a virtual fortune in illusory products for the Web. It might as well be you! But first you have to know how to get around in that vast electronic ocean, and you'd better get started - it's a surf or be deleted world out there!
Plugged in and catching the wave, I’m Otte RosenKrantz

An old one. But was I right, or what?

2005-03-22T13:48:00.000-06:00

Y2K Jelly.

Are you sick of hearing about the millennium bug yet? I mean, it was bad enough when we heard that banks might have trouble finding out money on January the first, 2000. Now they are telling us that the army is going to be ready to mobilize to protect the citizens of this great country of ours against – well, against ourselves, I guess. Apparently the thinking is that people are going to be so upset about their computers not telling them the right date that there may be rioting in the streets – in as much as computer operators can ever be imagined rioting.
Anyway, those of use who use personal computers don't really have to worry about the, do we? I mean, when the year 2000 rolls around, our computers won't be affected, will they? Only big corporations and the government – and now the army - have to worry about stuff like that, and they are fixing it, right?
Well. Wrong, actually. It’s beginning to look as if all of us who have been complacently sitting back letting all the mega-nerds worry about bugs in their software are going to have problems of our own, and I don’t mean just having the army running around pepper-spraying rampaging computer programmers. For one thing, come January one, year 2000, your computer will be out of date. Even if you bought it the last week of 1999, by the time 2000 rolls around, the hardware and software that came with your new computer will be obsolete, rendering your system worth roughly 1/3 of what you paid for it unless you want to trade it in for something newer, in which case it will be completely worthless.
Your computer will also be out of date in another sense in that the other thing that will happen in the year 2000 is that millions of computers all over the world, including many home computers - almost certainly yours - will suddenly think it is the year 1900. This is because computer programmers - who are well known as a whimsical lot of practical jokers when they are not rioting in the streets - didn't bother giving a lot of computer programs the ability to read the number 2000 in their internal clocks.
This problem has become known as the Y2K bug, Y2K being programmer language for a total computer meltdown that turns software into a petroleum jelly-like substance suitable only as a lubricant or rug cleaner. (Actually, there is a story going around that one programmer was once asked how much he would charge an hour to repair this problem, and he said "$2,000" - or 2K - and the person owning the computer then asked, "Why 2K?"
Anyway, there you will be, January 1, 2000, with a computer that, like millions of other computers around the world, thinks it is January 1, 1900. This will mean that as far as government and banking computers are concerned, a lot of us won't have been born yet. This may mean that we won't owe any taxes, but it also means we won't get paid, and that any money we might have squirreled away in banks and RSPs will simply evaporate - if you are not born, how can you have saved money…?
Affected computers will also think that William McKinley is the President of the United States, that Bernhard von Bulow is the German Chancellor and that the radio is just about to be invented.
Business computers will be sending invoices out to you telling you that your accounts are 1,199 months past due, and, what with late fees and interest and whatnot, you owe $13,698,874.05, and could you please remit immediately.
And just to confuse matters further, it is worth pointing out that there will be a February 29 in the year 2,000, making it a leap year, but that there was not one in the year 1900, which was not. As a result, even computers able to recognize the year 2,000 will turn into Y2K jelly on Feb. 29, 2000.
The solution is obvious. Put all your money in a sock under your bed, and then invest it in the Henry Ford Motor Company which will be founded in 1903, and will apparently do quite well.
Wishing you a nice millenium, I’m Otte RosenKrantz.

Airborne.

2005-03-16T09:06:00.000-06:00

This week, I come to the assistance of the busy business traveler. The most important piece of advice I can give you is to be nice to the in-flight attendants – they control your lives completely while you are on the plane.
Actually, a lot has changed in the airline industry over the years. Mostly, everything is now a lot older than it used to be. Airplanes used to be clean, sleek, fast and efficient – so were the pilots and the In-flight Hospitality Facilitators (who used to be called stewardesses and stewards). But now a lot of airplanes look like rejects from to the Aeroflot fleet of the former Soviet Union, and most of the In-flight Client Comfort Engineers (also formerly stewardesses and stewards) look like what they would really like is a chance to sit down for a while.
Another thing that has changed is that airlines don’t lose luggage with the cheerful efficiency the way they used to. Seasoned travelers in need of new luggage were once able to depend on the airlines to send their luggage to Tucson, Arizona, instead of Bridgetown, Barbados – probably because of the similarity in the spelling – which meant that the old suitcases would be replaced with nice new ones by the airline. But for some reason, the airlines can’t be depended on to perform this service anymore, so those who travel with any regularity are having to supply their own new suitcases, which is really inconsiderate of the airlines.
What haven’t changed are airports. Ever since Orville and Wilbur Wright first managed to confuse each other about where their plane should take off from and where it should land, airports have become like large, disorganized holding pens for rootless human beings. There are actually people who live in airports. Because their passport was either lost, stolen, or sent to Tucson in 1973 in a piece of lost luggage, these people are now citizens of no country, forced to travel from airport to airport around the world in a sort of airborne version of “Waiting for Godot,” searching for a customs official who speaks their language.
The best place to be in an airport is in the “Arrivals” section. If you think you’ve got it bad, go to the arrivals section and watch people who have been on a 16 hour flight from Bangkok or Wagga-Wagga Australia, come staggering off the flight, carrying babies and carry-on luggage, either of which may or may not be theirs. Dazed and confused, these people now have to answer for their existence to customs officials, and they have to find their luggage.
In an attempt to cheer up weary travelers, the airports have devised a kind of giant parlour game called “Guess the Luggage Carousel.” The object of the game is to figure out which of the 250 metal merry-go-rounds will regurgitate the luggage that was loaded on the arriving plane at its point of origin. The game requires at least 1500 participants for it to be really fun, and given that planes land in international airports every 30 seconds or so, getting enough players together is never difficult. One solution is to station family members at as many carousels as possible to keep an eye out for suitcases that look even remotely familiar. This ensures that even though you will likely never see that family member again, chances are they will at least have one suitcase with them as they start out their new life.
A few people have learned to cheat at this game. They are the ones who travel with nothing but their carry-on luggage and a gold credit card. But the airports have devised a fun little parting event for them as well called the “Full Body Deep Cavity Search”, which involves activities most people would have to pay for to experience.
So if you are going to travel, bring luggage; tell your friends and family where you are; learn to sleep sitting up; but above all, be nice to the In-flight Service Attendants. They may not be as young as they used to be, but they can still dump a dish of hot chicken-and-rice in your lap with the precision of Olympic archers if they want.
Travelling under an assumed name, I’m Otte RosenKrantz

Franchise this!

2005-03-10T13:44:00.000-06:00

Ever wondered what it would be like to be your own boss? If you were your own boss, you'd be able to take as much time off as you wanted, and you'd be able to give yourself a raise whenever you felt like it. All things considered, doesn’t it make sense for anyone with any ambition to quit their job and start their own business?
Question is, what kind of business? Obviously it has to be one with next to no start-up costs, as little paperwork as possible, and absolutely staggering returns on a minimum of investment and effort. But where does a Canadian entrepreneurial go-getter go to get such a business?
They go to the London Franchise and Business Opportunities Expo, that's where.
Every year, Prestige Promotions brings this event to the city. This year it was held at the London Convention Centre, and I was there.
There were 28 exhibitors at the exposition, all of them brimming with enthusiasm and optimism. Even the guy selling financial planning businesses could barely contain his excitement over the riches to be harvested from this "anything but dull" field of endeavour.
After a few minutes at the event, it became clear that the only thing that stands between a Canadian self-starter and unlimited success is lack of imagination. The expression that was heard more than any other was "Each transaction will bring around 25 per cent profit!" Next to that was "This is to the most incredible business opportunity you will ever encounter!" followed by: "There is absolutely no risk!"
So what kinds of businesses are no risk, have 25 per cent return on investment, and are the most incredible business opportunities you will ever see? Well, there were more coffee-vending franchises than you could shake Juan Valdez's donkey's tail at. And there were machines that would print on anything. One exhibitor was printing pictures and words on the shells of walnuts! Who wouldn't want a machine that can do that?
Yuk Yuk's was there - you know, the stand-up comedy people. They weren't selling stand-up comics, exactly. What they wanted people to buy were little machines about the size and shape of a condom dispenser, only these machines dispense jokes. Slip a loonie into one of these devices, and it will tell you four jokes. There are jokes for kids and jokes that are triple X rated. The idea, apparently, is that these machines will be located in bars and restaurants. Then, when conversation starts to run dry, somebody could scoot off to the machine, memorize a couple of ice-breakers, come back to the table and become the life of the party by telling these jokes - provided he could remember them.
This is how it might work:
You’re sitting at the table, and the conversation dries up. "scuze me,” you say, “I'll be right back..."
Minutes pass. You return.
"Say, have you heard the one about the Canada goose and the squirrel?"
The people at the table all turn to look at you expectantly "No, gosh, please tell us!"
"Well, it appears that this Canada goose goes into a bar and orders a glass of... no, wait, that was the squirrel... Yeah, that's it. A squirrel goes into a bar and orders a Canada goose, which is a kind of drink, and the bartender says.... Shoot. Now I've forgotten. Hang on a sec, I'll be right back. Anybody got a loonie?"
OK, so maybe the joke machine franchise needs some getting used to. But if none of this years’ franchise ideas caught the visitor’s fancy, there is always next year. Maybe they will bring in the lady who will show you how to make coffee tables out of caskets – I think she calls them coffin tables. Surely that franchise would get you out of your dead-end job.
Still working on the Canadian Dream, I’m Otte RosenKrantz.

It's not gambling; it's business.

2005-03-07T07:59:00.000-06:00

It is becoming increasingly clear that many Canadians want other Canadians to gamble. Gambling is, apparently, good for the economy. True, a lot of people are hurt by the effects of gambling - what is commonly referred to in spin doctor circles as "the downside" of gambling - but even when all those broken homes, lost investments and addicted souls are factored into the equation, gambling is pretty much all "upside" for the economy.
Fundraisers are also cashing in on people's love of easy money. A hundred dollar charity lottery ticket will buy you a one-in-27 chance of winning either a brand new monster home, or a CD player. And, of course, your hundred bucks goes towards building new schools or hospitals or jails or whatever - the things which were once upon a time paid for by the government.
But let's face it. Sitting at a one-armed bandit at Casino Rama or in Windsor or wherever, pumping loonies into a machine which may spit back $25 bucks from time to time, is really pretty small time for serious gamblers. And a one-in-27 chance of winning a kayak or a television isn't exactly going to raise the blood pressure and heart rate of the true dyed-in-the-wool gamester.
No. For those requiring the full-bore, high octane, take-no-prisoners-show-no-mercy, double-espresso hit of true risk-taking, there is now the delight and excitement of on-line stock trading.
Yes sir, in a development that would make P.T. Barnum weep with delight to see his adage of "there is a sucker born every minute" proven out, anybody with a home computer, Internet access and access to unlimited resources such as the family home or the employee home retirement fund, can now log on, 24 hours a day, and buy and sell stocks with the best - or worst - of them. Mind, it would be helpful if potential players first learned the meaning of words such as "margin", "wired funds", "leverage buy-out" and "insolvency."
Here is how it works. Through on-line trading companies such as E*Trade Securities or InvesTrade, anybody can fill out an application online and, after receiving a password and account number, proceed to gamble away the family fortune by buying and selling stocks and mutual funds. If you think that, say, Novell, the software maker, is likely to be a popular up-and-comer, you can buy stocks in the company, watch the market rise and fall for a few minutes, and when the stock is up enough, you can sell out and make money. Simple, right? Or you can buy stock in a pharmaceutical company, watch it rise and then plunge suddenly towards oblivion, at which point you can panic, cut your losses and run, and lose all your money. Equally simple.
One such "trader" who had decided to quit his job and spend all his time playing the market says that on his best day he made $30,000 US. He went out and bought a BMW by way of celebrating. Of course, his worst day was when he lost 80,000 US. But in this business you have to learn to take the bad with the good, right?
So isn't this more like it? Now we are talking true excitement with high risk and the chance of phenomenal returns. If on-line trading won't get your adrenaline pumping, you are obviously too dead to have a computer in the first place.
To a generation raised on Nintendo and Sega, this trading game should be familiar territory. The screen even looks a little like a computer game, with lots of images and crawling numbers and high speed, reflex driven action. The only difference between this and a rousing game of Riven or Doom is that if you lose to the market you can't just reboot the game. You only get to re-enter after you sell your house.
Naturally, there are all sorts of costs attached to playing the home trader version of the stock exchange. There are signup fees, account transfer fees, wired funds out fees and certificate withdrawal fees; safekeeping fees, annual fees, de-registration fees and account research request fees. And after it is all over, there will undoubtedly be lawyer fees and therapist fees. But these are all small potatoes when compared to the rush and potential gain of true gambling excitement.
I have to admit that I have not actually been able to play the home trader game: I still have 546 payments left on my 1991 Chevy Lumina. But once those payments are finished, I plan to make a fortune on the stock market. With the car paid for, I will at least have a place to live.
Boring but solvent, I'm Otte Rosenkrantz.

Coffee, anyone?

2005-02-24T10:19:00.000-06:00

It’s getting hard to find a decent cup of coffee in this town any more. There was a time you could walk into any restaurant, order “coffee”, and be reasonably assured that you would get hot water that had been strained through some kind of coffee beans, was served in a cup, and cost less than a buck.
The only difference in coffee served in these establishments was that it came in varying strengths. Ask for coffee late in the afternoon, and chances were that the pot had been on the burner all day and would deliver a jolt of high octane coffee that could keep a truck driver awake from London to Moncton.
The best coffee in the world came from Tim Horton’s. Still does, as far as I’m concerned. I have no idea how they do it. I have tried making Tim Horton's coffee at home, and it just doesn’t taste the same. They are not paying me to say this, by the way.
The absolutely worst coffee in the world comes from those machines still lurking in the musty corners of aging bus stations and darkened hallways of ancient manufacturing plants, machines that were designed by some Frankenstein of an inventor to dispense coffee, hot chocolate and what was euphemistically called chicken soup, all through the same spout. Everything delivered by these machines looks like dishwater and tastes like cod liver oil.
Over the past few years there has been an alarming trend away from “coffee”. Go into coffee shops these days and order “coffee”, and you are likely to encounter a perplexed and slightly supercilious (from the Latin “super” meaning “you”, and “cilious” meaning “moron”) look from the “waitperson”.
“Would that be a cappuccino, double orange mocha-chino, café latte, regular, with or without cinnamon and/or chocolate sprinkles, single or double espresso, long or short, with or without foam, in a mug or glass with whipping cream…?”
“Coffee” is not even on the menu – and whoever heard of needing a “menu” to list coffees anyway?
It was OK when cappuccino and espresso started showing up as regular fare in restaurants and coffee shops. We’ve all had days when we’ve needed a little extra caffeine kick in the pants of the kind those drinks deliver. And a double espresso on a February Monday morning can actually make the sun come out and the birds sing, at least until the headache sets in. But we are talking coffee here, people, not desert!
A few years ago, a friend of mine was given a home espresso machine for Christmas, and he invited me over to try to figure out how the thing worked. By the time we had learned how to mix the right amount of water and coffee we had consumed enough caffeine that we decided to wallpaper the living room, build a deck on the back of the house and detail his car while we were at it. It was a great afternoon, but I would not recommend it as part of a regular diet.
The height of the current coffee-as-food craze in all the new specialty coffee shops that are popping up everywhere has to be the decaf cappuccino. This is an oxymoron by its very definition: high-test coffee without the kick - like gasoline that won’t burn, or cigarettes without tobacco. I don’t mind the fact that the stuff is being served, I just wish the restaurants would remember to put a pot of real coffee on in the morning as well – and then leave it on the back-burner for the afternoon when I really need it.
Wide awake and ready to go,
I’m Otte Rosenkrantz

Up in Smoke

2005-02-21T11:40:00.000-06:00

So what's with all this cigar smoking that's all of a sudden going on everywhere?
For the past few years, smokers have been relegated to the absolute fringes of society because they pollute, cause illness and are a huge financial burden on the nation's health insurance system. Meat eaters at vegetarian restaurants were treated with greater kindness than smokers.
Then, suddenly, you pass somebody in a hallway somewhere, and what is that scent you detect in the air currents eddying in their passing? Could that be the fragrance of tobacco?
And then one of your golfing buddies is spotted late one evening, dodging out of "Ye Olde Cigar Shoppe", into a darkened parking lot. Does his wife know where he is and what he is doing? Suddenly the rich fragrance of expensive cigars is seems to be wafting through the air everywhere.
What is going on?
Well, what is going on is nothing short of a renaissance of cigar smoking. No, a revolution, because it is hard not to associate cigar smoking with revolutions, isn't it? Cigar smoking is the "in" thing to do just as jogging was 15 years ago, and surfing the WorldWide Web has been more recently. If you don't know your corona from your Lonsdale, your Arturo Fuente Torpedo from your Casa De Nicaragua Petit, you're out of the loop, left in the dark to kiln dry.
And this is not some brief, flash-in-the-ashtray passing fad. This cigar smoking phenomenon is taking on a cultural life all its own. And everybody’s doing it. Take a look at some of the magazines devoted to the cigar habit that have suddenly leapt into the literary forefront, and you'll see all sorts of shakers and movers on the covers, from the CEO's of multi-nationals, to major movie stars, posing, stogies in hand. From Tom Selleck and Tom Arnold, to Kim Cattrall and Pierce Brosnan, the men and women of Hollywood and the corporate community are coming out of the closet humidor and not just admitting to their fondness for the hand-rolled vice, but flaunting it.
And it doesn't stop with the cigars. No sir. There are humidors to be bought, at between $300 and $5000 per fancy box, and special lighters and "wax-less" matches to spark up the cigars, and special ashtrays to hold the venerable objects while they burn, and leather carrying cases at upwards of $100 per and so on and so on. And the cigars? A good one will run about $9.00 and a great one will cost as much as you are willing to pay.
Which brings us to the problem of where to indulge in this expensive little socially illicit activity. There is hardly a household left in North America where a person can come home from work and spark up something that will cause $20.00 to go up in smoke, and nobody wants to spend the 45 minutes or huddled in the garage to consume one of these things.
Not to worry. The aficionados have the situation well in hand. Smoking rooms are now springing up all over the place. Sporting the deliciously illegal-vice ambiance of Prohibition speak-easies, by-invitation-only cigar smoking evenings are becoming de rigeur among those in the know. There are even smoking rooms cropping up in the back of some cigar shops where customers can go to try out a new brand while sipping free cappuccinos.
So what is all this about anyway? A deliberate flaunting of the anti-smoking sentiment so prevalent in recent years? Hardly. The tobacco purists shun Cigarette smokers as social philistines. Is it a vice restricted to the few who still have money to burn? Not likely. Cigar smokers from all walks of life mingle at the $40 - $80 an evening cigar sampling events. Being a cigar connoisseur does not require a huge cash reserve - it helps, but the occasional indulgence won't put a fancier in debtors prison.
No, the cigar renaissance has more to do with nostalgia than snobbery. If you'll notice, there is no plastic involved with cigars - except for the plastic used to pay for them. Cigars are about the earth, wood and water, air and fire - all the essential elements. It is about enjoying a product that is not mass produced, can't be used in a hurry, has no "instant" version, that needs to be aged before it can be consumed, which has no expiration date and no built-in obsolescence, and which can never go into re-runs.
Cigar smoking is a rebellion against the modern times
For the Revolution, I’m Otte Rosenkrantz

An Electric Hum

2005-02-16T15:24:00.000-06:00

It's about 2:30 in the morning, and I am sound asleep. In my dream I am standing on a stage somewhere, about to receive the Glockenspiel award for excellence in humour writing. But there is a hum coming from somewhere. An electric hum. The kind of hum that gets under your skin and irritates your never endings until the hairs on your arm stands up.
In spite of my best efforts to see the dream through to the part where I actually get my award, I awake to discover that I am in bed, tossing restlessly.
But the hum has not faded with the dream, and suddenly I am wide-awake. Few things alarm me like my house making unusual noises. Nothing, for instance, can freeze my blood like the unaccounted-for sound of running water somewhere in my home. "Who left the water on?" I'll shout, chasing around the place until I find the garden hose that has been left running - usually by me, or the toilet that has been flushed. Unaccounted-for running water in a house is bad. It means burst pipes, invariably in the most inaccessible part of the house, and huge repair bills. Trades people with large trucks and very noisy tools appear shortly after the unexplained sound of running water, and they make noise and dust for several weeks, after which they present you with a repair bill that would pay the debt of most developing countries.
Hums are also very bad. Hums are associated with electric motors in dishwashers, motors that have seized up and will shortly result in the dishwasher springing a leak all over the hardwood floor in the kitchen, or with laundry machines that will also seize and leak through the floor into the finished basement, or with dryers that catch fire or with furnaces that fail on the one night of the winter when the temperature plunges to 30 below. Hums are very bad indeed.
I lie in bed in the dark and listen. The hum seems to be emanating from the headboard, but that's silly, there are no electric motors in the headboard, I'm pretty certain of that. I check the lamp, it's not humming, neither is the alarm clock.
I hop out of bed and put my ear to the bedroom wall. Yep, the house has definitely developed a serious hum.
"Whaddareyadoin?" My wife mumbles.
"We've developed a hum," I explain, my head pressed to the doorjamb.
"Checkit innamorning," she suggests helpfully, and drops directly back into REM sleep.
But there is no rest for me. You ignore a nocturnal hum at your peril.
Slowly and meticulously I track the faint, elusive hum, through the house, room to room, floor to floor, attic to garage, appliance to appliance, until I finally track it down and corner it in the basement. There it is, under a stack of boxes and ancient suitcases, beneath a large, black plastic lid: the sump pump. The electric motor of the pump, submersed under two feet of dark, murky water, has seized, and is humming away ineffectually, unable to pump.
The mystery has been solved. I unplug the sump and head back to bed, secure in the knowledge that all the creaks, bumps, pops, hums, gurgles and clicks of the house are familiar and harmless.
"Zzzzzzz," says my wife as I slip under the covers.
When the plumber shows up the next day, I tell him about the problem: how it woke me, and how I finally solved it. My wife shakes her head in disbelief. "How could you possibly be awakened by a hum so faint? You, who slept through the howling of the children when they were babies."
The plumber and I look at each other. The answer is easy, the babies might have cried when they leaked in the night, but their leaks were never large enough to do any serious damage. Had they hummed, it would have been a different story.

Getting to know Otis

2005-02-14T12:18:00.000-06:00

So anyone know who this guy Otis is anyway?
I ask because whoever designs elevators seems bent on making people nuts. I discovered this a few days ago when I managed to get a whole bunch of people riding in an elevator lost, which is no small accomplishment when you think about it.
There we were, a group of strangers thrust together by happenstance in a hotel elevator after having set out from the underground parking garage in search of our various floors. Since I was the first into the elevator, I followed established elevator etiquette and positioned myself by the control panel, ready to take requests.
"Which floor would you like?" I asked each of the other people as they came on board. Then I'd push the corresponding button, keeping in mind that no two elevators in the world have the same letters on their buttons to indicate what floor that letter represents.
When, for instance, someone asked for the Main Floor, I naturally pushed the button marked M, But when the elevator stopped and the doors opened, we found ourselves looking out at what appeared to be the entrance to a restaurant.
"I think this is the Mezzanine," a young executive-looking type pointed out.
The Mezzanine – from the Latin meaning "vacant”, as in "Boy, is that elevator-operator ever a Mezzanine-head!" was the wrong floor.
"No, no," another passenger said. "We wanted the ground floor."
I pushed G.
When the doors opened, we were looking at concrete walls and long rows of parked cars.
"This is the garage!" The executive dude reached out and punched a button marked LL. "We have to go to the lobby to switch elevators to get to the upper floors."
The elevator doors opened at the Lower Level, the level one floor below the main garage.
"Here. Let me try." A young woman stepped briskly up to the control panel and punched F.
"F?"
"Foyer."
The "Foyer" (Ancient French for "If you think you can do it better, be my guest,") turned out to be behind us. What had looked like the back wall of the elevator turned out to be another set of doors which opened up on a narrow hallway filled with laundry baskets and room service carts.
With the solemnity of Scott of the Antarctic, I turned to my fellow travelers. "Ladies and gentlemen. I regret to have to inform you that it would appear we are lost. Please try to remain calm. Since our survival depends on our ingenuity, I suggest we raid the room service carts before we continue our journey."
A word here about elevator etiquette. When someone is trying to be obliging by offering to push the buttons and accidentally gets everybody lost, and then makes an attempt to lighten things up with a funny comment, calling him names is really no help at all.
Also, when you are on an elevator, don't call people on your cell phone telling them that you'll be late for the meeting because some idiot can't tell his Foyer from his Mezzanine.
And while we are at it, whistling the theme from "The Beverly Hillbillies" is out, so is eating, dancing, making love, demonstrating slam-dunking techniques, arguing, holding political rallies, talking about how great your new computer is to total strangers, and in general doing anything. People on an elevator are expected to behave with the kind of cold formality usually reserved for audiences with the Queen. Imagine what it would be like to find yourself on an elevator with the Queen. You'd probably have to be dead in order to be well enough behaved.
Anyway, by this time there were very few buttons we had not tried. G was the garage. LL was the level below the garage, and LL1, LL2 and LL3 simply put us deeper in the hole, as did P1, P2 and P3. F was the service elevator, RS took us to an abandoned set from the Twilight Zone, M, the Mezzanine...
And then it came to me! We had been going about this the wrong way entirely. There was just one button it had not occurred to me to push because it seemed meaningless: the START button down in the left corner of the panel.
Sure enough, the START button brought us to the main floor of the hotel while muzak by the Rolling Stones played on the ceiling speaker.
So Mr. Otis, or whoever is in charge of putting those letters on elevator buttons, please MAKE UP YOUR MIND.

Clone Fall.

2005-02-10T08:11:00.000-06:00

Well, it’s certainly very exciting to think that we are close to the anniversary of the cloning of Dolly the sheep.
Cloning - from the Latin "clone" meaning "copyright" and 'ing" meaning "infringement" - is a very complicated scientific process whereby scientists take a small piece one thing, place it on a surgical table, raise it up through the roof of the castle on a dark and stormy night, leaving it outside in the rain until it is struck by lightning, and then lower it back into the lab and shout "IT'S ALIVE! IT'S ALIVE!" at it until it becomes genetically identical to the thing it originally came from.
Scientists have been doing this for some time with a variety of plants, promising, among other things, to create lawn grass that keeps itself permanently cut, which is something bound to make the world a better place for us all. But Dolly was the first time they successfully cloned an animal.
So they say. But if that's true, how do you explain Mike Harris and Brian Mulroney? Or Michael and Janet Jackson?
Anyway, why the Scottish scientists chose to clone a sheep is not clear. It may have had something to do with haggis. Haggis is, of course, a Scottish delicacy which involves oatmeal and a sheep's stomach, and was used by Mel Gibson to fight the English. It has been suggested by friends of that the scientists were actually trying to clone a haggis but added too much single malt whisky to the blender and wound up with an entire sheep by mistake.
It is the ethics of cloning which will be addressing today. People around the world have greeted the news of the successful sheep cloning with horror and dismay. "A sheep!" they are saying in editorials and on call-in shows. "Why on Earth did they clone a sheep! Does anybody know why the plural of sheep is the same as the singular? What if they clone a moose next, or an octopus? Who will know what the plural of those are?"
While the ethics debate rages through the scientific and journalistic communities, many wonder why the scientists didn't clone, say, Cindy Crawford or Mel Gibson. We are pretty sure that their research would have been much better received had they trotted out an army of Sean Conneries or Amanda Marshalls rather than a sheep, but there you are. That's why I write a column and they Xerox sheep.
The scientists named the home-made sheep "Dolly", by the way, which immediately raises the question: did the scientists say "hello Dolly!" when the sheep came into being, and if so, do we really want people with that kind of sense of humor diddling with our genetic futures?
The promise of the cloning technology is that we will pretty soon be able to make copies of ourselves, and presumably better copies. But I am not so sure this is a good idea. For one thing, the clones are not likely to think very highly of the arrangement. If a person were to be convicted of a crime, say, and were sentenced to 20 years in jail, he could simply rush off to the Clones "R" Us store, and grind out a copy of himself to serve the sentence. But how would you feel about being brought into the world, fully mature, only to be greeted with: "Welcome to the world. You now get to go to jail for 20 years. Have a nice day." Pretty soon there would be a clone union and nasty clone strikes and all sorts of irate clones writing grumpy letters to the editors.
On the other hand - or, presumably, the other of several hands - people are arguing that it would be nice to have a couple of spares around the house to pick the place up and cook the meals. But for those of us who are already talking to ourselves too much, this prospect is just way too frightening.
So instead of cloning sheep or people, I suggests the Scottish scientists try their hands at cloning long weekends. Now there is something you can never get enough of.
P.S. If you were to clone yourself, and discovered that your clone had a tendency to swear and use profanity all the time, and you decided to get rid of the clone by throwing it off the CN tower, what would you be charged with? That's right, making an obscene clone fall.

Lotteries are the future.

2005-02-07T09:48:00.000-06:00

A poll conducted a while ago on behalf of a large newspaper found that a lot of today's teenagers include winning a lottery as part of their financial planning for the future. Instead of working hard at school or thinking about their eventual careers, these kids actually figure that a sizeable lottery win will set them up in life.
Not surprisingly, this discovery sparked a great deal of debate among child development experts right across the country who felt that there were already far too many people buying lottery tickets which lessened the odds of the experts winning The Big One.
No, I am kidding of course. The child development experts were actually upset because the lotteries weren't around when they were kids, and it didn't seem fair that some spikey-haired, body-pierced little social misfit should be able to suddenly become a multi-millionaire overnight, while the expert had to keep struggling along on a mere $50,000 a year.
As a responsible journalist and observer of the human condition, the temptation here is to remind those kids that money can't buy happiness, and to point out that a penny saved is a penny earned, that hard work is its own reward, that anything worth owning is worth working for, and that the best things in life are free. But since none of that is true, I won't bother. Indeed, given the current state of employment opportunities for young people, investing their money in lottery tickets might be a better bet that investing it in retraining programs which help them develop skills computers can already do much better. Perhaps colleges and universities should be offering courses in sooth-saying and rune-casting to help people pick winning lottery numbers, rather than computer programming and business administration.
On a historical note, it is interesting to remember that lotteries were once used by the Romans to pick which victims would be tossed to the lions first, and which young men would be conscripted for the military. Winning the lottery used to mean you lost. It is also important to remember that playing the lottery is gambling, an activity which is against the law unless it is sponsored by the government - sort of like smoking that way.
But the research results do raise some interesting questions: is it desirable to receive a lottery windfall, and if so, why hasn't I won anything significant yet?
As it happens, someone who has recently become an extremely close, very dear, personal friend of mine recently did win a considerable amount of money in a lottery.
This person, who is now living under an assumed name and won’t return my calls, won a brand new vehicle worth about $38,000. Of course, once she drove it off the lot, it became a used vehicle and consequently worth about $5,000. Anyway, I asked her if the win changed her life for the better “I sold it right away” my friend said. As for as how people around her reacted, she reported that while her friends and family were very happy for her, there were clearly a few people who were more envious than delighted. "Some of the comments I heard after the win were, 'Hey that was my vehicle!' And, 'Who made you so lucky?' People also asked me: 'How come you won?' To which I always reply: 'I won because I bought a ticket.'"
But what about winning really big? Having tasted a little of what a lottery can do for you, how would she have reacted to winning, say, several million?
"I don't think it would change my life all that much. I would look after my family and I might buy a bigger house, but I would still keep working."
To which I join thousands or others in saying: "HA!" What's the point of including winning a lottery as part of planning for the future if that future still includes having to work?
It would appear then, kids, that what we learn from my friend’s experience is that winning a lottery can be fun, but it can also can make your life more stressful, and can cause otherwise nice people to say not so nice things about you.
So the moral of the story appears to be that money can't buy you happiness, it can only get you a better brand of misery. But don’t let that stop you from buying the tickets, and don’t let anyone tell you that lotteries are just a tax on stupidity – that’s already covered under NAFTA.

The Business Lunch

2005-02-03T10:31:00.000-06:00

Business lunches are dangerous places to be. Most corporations know that the business lunch is no place to send a novice. Only hardened veterans of the rubber chicken circuit have what it takes to survive this culinary minefield.
Over the years, people who have climbed mountains, survived avalanches and paddled through piranha-infested waters have been reduced to quivering heaps of gelatin in the face of a business lunch. It is one thing to stare down a raging grizzly, but it is quite another to stand up and deliver a humorous speech at a business luncheon: the grizzly is dangerous, but the luncheon is suicidal.
This is because the business lunch has little to do with business and nothing to do with lunch, but everything to do with power. You may have invented a cure for cancer or repaired the hole in the ozone, but stand up to give your talk with a splotch of strawberry and rhubarb pie of your suit, and you are just so much carrion floating in the shark-infested waters of the corporate oceans.
As with all encounters with dangerous wildlife, the best way to survive a business lunch is to make no sudden moves, no loud noises, and no eye contact - business people consider staring a hostile gesture. Make an abrupt reach for a wine glass that results in a spill, or a loud, unexpected guffaw when nobody else is laughing, and you will find yourself slipping into oblivion while the other more successful and better adapted predators lick their chops, withdraw their claws, and order Cafe Latte.
The five most common mistakes made by neophyte business luncheon attendees are as follows:
• Eating with their mouth open - and that includes especially talking while eating, unless you are the CEO in which case talking and eating at the same time are considered evidence of prowess.
• Using the wrong utensils. Use the soupspoon to stir your coffee, and you may return to work to find your desk moved to the mailroom.
• Spilling anything. A single drop of tomato sauce on a white tablecloth can start the sharks circling.
• Speaking too much or too little. Only people with telepathic powers can know how much polite conversation is just right.
• Telling inappropriate jokes - and then being the only one who laughs.
• Having too much to drink. And if you think the fact that you are eating bread in an effort to soak up the alcohol won't be noticed, you're wrong. The only people who can get away with drinking too much at a business lunch are authors, artists and journalists, but then everybody knows they are not really business people anyway.
The pitfalls are everywhere, so those unfamiliar with the business lunch must be constantly on guard. When the nice man to your left leans over and suggests helpfully that you should try the Cajun chicken, is he really just being "helpful" or is he trying to remove you from the corporate food-chain by getting you to eat a dish that will cause you to break into a sauna-like sweat? And when that kindly woman to your right asks you if you would like red or white wine with your calamari, is she really giving you a choice, or is she trying to point out to the others that you have no idea if calamari is considered meat or fish, and selecting either wine will be a serious faux pas - a term, by the way, used by Roman gladiators to indicate someone who was about to be cast to the lions.
The only secure way to successfully navigate a business lunch is to eat and drink nothing, speak only when spoken to, and laugh (softly) only when the highest-ranking predator laughs. If you look really carefully at the other people at the table, you'll see that's exactly what they are doing, except, of course, for those uncouth few who were obviously invited by mistake, and who will never see the light of another business lunch again.
Bon appetit!

Documercials and Dramatoonaries

2005-01-31T08:14:00.000-06:00

With the advent of anticipating government deregulation, the wild and wacky world of television is about to get a serious boost in its electronic arm.
Thanks to the wizardry of the fairy-folk, gnomes and sprites who work tirelessly in to bring us ever newer, more advanced and continually obsolete technology, it will soon be possible for Canadians to have access to more than 500 channels, and enjoy the same television technology as the Americans.
The benefits of this should be obvious. For one thing, re-runs of Green Acres - the best sitcom EVER - will finally find a channel of its own and get the recognition it deserves. But more importantly, we will no longer have to be satisfied with the current measly thirty or forty channels of infortainment, documercials and dramatoonaries that passes for Canadian television. With a 500+ channel television universe unfolding in our very own living rooms, the possibility for zoning out and tuning in will be limitless.
Of course, It’ll be impossible for Canadian production companies to grind out sufficient programming to fill all these channels. Fortunately, actual original programming won’t be necessary for many of the new channels since they will be so-called "specialty" channels.
A specialty channel is one that airs only a certain kind of programming. There is the comedy channel, for instance, which shows nothing but a steady steam of stand-up comedy acts - a kind of never-ending Seinfeld episode - a sort of entire network devoted to nothing. But what about an all-Disney channel feeding consumers a constant diet of Mickey Mouse entertainment; and several all sports channels devoted to ever lesser-known sports such as Shinty, where people could debate the virtue of the cork and worsted used in the game ball. Along with an all-violence channel and an all sex-sex channel, we might see a Happy Channel with news anchors Regis and Kathy Lee for people who are tired of all the bad news on television.
But that still leaves more than 500 channels unaccounted for. So what else would we like to see? How about a wallpaper channel? A regular feature of the wallpaper channel could be a marriage-counseling segment that would teach people how to hang paper without the aid of a divorce lawyer.
But possibly the most popular new concept would be a channel devoted exclusively to highlighting the lives of people who spend their time watching television. A viewer would be able to click on one of these channels and see someone, possibly even themselves, in the act of watching television.
The Viewer channel would let viewers see someone - let's call him Bob - sitting in his home, watching television. We watch him pick up the remote and change channels, go into the kitchen for a can of beer, eating microwave burritos and flossing his teeth. We will all be amazed at his ability to watch television for so long, and we will be kept glued to the set, wondering what will happen next. Will Bob get dressed today? Will he shower? Who is going to clean up that apartment? Does him mother know he lives like this? Can he possibly have a girl friend? What happened to the gerbil he had yesterday? The suspense! The cult following might eventually rival that of Dallas or Gilligan's Island.
The Viewer channel might even be the kind of thing that would pass for art and quality for a government grant, and it couldn't possibly be any worse than the bass-fishing channel, the all-compost network, or the 24-hour Gregorian Chant Music Network.
Is this a great time to be alive or what?

Chindogu

2005-01-28T14:43:00.000-06:00

Chindogu

A friend of mine recently complained that her husband spends all his time in the basement, dreaming up useless inventions. “I wouldn’t mind so much if he came up with something that would sell,” she said, “but all these pointless contraptions are a waste of time.”
Boy, have I got a book for my friend. 101 Useless Japanese Invention by Kenji Kawakami contains photographs and descriptions of (you guessed it) 101 totally useless but fascinating inventions created by people who are determined to solve problems we don't have. According to the editors of the book, these inventions have – and I quote - "broken free from the chains of usefulness to enjoy the sublime liberation of the highly impractical."
This concept of coming up with answers for which there are no questions is so intriguing that the Japanese have actually built a philosophy of design around it called Chindogu. As far as I can tell, Chindogu means that while inventions can be created which are initially intended to solve real problems, in order to be truly Chindogu, these inventions must fail "heroically, magnificently and beautifully."
Chindogu, then, is the art of failing spectacularly.
Is this a great idea or what?
Some examples from the book include the Hydrophobe's Bathing Suit which allows the wearer to take a bath without getting wet, the Daddy Nurser which is a sort of double-cup bra-type harness designed to –quote - "let Dad experience the joy of motherhood," and the Duster Slippers for cats which are booties with tassels that feline household pets wear around the house to help chase dust bunnies out from under the furniture.
Is North America ready for Chindogu? Considering that we are the people who invented and embraced the "J"-cloth which was so much more than a paper towel, so much less than a rag, the umbrella-you-wear-like-a-hat, and Jiffy-pop, I believe that North America in not only ready for Chindogu, but is already on the leading edge of the movement, with examples of Chindogu that date back to the last century.
I give you the old-fashioned wood-and-metal instrument designed to simultaneously peel and core an apple, for instance. The idea behind this invention was that the user would insert an apple into the device, turn a crank, and the apple would be both peeled and cored at the same time. Given that it took a good deal longer to insert the apple and perform all the necessary actions than it did to take out a pocket-knife and do the same thing, the invention of the apple-corer/peeler indicates that our pioneering ancestors either had way too much time on their hands, or had a much under-appreciated sense of humor.
A more recent example of North American Chindogu is the so-called "leaf-blower", which is a motorized device using an internal combustion engine to blow leaves and dust off sidewalks and lawns. The engine sucks fuel like a racing car, pollutes like a truck, deafens the user, frightens pets for miles around, retails for the price of a small motorcycle, and is only slightly less efficient than a broom or a rake.
So for those of you who spend countless hours perfecting cat grooming machines, silver cleaners, vegetable choppers and aluminum can compactors, take heart. Failing heroically in your endeavors may not land you your very own informercial, but it will guarantee you a spot in the Chindogu hall of fame.

The Guest Room,

2005-01-26T09:12:00.000-06:00

Snow Job

2005-01-21T13:52:00.000-06:00

It was pretty exciting watching El Niño in the fall, wasn’t it?
I, and every other house-owner I know, watched the development of the El Niño with special interest because, along with everything else this peculiar weather pattern does, it is supposed to cut down on the amount of snow that falls in my part of The Great White North.
According to the people who know about these things, El Niño is an oceanic and atmospheric phenomenon in the Pacific Ocean along the western coast of Ecuador and Peru which causes climatic disturbances of varying severity around the world. El Niño comes along every three to seven years, which is, coincidentally, about how often I contemplate purchasing a snow-blower. But I didn’t this year because, once again, El Niño’s promise of a mild winter with minimal snowfall lulled me into a false sense of frugality.
The problem is that winter only lasts four, maybe five months in my part of the country, with only about three months of heavy snowfall. So the only time I really want a snow-blower is on February the 15th at 6:30 in the morning, when the world is as dead, dark and frozen as the inside of my car’s battery, and I am standing in three feet of freshly fallen slush, my house coat flapping around my knees, try to calculate how much weight I can shift with my bent, 10-pound aluminum snow shovel before I can expect getting either frostbite or some kind of nasty lower back injury.
It doesn’t help any that two doors away, my neighbour waves cheerfully at me, hot cup of coffee in hand, as he surges through the cement-like snow at the helm of his brand-new, self-propelled, fully automatic, self-starting SnowMeister which is effortlessly launching the frozen, gray-white slurry clogging his driveway in a graceful arch onto some other hapless neighbour’s driveway. In the time it takes me to clear a little space around my soggy feet, he has cleared his driveway and the sidewalk in front of three houses.
I bought the euphemistically named snow shovel at a yard sale in June for a buck and a half. Here is how my thinking went when I saw the thing: shoveling snow is good exercise. I really remember thinking those words. Standing there in my shorts and T-shirt under a brilliant summer sun, I actually felt that shoveling freezing rain out of my driveway in February would be something I should ENJOY! It would be an invigorating start to my day, and it would provide me with a good cardio-vascular workout without my having to join a health club, I thought, exhibiting the same short-term memory problem that causes me to plan summer canoe-trips involving me having to carry the canoe over portages.
Besides, I said to myself as I handed over my money to a disbelieving yard-sales person, we don’t really get that much snow, so why spend all that money on a snow-blower which will just wind up rusting in my garage anyway? And everybody knows how noisy they are, and how much they pollute. This, of course, is the same line of logic which, if followed, would lead me to forego buying a lawn mower in favor of cutting the grass with scissors.
By now I am possibly the only person on the street without a SnowMeister, and I can feel as morally and environmentally superior as I like while I scoop spoon-sized chunks of ice and snow out of the mountain of slag the snowplow just deposited in my driveway. The fact remains that starting with the very first yard sale in the spring - El Niño or no - I am going to be on the look-out for a good, used, SnowMeister of my very own!
I do have a pretty good snow shovel to trade, though, if anyone is interested. It is a lot cheaper than joining a health club!

Modern Appliances

2005-01-18T11:29:00.000-06:00

Appliances

I was wandering through a kitchen appliance store in a mall the other day, when a very enthusiastic young salesperson asked me if I would be interested in having a look at their new Cappuccinotoasterbroiler-as-seen-on-TV. “It mounts right up under your kitchen cabinets,” he said with the same excitement he might have displayed had he been announcing a cure for a major disease. “That way your kitchen countertop won’t be cluttered!” What was more, this fabulous device came in a dozen designer colours, with more attachments than the Columbia space shuttle. It was self-cleaning, odour-free, ran quietly, had a remote control, and I could pay for it in several years’ worth of easy monthly payments.
“What does it do?” I asked the earnest young man.
“Do?”
“Yes. If I am going install one of these Cappuccinotoasterbroiler-as-seen-on-TV in my kitchen, I’d like to know what it actually will do for me.”
Well, the explanation that followed is far too long and complicated to repeat here, but clearly the impression I was intended to get was that this extraordinary device would make me a huge success in the kitchen, more popular with my friends and family, healthier, and possibly even younger – I think there was a separate attachment for that.
I did not buy the Cappuccinotoasterbroiler as-seen-on-TV. I don’t need an appliance that will turn me in to a younger, more popular, kitchen whiz. What I do need are some appliances that have practicable applications. A self-cleaning refrigerator, for instance, would be nice. The kids have a tendency to store science projects in the fridge and then forgetting about them, just as I seem to have a talent for not remembering bags of spinach I had every intention of making the kids eat, and which turn to slurry in the back of the “crisper.” Whoever comes up with a fridge that will sort out and dispose of my collection of liquid cucumbers, moldy yogurts and brittle ham slices will have my undying gratitude – and my money.
A few years ago, I could also have used some sort of diaper changing device – with a long-range remote control. Although I did manage to become something of an expert in the art of the rapid-fire diaper change, while at the same time learning how to hold my breath for several minutes, these are skills I could have done without; there are many ways for a parent to bond with his child, but I don’t believe this particular avenue is essential. Some sort of changing, disposing, cleaning and powdering appliance which would deliver my smiling, sweet-smelling child into my waiting arms would have been worth any number of Cappuccinotoasterbroiler-as-seen-on-TV.
I would also like to see the following appliances created: a machine that will bring a mug of hot coffee to my bedroom every morning, while at the same time waking me as gently as a summer breeze through an open window; a vacuum cleaner that will get the hair of my cat, Paws for Thought, out of my wool rug and then empty itself; something – anything, that will sort out the content of my garage and find my box of router bits which I haven’t seen since Kim Campbell was Prime Minister, but which I am certain is still in there somewhere; and finally some sort of extremely sturdy mobile unit I can send into my teenage son’s room to A: find him and bring him out before noon on Saturdays, and B: clean the place up, by which I mean returning the household plates and glasses to the kitchen, putting the lizard back in its cage, taking the melted wax out of the carpet and locating the three English assignments which have, apparently, been completed but have gone missing.
And oh yes, a dog washer would also be very much appreciated; some kind of machine that would be set up in the back yard, and which would lure Dimbulb into it, wash, dry and de-flea him all in one fell swoop, all without the bathroom having to be re-decorated, which is what tends to happen now.
Free Cappuccinotoasterbroiler as-seen-on-TV will be awarded to those who create any of these appliances.

Leaving Home

2005-01-15T18:53:00.000-06:00

Leaving Home

Well, the day I have dreaded for the past eighteen years has finally arrived: my son is off to college. I am very proud of him, of course, and I’m sure he’ll do well, but the college he has chosen is in another city, and any way I look at it, he is leaving home.
I’m going to miss him terribly.
It’s hard to believe that this tall, thin, dark-haired, deep-voiced young man who is now packing his bags in his bedroom is the same person who, just a few years ago, was a small boy who used to hunker down in the vegetable garden with me and ask me all those serious questions about radishes and ladybugs. This young man, who is now well on his way to becoming an accomplished musician, and whose girlfriend struggles to fight back tears as she talks about how important it is they stay in touch during the coming months, used to fit into the crock of my arm where he would lie and giggle as I carried him around like a football. I find it all so amazing. How did he change so much, while I hardly changed at all?
As I watch him pack up his guitars and amplifiers, and dismantle the futon and cram books into boxes, I find myself thinking about the last time we went camping in Algonquin together. Was he really only fourteen years old then? I remember thinking how strong he was, and how willingly he put up with the rain and the bugs, the sand in the food and the heat of the portages. All that seems so remote now. Back then I was always there to pick him up and dust him off when he fell. Back then I could tell him to be careful of slippery rocks and low-hanging branches; I could watch out for him. Who’s going to look out for him now?
I want to give him some advice about going out into the world – something I haven’t already told him during all those talks of the last 18 years. But what? Eat well, get plenty of rest, don’t drink, don’t do drugs, work hard at school, respect yourself. I feel there are so many things I haven’t told him yet. I should have told him not to be too trusting, and yet not to be too distant from people; I should have shown him more of the world so he would have a better sense of who he is. I guess he will have to discover these things for himself. I regret the angry words I have spoken in haste over the years, the missed opportunities to look at family pictures, the times I brought work home instead of reading a book or watching a movie with him. I wonder if he will be all right.
What I really want to say is “be safe.” And in my heart I want to say that the best way for him to be safe is to stay home.
But of course I can’t say that. I can’t hold him back from going out into the world, a world which has much beauty and delight in it, but which also has so much heartache and sorrow. Even if he did stay home, I can’t protect him from all that. All I can hope is that I have done my bit to prepare him as best I can. The time has come to let him go, I suppose, and then spend the rest of my life with my fingers crossed.
What I can do is do his laundry for him before he leaves, something I always insisted he do for himself so he would know how when the day came to move out – the day which is now here. I can iron his shirts for him so he will look nice as he heads out, and I can wash his sheets so he will have a clean bed waiting for him when he comes home for visits. I can pack a couple of boxes of food so he will have something to eat, and I can make sure he always has enough money for the train home.
But beyond that, I don’t suppose there is much more for me to do except hug him, wish him luck, tell him I love him, and then hang on tight to those memories as I let him go.

Trouble in Paradise

2005-01-15T18:27:00.000-06:00

Trouble in Paradise
There is trouble brewing in cottage country between those who think nature should be appreciated without being disturbing, and those who think it should be exploited for fun. And before I go any further, let me make it clear that I count myself firmly among the former. Having just returned from spending several days in the northern part of Algonquin Park, followed by a week at a cottage just south of the park, I am keenly aware of the differences in attitude towards nature among the members of the two camps.
Campers and cottage dwellers who travel through the region in canoes and kayaks – or on foot on the many hiking trails – do so quietly. They are able to experience the extraordinary silences of the wilderness, and if they’re fortunate, they may be privileged to spot moose, deer, bears, and a variety of wonderful birds, in their natural habitat. There is something awe-inspiring about paddling silently through the early morning mist of a marshy inlet to spot a moose standing chest deep in the water, feeding on the water plants, moving slowly through the shallows. And there is something both wonderful and humbling in seeing the bulk of a black bear moving through the wild raspberry bushes along a portage trail.
And of course there are the loons. Those incredible, ancient birds with their haunting early morning calls to each other echoing through the stillness from lake to lake, a sound that has been heard in that part of the world for millions of years.
The natural wonders of central Ontario are so amazing because they are still there, in some cases in pristine conditions. There are still a few lakes where the fish are abundant, where the water is drinkable, and where there is still the silence of the wilderness.
But perhaps the silence is a little frightening for some people, because there are certainly many who do everything they can to keep it at bay. Over the years, there has been an alarming increase in the use of motorized vehicles in cottage country, from SUVs thundering up and down the highways or over narrow forest access roads and ATVs tearing trails through the bush, to powerboats and smaller personal watercrafts roaring up and down the lakes, almost invariably accompanied by raucous music.
This summer, as every summer, stories abound about the destruction inflicted by these machines on the environment and the animals, and every summer the problem just seems to get worse. Sitting on a dock early one morning, cup of coffee in hand, watching a family of loons fishing for breakfast, I was stunned to observe one powerboat after another come tearing up the lake, to circle the loons while the people on board took pictures. The loons bobbed helplessly in the wake, their fishing disrupted until the boats left them alone. Had the boats been driven by teens, I suppose it might be possible to excuse the behaviour as a lack of understanding about nature, but these were adults taking their kids out for a ride, setting the worst possible example. During much of the rest of the day, powerboats sped up and down the lake, variously towing people on water skis or on any number of inflatable devices. The fact that the noise and pollution was a problem for so many other people on the lake was clearly of no concern to the boaters.
A story came from another peaceful cottager of having seen a length of shoreline being destroyed to make way for a huge, multi-level new “cottage”. While workers completed construction of the building, the owner spent his time driving his Hummer through the hills behind, tearing out small trees and destroying wildlife habitat. Unbelievable.
When asked to stop the destructive and irresponsible use of powered vehicles in such a fragile eco-system, the people using the equipment will say they have as much right to have fun in the great Canadian outdoors as anybody else. And perhaps legally they do. But this is not an issue about legal rights, but about moral obligations. The Victorian notion that the outdoors is a playground for people to use as they please is not only out of date, it is irresponsible. Nature is not something to be abused, but something to be kept in trust. Responsibility and respect cannot be legislated; we have to acquire these attributes on our own; we owe it to future generations.