Somebody's Mother Online

A Vote Mob Is A Good Mob

2011-04-19T12:49:00.002-04:00

It all started with a rant on Rick Mercer’s Tuesday night show, The Mercer Report. Mercer is famous for his short speeches or rants that are filmed as he hustles down one of the graffiti ridden alleys of Toronto. The topic was the youth vote. He began his one-minute rant with the observation that, in this election, every demographic group has been targeted except one. He finished his speech with the following:

It is the conventional wisdom of all political parties that young people will not vote. And the parties, they like it that way. It's why your tuition keeps going up.

So please, if you're between the age of 18 and 25 and you want to scare the hell out of the people that run this country, this time around, do the unexpected. Take 20 minutes out of your day and do what young people all around the world are dying to do.

What followed was the beginning of a series “vote mobs” on university campuses across the country. A vote mob is not a protest demonstration. Its purpose is to show other young people that there are youth who do care about the political process and to encourage as many young people as possible to vote on May 2^nd. These events are non-partisan, yet they are also meant to show politicians that youth are paying attention to what politicians are saying, and that it’s time for politicians to pay attention to people between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. Participants carry signs, sing songs, dance, and generally have a good time.

It’s really nice to see a celebrity use his fame for good, and I’m especially pleased to see Mercer attack one of my pet peeves, voter apathy. I strongly believe that it’s the responsibility of everybody of voting age to cast a ballot, and if you can’t vote for anyone, then you should show up, vote for everybody, thus destroying your ballot. Destroying a ballot is important because these are counted too, and if enough people who are truly disgusted with things as they are destroy their ballot, it would send a message as well. Voting is the one time when we can express our political will. If we shut up, then politicians can ride roughshod over us all. We just can’t let that happen.

The other night, I watched a newscast in which a woman in her twenties claimed that she didn’t vote because she just didn’t understand politics so she didn’t really care. I walked away from my TV in disgust. This woman was about to get married and perhaps would eventually start a family. You wouldn’t ignore what’s going on in your child’s school so why should you ignore what’s going on in the halls of government, the very place where decisions are made that will affect your child’s future.

I applaud the vote mob movement and I encourage everybody to get to the polling stations on May 2^nd and vote, no matter how old you are. If you are interested in what vote mobs are about, the web site www.leadnow.ca gives more information about this organization whose purpose is to get young people to be politically engaged.

If young people are the future of Canada, they have every right to give voice to what kind of future that will be. On May 2^nd, let your voice be heard and vote, because if you don’t, you have no right to complain about the government that you get.

Of Fathers and Sons-in-Law

2011-03-11T07:30:00.001-05:00

I don’t usually like to chat about goings-on in my family; you all have your own lives and your own problems that are probably far more interesting than mine, but indulge me on it this week as I try to make a point or two.

This past weekend, I went to see my nine-one year old father in New York City. Just before I went to see him, his hospice social worker caught up with me and told me that she was just about to call me as she was very concerned about the state of my father’s hair, moustache and beard. My father took a violent dislike to the nursing home barber and refrained from any form of haircut or shave. The social worker asked me if perhaps, I could do something about it. She also commented on how much she loves to visit with my Dad. She loves his stories. Dad tells people great whoppers: he was a four star general, he worked with Eisenhower, and he helped Albert Einstein develop the atom bomb. It is a family mystery to all of us whether Dad actually believes these stories or just simply enjoys pulling everybody’s leg, but Marcy the social worker doesn’t worry about the veracity of his stories; she simply enjoys them and lets Dad enjoy telling them.

When I saw my father, I knew that we really did have to do something. His moustache was curled into his mouth and was caked with the red juice that they gave him to take his medication. It would be easy to accuse the nursing home of negligence, but they have strict rules that you cannot force a resident to have any form of treatment, including barbering. I’ve been told by the staff that my father is normally gentle and friendly, but he can be pretty scary once you get his back up. That’s the Dad that I know and love.

Dad was perfectly amenable to having either of us help him out so it fell to my bearded husband who has far more experience and courage than I do in these matters to wield the scissors and risk the wrath of my impatient father. When we showed up with a just-purchased supply of scissors, comb, and mirror, I fully expected my father to bail on us and flatly refuse the makeover, but I was wrong. We did bring him his favourite treat of seedless grapes plus a Hershey bar which he happily devoured before my very nervous husband started snipping away at the back of Dad’s head.

When the hair was done and my husband got to the sideburns, my Dad asked if my husband would kindly trim his moustache as that was bothering him. With sweat beginning to accumulate all over my husband’s face, he gingerly began hacking away at the encrusted moustache which every now and then pulled at my father. This part was a much more difficult as Dad had to stop munching on the grapes, stop talking, and hold still. All through the procedure, my husband continued to apologize if he was hurting Dad and Dad gently responded that all was well. Then my husband took on Dad’s chest-length beard. By this time, my husband’s shirt was drenched with perspiration as he worked on my father’s face with courage and determination.

Once the procedure was over, we helped my wheelchair-bound father out of his hairy shirt and into a clean one. Seeing my father with his shirt off and with the once muscular arms now flabby made me sad. My father once wielded heavy bags and now he was utterly helpless to even lift a telephone and make a call. The way he maintained his dignity was embellishing his past to strangers.

Finally, my husband gave Dad’s mouth a good cleaning and my father looked much more like a retired officer and gentleman than a wild old hermit of the mountains. I looked at these two important men in my life – my husband and my dad – and remembered how unsure Dad was over thirty-five years ago that the young man who was about to marry me would be the right man for his daughter. I also remembered how, in my mother’s declining years, both of my parents admitted that they had been wrong and that they now loved my husband as if he were their son.

This experience made me realize how short life is and that the people that we trust the least may turn into the ones that we have to count on the most, so we should all be open to changing our minds…and girls, when you fall in love, take a hard look at your husband to be. If he’s the kind of guy that will trim your old dad’s wild and dirty beard some time in the future, you’ve got a winner, no matter how rich or poor he is.

It’s not something that I would have thought of in the days when my father could hold up the world, but I’m convinced that deep down, I knew that my husband would come through for my parents, and in the end for me, and for that, I am truly grateful.

Digital Community in the Superstorm of 2011

2011-03-09T17:51:00.004-05:00

It was a difficult drive back last Sunday after visiting my father. We drove through the Adirondack Mountains to Montreal where my husband, who had a meeting in Montreal on Monday, got me to the bus station so that I could take a bus to Sherbrooke. The road conditions were awful in the mountains of New York, and there was a bad accident in which people who had gotten out of their cars were hit by oncoming traffic. Once I was safe at home, the Environment Canada weather warnings made me nervous about what I was to face the next day.

Usually during a snowstorm, I can hear a snow plow going by between 5:00 and 6:00, but all was deadly quiet outside. I got up, ready to walk my dogs and go to work. When I opened my door, snow tumbled in. My car was buried under snow and my driveway was nowhere to be seen. I let the dogs out as I shovelled snow away from my front and back doors and tried to get the excess off my car. One look told me that I wasn’t going anywhere.

Later, I called my colleagues and found out that my employer was telling people who couldn’t make it in to stay home. I called my trusty driveway plow-man and chatted with his wife. He’d been out since 2:00 in the morning, and even the city plow couldn’t traverse some of the snow-covered streets.

I was snowed in and alone. Strangely enough, this made me feel a bit panicky and claustrophobic. Ever the city slicker, I couldn’t believe that I was stuck, but my power was on and my Facebook was working. I was not alone. My friends were online, The Record was online and Sharon McCully was online:

The Record Many Record carriers were unable to get out their own doors to get to yours this morning so your Record may not be delivered this morning. 8:02 AM

The Record The City of Sherbrooke has issued a notice that city offices will be closed today. Sidewalks will not be plowed and there will not be a garbage collection - it will be postponed till Friday. Essential services will be maintained. The city has set up an emergency service centre to respond to situations requiring fire protection and police services, public works. 8:03 AM

The Record Due to the continuing snowfall, and the risk to our employees who would have to travel to work, The Record will not publish today. Please see Wednesday's Record for full storm coverage as well as all the news and continue to watch The Record's Facebook page for breaking news and storm updates. 11:39 AM

All day long, I read Sharon’s and The Record’s posts and felt that I was in touch with what was going on. My friends posted photos and chatted back and forth with the latest measurement of snow from their backyards along with funny stories and words of encouragement. Meanwhile, I waited for my husband who insisted on driving home. My friends were sending me messages telling me exactly what to say to him in order to get him to turn around. He wouldn’t listen. Four hours later, when my husband finally made it up the street after being detoured by a stuck tractor-trailer in Rock Forest, I sheepishly posted the news that he was home and received lots of Hurrah’s and “likes,” as in people who liked the news that my husband was home. It seemed strange to him that I would post his doings on Facebook (he’s getting used to me telling tales in The Record), yet at a time like that, the commiseration of my Facebook friends was a wonderful support.

I think that Monday was a good example of what a digital community is. Sharon got the latest out to us on what was going on in Sherbrooke and friends did what friends do best, showing their concern and sharing the inevitable photo. Many people knock Facebook, but I believe that Monday was a great example of social networking at its best. Thanks, Sharon!

Getting the News

2011-03-03T14:55:00.001-05:00

Just the other day, a friend posted a cartoon in which a prophet type looking character with long hair and a beard is seen walking down a city street carrying a sign saying, “The world ended while you were on Facebook.” I can be shamefaced enough to say that when I open my computer in the morning while I have my coffee, I go to Facebook to see what my friends are up to and often, I get the latest news that way.

That’s a pathetic way to get the news but since I have friends who are fellow news hounds and take to posting stories from new web sites, that’s slightly less pathetic than you might think. I’m glad to see you all reading The Record and supporting your local English newspaper. You’re getting the local story and keeping Anglo culture alive in The Townships but of course, you probably want to catch some news that’s further afield once you’ve read The Record from cover to cover.

Cable TV has come a long way so that news is readily available all the time…but it depends on the kind of news that you prefer. Nowadays, I turn to BBC News for my world news because I find that it’s fairly objective and covers places that Canadian news networks don’t. For example, with all the uprisings in the Middle East and northern Africa, BBC gives pretty good coverage of what’s going on, not only in such hot spots as Egypt and Libya, but countries such as Bahrain, Tunisia and Yemen.

I also get a kick out of watching the world weather on BBC because there’s something very old school in how it’s done. They broadcast their logo and a loud hum before the weather forecaster comes on, as if it’s taking time to hook up with the guy somewhere in Mumbai and they talk about the weather as if Timbuktu is right around the corner. If you ever want to feel like “it’s a small world after all,” then watch BBC weather which comes on just before 6:30.

For Canadian news, I tend to watch CBC or CTV because I like their local newscasts. Yet here’s a question for you readers: Am I the only one who was miffed when all three major Canadian networks decided that there were not enough Anglophones left in Quebec to warrant cancelling local morning news shows in Montreal? I hope not. If I support CBC, it would be nice to have the service that I pay for.

For American news, I tend to watch ABC, as I no longer get CNN. You can only take so much of Wolf Blitzer and his situation room for so long. I don’t appreciate news being made dramatic, as CNN likes to make it.

One station that we won’t be turning to is a Canadian Fox news network as the CRTC has a rule that newscasts must be fair and honest and the CRTC has decided that Fox News does neither. I was opposed to having such a news network in Canada reporting its own bias rather than the news. There’s a difference between censorship and regulation, and I believe that the CRTC got it right. Otherwise I might have had to turn off the news at six, and see what my friends are reporting on Facebook.

Getting Prissy?

2011-02-22T07:20:00.003-05:00

It’s not easy being a middle aged person. You get set in your ways and you find yourself having expectations, perhaps ridiculous expectations. You go through your day thinking that sanity and courtesy will prevail and it doesn’t and it makes you angry.

The other day, on Facebook no less, a friend accused me of prissiness. Now I have many and sundry faults. There are doubtless people who would be more than happy to enumerate these faults to you and that’s not paranoia; we all like to gossip. Yet prissiness is a fault that I have never been accused of and it occurred to me that perhaps it is my again-ridiculous expectation that folks would think of others besides themselves that might make me look like an extremely prissy old crone.

The accusation came from my complaint that people who snowshoe or let their dogs walk all over cross country ski trails should be ashamed of themselves. I thought my statement was somewhat restrained. After the rotten cross country ski that I had in which my skis could not glide because some snowshoer couldn’t take three steps to the right and snowshoe on the snowshoeing path or some dog walker refused to keep his/her dog out of the skiing trail, I was ready to write something far worse and over the top. After falling and getting tripped up, I was pretty annoyed. To add insult to injury, I got called prissy in public…but the person who wrote that is a really good friend so I forgave her. Besides, some good cross-country skiing friends weighed in so I felt supported in my alleged prissiness.

Then there was the concert at Higher Ground in Burlington. If you are middle-aged and if you have flat feet as I do, I strongly discourage you from going to Higher Ground to see someone that you really like. Feel free to disagree with me but my experience was far from pleasant.

Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings played there on February 11^th. Sharon and the band do the best soul music that I’ve heard in a long, long time. The songs are great, the horn section and bass player are flat-out fantastic and Sharon works overtime to entertain you. What a great voice she has! It was bad enough that she was struggling with a microphone that cut in and out but she had the crowd with her every step of the way. She was terrific.

On the ticket, the show time was indicated as 8:00 PM. In fact, that was when the door opened and let you into a ballroom with just a very few seats in the back. The first band went on at 9:00. The Dap-Kings went on at about 10:30. By then, I had sore feet but I was ready for a great show. Just my luck, some drunk guy, ‘way taller than me decided that he and his girlfriend (both with no sense of rhythm) were going to dance in front of me with no care for who was around them. He nearly knocked over a lady well into her sixties. When he jabbed me in the stomach with his elbow…I was not happy and vociferously expressed that. He didn’t care, he just kept it up, banging into other people and being a regular jackass. Meanwhil,e all the other young people danced in place without hurting others. Curses upon such as he!

Life would be so much nicer if we all took a few minutes to consider how our actions might affect others. We’ve heard it before, but the Golden Rule still stands as a way to get through a day by making the world better for others and therefore, yourself. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you….and if you can see Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings in Montreal, by all means go!

Romance Amidst the Horror

2011-02-22T07:15:00.001-05:00

I don’t like horror movies or movies that have a blood bath of killing, but there’s one TV show that I’ve watched week after week for the last six years. It’s a show that has more than its share of icky and gory carcasses, and there’s both romance and humour to be had while hanging around those carcasses. That show is Fox’s Bones, which is on every Thursday at 9:00.

The show is very loosely based on Kathy Reichs, a real-life forensic anthropologist who has written many best selling murder mysteries. I am a fan of that genre, but not one of Reichs’ style, which probably puts me in a minority. Reichs produces Bones and I really like the TV show a lot better than her books.

The plot revolves around a brilliant but socially inept forensic anthropologist, Dr. Temperance Brennan (Emily Deschanel) and her F.B.I. partner, Sealey Booth (David Boreanz, formerly the star of the show, Angel) who solve murder mysteries together. Booth is a former U.S. Ranger and sniper. He is warm-hearted and relies on hunches to solve mysteries while Brennan (Bones) is a firm believer in scientific method and logic to solve mysteries. Bones just doesn’t get people. The two spar constantly and the spark between them is reminiscent of the 80’s romantic comedy Moonlighting which spent two years with the tease of whether the characters (played by Cybil Shepherd and Bruce Willis) would ever become a couple. The two years in which they did become a couple was seen to lead to the cancellation of the show. Obviously, the writers of Bones have spent the last six years doing everything possible to avoid the “Moonlighting curse.”

Bones also relies heavily on the ensemble cast who support the two main players. Brennan’s best friend is Angela Montenegro (Michaela Conlin), the team’s forensic artist and computer whiz, who tries to teach Bones how to behave like a normal person and has her own romance with Dr. Jack Hodgins (T. J. Thyne). Apparently, the Moonlighting curse has not applied to them because, after an on-again-off-again relationship, Hodgins and Angela were “allowed” to marry and now Angela is pregnant.

They are the more off beat couple on the show as Hodgins, who comes from a ridiculously wealthy family, is mad for conspiracy theories and Angela is a warm, high spirited artist type who doesn’t exactly fit in with the squints or scientists. There is also a series of graduate students, each with eccentricities that adds comic relief to the mysteries that are solved each week.

This is the key to why Bones differs from the Law & Order and CSI series on television. There is more focus on characters and the development of their own lives interwoven with the mysteries makes the show feel more like a movie rather than an episodic TV murder mystery. This is why I think that I’m able to stand all the blood, guts and gore; there’s humour and character development from week to week. The characters have changed and grown from the first year to this, their sixth season.

Will Bones and Booth ever get together? I think that they will when the show has a series finale. Meanwhile the writers will do everything that they can to stretch out that romantic tension for as long as they can to keep Bones going into as many seasons as they can manage.

Romance Amidst the Horror

2011-02-19T08:08:00.002-05:00

I don’t like horror movies or movies that have a blood bath of killing, but there’s one TV show vaguely in that genre that I’ve watched week after week for the last six years. It’s a show that has more than its share of icky and gory carcasses, and there’s both romance and humour to be had while hanging around those carcasses. That show is Fox’s Bones, which is on every Thursday at 9:00.

CBC Radio 2: A Little Something for Everyone

2011-02-11T07:40:00.002-05:00

Anyone who has followed my columns knows that I’ve done much whinging and whining about the changes in the CBC Radio 2 format. I liked the old classical station that I came to love when I moved to Canada. If I wanted rock and/or roll (a Reverend Lovejoy reference for you Simpsons fans), I would turn my dial over to CHOM when I lived in Montreal or to some of the obscure New England stations. I don’t know if anyone can still get WBTZ, the alternative music station known as “the Buzz” that broadcasts out of Burlington, but it is next to impossible to pick up in Lennoxville. I always enjoyed their mix of old and new pop/rock music though the commercials made me turn the station off about as many times as I turned the station on.

The thing is, when I get in my car, I don’t feel like futzing with my iPod and all the wires plus I figure it’s not good for the iPod’s battery to leave it in the glove compartment in minus 16 weather, so I’ve been leaving CBC Radio 2 on for the drive to and from work to make my life easier and to pretend that I’m keeping an open mind. I may be middle aged but I’m still curious about new music that’s coming out.

A crazy thing has happened; I’ve started to get used to Radio 2. I’m tentatively admitting that I like it. In the morning, I’ve been listening to Bob Mackowycz who plays a solid mix of old and new music. He definitely has a well loved play list as I’m getting a little tired of hearing We Could Have Had It All by Adele (I’m also getting more than a little tired of singers with only one name, kind of presumptuous, don’t you think? Why should Adele be the quintessential Adele? There are probably some other very special Adele’s in the world…and don’t get me started about Ellen! I had the name first.) Other than that, I must admit it’s kind of nice to turn on my radio in the morning and hear Bob Mackowycz sing the praises of a group like The Clash who I used to love and then hear Rock the Casbah which, politically incorrect as it is, is still a great song and frighteningly timely.

When I come home from work and then hit the exercise or guilt machine, I listen to The Drive with Rich…Terfry. The reason that I put the pause in is that’s exactly how he says his name on the air and all the time. Everybody has his or her eccentricities and that’s his, I suppose. He’s had a running theme to the show for the last few weeks which has been music to exercise to, and for me, that’s been very handy as he’s been playing a lot of upbeat music, like Adele’s You Could Have Had It All, but then, I grew up with AM radio when the number one song was played a lot so that doesn’t put me off too much. Terfry plays everything from Joni Mitchell to Patti Smith to Elvis Costello to a Canadian band called Lazy Susan whose single is called Sweet Thing, (not to be confused with Van Morrison’s song of the same name which is infinitely better), to The Decembrists who have garnered lots of favour, according to my Facebook friends. It’s a great mix of lively music and Terfry is an engaging radio DJ without being annoying.

CBC Radio 2 may not be the class act that it was a few years ago, but in its drive to be all things to all people, there are bound to be some hits and misses. CBC Morning and The Drive are a bit of what Peter Gzowski’s Morningside was, but in a more musical vein. When you play a wide mix of music, you are sure to please some of the people some of the time.

The Trials and Tribulations of Multiculturalism

2011-02-10T18:54:00.000-05:00

This has been a week in which the world seemed to get a little smaller. The demonstrations in Egypt, Yemen and Tunisia calling for a change in government and a more democratic government have grabbed our attention. In Great Britain, there have been demonstrations for quite a while protesting governments cuts to students. I’m starting to believe that 2011 is this millennium’s 1968 – people are calling for a world where everybody gets a chance to have his or her say and a world where people just feel that they might have a chance to get ahead period.

It’s very easy to feel that all that stuff is happening over there. On Saturday, I was cross-country skiing in the woods and feeling very apart from the world, but as I was swishing around and falling in the snow, I did get a little quiet time to ponder something that the Prime Minister of Great Britain said. He claimed that state multiculturalism has failed and that countries need to implement what he called, “muscular liberalism.” His idea is that once you immigrate to Great Britain, you have to accept its values. This is not unfamiliar territory. We’ve had a similar discussion here in Quebec with our debates over reasonable accommodation.

With a world so interconnected, I think that Prime Minister Cameron is trying to go back to a 1950’s world that will never exist again. Nowadays, people are moving from one country to the next in search of employment and in search of a better way of life for their families and themselves. With cyberspace, we are connected through Skype, Twitter, Facebook, and whatever social networking system will come along in the next few years, and there are sure to be plenty more with bells and whistles that we haven’t thought of yet. Very few places are isolated anymore; what happens in Egypt may eventually have an effect on us, particularly if oil tankers aren’t making it through the Suez Canal.

You can only ski in the woods for so long nowadays, both literally and figuratively. Whether you are in Montreal, Sherbrooke, London or New York City, you are sure to encounter people whose cultures, upbringings, food, dress are going to be different, maybe radically different, from your own. To think that we can create a national or international system of right values in the twenty-first century is nostalgic daydreaming and it’s the kind of daydreaming that can get us into trouble. We have to recognize that the days of one people of one nationality and one colour living together in harmony are long gone, and let’s face it, even within that same group, someone was always fighting with somebody else anyway.

We have to face the fact that we live in a multicultural world and multiculturalism simply can’t be allowed to fail if we are to live in some semblance of peace. People will come to live in our country and they will have to find a way to navigate through our value systems. Yes, they will have to learn to live side by side with us, but it might be a little much to ask them to accept everything that the rest of us believe in, hook, line, and sinker. Perhaps over time, they will adapt to us, and as our society becomes more diverse, we may adapt a little to them. That kind of give and take makes for a more peaceful and perhaps a more interesting social environment. In a world where modern day fascists are making hay with our fear of terrorism, decrying multiculturalism is downright dangerous. A prime minister should know better.

Things That We Can Do Without in January…or February

2011-01-25T07:41:00.001-05:00

January is a long, cold, dark, and cruel month. I’ve called it the dark night of the soul, and for me, it ever and always will be. Everybody always tells me how much they hate February, but February has longer days, and every now and then, you get those wonderful thaws where you just barely feel the warmth of the sun. The icicles are dripping off roofs, and spring feels like it’s around the corner.

What we don’t need in January is negativity, but…lists aren’t necessarily negative if they spread mirth, delight, and a feeling of commonality. If you feel the way I do, that’s great, and if you don’t, turn the page:

1. Sarah Palin: The shooting was bad enough. It was horrific. Did you have to cover yourself by using terms like, “blood libel?” What’s wrong with you? Stop giving women politicians a bad name and be a TV personality. It’s good money and you can be as dippy as you want.

2. Horoscopes: O.k., get ready for this. Astrology isn’t real; it’s fun, but not real. Yes, I am the epitome of a Gemini, but no one cares. Now, I’m a Taurus? Oh, gee, it just goes to prove that astrology isn’t real. Thank you for that amazing non-story when millions of people are starving to death, dying of AIDS, or from wars. Feel the shame!

3. American Idol: I can’t stand Simon Cowell, but he has my undying respect for getting out. He should have done it two years ago. American Idol has done more to ruin popular music and television than Coca-Cola and Sprite. Would Ella Fitzgerald have won American Idol? I don’t think so. Ignore it and it may finally go away.

4. Reality Shows: Are we getting sick of them yet?

5. Demographics: The largest generation is getting older, there are fewer kids, and how does society pay for seniors’ health care and pensions? It’s all bad news. Maybe I will get used to eating cat food in my retirement. I can have dog food on Sundays.

6. China: Bad news always comes out of China. Things like melamine don’t belong in milk; lead does not belong in toys. A guy wins a Nobel Peace Prize, and you don’t let him out? May we please get some good news from China already? Peace in Afghanistan would be really nice too.

7. Automated telephone systems: Your call is important to us. Please wait an hour and a half, and the next available representative will not be able to answer your question. Too late, our offices just closed.

8. People in the United States who compare President Obama to Hitler: Read your history, please! Hate him, revile him, sneer at him, but don’t compare him to the man who gave organized slaughter a name. It just makes you look ignorant.

9. Wack-jobs who picket funerals with disgusting signs: Your grandparents knew about manners and maybe compassion. You don’t.

10. Columnists who make lists.

Comedy Central and BBC Canada – A Continent of Reruns

2011-01-19T21:16:00.004-05:00

How many of you think that the Gomery Report is funny? How many of you can even remember the scandal that it investigated? You’d know if you watched This Hour Has 22 Minutes on Monday, January 17^th. No, it wasn’t doing a goof on Canadian History; the show itself was Canadian history, a good six years old. Political humour isn’t funny unless it’s current, but Comedy Central Canada just keeps playing reruns of This Hour Has 22 Minutes because even though it’s old and stale, it’s Canadian.

Good comedy almost always has an element of surprise. After all, a joke isn’t funny if you know the punch line. A pie in the face isn’t funny if you can see that pie coming from a long way off. Similarly, if you’ve seen the same stand-up comics do the same routines over and over again on Just for Laughs, it’s just not funny anymore. How many times can you watch Shaun Majumder do the most embarrassing shtick that couldn’t get a laugh from a college kid who’s had a few beers? It wasn’t funny the first time and it gets increasingly pathetic with each watching. A comic, who I’ve already seen, has to be particularly funny to get a laugh out of me after I’ve watched one of his pathetically un-funny introductions or eulogies to each comic’s routine. Yet I watch in hope, hope that one day I’ll see something new that will make me laugh.

While I applaud the mission of the CRTC to maintain Canadian content so that Canadian artists can be employed and that the country’s media reflects Canadian culture, there ought to be a law against the number of times a show can be broadcasted because it’s Canadian and cheap.

Speaking of Canadian content, if I’m paying for BBC in Canada, why can’t I see British programming? It makes no sense. When I watch ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox, I see American shows and not reruns of a bunch of Canadian home improvement shows just so the station can meet its Canadian content requirements. A little research answered this question. BBC Canada is owned both by a Toronto company, Alliance Atlantis (80%) and BBC Worldwide (20%), therefore the CRTC considers BBC Canada to be a Canadian network. (Please don’t try to read that sentence aloud – you may hurt your mouth.) As a Canadian company, they must show a certain quota of Canadian shows, and that’s why you get a lot of Debbie Travis and Holmes on Homes.

Much of cable TV, particularly during the day, is made up of reruns. I can accept this to a certain degree, but when primetime rolls around, I would like to get what I pay for if I have to pay for television. If I watch a network that advertises itself as a network of reruns – Déjà Vu, for example – I’m aware that I’m paying for old shows. When I pay for a specialty channel, I hope to watch new shows. As a fan of British television, it is extremely disappointing to pay for a channel called BBC and find that it’s a home and garden channel in disguise.

Back to the 70’s with Barney Miller

2011-01-15T10:13:00.002-05:00

Every day when I get home from work, tired and battle-weary from the tensions of the day, when I turn to television as a sedative to get my mind off my troubles, there’s one show on in the late afternoon that can elicit a chuckle out of me and make me smile. That TV show is Barney Miller which is on the Déjà View channel from 4:00-5:00.

It’s been at least 30 years since I watched this series so it’s brand new to me and I’m falling back in love with it. For those of you who weren’t around in the 70’s when this show was a hit series, the action almost always takes place in the squad room of the 12^th precinct located in lower Manhattan. Barney Miller (Hal Linden) is the captain of the precinct and his detectives are an eccentric group. Miller puts up with them with a long-suffering patience and humour and is the show’s straight man. Detective Fish (Abe Vigoda) is nearing retirement, has a daily war with his digestive system and his deadpan reaction to criminals and colleagues is hilarious. Max Gail plays Wojo, a young detective who is insecure and sometimes seems to have more brawn than brains. Detective Harris sports an Afro, is always neatly groomed, is writing a novel and is perpetually on the lookout for a better apartment. Yemana (Jack Soo) constantly has his nose in a racing form. The inimitable Steve Landesburg (who unfortunately passed away last month) also has a killer deadpan delivery as Detective Dietrich who is the squad trivia know-it-all.

In each episode, the detectives deal with mostly small-time crooks or people in conflict with one another and try to solve problems while working out of an ancient cockroach infested building while being perpetually underfunded for the police work that they are trying to do. As people who have to put up with each other day-in and day-out, their relationships with one another and with their spouses makes for some very funny situations. In addition, when you watch the show, there are many faces that you will recognize from other TV shows and many well-known character actors. Trying to remember who they are and what they’ve been in is part of the fun.

The series had an eight year run and while the dialogue and characters are a bit stiff in the first year, the writers and actors seemed to warm up to the characters that they were portraying to the point that when you watch the show, it seems very much as if you are watching a comic play, particularly because the show is shot in video rather than film. Over the years, the show increasingly added dramatic elements as well as comedy. For example, toward the end of the series, Miller has marital difficulties as his wife has increasing difficulties dealing with her husband’s job.

Some people may find the show somewhat politically incorrect as it was filmed about the same time as All in the Family. For instance, Barney Miller’s treatment of female cops and female victims may make you wince now and again. Otherwise, it’s a very funny show with superb character actors and great scripts.

Living in the Big Apple Just Isn’t Easy; Neither is Following Shows on HBO Canada

2011-01-08T10:47:00.002-05:00

One of my friends has been urging me to watch the HBO series, Bored to Death, which has been running at odd times on HBO. Strangely enough, it’s impossible to find out when a program is on HBO Canada unless you go on the Internet and check on HBO’s web site. In the case of this show, here is what you find: Jan. 8 -1:30 AM; Jan. 17 - 3:30 P.M.; Jan.24- 3:30 PM.

This seems like craziness to me. Unless I am a virtuoso in the use of a VCR or have a handy dandy digital recorder, what’s the point in telling me to watch the show? I’m new to HBO, so I can only think that the show, Boardwalk Empire with Steve Buscemi is on all the time, and HBO shows a few other shows every now and then. Don’t get me wrong, I love Steve Buscemi in all the Coen Brothers films that he’s in – the dude abides, and all that – but HBO seems to replay certain series day and night and then they just go away!

The other night, I watched Bored to Death for the second time and actually laughed out loud in a few places. The premise of the show runs something like this: Jonathan Ames is a struggling writer in New York City whose girlfriend has broken up with him. His writing career is not going very well either, so inspired by a detective novel, he advertises on Craig’s List as an unlicensed private eye and clumsily solves mysteries while hanging out with his neurotic comic book writing best friend, Ray (Zach Galifianakis) and George (Ted Danson of Cheers fame) who is a marijuana smoking man about town and editor of a New York City magazine. This makes life more bearable and interesting.

I found the first show that I watched tedious, but the second episode that I watched was quite funny. It is definitely a character driven series, and though some of the situations are impossibly ridiculous, that’s where the comedy comes from. Ted Danson definitely steals scenes. He’s such a natural for this part, and his character seems to have no problem turning lemons into lemonade without mussing a hair on his beautifully coiffed head. Mind you, if you are offended by vulgar language and drug using characters, this show is definitely not for you.

Right after Bored to Death came How to Make It in America though that sequence may never be repeated on HBO again; it’s all about catching shows when you can. Another vulgarity warning for this show that is about yet another struggling young man in New York City. Ben (Bryan Greenberg) is an aspiring designer who is friends with Cam (Victor Rasuk), a free spirit and would-be future mogul. Cam takes it upon himself to get Ben “back in the game” after his breakup with girlfriend Rachel, now dating a successful hotelier. The show is all about the hustle to get money for projects and to network with the right people.

I loved how this show was shot and the script moved quickly. I was also surprised to find the characters more likeable than I expected from the beginning of the show. The two friends meet obstacle after obstacle together, and you can’t help but sympathize with Ben, who can’t even begin to get over his girlfriend, and is perpetually unlucky in love.

The Good, the Bad and the Careless

2010-12-29T20:08:00.004-05:00

Do you see what I see? As the last few notes of Christmas carols recede into your memories of Christmas 2010, are you looking down at your protruding paunch and thinking, “Wow – can two days of food indulgence make such a noticeable and rapid difference in my waist size?”

Readers, it has reached the point where no one can look at me and comment on my sylph-like physique. My jiggling extremities may be cute to my husband who tries to come up with the right answers in the hopes of maintaining peace and serenity in the home, but my mirror has no tact. My mirror does not lie. I daresay your mirror isn’t lying either. If you are North American and middle-aged, chances are that you don’t have the muscle tone that you could have to lead a healthy lifestyle and that you are carrying over five pounds extra than you should.

For myself, it’s not so much the appearance that concerns me, but the possibility that my careless diet and lack of exercise is going to land me in the same boat that my parents were in once they were in their sixties – an inability to walk very far or do very much because they were overweight.

Right now, I am on the cusp of making another year’s unfulfilled resolutions when it comes to exercise and my foe, bad cholesterol. What is this deal with good and bad cholesterol? Does good cholesterol ride a white horse and comes to the aid of damsels in distress? Does bad cholesterol ride into town packing pistols and shooting up the town to the point that the whole community breaks down and somebody somewhere has a stroke as a result?

My doctor told me that I should be happy that I have a high level of good cholesterol but though my bad cholesterol is not at a level for major concern, care would be a good idea. Having deep-fried potato pancakes twice in the course of two days is probably not what she had in mind. In other words, I sent the bad guys into town and the sheriff wants to have words with me.

While I have resolved to cut back on butter and get on the guilt machine (my name for the elliptical trainer that I bought four years ago to get into shape and which I have probably not used more than ten times), I’ve got a few words for the sheriff too. “It’s Christmas!” January is the time to buck up and get started and be miserable through the short days with the closest promise of relief as Easter, which is some time in April. At Christmas and New Year’s, let me celebrate. Let me throw dietary caution and guilt to the wind. Let me ignore those December magazines that tell me how to get through the holidays without gaining five pounds that are going to take me six months to lose. In other words, and very rude words, “Mr. Sheriff, shut up.”

What is the good of being healthy if we cannot eat and drink and celebrate with good friends if we must have half a mind to what we’re eating and drinking? Granted that some of us have illnesses that require us to watch what we eat in order to avoid serious harm. This is not what I’m talking about. The obsession with perfect health and youthful appearance that can be a detriment to enjoying the good things of life is just silly. I say enjoy, be moderate, and make sure that you have great people to eat and drink with, and you will be happy. This is what I wish you in the New Year. Get out there and enjoy and have a happy and safe New Year.

At Christmas, It's All About the Magic of Redemption

2010-12-24T14:02:00.002-05:00

This is the time of year when you think that people will hang out with friends and family, eat too much shortbread cookies (all right, that’s probably just me) and drink a little too much wine or whiskey with our holiday dinners. Yet many of us will use television as a form of family entertainment after a big meal to kick back and enjoy the Christmas spirit, and what will we watch?

In the next twenty-four hours there are three movies that are going to be repeated on several channels: It’s a Wonderful Life, Scrooge (A Christmas Carol), and Miracle on 34th Street. Why are these three films repeated year after year on Christmas Eve? I think it’s all about what Christmas has come to mean in our secular Western society, the opportunity to have a second chance. Without question, this is many steps away from the kind of redemption that is implicit in the religious significance of the Christmas holiday for people of the Christian faith. Yet Christmas has been adopted as a winter holiday by people all over North America, and like it or not, when people celebrate the holiday, folks choose to look past the gift-giving to another purpose whether it’s a time for being with loved ones, showing an annual social conscience by giving to the poor, or looking to the hope of peace on Earth and good will towards all men and women.

Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, which was adapted into the film, Scrooge in 1951 with Alistair Sims as Ebenezer Scrooge, is all about redemption. As Scrooge is forced to review his life, he realizes that if he doesn’t change his ways, he will die alone with no one to mourn him and no one to say a kind word about him. Through magic, The Three Ghosts of Christmas manage to bring about a serious change of heart in Scrooge who becomes a real benefactor to the Cratchit family, and who most importantly, saves Tiny Tim’s life.

It’s A Wonderful Life, Frank Capra’s masterpiece of 1946 and once called “the best film to never win an Oscar,” tells a similar story, but in reverse. George Bailey is a very good man who always sacrifices his dreams for the good of others. When his uncle foolishly loses a bank deposit, putting George in danger of going to jail, George regrets all that he has done. He is about to end his life when a rather clumsy angel, Clarence, uses magic to help George see how important his sacrifices have been, and what a poorer place his community would have been if he had never lived. Once again, a supernatural intervention takes place through the auspices of Christmas to bring about a sincere change of heart.

A Miracle on 34th Street has two versions, one made in 1947 and a re-make in 1994. If you’ve never watched the old version, give that one a try as I find that it has a certain magic lacking in the modern one. There are some very tough messages in this one about faith for a secular society. Santa’s magic is on trial and the judge and jury are really an unbelieving single mother and young daughter. Yet in this film, the magic is much more subtle – is it magic or just a set of coincidences? The viewer is left to make up his or her own mind. For those of us who want to believe in magic, there’s just enough evidence to help us out.
If you want to believe that people can change, that the world can change, these three Christmas classics will help you convince that doubting Thomas uncle of yours that there is magic in the world, and that this magic is more likely to take place around December 25th. To all readers of The Record, I wish you all the joy and magic of the holiday season and then some.

Times and Channels: A Christmas Carol/Scrooge, CTV, Friday night at 11:30; It’s a Wonderful Life, Friday night, NBC at 8:00; A Miracle on 34th Street (1994), Friday night, CBC, 8:00. CBC will air the 1947 version on Saturday night at 11:00 PM.

Christmas Magic to Soothe a Cold

2010-12-24T14:01:00.001-05:00

It had to happen; I’m getting sick, yes, sore throat, chills, runny nose the whole bit, and Christmas is coming. I should be shopping, baking cookies, decking the halls, and jingling bells, but all I want to do is lie on the couch and watch Christmas shows. If I haven’t the energy to “deck them halls,” as Lucy told Schroeder in the the Charlie Brown Christmas Special, then I’ll just have to watch someone who can; maybe an animated character who is immune to animated cold germs.

What do I watch? Being the age that I am, I mostly say phoeey to the new Christmas specials, and that’s probably a mistake. Why, just this past week, the three Canadian tenors were belting out carols as was the remnants of Barenaked Ladies on CBC. I go for the classics.

In no particular order, (I’m too sick to prioritize), here are some of my wacky Christmas TV favourites:

A Christmas Carol and all its manifestations: My favourite, of course, is Scrooge with the irreplaceable Alistair Sims as Ebenezer. I own it on DVD …my kids hate it. So we go with some other versions like The Muppet Christmas Carol with Michael Caine. Surprisingly, they do use a lot of Dickens’ text, but they also have singing vegetables and dancing rats. Then there’s that old classic, Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol. I’m ashamed to say that I know some of the songs by heart.

Speaking of Muppets, there’s also the other Muppets Christmas Specials. I’ve managed to buy two as I’m a big fan of the work of Jim Henson and Frank Oz. In my favourite, the Family Christmas (1987) Fozzie surprises his mother by bringing the whole gang to her farmhouse on Christmas just as she greets Doc and Sprocket of Fraggle Rock who have rented the house for a quiet Christmas. They don’t get one. The DVD is very disappointing because songs have been cut as Henson only got the rights to use some of the songs for a one-time TV special. I tend to watch it on a tired, old videotape that also has A Charlie Brown Christmas which I still love.

A Christmas Story with Darren McGavin and Peter Billingsly: Set in the 1940’s, it’s the story of Ralphie, a boy who wants an official Red Ryder carbine-action 200-shot range model air rifle, and is thwarted by the inevitable, “You’ll shoot your eye out.” This is a Christmas Eve favourite that we watch year after year. You can buy it at Archambault, by the way.

Off beat favourites include: Garfield’s Christmas where the greedy and gluttonous Garfield learns the true meaning of Christmas with lots of songs packed into thirty minutes, and the Claymation Christmas, which we must watch on VHS as I can’t find it on DVD for under $30.00. This show is simply a series of carols that have been animated in the Claymation way, and it’s really a treat. The California Raisins do a jazzed-up version of Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer. Yes, those raisins sure can sing.

So if you’ve come down with a cold, like me, don’t let it get you too far down. Lie on the couch slurping chicken soup or tea with lemon and honey, and be prepared to make a leap of faith that with Christmas magic, everything will be all right.

Beware The Little Man With An Idea

2010-12-14T07:53:00.000-05:00

A few days back, while I was perusing my Twitter page, I discovered a news story that seemed to be ignored bye the major media of the day: Senator Bernie Sanders, an Independent senator from Vermont, held an 8 ½ hour filibuster on the U.S. Senate floor protesting the proposed tax bill that had been agreed upon by the Democratic and Republican parties.

Senator Sanders, affectionately known as Bernie by many, is the first Senator to declare himself a socialist and who admits to admiring European style social democracy. In Canada, we call them NDP; in the U.S.A., they’re called Communists, pinko-s and loonies.

That long a filibuster is a triumph of the spirit over the flesh. Bernie is 69 years old and for a filibuster to be carried on, the person is not allowed to eat or go to the bathroom. If he does, he loses the floor. Senator Sanders, a 69-year-old man, did not eat or leave the floor. He did have some short-term subs in the persons of Sherrod Brown a progressive Democrat from Ohio who spoke for 3/4 of an hour and center-right Democrat Mary Landrieu who took the microphone for 1/2 an hour.

Historically, Senate filibusters have been used for bad purposes too. In the 1960s, Strom Thurmond pulled a filibuster to oppose the Civil Rights Act that was passed in 1964. The famous senator, Huey Long, spoke for fifteen and a hour hours to block a bill that would have also benefited rich Americans over poor ones and wound up reading from Shakespeare to keep going. Interestingly enough, no filibuster has ever successfully blocked a bill from being passed. Sanders definitely knew from the get-go that history was working against him.

No matter where you stand on taxation, socialism, and the income disparities that are a serious problem in many Western nations today, you have to admire the courage of the man to get up and speak for the little guy. In his speech, Sanders referred to Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, two billionaires who have openly questioned why they need a tax break.

He spoke passionately about the jobs that are leaving the United States as corporations move to countries like Thailand where the minimum wage was recently doubled…from eleven cents an hour to twenty-two cents an hour. Sanders asked how American companies were expected to compete with companies whose labour costs were so low and he asked why it is that we are all racing to the bottom because of the greed of big corporations. Finally, Sanders enumerated the banks and corporations that were bailed out at American taxpayers’ expense, thanks to the recent disclosure of the list. This list includes Korean, Japanese and Bahrainian banks. Then he spoke of small and medium-sized businesses that were unable to even get a loan, businesses that could be a source of jobs for a population starving for jobs.

I watched about a half hour of his speech and I was riveted, not because Bernie is such a dynamic orator – he isn’t – but because the ring of truth was so loud and so clear that you couldn’t help but admire the honesty of the man.

Tommy Douglas, in his famous Mouseland speech said that, “Beware the little man with an idea. You can lock up a man but you can’t lock up an idea.” Sanders sent a definitive message in homespun words that a government that ignores the working and middle classes is doomed to failure…and more debt.

Ellen Goldfinch may be reached at radiomother@yahoo.ca

Surprised by Winter

2010-12-01T07:33:00.000-05:00

They said that it was snowing in excited tones on the news

I wonder why they always sound so surprised ‘cause every year it snows

Anybody ever hear of Sandy Denny? She sang for a while with a popular British folk-rock band called Fairport Convention, had a solo career, and met an untimely death from a brain haemorrhage caused by a fall down a flight of stairs. I’m glad I’m not a rock star.

The first snow always makes that lyric play in my head and I was reminded of it by something that my husband said. He was at Clark’s and one of the salespeople remarked that the store had sold 120 units of mittens and gloves even though they hadn’t had a lot of people come in. I suppose the freezing rain may have had something to do with that. I took a slide on to my backside while walking the dogs last Saturday and my husband sent me back to the house to take a long hot shower and put some ice on my back. Strange how middle age can make a gentle fall that might be nothing for a kid a potential catastrophe.

The run on mittens and gloves is probably a reaction to snow, freezing rain, and everybody hastily putting up their Christmas lights while the weather was relatively mild a couple of weeks ago. People are finally realizing that winter is here and it always surprises us, maybe because our autumns seem to be getting gentler. Sure, we had a freak snow at Halloween, but everybody knows that the two coldest days in the fall are Halloween and Remembrance Day, both days where you have to be outside for a long time whether it’s walking your little one around or standing at the Cenotaph. I can’t remember anyone ever complaining that either of those days was unseasonably hot. Yet this year, October and November have been fairly warm.

When I took that slide on the ice that was hidden by a thin layer of snow, I could vaguely smell January coming. Everybody always complains about November and rightly so. November is grey, bleak, with a damp cold that is downright unfriendly, but November has anticipation. We can’t help but look forward to Christmas, so as the days get ridiculously short, we’re putting up lights and glitzy decorations that take the sting out of the cold, grey weather. When New Year’s has come and gone, there’s nothing to look forward to but a dark January, which I like to call the long, dark night of the soul. Once the holidays are over, that seasonal adjustment disorder hits me like a ton of bricks and I am SADD in all capital letters.

Of course, skiers have a completely different take on January; they revel in it. They watch weather reports with baited breath. They bounce up and down with glee at the first snow flake, and comes a blizzard, they are almost unendurably ecstatic. You may want to kill them but if you are a confirmed hater of winter, you have to envy that love of winter snow. This is their season and I try to take comfort in the joy of others.

Of course, my other solution has been to take up cross country skiing which, believe-you-me, is a lot of work. Like an idiot, I bundle up and then when I’m sweating like the proverbial pig, I’m peeling off the hat, the scarves and tempting pneumonia with reckless abandon. There are mornings in the woods when the sun shines on the snow in the trees and it’s magical – so much so, that I can almost enjoy winter…and that’s the trick. Get out in it and enjoy it.

Equipped with my brand new woollen mittens that my husband picked up at Clarks with the cat food and the dog food, I will try to approach winter and snow with the joy of my dog, Molly…but I refuse to roll in the snow unless I’m sent flying by a hidden sheet of ice.

Ellen Goldfinch may be reached at radiomother@yahoo.ca

A New-Found Twin in Yonkers, N.Y.

2010-11-15T14:09:00.000-05:00

I have just discovered my twin and she’s an African American woman named Charlene who works in a post office in Yonkers, New York. The reason that I bring up the fact that she’s African American is because I’m definitely not and this calls into question a whole bunch of stuff, yet Charlene was pretty convincing so I have to believe her. If Charlene says that we’re twins, it’s good enough for me.

Two weeks ago, my family were down in New York visiting my father who is in a nursing home in the northern most tip of New York City, an area called Riverdale. We’ve discovered a Marriott hotel that is a 15 minute drive north in the city of Yonkers that makes staying in New York and visiting my father much easier as the hotel has its own parking lot. I can tell you some very unhappy stories about trying to find parking in lower Manhattan, but I’ll just put you off driving down to one of the most vibrant cities in the world. Actually, if you must stay in Manhattan, a hotel called On the Avenue which is on 78th Street and Broadway, is a very nice hotel (although the rooms are small, but all Manhattan hotels have small rooms), and we’re usually able to find parking on the street within ten to fifteen minutes of getting near the hotel. This hotel is a good option if you want to bring your car into the city.

I hope you find all this information useful, but what I really want to tell you about is my twin, Charlene. I had to go to the post office in dealing with some family business and was pleased to find that the post office was open all day Saturday. I walked in with a bunch of mail that I wanted to put into a package, so I needed to buy an envelope, stuff the mail into it, and send it on its merry way. Every time poor Charlene started to suggest what I could do and how my task could be achieved, I repeatedly anticipated what she was going to say and as usual, I was incorrect every time. This is an unfortunate habit that my family has dealt with for years. Charlene had a different approach.

She said to me, “Do you know what the word foreshadowing means?” I was taken aback by the question, but I reassured her that yes, I did know what foreshadowing means. She continued, “I used to do the same thing to my English teacher in college and she used to say, ‘Charlene, you’re foreshadowing.’ ” I promised her that I would be quiet and let her talk. She looked at my husband and said, “And I want you to be quiet too.” He complied.

Charlene weighed the package and gave us our options and we paid for it to be sent. “You’re my twin because you do the same as me. What’s your name?” Well, that was it. We started to chat, I wound up telling her that we were from Canada and the whole mailing experience was about as pleasant as it could have been made to be. I found out a little bit about Charlene, her colleague Daisy re-weighed our package and found that we owed a few more cents…and then wouldn’t let us pay it.

I think that Charlene and I really are twins because it’s always been my own philosophy that if I’m going to work, I’m going to have fun with it which luckily is very easy when you’re working in a small high school. I get to joke around with kids all day long; some kids get my jokes and some don’t. Sometimes it’s the ones who don’t get what I’m on about that provide greater entertainment. Trying to have fun with things as simple as buying stamps just makes life more liveable and that’s the attitude that makes Charlene and I twins even though Yonkers and Lennoxville are far apart. Try it some time.

Lennoxville's New Café

2010-11-01T17:47:00.000-04:00

The borough of Lennoxville is very much like most of the college towns that I’ve seen and we have the bars to show for it, but most college towns have a variety of daytime hangouts. Lenn, as kids affectionately call it, has McDonald’s and the drop-in centre forthe high school kids. Café Java has been a university hang out of sorts. Tim Horton’s gets a mix of folks, and now we have La Brulerie de Café.

As soon as I walked into the new café, it was like stepping into a more urban setting.
Brick walls, wood ceilings, and jazz pumping out of the sound system made it seem
like a Montreal café. One student was surfing the Internet on her laptop (I meant to ask
whether or not the Wi-Fi was free), and in the passage between the front and back rooms,
there were two computers with enormous screens being used by people also happily
surfing the ‘Net sipping on big mugs of coffee…and that’s what I was really there for.

While the ambiance was very welcome, I showed up for the caffeine. I’d heard that there
was a coffee roaster there, and that you could buy bags of Ethiopian fair trade coffee
that is a very wonderful blend of coffee. For years now, I beg my husband to go to Café
Myriade whenever he’s in Montreal to pick up a brand of coffee called 49th Parallel
which has flavourful coffee beans that are perfect for espresso or regular coffee which
we make in a contraption that we bought at Myriade called an Eva Solo. I’ve been very
excited about the fact that there is a coffee roaster within a ten-minute walk of my house,
but I’ve been too busy to get there till last weekend.

We went for lunch and coffee. Unfortunately, we showed up after 1:00. It’s important
to know that they close the kitchen at 1:00, but happily, there were some sandwiches left
which heated up were really delicious. I had a date square for dessert and my husband
had a cranberry raisin square. Both of these were really good too.

We ordered two cappuccinos. As some of my readers will remember, I was in Italy this
summer and that experience turned me into the worst kind of coffee snob. Don’t get me
wrong – I am very willing to drink bad coffee and mediocre coffee as long as there are no
pretensions involved. I was hoping for an excellent cappuccino at La Brulerie de Café,
but it wasn’t excellent. It just wasn’t strong enough and a cappuccino should be strong.
People get all caught up in the milk foam, and this is very wrong. In Italy, you get the
steamed milk and a little foam on top, because in that country, it’s all about the coffee.
The coffee is always rich and strong, and that’s the way it should be. The one that I had
at La Brulerie de Café was very drinkable but it really wasn’t strong enough.

I’m not a complete traditionalist; a true Italian would never drink a cappuccino in the
afternoon and I was happy to be able to go out for a cappuccino close to home so I’m
hoping that this will improve and that the folks at the Café will use a stronger blend. I’d
be willing to settle for a smaller cup and less milk.

My other suggestion is that the staff should walk around and clean tables. When I went
in the back to look for a cozy table, one had coffee cups still on it and just about all the
empty tables had crumbs. This doesn’t make a good impression. Apart from that I,
like all of my friends, are delighted that La Brulerie de Café has opened up a branch in
Lennoxville, and I’m hoping that it has a long run in our town.

Battling the Children's Crusade

2010-10-25T07:56:00.001-04:00

In his novel, Pattern Recognition, William Gibson called the endless adolescent crowds that invade Camden Market in London on Saturdays, the Children’s Crusade. We, in Lennoxville, have our own Children’s Crusade between 8:00-9:00 every weekday morning. I’m referring to the parade of young adults who emerge from the houses and apartments on College and Depot Street and trudge across the bridge to the Bishop’s University/Champlain campus. They brave the College Street crosswalk and dare traffic to stop. Mostly it does; sometimes it doesn’t.

With time, many of us are getting better at seeing pedestrians who have a right of way that they did not have before. It was only a few years ago that any one who wanted to cross College had to dash out when no car was coming with the hope that an automobile didn’t just materialize from another dimension. It should have been an Olympic sport, but unfortunately, there are no medals for courage or agility in outwitting cars.

I should be more sympathetic to the students’ plight but as a motorist, I’m getting testy. Is it just me or does the traffic on College seems worse now than in years past, and is the crosswalk the cause of the problems? I have seen joggers run blissfully past me as my sporty little car that is capable of great speeds painfully inches its way toward the third traffic light just in front of Bishop’s where I wait to make that left turn across the bridge that will take me to work. I could understand this kind of traffic if I was back in Montreal or even New York City, but Lennoxville? This is a small town of 5000 tops, even when the students are here. What’s with all this traffic?

On mornings when the traffic is moving, it’s a lovely 5 minute drive with the mountains, the trees, and church steeples all looking very pastoral and very pretty. Yes, those are the mornings that make you glad to be alive. Most mornings, however, I am faced with the monumental decision of which street will be less congested, Queen or College. My coffee is not strong enough to fortify me with the prescience needed to make such a crucial choice. If I go down Queen, I can make a left turn by the Town Hall, and if I’m lucky, I can make another left on to College from Depot, but I have to be cocky. I have to have nerves of steel to sneak out in front of the traffic and make my way to the Promised Land in hopes that the crosswalk won’t bog the traffic down too much. At least my hairdresser appreciates my problem; the traffic has turned my hair gray and she’s making money dying it closer to its once youthful brown.

It could be that the new 410 overpass will alleviate some of the traffic so that the large trucks that are a pesky component of the morning traffic will go another way, but I’m not overly optimistic. There is still the Children’s Crusade to contend with, and though the kids finish school and graduate, there are more, always more, to take their place.

If this is the case, once the new highway is up and taking the strain off in-town traffic, we can be sure that more experts will come up with a new scheme, maybe a fourth traffic light, so that at least you could move for a few minutes before the next student waits to cross the street. Maybe we could see a footbridge go over College Street, something like the bridges in Venice, or maybe they will come up with hover crafts so we can all fly to work like George Jetson. Yes, that’s the answer…except by that time, I will have retired. Pity, I always wanted one of those.

Jury Duty and More Jury Duty

2010-10-19T07:44:00.000-04:00

Two weeks have gone by since I wrote my last column about reactions to jury duty. I’ll cut to the chase: I got exempted because of my poor French skills (I’m not proud of that), and the fact that I am health care proxy for my 91 year old father who lives in The Bronx. In the last two weeks, Dad has taken a turn for the worse. I will head down to see him soon, something that I would not have been able to do had I been selected, so thank you, Sheriff’s Office, for your understanding at a bad time.

On a more cheerful note, I’ve had some wonderful conversations with friends and emails from folks who have been called up for the selection process. One reader was convinced that if she thought about jury duty often, she would get called up and sure enough she was:

“I tend to believe in the law of attraction...What I think I create. Well.... I have been thinking briefly, but profoundly about this event and I "knew" that this was coming for me. When I received the notice I felt such a contradiction of feelings. I felt excitement and terror all in the same bundle. I think I am bilingual enough to be chosen, but I really don't know how strict their demands will be. I have such mixed feelings especially because I am a teacher and my students and I are beginning to build a strong and cohesive community together, I feel worried about them as I imagine the possibilities. So, my rendezvous is Wednesday, October 13th (I am not one bit superstitious) I hope and wonder and dread what the outcome will be.” She wasn’t the only teacher that heard the call of Lady Justice; I’m wondering how many teachers if any will wind up as jurors.

What I find truly interesting is that some people that I spoke to and heard from by email expressed an honest concern about doing the job properly, whether it’s following the nuances of the case in both official languages or going in with preconceptions about the accused. I received one email that explained this worry with a story that I’m going to reproduce here:

“I've honestly been working on not judging people by their looks for a good twenty years. When our daughter was tiny, we went to the fair and she wanted to go on a bouncy castle thing. Adults weren't allowed beyond a certain line. She had to take off her shoes and in her excitement got a knot in her laces. A big guy, tattooed arms, shaved head and leather vest approached her and I was about to scream ‘Get away from my kid!!’ when he knelt down, untied the knot and gently lifted her up on the air mattress. I try to remember that.”

Other people’s reaction was to ask me how I “got off.” There was a fair amount of understandable worry that they might be perceived as being more bilingual than they really are. For example, at the courthouse, one of my friends got into trouble when she said, “I don’t speak French.” This was not what the lawyers wanted to hear; they wanted to know whether or not potential jurors could understand French. When my friend quickly explained that she meant to say that she didn’t understand French, she received her exemption. Yet another friend who is over the age of 65 - which is supposed to be an automatic exemption - tried calling up to get out of going in but was told that he had to go – I, on the other hand, was exempted by phone. Go figure.

Meanwhile the process continues, and I wonder if the search for a juror will move to another locality where they will try to find twelve more not so angry men and women who will give the accused their fair shake at justice. If you see a yellow letter in the mailbox, try not to panic.

A misty morning , September 26th

2010-10-03T18:33:00.000-04:00

Over and over again, RG told me to take the camera out. Sometimes I do listen to him. I pulled out the Sony, went upstairs and decided it would be best to get the zoom lens out. I'm awkward at it but I managed to exchange lenses without too much of a hassle, and most importantly, without asking for help.

I went out on the balcony and took about 35 shots. This was my favourite.

People keep asking me how it is that someone who grew up in New York can live in the Eastern Townships. I've been here for close to 22 years. If this photo doesn't answer the question, then there's a part of me that you really don't know.

Jury Duty!

2010-09-30T18:15:00.000-04:00

If you were one of the 4000 people who received a yellow letter in the mail summoning you to jury duty, as I was, I’d be very curious to know your reaction. My reaction was, “Why me? Why now?” Just that morning on my happy walk through the woods where a mysterious Good Samaritan had cleaned away the enormous trees that I clumsily climbed over for months, I was attacked by bees and stung three times on the arm. Then my husband phoned me at lunch to tell me that I had received a letter from the Ministère du Justice and did I want him to open it for me. Bees and jury duty in one day makes me wonder about fate, destiny, and all that other existential stuff.

It is one week later and over the course of the week, I’ve discovered that many of my fellow Townshippers are experiencing the same call to be the lady with the scales, Lady Justice herself, and their reactions are joyful. Most people have responded with fear. What will I be asked to do? Will it be some gory murder trial? That certainly crossed my mind. Show me blood and I’m going to faint, and then have nightmares for the next twenty years. Luckily, I never tried to work in an Emergency Room of a hospital because people showing up with things sticking into their bodies that should not be stuck in their bodies would just render me useless and possibly unconscious as would photos of the same.

There’s also the level of fantasy about delivering a guilty verdict to some gangland criminal and spending the next twenty years, (I’m kind of stuck on the number twenty in this article – I apologize for the repetition), living in fear of someone hunting down jurors, one juror at a time, once he got out of prison to fulfill his goal of the ultimate revenge. You think you’re safe, and then, wham-o!

People who know that I write – whatever that means, we all write, we all have stories to tell only some of us are brave enough to put it on paper – where was I? Yes, I was being a writer. People who know of this habit of mine tell me that jury duty is a wonderful opportunity though I’m not sure to what. My imagination is good enough for me, thank you very much, and most of us have sat through enough episodes of Law and Order to have a sense of the courtroom. My nephew-in-law has told me on a number of occasions that this is patently untrue; courtrooms in real life are not at all like they are on television. If that’s the case, I don’t need to sit through something more tedious than Law and Order to get a feel for courtroom tedium. Tedium is exactly what writers are not supposed to convey, so I am hesitant to perceive jury duty as a golden opportunity.

What I find truly fascinating is that the people who have NOT been called for jury duty say that they wish that they had been summoned. Maybe someone should go on television and say, “Who wants to do jury duty? Call this number and come on down. We will see if you’re the kind of guy or gal that we need!” I bet they’d find people who would work out just fine. There would be people who would be willing to give justice its best shot. Unfortunately, most of the people that I know just aren’t champing at the bit to get into the courtroom and participate in the wheels of justice.

Thank You, Good Samaritan With a Chainsaw…and Goodbye Terry Jones

2010-09-12T14:30:00.000-04:00

This past Saturday, my husband came into the house after running an errand, waving an envelope that had the word, “Done,” printed in ink on the front. Inside the envelope was a cut out of my Somebody’s Mother column of a week ago, “Dear Good Samaritan With a Chainsaw.” My husband smiled and said, “The plot thickens.” You see earlier my long suffering husband who had put his back out badly walked the dogs and found that the three huge trees that had fallen in our dog-walking path and which I had written about in my last column were now sawn up and piled into neat logs on either side of the path.

Oh, Good Samaritan with a Chainsaw, you are truly a class act, and I and all the other dog walkers in the neighbourhood thank you! I’m especially grateful because on Friday after scrambling over the trees, I unthinkingly walked on the board that someone had put down over a small ditch to allow bikers to use the path. The board was wet, and before I knew it, my legs had flown up from under me, and I landed right on my back with my head slamming against the board and very luckily, not on one of the rocks nearby! I lied there and whimpered like a baby with my head aching and my neck stiffening up within moments. I told you that I’d break my leg, but I practically broke my head; I only have one of those. When I walked past those logs on Sunday, I was singing your praises.

I was thinking about you, Good Samaritan, and comparing your anonymous act of kindness to the type of media-grabbing, attention-seeking stunt that Pastor Terry Jones pulled by threatening to burn the Qur’an last week. As a librarian by trade, I’m not in favour of burning books; I’m rather set against that. I also think that someone who claims to be a spiritual leader, and who holds his government hostage by waving another religion’s holy book and threatening to burn it, is not very spiritual and is, in fact, committing a hate crime of the most offensive kind. There is a fine line between freedom of speech and hate crimes, and here in Canada, we have laws against hate crimes. I’m not so sure about Florida and what its laws consider a hate crime to be. Then again, when Bush won the election ten years ago because of the shenanigans with ballots and chits and such things, I began to have my doubts about Florida. What’s in the water down there?

As soon as Jones began his posturing, people’s lives were endangered once again and that becomes more urgent than the debate over a mosque being built near the hole in the ground which is the burying place for all those people who died when the planes smashed into the Twin Towers of my hometown, New York City. As I write this, people have already died as a result of Jones’ stupidity. No, they are not Canadians or Americans but they are people who have families who are grieving over them today and looking at this side of the world as evil just as some North Americans see them as evil when they burn our flags. Hate is a plague that is as contagious as swine flu. Who knows how many others will die because Terry Jones picked the ugliest way to attempt to gain power in a world where the media would allow him access to it.

In a week or so, Terry Jones will fade into obscurity unless he comes up with a new stunt that a gullible media will latch on to. The only Terry Jones some of us will remember is the member of Monty Python who is hilarious, and who should sue the pants off of the other Jones for besmirching his good name! I’ll forget him, but Good Samaritan, I won’t forget you. I’ll be telling this story for a long time.

Dear Good Samaritan with a chainsaw…

2010-09-01T07:51:00.001-04:00

Dear Good Samaritan with a chainsaw,

I know that you’re out there, and there is a vague possibility that you are reading this or perhaps there is a better chance that someone who knows you is reading this. In any case, I am casting out these few crumbs in the hopes that you will read this and help me one more time.

I have started walking my dogs with my husband in the woods just up the hill on Lorne Street in Lennoxville. I have already seen one of the wonders that you performed last year when you chopped up a tree that had fallen across the path. This tree was huge and my husband had to shorten his daily walks, which really was sad for the dogs. Then one day, lo and behold, the path was open again because you came along with your trusty chainsaw and chopped it into reasonable bits and placed those bits on either side of the path. This was an anonymously performed good deed, and I couldn’t properly thank you.

The chainsaw is a tool that has been much maligned, don’t you think? Normally, when people think of chainsaws, particularly city people, they think of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. They might think of loggers who indiscriminately cut down old growth forests or beloved trees in parks. If they’ve been watching too much Space Channel, they might think of that dumb commercial that it is replayed excessively to advertise their evenings of horror movies. All this media coverage is giving the chainsaw a lot of bad press.

The media may be the reason that we don’t think of new beginnings or rebirth when we think of chainsaws, and yet this is what the chainsaw is capable of achieving. A chainsaw can clear away the dead wood and open up a new path where there was none before or bring back a path that had become blocked or overgrown. Its power is truly awe-inspiring.

People can be very narrow-minded when it comes to chainsaws. They can also be pretty stupid about them. Some people should never be allowed to use one. I myself would never pick up a chainsaw, and I would really prefer that anyone that I love never pick one up. I firmly believe in heredity, and clumsiness definitely runs in my family. The Eastern Townships will certainly sleep better in the knowledge that I will never wield a chainsaw even though I have a great need to do so, which brings me back to my original point about dog walking and the woods above Lorne.

Three great whacking trees have fallen across the path just behind the houses that face Lorne that are on my dog walking route…and the dog walking route of quite a few other people, I should add. Every morning, I have had to balance precariously as I scramble over these trees and I’m getting older and clutzier by the day. Come winter, there’s every chance that I’m going to break my leg going over those three great whacking trees.

Would you please take out that magic chainsaw of yours like the Good Samaritan that you are, and if you do, please leave a note behind so that I can thank you. You have taught me a lesson about chainsaws that I will never forget.

Your admirer, Ellen Goldfinch

Of Mice and...Me

2010-08-16T20:44:00.000-04:00

The ghost of Topo Gigio, the little mouse who used to ask Ed Sullivan to kiss him good night, is stalking me. My husband has accused me of murdering him, but I swear to all readers of this blog that I am completely innocent of the crime.

It began when I was washing the plaster off the bathroom floor of the house that we’ve been building for the last nine years. Okay, so we’re slow, but we’re not in debt for it…yet. I had swept the floor, vacuumed it – plaster dust is stubborn stuff - and was fishing around for a bucket that I could use when I remembered the two buckets of water that we moved out of the bathroom into a corner once we had turned on the shutoff valve for the plumbing upstairs. The buckets of water were for pouring in the back of the toilet so that we could flush it. I feel compelled to give you all this background detail as evidence that I’m not an altogether namby-pamby-New-York-City-born-and-bred gal who can’t rough it. I can do without many comforts when the need arises.

I sauntered over to the buckets where a gruesome sight awaited in me. In the bucket was a rather large, perhaps bloated, dead mouse floating with splayed legs and a pathetic expression frozen there in his last seconds of life. I yelled. My husband, who was working outside, immediately responded with a “What’s the matter?” To his credit, it was not, “What’s the matter now?”

“There’s a dead mouse floating in one of the water buckets.” I rushed out to the porch, “Could you deal with it?” There it was, the line of what I won’t do and what he can do. When it comes to dead mice and emptying out the kitty litter box along with most of what the dogs and cats upchuck and…well, you know…my long-suffering husband crosses the line of what I have great difficulty doing and does it.

When he’s not home, I have cleaned up the dog messes, etc., but anything to do with rodents, alive (the squealing presents that Shadow the Cat bring home) or dead, these jobs become his jobs. I won’t say the man’s job – the feminist in me is humiliated at admitting this in public – but it’s my husband’s job. I am one female who does not or cannot bring herself to the task of cleaning up dead mice.

Although he was willing to clean up little “Topo Gigio’s” remains, he was definitely not willing to let me off the hook. When the mouse was disposed of, my husband gave me the all clear to come back in the house with a big grin and his best mouse voice, “Eddeee, why did you kill me? All I wanted to do was marry Suzee the leetle mouse from Chez Helene?”

This is my alibi. Topo and Suzie are long gone, buried in the annals of television history. I’m not going to take the fall. I don’t know who this mouse was, but suicide can be the only answer. This mouse was in the midst of an existential crisis, lost between being and nothingness, and he apparently made the wrong choice. It was written all over his face.

I don’t know what happened in the field that forced him to invade my house and dive into my bucket, but you can’t hold me responsible. Remember, I don’t deal with mice so you’re going to have to look further a field. Yes, I said it, further, a field.

Ten things that I will miss about Italy

2010-08-09T13:54:00.002-04:00

1. I’m staying just outside a town that is about 80 kilometres north of Venice. It has a beautiful covered bridge that overlooks a small waterfall and beautiful mountains in the distance. The historic centre has gorgeous old buildings and very few tourists. I will miss that town. Which one is it? I promised my family that I wouldn’t tell!

2. Caccciotta cheese: it has a creamy mild taste and is amazing to eat when you’re hungry and want to nibble on something before supper, but it’s also easy to overeat. Alas, we don’t get it in Canada!

3. The bells. Wherever you go, bells echo off old buildings on a cloudy day just before it rains, or on a sunny day when people are filling the trattorias at lunch time; it doesn’t matter. The bells make me happy and remind me that I am somewhere else.

4. The Brenta river. Uh-oh. That’s a hint to number one. White-water rafting down the Brenta was more fun than I expected, especially because our guide kept us ramming into rocks and made us jump into the river. I jumped into the river and was more than happy that I was wearing a wet suit. A church bell in a tower by the river chimed noon, and it was a perfect moment.

5. Italian coffee. Caffé Diemme is a brand of coffee that we discovered that was super whether it was done up as a macchiato (espresso with a little steamed milk) or as a cappuccino. I have guilt because it’s probably not fair trade coffee. I may write a letter asking them to go fair trade but I’m afraid that my Italian is not up to letter writing.

6. Pizza. Would it be so hard for North Americans to learn how it’s really done in Italy? Thin crust, thin crust!! Sauce that doesn’t taste like it came out of a great big tin, so that you taste the tomatoes rather than the sugar. We can do this if want to – it’s important!

7. Siesta. Things stop at 12:30. Stores close and don’t reopen till 3:00. It’s inconvenient but civilized. People eat lunch with family and friends and relax. Lunch is the big meal supper isn’t. No wonder Italians look so trim…except that there is ‘way too much smoking going on. This may be the real reason that they stay so thin.

8. Reasonably priced public transit – You can take a train from the town that I’m staying in to Venice for about 8 euros fifty. That’s under $15.00. It costs a lot more to get from Sherbrooke to Montreal, and wouldn’t it be nice to take a speedy train than hassle with traffic and parking?

9. The climate…but ten days of thirty-eight degree weather did teach me that I don’t love heat as much as I thought I did. I think I need to check out winter in Italy. I hear it’s shorter. Unfortunately, there’s nothing much Canadians can do about that except to love skiing. I’m not sure that I love skiing that much.

10. Finally, I will miss the Italian language and the Italian people. As soon as you make an effort to communicate in Italian, people will warm up to you and be happy to engage in conversation. Plus, it was lovely to be in a place where people talk as much and as loud as I do!

Arriverdeci, Italia! I will miss you and I hope that I get back before too long. Ellen Goldfinch may be reached at radiomother@yahoo.ca

Viva Italia!

2010-08-09T13:52:00.000-04:00

I’ve been in northern and central Italy for about two weeks now visiting family and touring around as well. The joy of re-visiting a country that I’m madly in love with for its food, its language, its beautiful countryside, and rich culture is being mitigated by one negative factor – blistering heat. After four years that have included four winters of complaining about the cold, I put aside a little money every month so that I could finally go away with my family to Italy, and what have I done for the past two weeks? Yes, I’ve been complaining about the heat in pigeon Italian, “E caldo. E molto caldo. E caldissimo.”

I really would like to chalk it up to trying to make conversation and using the few words that I know but it has been thirty seven to thirty eight degrees every day which means that you can only walk in the shade and when you sit down, you perspire so heavily that natives of Florence or Venice refuse to come anywhere near you.

It is a mystery of nature how the women of these cities manage to look perpetually cool, elegant, and chic in such high temperatures. I would like to think that they walk around in some sort of transparent air conditioned bubble that is only available to native Italians. In Florence, women manage to look fashionable, wear extremely high-heeled shoes, and cycle through anarchic traffic while looking like they are about to fall asleep. Meanwhile, my ankles are caving in from hours of walking in my comfy flat sandals, my deodorant surrendered hours ago, and I am looking for the nearest air conditioned café to drink aqua frizzante or carbonated water on ice. They must have a technology that I don’t have.

Apart from this, I feel like the luckiest woman in the universe to have been able to share this experience with my son (who managed to keep my husband and I museum hopping for ten days) and my daughter who, like me, enjoys the experience of sitting in a nice café while eating good food.

Yet some of my happiest times have been meeting a very dear high school friend who lives in the walled city of Lucca with his lovely and personable family, and hanging out in what I have come to think of as my Italian hometown, Bassano del Grappa, a small city in the foothills of the Dolomite mountains where my sister-in-law lives. It takes about one hour and twenty minutes to take a train from Venice to Bassano, and though it’s not in most guidebooks, it’s one of my favourite places to be. It’s old, there’s great food to be had, beautiful scenery, and not a lot of tourists fighting you for your space.

Today, there was a huge thunderstorm at four in the morning and it’s been cloudy all day. Best of all, the temperature has gone down to twenty-five degrees so it’s been a real treat to walk around Bassano’s old town and eat a pannino (the real word for pannini) in an outdoor café with a really good cappuccino to end the meal. This is the good life; I’m trying very hard not to think about the winter to come.

Organizing Stuff and Facing the Unexpected

2010-08-09T13:48:00.000-04:00

Vacation. Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out. Decompressing from the stress of work and shifting gears is not easy. The first Monday of my summer holidays was spent looking for things that I misplaced and trying to organize the house for vacation mode. As a professional librarian with twenty-seven years of experience, organization should be second nature to me, and it is…at work. Home is another story.

Getting ready to frolic requires reservations, itineraries, changing money, preparing the housesitter/dogsitter, getting the animals to the vet, making lists, packing…wait a minute. Organizing is what I do for a living - why am I spending days of my vacation doing what I do at work?

Then there’s helping my children organize their lives. When you have kids in university, they invariably move, and they move once a year so there’s the packing and organizing of someone else’s stuff which requires lots of questioning and hence lots of arguments about what to throw out, what not to throw out and the best way to organize stuff. No matter who you are, you will eventually have to organize someone else’s stuff.

It’s somewhat amusing to me that my last rather serious column was about organizing your parents’ stuff or getting your parents to organize their own stuff so that life doesn’t become a complete and utter living hell when all hell breaks loose. Yet, the other side of the coin is that no matter how organized you think you are, life has a way of throwing challenges at you that makes that old British game show, The Weakest Link, look like child’s play. It’s always best to leave room for the unexpected because it’s coming and it’s darn well going to get you. Don’t be The Weakest Link

Travelling is an invitation to the unexpected which is both its attraction and the thing that causes many people to just stay home, put their feet up with a cold beer, and watch whatever game is going on TV. That’s the safest bet but without the unexpected, life just doesn’t have any spice. The older I get, the less I like the unexpected, so that’s why I comfort myself with lists, research, and planning so that I can get the most out of a travelling vacation that I can get while still maintaining the point of view that if things go out of whack, you just have to go with it and see where you wind up.

One of my first adventures was nearly ruined because I was bound and determined to see the Sistine Chapel, the Tower of London, the Eiffel Tower and all those sights that we expect to see. I soon learned that sitting in a café with new friends and watching the world go by was far more fun and gave me more insight into a new culture then rushing off to tourist sights. When I went to India this year, I found the Taj Mahal very beautiful, but it wasn’t the highlight of my trip – singing Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star to a mentally handicapped little girl in an orphanage was. Her smile will always stay with me even though I didn’t take a picture of it.

There’s no doubt that organizing stuff can make a trip safer and more fun, but leaving room for the unexpected will always allow for the opportunity of a magical memory and apart from relaxation, that’s what we really hope for when we travel.

If you love your children…

2010-06-18T17:16:00.000-04:00

This has been a sad time of year for a few of my friends as they have either had parents who have passed away, parents whose chronic age-related illnesses have gotten worse or parents who have been forced due to deteriorating physical and mental ability to move into a nursing home.

Someone once told me that no matter how old you are, you are still someone’s child, and even in middle age, I find that I miss my deceased mother’s guidance and the guidance of my father who is suffering the ravages of dementia. He does know he’s losing it and it saddens him. There is no question that no matter how old you are, it’s tortuous to watch your parents come to rely on you instead of it being the opposite way around, the way it’s always been for most of us who have had parents who did their best to bring us up.

What is so difficult for most families, however, is to undergo this kind of pain and to make matters worse, deal with disorganized finances of parents who could not face the fact that someday they might not be able to take care of themselves. This was the case with my parents. Although they had made out a will, they never created any trust funds, always kept their home in their own name, and never discussed any of their finances with my sister or me. They assumed that they would live in their home until they keeled over.

Then my mother’s cancerous tumour burst in her colon and as I sat with my father in the hospital while my mother was in surgery, it became all too apparent that Mom had been hiding the severity of my father’s dementia so that they could continue living in their own home. Both were in their eighties and once they both came out of the hospital (yes, Dad had to be hospitalized at the same time with heart and respiratory problems), my mother and father had to be moved to a nursing home, which in the United States can cost $10,000 a month…each!

The usual practice below the border is that once placed in a nursing home, the elderly run through their money quickly, voluminous forms are filled out, and they go on Medicaid. They lose the ability to pass down money, homes, etc. to their family. I remember a horrible moment in a nursing home room in upstate New York with my parents and their elder care attorney when after learning what the nursing home would cost and what Medicaid would eventually take, my mother looked me in the eye and said, “You would have been better off if we had died.” Sadly, if my parents had faced up to age and been better informed, this might have been avoided.

Firstly, colon cancer – if Mom had gone for regular checkups, the polyp that turned cancerous could have been removed, but my mother was too frightened to go to the doctor. Secondly, if my parents had kept up with their taxes and if they had gotten financial advice when they were in their sixties or seventies, they could have made provisions to protect their family estate so that they wouldn’t go through the pain of watching the government take their home and all their savings. We, their children and grandchildren, might have had more time to focus on their care then spending hours on the phone trying to settle matters and not fight with one another about the best way to deal with all the issues that we had to face.

It is very difficult for all of us to face old age and death. We don’t like to talk about it and we don’t like to think about it. As I get older, I can understand how difficult it might be to talk with my children about these matters, let alone trust them with my finances, but if we love our children, this is precisely what we must do.

If you are in your sixties or seventies, I urge you to take a deep breath and make plans for illness and incapacitation so that things work smoothly for your children and so that they can take care of you instead of taking care of your money. It’s the kindest thing that you can do for them and they will praise you for it, and you will keep your children from the kind of battles that might keep them from talking to each other for years. On the other hand, if you’ve done this already, kudos to you…go play with your grandchildren.

Who Can I Blame?

2010-06-06T14:56:00.000-04:00

The good news is that Bangladesh has lifted its two-week ban on Facebook. The bad news is that nine activists died in a flotilla carrying humanitarian supplies for the citizens of Gaza. The good news is that, five days later, when the Israeli army boarded the Rachel Corrie ship, no one was hurt. The bad news is that the Egyptian Supreme Court has upheld a law stripping citizenship from any Egyptian man married to an Israeli woman and there are approximately 30,000 Egyptian men who are married to women with Israeli citizenship as during the Iraq war, Egyptians found work in Israel and subsequently married women of that country.

The bad news from the Middle East keeps getting worse and the good news is so mild in comparison, so scant, that even a cautious optimist like me has to throw up her hands and try not to read too much news on the Internet. There is so much conjecture and hot air fuming out of my TV and computer these days that I can scarcely breathe in my home. I would like to throw a verbal temper tantrum but I would only be adding to the pundit global warming that is going on these days.

The Middle East isn’t the only problem: go south of the border, very south of the border to the oil-drenched shores of Louisiana. The good news/bad news rollercoaster there is not buying friends for the folks at BP or for President Obama. One day, capping the leak with mud failed. A few days later, we hear that the containment cap placed on the gusher trapped about 1.67 million litres of oil…but the oil is still coming out.

I like a scapegoat as much as the next guy but if you’re going to pick between Mr. Obama and BP Chairman Tom “I’d like to get my life back” Hayward, I know which one I would choose to throw the rotten tomato at. How he could fit a very big foot like that in his mouth is a question for physics. When you think how many men died on that rig, how many livelihoods may be ruined by this disaster, it is hard to pity Hayward for losing quality time at the ski hill or golf course when so much of the Gulf of Mexico is likely to suffer damage that, some experts are saying, will not be fixed in our lifetime. Perhaps this is a pessimistic assessment. The damage to fish stocks, animal and plant life may be understood better next year at this time, but right now, it’s looking very bad. Blaming Hayward may feel good, but what does it accomplish?

With all this bad news, the world desperately craves someone to blame, so making scapegoats of Obama, Hayward, the Israeli people, (instead of the Israeli government) seems to be a simple reaction to complex technical and political problems. This is where we all get into trouble.

There is no question that we need to hold guilty parties accountable for their actions and that measures have to be taken to provide equitable solutions to people who are suffering, whether it’s the people of Gaza who are living in an economic hell, the Israeli people who never know when a rocket will be lobbed on them, the widows and families of the men who were killed on that BP oil rig, and the people who make their living from the waters that still have gallons of oil gushing into them.

Regulatory agencies that are supposed to ensure the safety of offshore drilling need to do their jobs instead of kowtowing to the oil industry. Politicians need to stop posturing and start negotiating in an atmosphere of mutual respect and a willingness to protect human life and the dignity of human life. Until people do their jobs right, this planet and its inhabitants remain in a perilous state, and no amount of pointed fingers will change that.

A Cry for Civility

2010-05-30T18:10:00.000-04:00

As of last week, Facebook has been banned in Pakistan. While this is a blow to freedom of speech, it is also a perfect example of how a world made small by technology is open to culture clashes that can eventually cost people their lives.

The ban is a reaction to a Facebook page entitled, “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day,” that encouraged people to draw Mohammed on May 20^th. Graphic representations of the prophet are strictly forbidden in Islam, so you might wonder why anyone except a drunken college student would come up with that so-called bright idea. When it comes to religion knee-jerk responses are so easy to snuggle up to, and this was yet another knee-jerk response made in protest of fundamentalist Islamic groups who threatened the producers of the cartoon, South Park, for depicting Mohammed in a bear suit costume. You may ask yourself if someone else will up the ante with another over- the-top response. You bet! Holland has a popular anti-Islam party which according to the Associated Press is one of the fastest growing political parties in that country, and what’s the response to that? Associated Press reports that, “ …an alleged al-Qaida militant detained in Iraq said he had talked to friends about attacking Danish and Dutch teams at the World Cup in South Africa next month.” And so it goes…

I blame all this on the loss of a value and a word that is old-fashioned, civility which is a stately way of describing the act of being polite. Civility on television, radio and the Internet has gone right out the window. American talk radio is certainly inflammatory which may attract listeners but does more to harm public discourse than anything I can think of. People interrupt one another without hesitation, and trading insults is the main agenda for all parties. Call Obama a Communist, a Fascist, Adolf Hitler reincarnated and you will probably attract listeners but as far as engaging in serious political analysis, forget it. Talk radio sounds like a bunch of bullies participating in mindless name calling.

Civility has been replaced by shock. Insulting major religious figures may be amusing to adolescents and adults who can’t quite climb out of adolescence but in the end, it has needlessly increased tensions between East and West among factions that are just crying out for a reason to up the ante, and this is all done in the name of profit. The producers of South Park have to satisfy the appetites of fans who crave that kind of material and this need supersedes any form of common sense. It’s all about entertainment and entertainment is all about money.

I am not advocating surrendering our freedoms because we are threatened by people for using them. Art will always call into question our most sacred values and the conflict will always exist between freedom of expression and religious expression. Yet even the makers of South Park would be loath to call what they do art.

If people are going to wave the freedom of expression flag, then let’s hope that it is waved every now and then with some seriousness, and for a purpose that is just a few notches higher than entertainment with shock value. If as much effort was put into finding common ground between East and West as in finding fault with another, we might make some headway, and that can only happen if people actually start to listen to one another respectfully.

Maybe civility is as old fashioned as costumes in a Jane Austen movie but without it, we’re all just a bunch of mindless louts shouting at one another and getting nowhere fast.

Mom-less on Mother's Day

2010-05-17T17:27:00.000-04:00

A funny thing happened on the Saturday before Mother’s Day. I was upstairs working on the computer when the doorbell rang; my husband answered the door, and within seconds I heard my son’s voice which was strange because my son works in Ottawa. I came downstairs and there was both my son and daughter. My daughter ran up the stairs from our entrance and yelled, “Surprise,” extending a bouquet of daisies. I burst into tears and hugged them both.

They came at a great time. This was my second Mother’s Day since my own mother, Lynne, passed away. I think it was worse than the first one. Seeing my own children was a wonderful consolation after the weeks of Mother’s Day advertisements that depressed the heck out of me.
Mother’s Day was a big deal for my mother – heaven help the child that forgot it. In later years, emails and FTD florists took the worry out of realizing three days before that Mother’s Day was coming. A credit card and a phone call would send a new plant or bouquet of flowers my mother’s way and she always appreciated it. Every year, she told me that I shouldn’t have, but I knew that if I didn’t send something, I’d never hear the end of it. That was one of my mother’s endearing quirks; she simply wanted her children and grandchildren to pay attention to her and to express their love in one way or another. It took me a long time to understand it.
It also took many years to establish a non-combative relationship with my mother. She had a very vivid personality, so vivid that it’s hard to believe that she’s gone. My mother was the life of any party, she water skied and spent the summer in a bathing suit when all the other kids’ mothers were playing cards and she had the richest, most beautiful singing voice. Though I inherited her love of music, I didn’t get that voice, only a shadow of it.

Over time, I find that I’m taking on many of her characteristics. When my father tells another of his improbable stories, I can hear my mother’s voice saying, “Sonny, you know that didn’t happen.” I can feel my face take on my mother’s expression, the rolling of the eyes. It’s all that I can do not to say, “Dad, you know that didn’t happen,” but my father is ninety-one years old. His stories are overwhelmingly exciting. When I hinted to the nursing home staff that they were also untrue, I could see their faces begin to fall. I had to catch myself. He’s ninety-one and he’s entitled to an audience.

Coming from a home with two gregarious and charming parents was not easy. Everyone seemed to compete for attention and believe me, there’s still a fair bit of emotional baggage that my parents’ children and grandchildren are dealing with. Yet my mother was absolutely right when she said over and over again that I would miss her when she was gone. Of course, I miss her. Two years on, I’m still surprised to come home from work and not have a message on my answering machine with her usual, “Hello, it’s your mother. I’ll talk to you,” followed by the click of the phone hanging up. I miss my mother terribly.

It only makes sense that when my children surprised me on Saturday, I was thrilled to see them. They reminded me of the role that I have to play and I try to never ever say that they will miss me when I’m gone, because of course they will. Our bond is bigger than our disagreements.
I imagine that this isn’t going to get easier as the years go on. It is a pain that I will get used to every Mother’s Day, and there are some of you out there who have lived with this for years; you know this pain better than I. About six months, before my mother passed away, I thanked her for the wonderful life that she gave me; I’m so glad that I did.

The Doctor is Back

2010-04-25T11:48:00.000-04:00

A new season of Dr. Who started on the Space channel last week, and it makes me happy to see the Time Lord back even though the latest incarnation is so young looking that it makes it difficult to believe that he is thousands of years old and wise in all things. Still, I am willing to cut the new and baby-faced Doctor a lot of slack because I’ve been following Doctor Who for a long time.

I first “met” Dr. Who in Hedon-on-Hull, England in 1979 when I was twenty-four and about to begin my great adventure of crossing Europe. My husband and I had only been married for two years, but we worked and saved money for a European trip. Just before we left, we bought forty acres with friends of ours in the Eastern Townships with the hope that we might live there some day.

During a three-month stay at a long-suffering friend’s house (and I subsequently named my first child after this kind friend), I discovered the joys of British television and there were two very different shows that particularly struck my fancy: Dr. Who and All Creatures Great and Small. Both shows do share one thing in common; they tell stories that take you “somewhere else.” This is obvious with Dr. Who as the stories leap back and forward in time. All Creatures takes place between the 1930s and 1950s in a gentler world where people were more or less polite to one another and courageously struggled to get by on very little. Mrs. Hall, the vets’ housekeeper, would have been outraged at the loose morals and wastefulness of today’s throwaway society.

I am still amazed at how many story lines the Dr. Who script writers can come up with, particularly with villains who look like Hoover vacuum cleaners turned right side-up, the Darliks, and whose main line in every script is “Exterminate. Exterminate.” Since they can only say this in a monotone voice, forgetful and tone-deaf people everywhere would have no trouble with a sing-along-with-the-Darliks album which no doubt would be called, you guessed it, Exterminate.

As actors are prone to coming and going and not wanting to waste their precious talents on being stuck in a childish science fiction show like Dr. Who, the writers came up with the ingenious idea that if Dr. Who was about to die, he would morph into a new person who would continue in the battle to save the universe from evil-doers and megalomaniac robots who also seem to share his abilities to go back and forth in time thus explaining, for example, why aliens might be attacking Earth in the nineteenth century.
The first Doctor Who that I watched in the 1970s was the inimitable Tom Baker who wore a ridiculously long striped wool scarf and was followed by his female companion Ramana and his trusty robot dog, K-9. His huge eyes could say volumes. Peter Davidson, the actor who played Tristan on All Creatures Great and Small, soon followed Baker; my young son and I watched him together and dubbed him the Tristan-Doctor. Until the present actor, Matt Smith took the part, Davidson was the youngest actor to be cast as the Doctor.

Each actor who has played Dr. Who coincides with a different point in my life and every time that a new one takes the part, I am convinced that he just won’t do. I felt exactly that way when David Tennant took over for Christopher Eccleston who quit Dr. Who after only one season, but over the five years that Tennant played the part, I warmed up to him because he was nuts, plain and simple.

The main prerequisite for playing the part is the ability to portray a brilliant maniac which Tennant did so very well. If an actor can do that, and if the writers can keep spinning impossible stories, the die-hard fans like me will watch and keep watching for years to come.

The Zen of Taking and Sharing Photos

2010-04-11T12:01:00.001-04:00

On Easter Sunday, before going out for dinner at a friend’s house, my husband and I went down to the Old Port in Montreal and I did something that I’ve always wanted to do. It may sound crazy but I’ll let you in on the secret: I spent an hour taking photos of the large silos that are on the Highway 15 as you come into Montreal on University St.

Remember how beautiful and warm it was on Easter Weekend? On that day in Montreal, the sun was warm, the sky was a bright blue and there were very photogenic puffy white clouds in the sky. I even took a few shots through the car window with my Blackberry, uploaded them to Facebook as we were driving down the Eastern Townships Auto route and within minutes, my friends in San Francisco could see the snow on the ski hill in Bromont…and one commented that she liked the shot!

The speed of the technology that we live with still amazes me. In fact, I’ve just seen a Skype phone advertised. If you can catch broadband wireless, you can have a videophone conversation with someone anywhere in the world on a small phone. If we had flying cars, we’d be the Jetsons!

The park at the Old Port was crowded with people going for walks and riding their bicycles, but as soon as my husband and I crossed the bridge to the silos, we were truly in a no man’s land. I know this because a Montreal Amphibus bus went by on its way to the water and the tour guide explained that only drunks and homeless people hang around here. We did get a lot of strange looks so I played my part and waved to the tourists in hopes that they would return home and tell their friends that Montreal drunks and homeless people are very friendly.

Today’s digital SLR cameras allow you to shoot in different formats and I’m just learning to understand a few. Most people are familiar with JPEG photos. This is a compressed format that allows you to send photos in small sizes that make it easy to email, for example. Another format that is much bigger in size is called RAW. The advantage with RAW is that the data in the photo is saved in an unprocessed format. You can manipulate your photos in a program like Photoshop or Aperture (that’s the program that I bought with my Mac; I’ve tried to use Photoshop and I think you need a one year course to understand the program). With these programs, you can fix problems with colour and exposure without degrading the quality of the original digital file.

Because I’m a hobbyist and not a professional, I am sometimes very happy to make a few corrections on a copy of the photo in iPhoto and then either have them professionally printed or just upload them to Facebook to share with my friends. You can get great snapshots with JPEGs. All the photos that I have taken on my travels have been done in JPEG and though some of my old film photos may have been slightly sharper, I get many more all-around, better quality photos shooting with a digital camera.

iPhoto makes it very easy to upload photos to Facebook. You just highlight the photos that you want and click on the Facebook button on the bottom right hand corner of the screen. That’s all you do! I just discovered that the photos don’t even have to be next to one another to select them– you simply hold down the command key and click on the photos that you want to select.

The fun of taking photos is not only the finished product; shooting pictures forces you to really look at what’s around you. You have to focus your mind as well as your camera and on a beautiful day, that’s not hard to do.

On reading Julie and Julia

2010-04-01T20:02:00.003-04:00

I'm utterly ashamed of myself. No, not because I'm reading Julie and Julia, which is admittedly, a fluffy sort of book, but there's no harm in that. The woman swears the way I swear, but there’s no shame in that either. I do not and cannot imagine myself taking on the project that she took on, namely, cooking all the recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child in 365 days. I'm not even ashamed that I can't cook. It's that the woman did the recipes, blogged about her experiences and then headed off to work from Queens to lower Manhattan for a mind-numbing day as a secretary in an office. She did all that and rode the subway both ways, for God’s sake.

I'm not knocking secretaries; my mother brought home the bacon (okay, so we didn't keep kosher - Mom loved bacon and served it every Saturday morning, kinehora). Julie Adams spends much of the book bemoaning her life, first as a temp secretary than as a secretary for a government agency doing post-September 11-memorial work. Her original intention in coming to New York was to be an actress. The kvetching is hers not mine and everything comes from that kvetching.

As she approaches thirty and discovers that she has cysts on her ovaries that will probably make conceiving a child difficult, she hits biological clock despair. Through a series of visits back to Texas and conversations with her husband, she resolves to begin the Julie/Julia project, complete it in 365 days and blog about it.

I just can't get over the fact that someone would cook and wash dishes in a crappy apartment till eleven at night, get up in the morning and blog about it and then go to work. This is the kind of commitment that is beyond my comprehension. Yet when I look back at that period in my life, I destroyed my voice by singing/screaming in a New Wave Band that was just as bad as my singing/screaming. The late-twenties bring on a late-youth crisis that can be resolved innumerable ways. Her way was definitely more popular and lucrative than mine.

One thing that attracted my attention was how Adams received comments on her blogs almost instantly. I guess when you actually are doing something and writing about it, it will attract more attention than writing a blog for older people who are first learning about technology, I mean how would they even find my damn blog anyway. I’m taking this book personally!

I’ve had quite a few colleagues tell me that the movie is much better than the book as it focuses more on Julia Child’s experiences in France which are far more interesting to them. I think people are probably taken in by Meryl Streep playing Julia Child, and everyone knows what a commanding actress Streep. This is a bit unfair to the original concept of the book which is to look at an every day young woman who rises above her despair in a novel and entertaining way.

A certain flair for cooking would be a prerequisite for this project. I've often thought that I could be a hit as someone who no one could teach to cook. Pair me with Jamie Oliver, and watch the comic antics ensue as I chop off a few fingers and set the stove on fire, oh yes, and scream for my husband who is the real cook in the family. Jamie knows better than to take me on.

I’m enjoying this book. It’s funny and there’s also the message that when life is really crappy, you can find something to get you out of your funk and back into a place where you can derive pleasure from life again; in Adams’ case, it’s eating very fatty foods and chopping up live lobsters. As someone who is willing to eat lobster as long as someone else chops it, I would recommend this book to those who are not afraid to read a book that involves food, sex, whining, soul searching, New York atmosphere, and a little bit of Julia Child’s life thrown in. It’s a decent vacation read which has inspired me to blog about something other than web sites. On the other hand, you couldn’t pay me to make calves foot jelly, which is really made from a calf’s foot. My daughter may have the right idea about being a vegetarian.

Health on the Internet: Use your Common Sense

2010-03-31T15:09:00.000-04:00

While there is a saying, “Physician, heal thyself!” I have yet to hear a saying, “Patient, heal thyself,” yet every day people are falling victim to this syndrome by searching out information on their health conditions through Google or Yahoo. Anytime someone that I know comes down with a chronic condition, they always seem to know better than everybody else because they’ve gone through a few web sites and not only have diagnosed their own condition but come up with a cure.

Here’s another truism: “There’s a sucker born every minute.” The Internet is a very powerful fraud magnet and if you are suffering from a chronic health condition, you are probably at your most vulnerable, and may be open to trying some remedies that you’ve found on a web site. This is a very bad idea and I beg you to think twice before parting with your hard earned cash. At least, speak with your doctor and use your judgement before embarking on a journey that may wind up with an unhappy ending.

Just recently, I became afflicted with a condition known as tinnitus, which is a constant ringing in the ears. It’s actually like having crickets or cicadas hanging out there. In my desperation, I did something that I knew darned well that I should avoid. I Googled tinnitus - big mistake. I know that this is usually an incurable condition but I still searched on the Internet and found the usual advice that you will get no matter what ails you: quit drinking coffee, don’t eat chocolate or strong cheese.

That’s just great. Not only will I continue to have an annoying sound whining at me 24-7, now you’re going to take away from me those last comfort foods that give me some kind of pleasure. My friends, whether you have digestive troubles, tinnitus, or migraine headaches, you will be told to cut out chocolate, coffee, and cheese; it’s just no fair. Yet on the sidebar, all kinds of remedies can be bought to cure everything from warts to tinnitus if you just give them your credit card number. Yes, I may be desperate but I’m not stupid.

Facebook is another dangerous place to announce your illness. I have a friend from my long past who is a follower of herbology and who swears that if I use a herbal concoction – and cut out chocolate, coffee, very cold foods like ice cream and some vegetables – I will be cured because my tinnitus is a symptom of weak kidneys and these herbs are the solution.

Now if I carelessly post the message that I’m enjoying a cup of coffee while perusing my Facebook page, I get a harassing message from my friend reminding me that I’m only damaging my health by drinking that cup of coffee. It’s enough to make me cut my membership and go into hiding from overly well-intentioned Internet friends.

So here’s the deal: Make sure that you’re getting your health information from reliable sources, consult your doctor and don’t complain to your friends on Facebook because it will come back to haunt you in the end. Then go eat a Mars bar, and enjoy it.

TV on computer, Radio on Computer or What’s a Podcast?

2010-03-13T18:30:00.001-05:00

It’s bad enough for a media addict like me to have a wide variety of TV channels to keep me off the guilt machine (read exercise bike or more appropriately, elliptical trainer), but now my computer offers the possibility of having all or most of the TV and/or radio shows that I’ve missed at my disposal. Not only that, most of it is free, legal and offered by the actual distributors themselves, so that I don’t have to suffer the eternal guilt and damnation of having downloaded illegal shows.

You may have heard podcasts mentioned on television and radio and wondered what they are. In these days of iPods, everything is somewhat pod-related but a podcast is actually a digital media file which can be downloaded to your own computer, transferred to a portable device such as an iPod and used whenever you like.

iTunes, as most people now know, is the Apple online store where people can buy music, movies and television shows if they can find their wallets and then locate their credit cards. The iTunes store also offers free podcasts and there is some very interesting material to be had.

Most of the CBC radio shows have some kind of podcast available on iTunes. You can even set up a subscription to one and iTunes will automatically download the show for you once a week. I just think it’s great for catching shows that I’ve missed. For example, I’m a Van Morrison fan, and Jian Ghomeshi interviewed him a few months ago. One of my colleagues at work told me about this so I went to iTunes, searched for the CBC radio show, Q, and before you know it, I had downloaded the show for free. Even though I didn’t have time to actually listen to the show when I downloaded it, I was able to put it on a few days later when there was nothing on TV.

Another form of catching shows is through streaming. Many television stations like CBC, CTV and Global allow you to go on their web site and watch shows that you might have missed. With computer screens getting bigger and sharper, this is not such a bad way of keeping up with your favourite TV show. The difference between streaming and podcasting is that you don’t get to download and keep the show when it is streamed. The web site broadcasts the show to you and you just watch it, much like watch a TV show without taping it.

There are web sites that stream that are not completely legal and I admit to trying it out; it was an amusing experience. If it wasn’t for surfthechannel.net, I would never have fulfilled my goal of watching every episode of Star Trek Deep Space Nine which was being shown on the cable station, Space Channel. Every time I missed an episode, I was able to watch it through surfthechannel.net. The only problem, if you can call it a problem, was that I had to watch it with Japanese subtitles. I honestly believe that it enhanced the experience.

Sometimes it is frustrating when the Internet is streaming slowly so that you have to wait for the next bit of the show to load up. The best way to get around this is to walk away, do something else, and come back when the whole show is in your computer’s temporary memory cache. Now you’re ready to watch the show without any interruption unless your spouse comes over to chastise you for having nothing better to do with your time than watch every episode of Star Trek Deep Space Nine.

Possibly you might want to do what teenagers do: open another tab on your computer with a more serious and weighty web site and flip to it when you hear your spouse’s footsteps. As soon as your spouse has satisfied himself or herself, you can quietly go back to the show. I, of course, would never dream of doing such a thing and have never done it. Now, I’m going to flip to last week’s episode of House. Happy procrastinating.

Somebody's Mother on Crackberry

2010-02-21T11:24:00.001-05:00

As most people are discovering, cyberspace may now be entered in a variety of ways: by cable, through phone lines, by satellite and now by the wireless telephone network. By making the Internet accessible wherever you go, through your iPhone or your Blackberry, someone can make more money out of you and you are almost never alone. You can become addicted to perpetual accessibility.

My cell phone contract was about to end, and did I weigh out the options? Yes, I did. Did I opt for a pay-as-you-go plan, since five days a week I am at work and never pick up my cell phone? Was I prudent and thrifty? No, I was not.

It started out with my love for my birthday present, the iPod Touch. If I loved the iPod so much, wouldn’t I love an iPhone even more? If I was a crazy spendthrift, that might be the end of the story, but I knew that even I, Apple gadget-lover that I am, could not justify buying the data plan that would come with the iPhone. Indeed, if I was a true addict, I would have gone out, paid a few hundred dollars for an iPhone with the lowest amount of gigs, marched into the Telus office and started negotiating. My other option would have been to get an iPhone for $100.00 then buy the $50.00 a month phone and data plan, which would have finally cost me, with taxes, about $67.00 a month.

Ah, the salesman saw me coming. He said you’ll be paying close to $70.00 a month for your phone, and I know that I can’t justify paying that kind of monthly price for what is really and mostly…a toy. Yes, cell phones are practical in emergencies and when you’re on the road, but gadget babies like me want and crave the gizmos, what they call apps, but what you and I would call toys.

When he saw that I had accepted that the iPhone was not to be, he soared in like an eagle after its prey. He offered me a Blackberry for no charge, plus unlimited usage of Facebook, MySpace, MSN and Blackberry Messenger for $40.00 a month and he threw in caller ID and he threw in unlimited calls and texts to five numbers…and this was how, I, like many before me, acquired a Crackberry! One of my good friends calls it a Crackberry of course, because it’s as addictive crack cocaine.

Yesterday, I spent hours setting up my ring tones so that there would be a different bell or whistle for each type of message. I know all too well that this activity was a waste of my time as I usually put my phone on vibrate so as not to annoy others, but as I said before, it’s a new toy, gotta play!

Once my children discovered my Blackberry pin number -this is like a phone number that only Blackberry users can use to send messages – they began to text me all evening with tips on how to use it, and then, with updates on where they were and what they were doing. I was actually texting back and forth with them while they were carrying on conversations with friends.

I find this a frightening prospect: will I become one of those people who always has my Crackberry in the palm of my hand? Will I never give family, friends, and acquaintances my undivided attention because there is always someone messaging me, always a new notification on Facebook letting me know that someone has found a kitten while playing Farmville a Facebook game? Will I turn into a rude middle-aged copy of a techno-addicted teen who can’t let her Crackberry go?

I hope and pray not. Right now, the pretty new Crackberry is turned off so that I do not give into temptation and see what the latest post on Facebook is. If I were a really mature person, I would have opted for a mature plan which would have given me access to my email, my grownup email, but what’s the point? Most of my emails are Facebook notifications anyway. Oh, well, at least the next time I get a flat tire and call my husband for help, I can give him a feeble justification for having a cell phone, a pretty red cell phone with a pretty screen and access to Facebook.

Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail - Which Mail

2010-01-24T18:26:00.001-05:00

I have too many email addresses. I have a work address, a home address and three webmail addresses with the top three webmail providers: Gmail, Hotmail/Windows Live and Yahoo. Webmail is very handy in that you can pick up your email anywhere at any time - you just log in and go. When I went to India, however, there was major confusion among my family members. Which email address should they write to me at? In my travels, I’ve often found that some email addresses are harder to get into than others.

In writing this article, I Googled “compare webmail” and found three interesting sites that reviewed Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo Mail: consumersearch.com, ghacks.net and techcrunch.com. I found that all three of these techie blogs said pretty much the same thing about all three. So, here’s what I found:

Yahoo Mail has the most users - I would have guessed that it would be Microsoft’s Hotmail. Yet hands down, all three blogs preferred Gmail as the best free webmail service. Free is definitely the operative word as $20.00 a year will buy you greater amounts of storage and email service with little or no advertising. Apparently Yahoo’s pay service cuts advertising completely while Hotmail will still show you Microsoft advertising.

For the everyday person who doesn’t receive hundreds of emails a day, I don’t see storage as an issue. My Yahoo account was my first email account so I started storing important emails in folders and after a few years, I still seem to have oodles of storage space to go. The advantage with Yahoo is that you can do several things at once and have tabs at the top of the screen so you can go back and forth and look at several email messages at once without having to reload the page. Unfortunately, every time I send an email, Yahoo puts advertising at the bottom of it and I really don’t appreciate that.

I like the Hotmail screen because, of all three, I find it the cleanest looking. If you’ve ever used Outlook Express, it’s very much like it in terms of having access to a calendar and reminders. There is advertising to one side for dating services but I don’t tend to clue in to it very much although I suppose my subconscious mind is probably working over time trying to discern what I really want to buy and works at ignoring the lovely lady who wants to date someone, but not me.

All three reviewers like Gmail best. I agree with them that, of all three services, Gmail loads up the fastest and when you’re in a foreign country working on a ten year old computer, that is really important. Gmail also offers a great deal of storage space. I can’t seem to use more than 1% of the space that I’m allotted but I do tend to delete old messages. All three also claim that Gmail has the best spam filter and I would agree with that. I get almost no unwanted email there.

My own beef with Gmail is that I often find it difficult to locate the reply and forward buttons or to find the actual email that I’m composing. This is because Gmail is the only one of the three that shows you all your correspondence in one screen, and if you’re not used to it, it can be somewhat confusing. Yet, over time, I’ve noticed that the more you use Gmail, the more you understand its ways. Gmail also allows you to colour code and label your emails for easier recognition. This isn’t something that I tend to use much but others do find this useful.

In short, Gmail seems to be the way to go according to the tech-mavens, but I think that most people just get used to the one that they’ve used the most, and stick to it. If you’re just starting out with a webmail address, Gmail may be your best choice.

Cross Border Dial Tone Blues

2009-12-18T12:45:00.001-05:00

Two weeks ago, I wrote about holiday gift items such as cell phones and cameras. Over the course of the last week, I’ve had the occasion to realize that if you want to give someone a headache, give him or her a cell phone. When it comes to service, cell phone companies figure that, once you’re in their clutches, they have you over a barrel, and there’s nothing that you can do about it.

In Europe, it seems to be understood that one’s own country is not the only country in the world, and that someone who owns a cell phone would probably need that piece of equipment to communicate with others when abroad. North American companies seem to think, however, that no one goes over the border. Canadian and American companies have some sort of perverted agreement that if you use a cell phone out of your respective country, they have every right to charge you the most extreme prices that could possibly be allowed: over one dollar per minute of air time PLUS long distance charges. I find it impossible to believe that the cost of making a phone call goes up exponentially as soon as it crosses the border, but it seems to me to be a very profitable excuse for mobile phone providers.

I have to go down to New York City to visit my father frequently and I’ve found only one American phone company that seemed to have a plan that wouldn’t lock me into a contract, Virgin Mobile USA. As long as I topped up my phone with twenty dollars once every ninety days, I could keep my phone number. This seemed reasonable until I found out that there was one big hitch. I lived in Canada. Virgin Mobile USA would not accept a Canadian-based credit card. That seemed crazy to me. The only way to top up your phone if you are a Canadian with an American cell phone is to go down to the United States, buy a phone card and call in the pin number on the card or enter it on Virgin’s web site.

For a variety of reasons, I was unable to visit my father and was getting emails and messages on my answering machine from Virgin that I had better top up my phone or lose my number which meant buying a new phone, telling everyone that I had a new number when in the USA and going through a great deal of inconvenience.

Luckily, my son had to be in the United States so I asked him to buy me a card and give me the pin number so that I wouldn’t lose my phone. He did so. When I entered in the pin number, the web site told me that it was not a valid number. So, I called Virgin Mobile USA’s phone number.

A very hip computerized voice answered my call and offered me a variety of options, none of which would allow me to speak to a living person. I screamed and yelled until finally the computer figured out that I wanted a “live adviser” which I would presume to be better than a dead one. My live advisor found out that I lived in Canada and instantly suggested that I call Virgin Mobile Canada. It took nearly ten minutes to convince her that I was using an American phone with an American number which I only used in the United States of yes, you guessed it, America, and that Virgin Mobile Canada would just send me right back to Virgin USA.

When I asked to speak to a manager, I was put on hold where the music of choice was rap music, and the music system was badly in need of repair as it crackled and changed volume repeatedly, probably a great means of getting people to hang up as one can only take that kind of torture for so long. I never got to speak to the manager, by the way, she was busy!

I was finally advised to fax or email a scanned copy of the card which my son kindly did for me. Two days later, I got the following rather terse email reply:

Hi Mrs. Goldfinch, While reviewing your attachment, the top up card that was purchased is for Verizon Wireless Prepaid and not for Virgin Mobile USA. I apologize for any confusion. Thank you.

My son told me that he bought the only Virgin card in the store and as far as confusion goes, my son has a B.Sc. in Biochemistry. He knows stuff that I can’t begin to fathom. If he can be confused in the process of buying a phone card, what hope is there for the rest of us? More-over, THEY HAVE MY MONEY. If a computer can answer my phone call and transfer my call to a so-called live advisor, why can’t it transfer thirty dollars from Virgin Wireless Prepaid to Virgin Mobile U.S.A.? It is a mystery, and the ways of cell phone companies are mysterious to any consumer who can’t fathom how they can get away with such murder. Miraculously, they do. Taking someone’s money without giving anything in return is what most consumers would call robbery.

Apparently, a new company, Wind Mobile, is being allowed to do business in Canada and rumour has it that the competition is going to make cell phone prices drop. The media has advised people not to lock into contracts, now as prices will be dropping so keep that in mind when you shop, and remember, cell phones are the gifts that keep on taking…your money, that is.

Christmas Electronics - Know What You’re Getting Into

2009-12-18T07:26:00.001-05:00

The one thing that is sure to botch up Christmas morning is an electronic gift. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again here. Everyone is a good mood opening presents delighted with the new laptop or cell phone or iPod and then the inevitable happens. It doesn’t work. It’s incompatible with your operating system or a part is missing or you were too tired to read the instructions properly so you messed up the installation. Electronic presents are an invitation to frayed tempers and general crankiness. Yet we keep on giving these because they’re flashy and they say that we care about the person enough to spend a lot of money on him or her.

It goes without saying that some of you who read this column will be swayed, as I am, by flashy television advertising and will be in the market for a cell phone, camera, iPod, etc. I know that I was fairly impressed with my American niece’s iPhone and started dropping a lot of hints to my long-suffering family…until I found out that hidden cost of the iPhone, The Plan.

I am a fairly light cell phone user. During the week, I hardly use it at all as I have a well functioning land line both at home and at work. I tend to turn it off. Teenagers and young adults do not understand this as they keep their cell phones perpetually on and forget to charge the battery. This is something that adults fail to understand when they try to call their children. It is an electronic generation gap.

The other part of the cell phone generation gap is cost. Neither of my adult children have a land line which is sensible because they are always on the go. So they are used to spending probably well over $70.00 a month for their phones. Given that my phone is usually turned off, $70.00 seems exorbitant but that’s what it will cost me to keep an iPhone alive, according to a column by the Globe & Mail and that’s just the minimum. It will cost more if I want to have voicemail on my phone (something that I like to have with a 90 year old father in New York City) and a reasonable texting plan which I need for my children who don’t live in the Townships anymore. Needless to say, I will be replacing my cell phone with something other than an iPhone though it saddens me as it is great to text with and you have easy access to the Internet everywhere with it - if that’s what you want.

In the camera area, I must say that I am very impressed with my little Canon Powershot. If you know someone who is about to go on a trip, it’s a great little camera. The photos are reasonably sharp and the camera is very easy to learn to use. I got it just before I went to India, played with it for one weekend, and was banging off pictures for the rest of the trip.

The small size is a real advantage. I have become accustomed to lugging heavy SLR cameras whenever I want to take pictures and though these give you amazing versatility and a wide range of options when you take pictures, they are huge and when you take a picture, you stick out like a sore thumb.
When I travel, I like to take candid pictures of people on the street. India was great for this. With a small camera, I was often able to take the shot quickly and slip the camera back in my purse. The Powershot is light weight and its automatic functions make it very easy to do this. It’s true that the folks who had a heavy Nike SLR came back with sharper photos of the Taj Mahal but the bonus for me was two weeks of comfortable travel without a sore shoulder. Besides, I got some very nice shots of the Taj Mahal too so I’m not complaining.

So if you must shop for electronics, I’d say that a digital camera is a safe bet for a more relaxed Christmas morning but be warned that cell phones are a gift that keeps on taking all year long and make sure that you know what you’re getting into.

And Then I went to India

2009-12-18T07:23:00.004-05:00

“You haven’t written a column in a long time,” someone mentioned to me in passing. Yes, that’s true and I have some good excuses. I was chaperoning a trip to a student conference in India which included a one week pre-conference tour. It took me two weeks to get over jet lag and catch up at work and being a procrastinator, it’s taken me about another two weeks to decide what to write about.

The good folks at The Record have asked me to give my column a focus and in the last few months, my focus has been the world online: the Internet, cell phones, and the new technologies that are related to that world. Of course, coming back from a land and culture that seems so different, almost the complete opposite of the one that we know and love in Canada, I want to tell you about it.

One way that I can merge both of those is to give you an edited version of an email home. Now, at the time that I wrote the email, it was about 5:30 in the morning and the sun was just starting to come up. The overnight temperature probably hovered at about 30 degrees and that estimation might be on the low side. Day time temperatures rose above 40 degrees and the days were utterly scorching. I was told that this was hot weather even for them in October and all I could think of was that it would be impossibly hot as a summer day in the Townships! Early morning and night were the most comfortable times of the day, particularly because my students and I were staying at a boarding school in rooms in which there was no air conditioning.

The heat alone made it difficult to sleep but the fact that I was actually in India made it nearly impossible to sleep. Even after a week of adjusting to the fact that India is nine and a half hours ahead of Canada, I slept very few hours a night which explained why I was often in the dormitory’s computer room at sunrise typing an email to my husband on vintage computers from the 1990’s. The following email, however, was typed on a hotel computer, equally as old after one of the most challenging days of the trip:
Hi again,

It's 6:15 here so must be 9 something or 10 your time.

I went to the Agra Fort today and just as my camera battery was dying, we went to the Mother Teresa Mission where there were mentally handicapped of all ages and orphans. We were all scooping up infants and holding them. The babies' legs were like twigs. The baby that I picked up had a very runny nose and a big smile. I couldn’t help thinking how much his life might be changed for the better if I snuck him back into Canada, even though I’m too old to start childrearing again.

As I was bouncing the baby around, I sang Twinkle Twinkle Little Star to the baby and to a girl who looked very badly off. She begged me to sing it over and over with her hand gestures. She smiled so widely while I sang. I almost cried - it was an amazing feeling to give someone a moment of happiness just by singing a nursery rhyme.

The worst moment for me was meeting the little boy, Rahul, who had lost a leg and whose other leg was bandaged and badly scarred.. The scar on his stump was very difficult to look at yet he had a very bright face with a huge smile. He was selling water to a train and the train ran over his leg. He was 10, 12? It was all I could do to keep from crying. The sister said that Rahul had been in the hospital for 6 months and then the hospital handed him over to the Mission. The sisters are caring for him but they cannot afford to pay for any further medical care which is worrisome because his other leg was bandaged and there was a large stain on the back of the bandage that didn’t look good to my untrained eyes.

I got some pictures of the mission and one of my travelling companions took a lot of photos and promised to share these with me. I think people need to see them. The sisters here are caring for what is considered to be the dregs of this society. We were all blown away.

We collected the equivalent of 400$ U.S. from our group so the visit was well worth it for the sisters of the mission. That might run the place for a month-they run strictly on donations.

Love,
Ellen

I have to tell you that one month later that little boy Rahul is still very much on my mind so I have written to the mission asking permission to provide help, not an email, but good old fashioned snail mail. I have shown my school, friends and family the one photo that I have and many people are interested in donating money to see that he gets medical care and perhaps - and this is my big hope - a prosthetic leg. If not that, at least crutches that will help him get around. Right now, this poor little boy can only crawl.

I can’t help thinking that this is a problem that money can solve. You and I cannot help all the poor children that I saw begging on the street. If you saw Slumdog Millionaire, you have a pretty good idea of the brutality that children experience each day. One of my own photos shows a young girl with a baby slung around her shoulder who is standing in the middle of traffic in 40 degree heat and begging from car to car every time the traffic light turns red. I cannot help her though I somewhat callously took her photo from my seat on the air conditioned bus so that I could tell her story or the story of that moment to others. Yet I do know where Rahul is and I think that he can be helped.

I hope that the sisters agree to this and I hope that I can find the way to funnel money to the right organization who can help Rahul. It’s not enough to feel sorry; sometimes you have to put your money where your mouth is and get a job done no matter how tough it looks at the beginning.

YouTube – Tool or Time Waster or Big Brother

2009-08-27T18:27:00.002-04:00

If you love film or TV shows or music videos or even stupid movies and you are hooked up to high speed Internet, you are probably half way to confessing your state of addiction to the web site, Youtube.com. Everybody shows up on YouTube sooner or later. You can watch both the United States Supreme Court and the Pope on this web site. Anyone who has a webcam, can play guitar and carry a tune has probably filmed himself or herself and posted the video on YouTube.

I am always amazed that no matter how obscure I think something may be, I will find a video of it there. In fact, when I was first let loose on it, I spent hours searching for old videos of Laura Nyro who was my favourite singer in high school and yes, Joni Mitchell too and found a lot of films to choose from. I’ve watched old episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine on YouTube and looked at videos of San Francisco to help me with a piece that I’m writing. If you can’t be there, you can get a good idea of an area by watching a video of it.

Of course, there are issues of copyright infringement that get film and television companies a bit hot under the collar when they find their material illegally posted on YouTube. Viacom has sued Google for a lot of money. Where’s the profit in people having access to your wares for free? Apparently, even here, some companies have adopted an if-you-can’t-beat-them-join-them attitude. One company, CBS, has allowed it and found an opportunity for making money by placing advertising in with the videos. Ironically, CBS is Viacom’s “sister company.”

While YouTube may be quite entertaining, there are some very real dangers that everyone should be aware of, particularly teenagers. We are living in an era when we are all Big Brother. Anyone who has a cell phone that is equipped to make videos can very easily film someone and post that film on YouTube almost instantly. So if you’re at a party and you stick the proverbial lampshade on your head and feel inclined to shimmy and shake to the delight of your equally inebriated friends, you may find that one of them thinks it’s an absolute hoot to post you on YouTube that night. The next day, you may think that film clip is humiliating and a prospective job opportunity might crumble into dust.

YouTube does have a privacy policy and people can request an offending video be removed but sometimes the consequences can become serious very quickly. At the beginning of August, YouTube was in the news as people were outraged by a video of three men in Saskatchewan shooting ducks and howling with laughter. They were finally arrested and faced conviction for breaking both provincial and federal wildlife laws. For these three, the consequences will live with them for a long time to come but of course, they were stupid enough to post the video in the first place so they have only themselves to blame.

As for the rest of us who prefer not to look like idiots for all to see, we will continue to find videos of children falling down or cats tumbling into toilets on YouTube. If you’re bored and you like that kind of thing, there will always be something to amuse you. A word of caution: if you’re at a party and you find someone holding up a video camera or cell phone at you, common sense would dictate that you drop like a fly and play dead. With any luck they will probably walk away. Stay still for a very long time just to be sure.

Loving and Hating Wikipedia

2009-08-16T09:24:00.003-04:00

Wikipedia was founded in 2000 to be a free online encyclopedia in which anyone could contribute information. When interviewed on CBS founder, Jimmy Wales commented, “I mean, writing an encyclopedia as a hobby is obviously a fairly geeky thing to do. The real core thing that people believe in is free knowledge. So people can copy or modify it, redistribute it."

His belief that knowledge should be freely distributed has grown like a weed and the search engine Google has helped. If you don’t believe me, try it yourself. Search anything from rain to corn to Barak Obama on Google. The Wikipedia article on that subject will come up near the top of your list. To prove this to myself, I just typed the word Obama into Google and the Wikipedia article on Obama was third to the top.

No wonder elementary and high school students love Wikipedia. Who needs to go to a multi-volume encyclopedia and struggle with the alphabet when in two clicks of your mouse, you can have the information that you need for that pesky school project? Is this such a bad thing?

No…and yes. Wikipedia is great when it’s right and it usually is. According to one study done by the journal Nature in 2005, Wikipedia was only slightly less accurate than the Encyclopedia Britannica. It averaged about 3.86 errors as opposed to Britannica’s 2.92. (Britannica did argue that the study was flawed.)
For looking up a quick fact, Wikipedia is great. When you want to know who the youngest president of the United States was or which album I Want to Hold Your Hand was on, Wikipedia is a fast way to get these answers. For more intricate search questions, the quality of writing can get in the way of comprehension. One teacher that I met at a conference expressed the opinion that the writing on Wikipedia is often over most students’ heads.

The problem with Wikipedia is that there is very little editing or proofreading. When I looked up the singer, Rickie Lee Jones on Wikipedia, I found an extremely poorly written article rife with grammatical errors and typos. As for fact checking, it’s a catch-as-catch-can situation. Other Wikipedia writers can correct each other’s articles.

This open editing can lead to vandalism. In one famous case, comedian Stephen Colbert changed an article in the course of his show and said that, “…any user can change any entry. And if enough other users agree with them, it becomes true." In another case, former Kennedy advisor, John Seigenthaler, Sr. was accused of being involved in Kennedy’s assassination. This was quickly corrected but other articles continue to be attacked. Birth and death dates have also been found to be incorrect.

Young people are often tempted to plagiarize text from Wikipedia into their essays as it’s so easy to copy text from Wikipedia and paste it into a Word document within seconds however the vocabulary almost always gives them away.

My verdict on Wikipedia is that it’s a great source of information but you should always look further. Other web sites can be far more reliable than Wikipedia and can be used to back up what Wikipedia has to say. If you’re a parent arguing with your child about using Wikipedia for a school project, just let your child know that a teacher will be far more impressed if they use a book (remember books?) as a source too. Books that are targeted toward a child’s age group will also be easier for them to understand.

Like it or not, Wikipedia is here to stay and as with anything else on the Internet, using it right will save time and may just help you win that argument that John F. Kennedy was the youngest president elected to office. Now go find out who the youngest president actually was.

Heard it through the Grapevine…or Facebook

2009-07-25T19:49:00.002-04:00

I can’t believe Michael Jackson is dead.
Michael Jackson is dead?

This snippet of dialogue did not take place in a face to face conversation. It passed over the course of a few hours on the social networking site, Facebook. Millions of people all over the world are using free web sites like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and many others to communicate with their friends, family and with people that they may have never met. Through Facebook, I have tracked down and been tracked down by people that I knew in elementary school and high school and have renewed these friendships. Whereas Facebook used to be the exclusive domain of high school and university students, we middle aged types have invaded and we like it. Many writers say that the young will just move on to other social networking sites but one of my uses for Facebook is to stay in touch with former students and it’s working well for that.

Interestingly enough, social networking sites are now becoming a means of obtaining news and commentary and a means of mobilizing social action. In a short article on a blog for newspaper editors, Ellyn Angelotti pointed out “…that it is more likely that people would look at what their friends and social network would suggest, as opposed to editors.” I found a poignant example of that this week in relation to the way that I found out about the need to boil tap water in Lennoxville. I happened to check my work email address and found an email advising all employees that the water supply was contaminated with bacteria and that it would be necessary to boil our cooking and drinking water.

When I went on my Facebook page, I found a lively discussion going on by a few of my Lennoxville acquaintances in my newsfeed. In the case of the Lennoxville water situation, 5-7 people commented on how Lennoxville might have communicated the water situation more effectively. One person gave a brief summary of her visit to the borough office to express her concerns. In turn, others commented on this.

This is a local example of how Facebook is used the world over for discussion on the bigger issues. There are citizens’ groups, fan clubs, student organizations, etc. on Facebook who can also issue invitations to events to its members who can in turn simply click on yes-or-no buttons to indicate whether or not they will participate in these events.

While this looks very democratic, some countries - for example, Russia and China - are expressing concern at the way the Internet might be used to convey anti-government messages. There are many reports of citizens being arrested for email messages and postings that are perceived to be out of line. While no such threat appears to be apparent in Canada or the United States, North American critics of social networking sites have grave concerns about issues of privacy. Users of Facebook are no strangers to these discussions as the controversy of ownership of photos and text showed some months back.

With the advent of censorship and DDO attacks on web sites, both governments and independent groups with an axe to grind are finding ways to circumvent the democratic possibilities of the Internet. An interesting article on Internet and power in the magazine, Dissent, gave examples of government sponsorship of DDO’s in China and Russia which were able to crash web sites and private parties have been able to crash web sites published by gay organizations as well. We need to watch this situation very carefully and how North American governments will look to control the Internet.

Sites such as Facebook hold a lot of promise to help people stay in touch with another, particularly for people who are shut in due to physical disability. As baby boomers get older, Facebook will help us be in touch with the world and each other and if history is any example, we will not be silent.

Changing the blog template: Learn and Learn fast

2009-07-08T08:18:00.004-04:00

Thanks to Sadie the Foodie,blogger extraordinaire and a former student of mine, I succeeded in finding a new template for this blog and then installing it.

This leads me to believe that messing around with technology is much like the old days of teenagers hanging out together with guitars in the 60s and 70s. You hear a wacky chord you like or discover that someone else knows how to play an approximation of Black Bird and then in today's parlance, you "copy and paste."

This kind of free association and learning is what the Internet is all about. People have a question, people Google the question and if people are the slightest bit discerning, they will find the answer from a reliable source.

I'm excited by this kind of learning. The sort that gives you the quick answer to the question and gets you running in the right direction. How much of this kind of learning is deep learning is another story. When we read news on the Internet, when we satisfy our curiosity about what's going on in the world, how much critical analysis do we actually get?

I'm not saying that it's not out there. There are many more pundits (far more learned than I am) who do provide a myriad of opinions and analyses as to what is going on in the world today on numerous websites. Do we read them? Do we take the time to go further than the one minute YouTube sound bite? Why should we when the sound bite is so much easier to digest than a 3 screen New York Times editorial?

Just today, I mentioned to my husband that I saw a headline that hog workers in Saskatchewan were coming down with a new flu virus. He was on his laptop too so while I meandered off to see who had written what on Facebook, he actually checked out the article that I referred to. This is what the first two paragraphs had to say in the article on the CBC website:

"Two workers in Saskatchewan's hog farm industry have tested positive for what health officials are calling a "novel" strain of flu virus and have fully recovered, government officials reported Tuesday.

Dr. Moira McKinnon, the province's chief medical health officer, stressed that the virus identified was "non-pandemic," adding that the two workers did not contract the H1N1 swine flu virus currently in the news."

Now if I had not bothered to read any further, I might go around spreading a nice fat juicy story that the H1N1 virus is mutating into a new form and just sharing the fear that goes with it like the gossipy Typhoid Mary that I am. Back in the 70s, without the communications technology that we have now, it was pretty easy to spread the rumour that Paul McCartney was dead. Imagine the havoc that we can wreak with the Internet.

The Internet can be used very successfully for finding out quick fix answers to why your iPod is frozen and how to find a lovely new format for that blog that you’ve been keeping but I am less confident in its ability to help us find a solution to the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine and what is the real answer to life, the universe and everything. Learning is more than finding out quick solutions to today’s snags. The Internet can certainly help us to communicate with others, to share serious information; we just have to be willing to take the time to do just that.

There's No Place Like the Home Page

2009-07-01T14:42:00.004-04:00

I've recently been asked by the Sherbrooke Record to continue my columns but slanted toward older, novice users of technology. Here's my first column.

Welcome to a new and slanted toward technology version of the original Somebody’s Mother column. As a middle aged Mom type who loves gadgets, computers, the Internet, cell phones and all kinds of electronic toys, I hope to introduce you to some of the ways that technology can keep you informed, keep you connected, and yes, keep you entertained.

Since there’s no place like home, I thought it might be best to kick this series of columns off with the home page, that place that your computer goes to when you click into the Internet and get ready to dive into the cyber-universe. Many different websites will compete to get you to pick their site to be your home page. This only makes sense as the web page developers sell advertising space and they want you to get their message. While much of the Internet may be accessed free of charge (it reminds me of the old days of getting TV stations for free with bunny-eared antennas), advertising is what makes the Internet go and websites like Google, Yahoo, Facebook and My Space want you to click on their site as opposed to anybody else’s.

You can use a home page for a variety of purposes. Many people have a plain old Google search page as their home page but a home page can do a lot more for you than give you access to the world’s most popular search engine. You can get the latest news headlines, your horoscope, local weather, entertainment news, currency exchange rates, your favourite comic strip and so much more. If you have stocks and can figure out what your stock symbols are, you can have updates as soon as you turn your computer on. You can have the weather of all the cities that your family members and friends live in. As Canadians, we like to know about weather.

Putting a home page together is very easy and one of my favourite ways of procrastinating more important tasks is picking a new theme or background for my home page. Years ago, I chose Yahoo as my home page because it offered all the goodies that I just mentioned plus the possibility of picking seasonal themes. Google now offers the same possibilities at iGoogle.com. In fact with iGoogle, if you’re the kind of person who likes variety, you can have a different theme every day. There are people out there who apparently have more time for procrastinating than I do and they upload their latest designs. iGoogle allows you to pick Theme of the Day so that with little effort on your part, you get a snazzy page that someone has worked hard to produce. Once you’ve picked your content, there’s options for creating a colour scheme or if you’re an avid sports fan, you can even pick your favourite team’s colours. My own Yahoo home page sports a yellow and blue beach scene with colourful sailboats.

If you can click a box to check it off, you can make your own home page with the content that interests you. Have a look at both iGoogle and Yahoo and see which you like better. Very cleverly, iGoogle has its most popular content in a big blue box at the top of the page with boxes for you to check off. You can pick which city you want to get your weather for, and yes, Sherbrooke is one of them. If you would like to try Yahoo, you can simple Google…or Yahoo My Yahoo and if you click on “I’m New Here”, it will guide you in setting up the page.

One of the advantages of the computer and the Internet is that there are many options for setting things up in the way that it is most convenient and pleasant for you so don’t be shy. Finally, once you’ve done all the work to set up your page the way you want to, go into your browser’s menu (whether it is Explorer, Firefox or the Mac Safari) and set your new page as your home page. The easiest way to do this is to go to the Help menu and search Home Page in the help menu index. It should give you easy step by step instructions on how to make the current page that you’re working on your home page. Good luck and have fun.

When you’re living in the past, who needs the CBC?

2009-03-29T16:07:00.001-04:00

Sometimes I want to hide out from bad news and what better place to hide out from bad news than a wormhole or a jail or that place in The Chronicles of Narnia where nothing ever happens – you just use it to jump from one world to another. I like these in-between places where nothing ever happens. That’s the vacation for me!

Television and movies have served that purpose very nicely for me over the last few weeks. This means that when the previews for the news comes on, I stick my fingers in my ears and do my best version of that old favourite, “La-la-la, not listening.” That song is becoming as popular as Happy Birthday to You. And why not? Who wants to hear any news anymore – it’s all bad. My ninety year old Dad has told me not to worry about things that I can’t control. He’s been telling me that since I was sixteen. I’m beginning to suspect why the sum of my parents’ life was having children, going to work every day, and coming home to an evening of watching TV. The real world was too scary.

Nowadays, avoidance of reality is very easy and very legal. For example, if you turn on Canada’s Comedy Channel, you see reruns of Montreal’s Comedy Festival Galas from a decade ago. The comics are all cracking jokes about history instead of current events. I find this very reassuring. Turn on the Déjà Vu Channel and it’s the Seventies and Eighties all over again: All In The Family, Who’s The Boss? Archie Bunker and Meathead and Gloria are fighting the same battles forty years later and they’re all still alive. How good is that?

My own particular favourite is The Space Channel because it’s all about lands and peoples who don’t exist at all. If I think that I’ve got it bad, all I have to do is watch Star Trek - Deep Space Nine as Captain Sisko struggles to deal with The Dominion and the evil Founders, a people made of liquid who can change into any solid shape at will. The Founders created a race of unbeatable soldiers the Jem Hadar and they are beating the pants off the nice Federation of Planets who really just want everybody to get along. Good guys die by the dozens but Sisko struggles on in this fictitious universe that knows the meaning of epic good versus bad battles yet is kind of challenged when it comes to acting…but I don’t care. It’s all pretend.

Meanwhile, like a good citizen of the world, I signed a petition to save jobs at the CBC. In spite of the fact that the CBC now broadcasts Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune everyday (as if nobody else does), this is one of the few broadcasters that even bothers with a local Montreal English language broadcast every evening. CTV seems to be hanging in there but ALL of them bailed when it came to morning new shows. Global, CBC and CTV just figure that there aren’t enough English people in Quebec who care to get news in the morning on TV. CBC is all about what’s going on now and though that’s hard to take, somebody has to be reporting the stuff.

The CBC was set up as a national television and radio network to inform people about local, national and international news. The problem is that when bad times roll around, people wonder if this is worth the cost. Shouldn’t private companies be taking on the job of media? Where do we look for a model – of course, our neighbours to the south, Yes, indeed. Fox News is the pinnacle of fair, objective broadcasting and shows exactly how good an idea it is to leave news reporting to businessmen. (No, I’m not at work, so I can be as sarcastic as I damn well please!)

If you want to spend an entire life hiding out in a mythical wormhole, then the future of the CBC may not mean much to you but for the rest of Canada who needs to know what’s going on, who cares to know what’s going on, dollars must be found for the CBC to continue to be a strong voice in Canadian media.

Meanwhile can Ellen find sanity outside the wormhole? Tune in tomorrow.

A Plea to Bosses Everywhere – Walk Away From the Dark Side

2009-03-20T18:33:00.000-04:00

I’m lucky to have sympathetic friends. There is no question that they can offer comfort when I’m feeling confused, stressed and beating myself up with a big psychic baseball bat. Yet they often have the intelligence to say unexpected comments that ring out with pure unadulterated truth.

A friend of mine who had been an administrator in a company and who retired a few years ago said to me, “What makes you think that the people who make decisions are actually qualified to make decisions?” It was the last thing that I expected him to say. I expected him to defend administrators to the bitter end but no, he had experience with people further up the line than him who were continually making bad decisions so he finally retired and walked away.

I am continually amazed by the low quality of decision-making that I see by people who are supposed to be in a position to know better. They will undercut the exact goals that they wish to achieve by going out of their way to make these bad decisions and then to make matters worse, they will go even further out of their way to make the people who work for them feel crappy.

If you have a group of intelligent people who are willing to collaborate to get the best for everybody and the most productive and profitable work environment for everyone involved, doesn’t it make sense to solve problems together rather than using the old school ideas of “We know best and you are idiots. Do what we say and stop whining!” Hundreds of years go by and we still work with outdated confrontational models of solving problems in the work place - the model where the boss has to be the smart, all-knowing monarch and everybody else has to be stupid because they haven’t achieved boss-status. Not only does the boss have the monopoly over the purse strings, he has the monopoly over information and he can use that monopoly to keep his workers “in their place.” And in their place, they must stay.

As one friend says, it doesn’t take long for people to go over to “the dark side” once they are promoted to administrator. They feel that they have achieved this through working harder and being smarter than everybody else. Soon they treat others badly because it is fairly obvious that their underlings just aren’t working as hard as they should be and they aren’t smart enough to realize it.

In many fields, people have to take Human Resources and Administration courses so that they have some theoretical knowledge about how to manage others properly. Yet, all too often, the people who are promoted to management positions have never had this kind of training and soon become bullies who push people around because they can. What they usually don’t see is that the very methods that they are using (and I realize that I’m repeating myself here) are achieving the exact opposite effect of what they had originally intended. Both morale and productivity suffer.

These are hard times for most of us. Our investments are dwindling. Retirement is getting closer and our money is fading away with each monthly RRSP statement. Is it too much to ask our so-called superiors to drop the superior attitude and realize that the bottom line can be affected, perhaps even improved in many ways? People need to be treated with respect and dignity in times like these. They don’t need to feel as if they’ve been raped after a meeting with management because if they do, a whole organization can suffer and I fear that as time goes on, more organizations will. As times get tough, courtesy and common sense are becoming increasingly uncommon.

Uncertainty, Stress and the Writer’s Block Wall

2009-03-09T20:14:00.001-04:00

Uncertainty breeds stress and stress breeds a general state of crappiness that is a taxi to a very unhappy place, the writer’s block wall. I haven’t felt moved to write for about ten days because of uncertainty and stress and I am trying to figure out a way to un-strand myself from this wall that I’ve been hanging out beside ever since…ever since…well, ever since I surrendered to uncertainty and stress with a white flag waving in one hand and the other tied behind my back while I was screaming “Uncle,” to uncertainty and stress.

The writer’s block wall is a very ugly place to be stuck at. It’s a wall that is immeasurably tall and wide. It’s made out of stone the size of boulders that have been carved into ugly rectangles. The stones are painted black and in between them is some sort of grout that is a particularly nauseous shade of neon green. It’s dark by the wall except for the occasional spot light that picks you out of the crowd which consists of the rest of the losers hanging out by the wall. When the light goes up on you, you’ll be greeted by raucous canned laughter that comes from everywhere and nowhere. You just want somebody else, anybody else, to be the target of this derisive mirth from an audience of what might just be successful writers who are published every couple of minutes in hundreds of different languages and who receive endless amounts of praise and royalty cheques.

This is no place for the weak but it is the place where all the weaklings wind up. The worst part is knowing what exists behind the wall, ideas - ideas of every size, shape and every colour of the rainbow. They hide behind the wall giggling and whispering. You can hear them very faintly; that’s why you know that they’re there but you just can’t get to them. If only you could climb the wall or find the place where the wall ends, your writer’s block would be gone and your confidence would return.

It’s writing about the wall that helps me. Whichever devils and demons have created the wall – these little pointy headed meanies get very pissed off when I sidestep the depressing effects of the wall by describing the wall itself as well as the sad sacks like me who wind up by the wall. The men always seem to have stubble on their faces and wear bad trench coats and their cigarettes are almost always on the verge of going out. The women are dressed much as I usually dress: men’s red checkered shirts or sweaters with years of pilling and fuzz and of course, the badly fitting jeans bought at some discount store.

If I should dare pick out one man and one woman and write a story about their meeting by the wall and how they fell in love, stopped writing and found their way in life so that they never had to return to the wall, if I tell that story, all the writer’s block demons howl in pain. They try to tell me that’s it’s crap and that everything that I have or will ever write is crap but what can they do? There’s the story and it’s just agonizingly painful to the vindictive writer’s block bastard-demons that I could find a way to circumvent the wall and them and make my way over to the ideas that dwell behind the wall.

Once you have an idea, the wall just fades and the only thing that exists for the hour or the day is the idea. Then it’s farewell uncertainty and farewell stress and shut the hell up, you stupid demons because for just a few minutes, all the distant people who’ve made my life stressful just disappear and so do you.

It’s quiet here right now. No one is demanding my attention. Uncertainty is in the back of my head and it worries me but only as the sound of a fly buzzing on the other side of the house can worry me. It may come closer. It may turn out to be a hornet that can sting me but for now, for a few moments, I can ignore it and choose to deal with the hornet when it comes to sting me. That may be the moment I pick up the swatter and smack it right down.

You demons can look pretty nasty by the wall when the light hits you a certain way but at other times, you look as ridiculous as you try to make me out to be. I may be less than five foot three but I’m bigger than you and for this moment when I’m dealing with you, you look a whole lot more uncertain and stressed than I do. Now say Uncle, you little bugger and say it louder.

“You Just Might Have To Hardnose The Highway”

2009-02-22T16:51:00.002-05:00

On the way to the shopping centre today, I put on Van Morrison’s album, Hardnose the Highway on the car stereo. As the chorus came in on Snow in San Anselmo, I was instantly transported back to our living room in Lachine in the 1970’s. You were in it as soon as you opened the door. Five steps later, you’d be in our kitchen with the oil furnace to your left and the stairs going up to the bedroom and bathroom. On cold days, I’d have my coat off and I would practically hug the furnace with my dog, Shy-Ann, at my heels and three other cats meowing for food or an open door to get back out of the house.

Hardnose the Highway brings back my university days when Richard worked at the furniture factory next door and I would take the 191 and 78 buses to McGill, working on my B.A. in Sociology. On warm days, we would drink our coffee on our front steps and feud with the new neighbour across the street who had the audacity to cut down all the beautiful lilac trees that old Mrs. Murray kept by the white picket fence.

Our original neighbour, Mrs. Murray, was the quintessential sweet little old lady who had a romantic and old fashioned garden in her backyard and who fed every cat in the neighbourhood, including ours. We could barely keep them home. Her yard was like a scene from a 1940s movie. Mrs. Murray sold the place and our new neighbour was an extremely obese woman with a very ugly and perpetually barking Chihuahua. Her sons tore down the lilac trees and parked their cars which were the size of great whacking boats on the lawn. Along with her excessive weight, this woman distinguished herself by yelling out in the whiniest of tones “Taber-n-a-a-a-c!” at all times of day or night. It didn’t take long for us to imitate her.

Needless to say, she and her family had done everything possible to make us detest them but we kept our distance. It was a small dead end street and life could be made much worse by fighting with the people who live right across from you. Dogs and cats, however, have very different ideas when it comes to neighbourly relations. The animal kingdom knows nothing about mutual tolerance. The first conflict arose when our street-wise cat, Peg-Leg was hanging out on a summer day…and now the story is put on hold as I give you a description of the inimitable Peg-Leg.

Peg-Leg moved in with Richard as a kitten and it was weeks before I met the two of them. He had one paw in which he couldn’t control his claws. When he walked on carpet, you would hear pad-pad-pad-rip and that rip would be poor Peg-Leg pulling his claws out of the threads of the carpet. He had been in innumerable cat fights so that his face was a mass of scars and his ears were completely chewed up. He was very affectionate with people and I have seen quite a few of my friends taken aback when this massively ugly black cat jumped in his or her lap and began to purr loudly with much mucous resonating in his nose. Repulsion was the most usual reaction. Richard and I adored that cat and though we have had many wonderful cats over the last twenty-five years, Peg-Leg was a standout for his heroic personality.

So back to that summer day in what might be 1975 or ’76. Peg-Leg strayed out into the middle of the street with a kind of lazy I-own-the-street swagger. All of a sudden the neighbour’s Chihuahua zipped out of their yard after Peg-Leg. That’s when our dog Shy-Ann sprang into action. Shy-Ann was a small German Shepherd mix and towered over the little mongrel. She grabbed the Chihuahua by the neck and began to shake him left and right so that the Chihuahua was swinging in the air. She shook him like a dirty wet rag. Peg-Leg escaped unharmed.

The usual “Taber-na-a-ac” rang out from her neighbour with a torrent of curses and threats to call the police. Richard quickly broke up the dog fight but our gargantuan neighbour continued to abuse him. Well! We gave back as good as she did and we threatened to call the police because her dog attacked our cat. Anybody who was around was out on the street watching the show. It was like being back in New York City!!

Finally, both sides retreated to their respective porches with their respective pets none the worse for wear. The stony silence remained and within another year, we packed up and went off to Europe and one of our friends bought the house that we rented and the adjoining one too, turning it into a sprawling home.

It takes only a few lines of Van Morrison’s Snow in San Anselmo to make me think of those days when we were in our twenties and our life seemed to be stretching out before us. Some people say that scent revives memory. Agatha Christie used that device in her mysteries all the time but for me, it’s music. Play a certain album and the movie replays in my mind. It’s a blessing and unfortunately, it’s a curse too.

Facebook Nation Says Give Us Back Our Stuff!

2009-02-21T08:32:00.002-05:00

Boys and Girls: We've just discovered that Facebook Nation is the sixth largest country in the world, 175 million strong. Yes, there are 175 million of us who have nothing better to do than upload gossip, photos, and play with ridiculously silly applications that give mysterious companies around the world all the personal data that we put up on Facebook. Think of it - 175 million people with nothing better to do. No wonder we are in a serious recession; we’re all playing on freaking Facebook!

Yet along comes the news that Facebook has changed something that we pay no attention to (my media source said “quietly changed” which makes Facebook sound ve-e-ry sneaky) Facebook changed its user policy so that we don’t have exclusive rights to the text, photos and other miscellanea that we put on Facebook. Kaboom! Big to-do! The response was apparently furious enough to make Facebook have a re-think and to inspire the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) to prepare a federal complaint against Facebook:

“It appears that the major thrust of EPIC's--and many others' anger--at Facebook stems from new language in the privacy policy that grants the company seemingly perpetual control over content users post there:

You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings....” (Webware, http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10166290-2.html?tag=mncol;txt February 17, 2009)

Here I am, blissfully blogging away as the attention-seeking little writer that I am, completely ignorant of the fact that Facebook could have all legal rights to what I write simply because I upload my Somebody’s Mother rants on Facebook. That is just not kosher!

A few years back, Billy Bragg (British folksinger, author and political activist) launched a similar onslaught against MySpace. Young musicians often put their work on MySpace so that people can see and listen to them. It’s a great way for Indie Rock to spread the word about new artists. The problem was, of course, that with such a policy, young composers would lose the rights to their music. Who in their right mind would put their music on MySpace knowing that?

MySpace retracted this policy and I haven’t heard much about it since. Facebook has done much the same thing. Apparently tens of thousands of Facebook users went on the Facebook blog and protested the changes in the terms of service, urging Facebook to go back to its old policy. Most of you Facebook-ers must have seen the notice the other day at the top of the screen that Facebook has done just that, gone back to its old policy but the post did say that they will be examining the Terms of Service and that changes will be coming up again.

I think that this is a big wake-up call to all of us about being careful on the Internet. Personally, I believe in the strength and anonymity of numbers. Why the hell Facebook needs my texts and photos is beyond me. Yet for others, I could see big problems. If Facebook sites can be used as legal evidence in a criminal case, you have no recourse. They own it, the government asks for it and Facebook will happily hand it over, pure and simple.

If someday, I want to write a book of all my Somebody’s Mother columns and blogs, is Facebook going to get the profits? Maybe it isn’t me who will from suffer this ambiguity about ownership. Maybe it will be a far more talented writer than me.

The Internet has been around for awhile but it’s apparent that it’s still frontier territory when it comes to who owns what. We’ve all been leery of having the Internet legislated into a bland approximation of what television is. So meanwhile, it’s back to the old “Buyer, Beware.”

Facebook is free for now but if there’s a way to make more money off our backs, you can be sure that Facebook will be on it like bears on honey. It’s up to us to keep from getting stung.

You sure that web cam is off?

2009-02-12T18:32:00.002-05:00

Another week has gone by and as I write this, there is a web cam staring at me. I can only assume that it springs to life when I tell it to...as in when I fire up my newly downloaded Skype to talk with a friend or relative down the road in Montreal or across the Atlantic, in England or Italy. It's pretty nifty but I get the impression that it might all be a plot and the little gadget is secretly broadcasting me typing away with furrowed brow and tongue in cheek. It’s not a pretty picture and that will only get uglier if I decide some summer evening to type up my musings in my underwear. No, no, I’ll have to unplug the thing just to be on the safe side.

Any of my ex-sociology students will vaguely remember me teaching them the term, “Future Shock” that Alvin Toffler coined years ago. Now it’s the Baby Boomers who have become the techno-idiots and feel so very futuristic as we make video calls on Skype and feel like it’s straight out of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Oh, man, I was supposed to be living on a moon colony by now. What the hell happened to the future? It’s so mundane.

One of my biggest shocks is this lack of privacy that we’re getting so very cavalier about. I’ve had discussions with teachers in both the public and private systems who are very gung-ho towards the computer software that allow a teacher to go into any kid’s computer and see whether he or she is on task or bouncing around the netherworlds of the Internet. What’s more interesting: typing up that English poem or exploring the cyber-underbelly of humanity? Maybe I’m overdramatizing, more likely little Suzie is getting the latest gossip about who’s going out with that GUY. Shouldn’t the teacher be able to zoom into Suzie’s computer with a warning, GET OFF MSN AND GET BACK TO WORK!!

After all, Suzie should be prepared for the computerized workplace where there is no privacy and the administration could swoop down on her at the first sign of inattention. Suzie should be prepared for street corners where TV cameras check for crime, terrorists and anyone who might jaywalk or drop a gum wrapper. In the interests of civil order, Suzie should be prepared to give up a modicum of civil liberties for everyone’s safety.

I don’t know about you but if Suzie was my daughter, this would not be the kind of education that I would want her to have nor is it the kind of world that I want her to inherit. Suzie should have a strong sense of her own personal space and the right to her own world and that includes her computer. If Suzie doesn’t get her poem done, then she should suffer any and all of the consequences that not doing her work brings. Flunk her, keep her in after school…better yet, watch the kids’ faces as they work; you can usually tell who’s working and who’s not. The smiles give it away.

What I don’t want is a paranoid 1984 world that seems to be coming up on us, thick and fast. If Facebook says that they can ensure my privacy to a reasonable degree through their security systems and options for setting up Friends then I want them to do that. By the same token, it’s my responsibility and Suzie’s responsibility to be aware that the Internet is public space and that stupid pictures and stupid comments have a way of finding themselves in the hands of the people that we least want to have them.

As I write, I’m very careful about what I say. If I want total freedom to write, I can write on my own computer or in the security of my writing group who understand very well that the narrator isn’t always me; often it’s a fictional personality.

If we want our civil liberties, we have to use them responsibly but more importantly, we have to defend them. If we forfeit these liberties in our schools, I think that it’s a hop, skip and a jump to adapting to a lack of privacy that will make us more likely to give up these rights in later life. It really isn’t worth it and it worries me that others don’t see it. We’ve come a long way in how we cherish civil liberties. It’s a shame to think that as technology grows more sophisticated, it threatens these liberties that people have fought to preserve.

25 things or how Facebook brings out my wishy washy tendencies

2009-02-07T11:28:00.004-05:00

Rose tagged me and those tagged must follow these instructions: post 25 things about you, then tag 25 more people. Yes, you too can make a nuisance of yourself to 25 people so get tagging. Here’s all the stuff you never need to know about me.

1. I never knew do chain letters. My husband is disgusted with me.

2. Cranberry is my favourite colour; it’s a step up from pink…but I love wearing black.

3. Growing up, I always wanted to have dogs and cats but Stuyvesant Town (a development in Manhattan) wouldn’t let us. Now I have too many dogs and cats.

4. Good coffee, good wine and good beer are essential to my well-being. I refuse to joke about these things.

5. I love my husband and children so much that it makes me look stupid.

6. I worry.

7. I talk a lot in a New York accent tempered with many years in Canada and my hair is not as curly as it was once. People define me by these things. I’m used to it.

8. If I could, I would travel much more than I do and if I could, I would choose Baldwin’s Mills to be my home base. But if I were filthy stinking rich, I would have condos in Montreal, NYC and Venice.

9. I miss playing guitar and singing. I almost got good at both.

10. I love watching my plays performed. I love seeing my writing in print. I love these things almost as much as I love my family.

11. I still can’t understand why people treat each other so badly and why the world’s resources can’t be shared more equitably. I seriously don’t get it.

12. I never should have read 1984; rodents scare the hell out of me.

13. Star Trek is an escape, books are an escape. I really like going somewhere else cheaply. Picard was the best captain and I don’t care what anyone says.

14. I have a love/hate relationship with New York City. I wish I had a British accent.

15. I have a love hate relationship with t.v; it makes me happy but keeps me from writing.

16. I love my friends - they put up with me.

17. I have no fashion sense whatsoever and I hate make-over shows. Kill the fashion fascists!

18. Certain people have been ejected from my universe and they don’t know who they are.

19. I believe all commercials. Commercials have happy endings. Why isn’t life like commercials?

20. I hate the cold. I wanted to marry a Floridian. I didn’t. Now I wear snow pants for 5 minute drives to work.

21. I love taking pictures and looking at photos. I would love to take serious photography and printing courses.

22. Sometimes I listen to music that my husband and children don’t like…I live with
music-Nazis.

23. I love my little library and I love teaching sociology to teenagers. This continually surprises me.

24. I’m not as funny as I’d like to be - I wish this list was funnier.

25. An employer or work colleague may see this list so I can’t say what should have been 24 and 25. Oh yeah, also, I’m inconsistent. Please see point #1.

Thursday's Child is Sunday's Clown

2009-02-05T09:02:00.003-05:00

Nico lives
There are actually goldfinches at my feeder this morning, very exciting. No, it’s not the same as walking around Times Square in a crowd of tourists shepherding 12 excited kids to Broadway shows. Still, as I contemplate a mountain of snow and four days off work ahead of me, I’m glad of the break, even mildly excited for a break. I loved the atmosphere yesterday. Everybody was walking around with a slightly wider grin and a bit of spring in their steps because at 12:30, the buses would be leaving and freedom was beckoning.

It’s confession time on the ranch and I’m going to share a rather silly secret with you: years ago, I stopped going to see Broadway shows because they made me feel like such a failure. I wasn’t one of the brightest lights at the High School of Performing Arts and seeing shows simply reminded me that I wasn’t in the shows. Sour grapes are very bad for the soul.

Luckily, this trip was redemptive and a liberation from all that nonsense. I love writing plays, I love participating in school and community theatre and I just love theatre in general. If anything this trip renewed my passion for theatre. How can you not be excited and re-energized by theatre where skill, imagination, and budget seem limitless?

This might be the part of the silly confession where I swoon about the sets, the lighting, the technical wizardry, voices, dance and acting. Trust me - they were ‘way beyond what I remember from the Broadway shows that I saw as a teenager. I was mesmerized for two hours. Now I understand why Vaudeville and Burlesque were so important in the Thirties. During my time in the theatre, I almost forgot who I was. All my problems were gone. Watching Equus, I was drawn into Dysart’s struggle to make his way through the complexity of Alan Strang’s personality and Dysart’s own personality. The horses’ movements were literally chilling. Billy Elliott flattened me to my seat. The music and dance, the lyrics, the sets flying out of the ground were just breathtaking.

When both shows were over, I wanted them to start all over again. I wanted to catch things that I might have missed. (Believe me, if orchestra seats weren’t over $120.00 a pop, I’d be back in a flash to do just that.) This is really what theatre should be about; it’s an opportunity to be in the same space with living people who re-enact a play, almost a religious ritual that gives the audience a transcendent experience.

I’m so glad that I have a break now to rest up from all yesterday’s parties because that’s what the trip was to me. Two plays that reminded me what big theatre is all about, seeing my family (my dad looked great), and walking by the building that used to be the High School of Performing Arts. They seem to be renovating the outside now but they can’t get rid of the ghosts.

Those ghosts haunt me less now. I have a less silly confession, kind of a happy one. Things went better than they should have. I found other stages to play on and though they weren’t on Broadway, they suited me better and they gave me joy. This is when I knock on wood (I just did) and move on to find those other stages that I can take up space on so that I don’t “cry behind the door.” I have to keep reminding myself in the next weeks and months that closed doors usually open windows and when you scrape through those windows, there’s the hope of finding yourself in an even better place.

Somebody's Mother on Obama Watch

2009-01-25T12:59:00.002-05:00

I went a little crazy with Obama Watch this week. President signs an executive order to close Guantanamo Bay in a year. I cheer. News reports that a released prisoner is now second in command for Al Qaida in Yemen. I say it figures that something like that would be reported immediately. Perhaps this is a Fox News plot but no, Al Jeezera confirms the report. Ellen shrugs – human rights first and all that. She fishes around seriously for excuses.

Day Two – President signs an executive order reversing Bush’s order that bans funding to any international group providing abortions or information on obtaining an abortion. I cheer again. Stem cell research? Yup, Obama is on that too. Bombing in Pakistan? Oy vey.

It’s been a long time since an American president has done things that have made me cheer. I’m frightened. Maybe I’m going soft. I’m making excuses to my skeptical husband for anything that the President does that seems out of my realm of good and evil. This is definitely worrisome – it’s two steps from there to my homeland, right or wrong. I have to get a grip on reality again.

Take Obama’s appointment of Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan. Here’s a man whose answer to problems in a school is to fire the principal, all the teachers and close the school. He’s a good buddy of the president’s; they’ve enjoyed quite a few games of pick-up basketball. Considering the social problems in the United States, it seems a bit iffy to use teacher-firing as a means for improving education when you have issues of poverty and family break-down in the United States that make it increasingly difficult for children to receive a decent education in the public system. Now add on the fact that classrooms are overcrowded and the fact that many take place in buildings that need serious renovation and you have a problem whose many facets are far beyond an individual teacher’s ability to solve. The Goldfinch jury is definitely out on this pick.

If Obama is seriously interested in educational reform (are you listening Stephen Harper?), here’s my recipe. Bring down class sizes and you’ll see a big change. This takes more than finding a few twenty-one year old college graduates, giving them a summer course and plopping them in some urban district in the hopes that they can teach kids with severe social and learning problems a thing or two before these grads with big ideals move on to their real careers. Teach For America is a program that seems to be designed to discourage people to be teachers. More teachers, more experienced teachers are needed in problem schools and some kind of financial bonus should make it worth their while to get into such schools and give it a try. You pay people what a job is really worth and there will be enough people to choose from to get the job done. It’s been a long time since teachers have been truly valued for their years of education and the stress factor in the jobs that they do and the complexity of what they try to achieve that often cannot be measured with test scores.

In the weeks to come and the year to come, I’m hoping to see the mess that Bush AND Clinton left us show a semblance of clean-up. Let’s not forget that the de-regulation of the banks started with the Clinton administration. Just as we’ve seen salmonella scares in the food industry for lack of food inspectors, the near-collapse of the credit system is a result of trusting the big guys too much to keep the wheels turning. It’s just crazy – as long as their wheels are greased, what the heck do they care about the rest of us? All eyes are on the President to figure this out. I wish him a lot of luck; he’ll need it. After all, it’s nice to have something to cheer about for a change. I hope he can keep it coming.

Greasy Roads, Summer Tires and Life Spins Out of Control

2009-01-18T22:26:00.000-05:00

Last week was a tough one: the six month anniversary of my mother’s death and the death of a colleague after a four month battle with ovarian cancer. I went to her funeral on Friday and felt such a strong sense of disbelief. Four months ago, she said to me, “I feel perfectly fine and I know that they’re going to make me sick.” She looked perfectly fine but as the months went by, the news got repeatedly worse and we were finally warned that the end was near.

I went into Montreal after the funeral and went out to supper with my closest friends and some members of my family. I ate a good and very large Indian supper, washed down with a pint of Newcastle Brown, my favourite beer. The dinner conversation was lively and it was a good evening. For the rest of the weekend, I cleaned house, baked and ate some delicious oatmeal raisin cookies, sat by the fire a lot and drank big cups of coffee and a few glasses of wine with supper - a quiet but comfortable weekend only broken up by the routine of the weekly house cleaning and food shopping. I had no major complaints.

Life is tremendously precious to me although I have not trekked down the route of fame and fortune that I originally thought that I was on. The bliss of middle age is looking back on a life with few regrets. This is always incomprehensible to young people - and there is a bad Cat Stevens song that you can use as background music for that thought - but please don’t. Things could have really gone a lot worse for me but I was fortunate to find help on the way and a few people set me straight.

My father used to say to me on many occasions that there are two kinds of problems: those that are out of our control and those that are man-made. My mother was afraid of dying and yet she faced her terminal illness with courage. Yes, she used denial much of the time to handle the fact that she was going to die but it worked for her. Who am I to knock a life-long tool that has stood me in good stead? Procrastination is just another form of denial and it works just as much as it gets me into trouble. Mom complained rarely and cracked lots of jokes till she couldn’t talk anymore.

Some of my close friends are going through a similar process, getting through the first year of an elderly parent’s death. You find that some problems have sadly ended while the newer and more mundane ones of dealing with what parents have left behind seems to go on and on. It is a source of constant worry for me at this point. At least two members of my family have severed their relationship with me and I with them; it’s too painful.

These are the man-made problems that Dad talked about. Something can be done about them. Grieving for a lost loved one and death are out of our hands. It’s a test of our characters that we can’t avoid and that we need a sack-full of aphorisms to get through. I carry that invisible bag across my shoulder, like Santa, like the laundry bag that my father used to haul to the car on the way to his laundry business.

You take it one day at a time or it takes a year to get over the death of a loved one or as Janis Joplin said, get it while you can. For me, getting it has become that glass of Chateau Lafitte Laujac 2004 or that pint of Newcastle or that smile across the breakfast table from the one I love.

Here’s another one. The late, great Frank Zappa got up in concert and said that the show was going to be about the fact that it’s fucking great to be alive “…and if there’s anybody here who doesn’t think that it’s fucking great to be alive, then I wish that you’d just leave now because this show will just bum you out.”

Wish you were here, Frank. It’s 2009, an African America is about to be president (the jury’s out on what he’ll do with it though), the world is sinking into some kind of Depression/Recession and in spite of it all, it’s still extremely fucking great to be alive.

Pedaling on the infernal guilt machine

2009-01-04T12:38:00.001-05:00

Exercise and music-these are my two New Year's resolutions. I'm not doing enough of either. For the sake of my mental health, I realized that I'd better get back into a habit of listening to music and playing music because we are entering the dark night of the soul, January, and if I don't doodle around on a guitar or turn my stereo up loud (my dog Molly will just have to go down to the basement of out on the back porch to wail at wind/string instruments), then I may go stark raving mad this winter.

Music is definitely the easy resolution. It makes me happy. Exercise does not make me happy and lack of exercise goes on to do something even worse to me - it churns up guilt. I have enough to feel guilty about. I don't send my children care packages. I don't do enough for my old dad in NY. A sibling and her brood think that I am one of the evildoers and I have students who hate me for assigning work to them and expecting them to do it. I feel guilty about my deeds that have had an impact on these people whether or not the guilt is warranted.

What the heck do I need another thing to feel guilty about? Ah, but you see, I did this to myself. Two years ago, I bought myself an elliptical trainer and I figured that since it cost me dearly, I would use it. I know that I can be a rather cheap little woman and wouldn't it be the height of waste buying an exercise machine and not using it? Most of you who chose to read this little tirade are probably shaking your heads with a knowing smile on your faces. Stop being so damn smug. You were right. You are still right.

I don’t use the machine and I’ve taken to calling it the guilt machine. It works so much better at exercising my guilt reflexes than it does at toning up my calf and thigh muscles and burning calories. Twenty-five minutes on that machine is so boring that it makes me want to scream for mercy. An iPod is no help - I’m bored to tears even with music. My latest idea is to stick a TV in front of it but you see that involves an outlay of more cash for a TV/DVD player and if I don’t use the machine and watch the TV, I will feel even guiltier about wasting money.

There is a solution: forget the exercise resolution and go forth to a newer, different me, a me who has resolved to banish guilt from her life. That is a resolution that is doomed to failure as I am guilt-ridden due to genetics, upbringing, cultural heritage and the present world situation. Anyone who lives as well as I do should feel guilty, right?

For twenty-five years, I’ve resolved to be more patient in the New Year and that never worked. Now I don’t need more patience; my kids have left home and I’ve got enough patience for what I do in life. Why be greedy? Why look for more? Maybe exercise should have a similar place in my life. I don’t need to run marathons and I’m not excessively overweight…no, I’m afraid it doesn’t work. When I get to old age and my legs fail from under me, I will be infuriated with myself for not getting enough exercise when I was young enough to do something about it. Then, I’ll feel guilty and it will be the same crap yet again: more guilt, more misery.

No, I will play music, I will listen to music and I will try to find some form of exercise that doesn’t bore me to tears…and when January gets too much for me, I’m going to drink a glass of very nice red wine in front of the fire. The Christmas lights outside may stay up till February too. Lights and wine and fire - that will be enough to stave off guilt for a few days anyway.

Montreal, the city that never...sweeps, shovels or cleans

2008-12-29T11:46:00.002-05:00

A New Year approaches and I can only celebrate my insignificance as a human being and even worse, a pedestrian, thanks to Montreal’s municipal government. Yes, Montreal was hit with a heavy snow storm as well as heavy rains that turned to ice. These are the blows that a sadistic or vengeful (depending on your point of view) Mother Nature sends our way during December. It makes us sad and weary but we expect it and soldier on.
What we do expect is that our roads and streets will be cleared as quickly as possibly and as much as possible. Unfortunately, this is an unreasonable expectation in some parts of Montreal, no, in most of the parts of Montreal that I saw in the last few days. The ice on the sidewalks was thick and uneven making slipping and sliding a certainty. While the streets were slushy, they were not icy. This forced pedestrians to compete with cars and forgive me for stating the obvious but cars definitely have an unfair advantage in the weight and speed departments.
This state of affairs would be bad enough but to rub salt in the lower class wounds, N.D.G’s sidewalks were impassable while upper class Westmount sidewalks were reasonably clear. When I went to get fresh bagels at the Fairmount Bagel Bakery, I found that the sidewalk on St. Urbain was not only clear but had small stones thrown down to make it safer.
I may not be in top condition but I was pretty scared of breaking a hip on those sidewalks and did a lot of hiding indoors during my stay in Montreal until cabin fever finally drove my loved ones and me downtown to see the Andy Warhol exhibit at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Outside the Museum, workers were cracking the ice with shovels and throwing salt down. If the city couldn’t get that together, it would have been nice if a few more building and home owners might have at least tried to get the square in front of their homes done as the Museum and our hosts did which made getting in and out of their home much less frightening. A little thought for others goes a long way.
If I was an elderly person who hadn’t stocked up on groceries and couldn’t have them delivered, I’d be pretty worried at this point because the sidewalks were barely fit for twenty year olds, let alone the elderly. I lived in Montreal and cannot remember seeing the sidewalks in such rotten condition for pedestrians.
Granted that cars need to have safe streets because car accidents can be more catastrophic than a few fallen pedestrians but this is no excuse for what Sherbrooke St. in N.D.G. looked like this week. I think that we deserved better and I hope that there are more complaints going out along with this one.
We live in a country where we can predict that weather like this will happen frequently and Montreal certainly needs to have a better strategy for dealing with snow and ice so that people can walk their streets without fear of breaking their necks.
Having said that, have a very happy and healthy New Year and above all, and I mean this, don’t break your neck.

An Open Letter to Santa from Somebody's Mother

2008-12-22T17:46:00.001-05:00

Dear Santa,
Well, another year has rolled around and I’ve got to admit it, Mr. Claus, this has been a rough one. Watching the world – my personal world and the great, big wide world – go to hell in a hand basket is rough. The rich may not be getting richer this year but the middle and poor classes are certainly going down the tubes faster than a toilet flushes and the Third World? They’re doing so miserably that they can’t even enjoy our slow demise as much as they should.
I teach teenagers and their latest kick is positive visualization. Yes, I have kids telling me that if they believe with all their heart that they’re going to get no longer than a 98%, that’s what they’ll get. The down side is that if they entertain the slightest amount of doubt, then that 98% goes down to a 96% or lower.

You have to love teenagers for their faith in magic. I know Santa that you are crazy about it but alas, I love those cynical types who have mean and nasty answers for the positive visualizers and I suppose that makes me a bad person too. As one of my colleagues pointed out, where does that leave poor people? Do they just lack faith? I have to say that disease, starvation and misery is punishment to the overkill-degree for someone who just can’t visualize a life without family dying of AIDS and lack of food and clean water.

Santa, it is beyond me to imagine a world where greed takes a backseat to compassion and where all the goodies get spread equitably. Maybe John Lennon had a better imagination than I have because I cannot imagine a world where people live for today and live in peace. Years of bad news have beaten that vision out of my head along with sugar plums.

By the way, I’ve never had a sugar plum in my life. The closest thing that I can imagine is a candy apple and I never was keen on those - too sticky for me. I suppose the elves like them but nowadays, kids have visions of iPhones dancing in their heads as I’m sure that you know very well. You should be so lucky as to get away with leaving kids sugar plums. They’d probably chuck them at you.

Mind you, if you were so kind as to drop off a grocery bag of sugar plums somewhere in Zimbabwe, you might see more gratitude. Given the cholera epidemic, you might want to send in an army of elves to do something about the well water and while you’re at it, there’s a few people that need some slapping up side the head rather than coal to let them know how truly naughty they are but I imagine that’s out of your power. You leave that to God, Fate or Karma.

So where am I going with all of this? Well, Santa, how about one year with very little drama? That’s what I would dearly love to have under my tree: a year where my family can figure out how to get through the various messes without intrigue and soliloquies. As for the rest of the world, what about some boring peace and prosperity? Maybe this big Recession/ Depression is a wake-up call for some but please remember that some of us are plenty awake already and don’t need the drama that those rich schmucks do. Excuse the Yiddish, Santa, but these self-centered guys really are schmucks and they have about as much spirit of Christmas as a Jew in a mosque.

Cut the poor some slack Santa by cutting the drama and we’ll all have a very good year.

Your friend,
Somebody’s Mother

Need a little Christmas and cough syrup

2008-12-14T14:30:00.002-05:00

“It is at this time of year when there is cold instead of warmth, rain instead of snow and dark instead of light that I begin to look forward to the Christmas season. It’s misguided, I know, perhaps a little foolhardy but please remember that so far I’ve heard Christmas music at a mall only once so it hasn’t filled me with horror and dread…yet.”

I wrote those words about three weeks ago when I had a cold and laryngitis. Well, it’s déjà vu time again because I’ve got another cold, another case of laryngitis but I just spent 4 hours shopping on a frigid day after I did 14 hours of residence duty and through my coughing fits, I need Christmas and Hannukah and Kwaanza and all the associated festivities.

It is indeed at this dark time of year that I realize that it will be a losing battle to start thinking of Christmas decorations because we have time honoured traditions in our family that forbid the hint of a Christmas light till two weeks before Christmas.

Granted this is the first Christmas where my children are not living at home and I am starting to realize with some apprehension that there may come a time when they are living so far away that it may not be possible for them to come home for Christmas. My mother in New York used to say that Canada stole her baby. Though I tried to make it home for some part of the holiday season, it became more difficult once I had two kids and those white-knuckle drives through the Adirondack or Green Mountains became less and less appealing. It was much easier to spend the holidays with friends in Montreal whose families were also far away.

What was very difficult for my family was that I was never home for the American Thanksgiving holiday that always takes place at the end of November. Thanksgiving Day is huge in the United States, a two day holiday of feasting and togetherness. It just wasn’t possible. Many families are experiencing this and expectations are certainly changing.

Shopping habits are changing too. More and more people are avoiding the holiday rush at stores by shopping online. I find a great appeal to this. Not only can you skip the long lineups, you can avoid hearing bad versions of The Little Drummer Boy and Silent Night ad nauseum. I must admit that I am willing to risk identity theft (my credit card has all sorts of lovely insurance just in case and so does yours, I bet) just to sidestep the crowds, the lineups at the cash registers and the holiday Muzak.

So as I cough my way through the first two dark months of Eastern Standard Time (when the clock falls back, I fall ‘way back), as I cherish every ray of daylight that comes my way, I realize that the crowds, the carols and the garish decorations are not to be scoffed at. People need presents and a reason to celebrate in these dark times when we may not have enough money in our pockets very soon to do any celebrating at all. I know that my more religious friends will urge me to put the Christ back in Christmas but being Jewish, I get some leeway on that score.
We do need some Christmas cheer about now so I say to the stores and malls, "bring it on, bring it all on.” To my religious friends, I urge you to cut the heathens some slack. Together we will face The Little Drummer Boy and we will triumph.

You can’t put a price on warmth!

2008-12-09T07:40:00.000-05:00

At the end of a hard day on the road, when you want to fall into bed and sleep, there is nothing worse than searching for a hotel room and finally finding one only to be caught by nasty surprises.

This happened to me last weekend and I suppose that it would have been funny except that I had experienced a weekend from hell. As many of my readers know, my mother passed away this summer and my father is in a nursing home. Last weekend, I went to their home to burn any documents that might have their social security numbers on them and to take whatever mementos and furniture that I wanted for my children and myself.

It was indeed a sad job made even more unbearable by the fact that there was no heat in the house and the weather had turned bitterly cold. Our hands were frozen and the task was made even longer by a meeting with the realtor who will probably be selling the house for us. She got cold so luckily the meeting was shorter than it might have been which allowed us to get back to work.

We finally finished throwing things away and burning papers and loaded up the van that we rented, heading north exhausted. I had picked up a coupon book that allows you to get discounts on hotels. Unfortunately, it was Saturday night and the coupons didn’t work for most of the hotels except for the Super 8. My husband was sceptical; he is a big believer that one should never stint on hotels. I thought that since it was a big chain, it couldn’t be all that bad. I was so wrong.

We got a pleasant enough greeting from the desk manager who even offered me a cup of tea. My husband picked up the key and we got back in the van and drove around the building to our room. We opened the door and that was when we were hit by something that we hoped and prayed that we had escaped, the chill.

The rooms each had their own heater and were not preheated. I turned on the heater with hope in my heart but when I put my hands up to it expecting hot hair, all I got was a lukewarm blast. I called up the cheerful desk manager who informed me that they never heat the rooms until it reaches -5 degrees. I was too cold and dispirited to ask if that was Fahrenheit or Celsius.

We jumped a blanket off the second double bed in the room and brushed our teeth with our coats on. The fan on the heater blasted all night long and by morning the room was warm enough. Then it came time for a hot shower but no such luck. My husband let the water run for a good ten minutes and finally managed to get a tepid shower. I was desperate for a shower so I gave it a try and was luckier. Somehow more hot water had made it to our bathroom and I got a hot-ish shower.

Disgusted, we decided not to try our luck with the complimentary breakfast so we left the Super 8 in White River Junction and didn’t stop till St. Johnsbury where we had breakfast at Anthony’s Diner. The food there is always good and it’s nice to eat well after such a cold ordeal. I love their home fries and if you’re ever there for lunch, try the coleslaw; it’s the best in Vermont.

I hate conceding a point to my husband but I admit - very publicly admit - that it would have been worth an extra fifty dollars to stay in a well heated room with hot water.
Take my word for it, if you need to stay in White River Junction when the weather is cold, steer clear of the Super 8. Learn from my experience. If I wanted to freeze, I would have slept in a tent.

2007-01-31T06:57:00.000-05:00

CBC: Bring Back On the Road Again

On January 27^th, CBC’s On the Road Again broadcast its last show. At the end of the the show, Wayne Rostad announced that the CBC had decided that this would be iOn the Road Again’s last year. Both my husband and I were stunned and did what we always do when our television says stuff that it shouldn’t – we yelled back.

Yes, On the Road Again has been on television for twenty years and it is vaguely possible that the show is out of date. Rostad’s songs approach a level of hokey-ness that many of us are incapable of handling. I may have a low threshold for corn but I think the sad thing about the cancellation of On the Road Again has more to do with where our society has gone as opposed to where the show has gone.

From seven to eight o’clock every night, there are back to back shows that do no more or less than advertise celebrities and the projects that they are coming out with. We are inundated with information about their movies, records, marriages, babies, drug abuse problems and of course their divorces. All of this stokes the industry that is larger than life and that keeps us happy when we are too tired from a long day at work to do more than absorb the latest about J-Lo, Britney and the queen of entertainment shows, Paris Hilton. More importantly, these shows keep us buying the records, movies and the products that the shows advertise.

On the Road Again has done something different. Every week for the last twenty years, Rostad visits ordinary people who do extraordinary things. This is pure unadulterated feel-good stuff that is not glamorous. Some of these folks are wacky in every sense of the word but most of them are inspiring as people with a passion for something and the will to carry it out.

There is the octogenarian who sends a weekly column from Old Crow, Yukon to a newspaper in Vancouver and the artist who uses every day articles to create beautiful sculptures. We’ve seen a Haida artist who tells the story of her people in the blankets that she creates and the calligrapher in Whitehorse who has an unabashed love of the written word. Week after week, we’ve been able to learn how varied this country is with its fascinating people who are every bit as interesting as the movie stars who rise with a bang and fall with a thud.

On the Road Again is the kind of television that our national network should be providing us with. It may not be as commercial as e-Talk and Entertainment Tonight or even Entertainment Tonight Canada. The point of having a national network is to provide people with the opportunity to see and appreciate what is going on in our country. It’s not all about celebrities or even celebrities visiting Canada; it’s about who we are, the people who don’t enjoy fame or notoriety.

It takes a special person to be able to put three meals on the table and then go on to build a replica of the leaning Tower of Pisa in one’s backyard or create an unofficial museum of vintage clothing in one’s home.

I am really sorry that I won’t be finding out about these people any more and I think that it is a real mistake that the CBC has cancelled a show that has been a lively tradition for the past twenty years.

Nobody made a big stink when The Friendly Giant was cancelled but other shows have been revived if a network receives enough complaints. If you feel the way I do, fire up your computer and go to http://www.cbc.ca/contact/index.jsp and send the CBC a message that you think cancelling On the Road Again is a bad idea. We like having a show that shows the wonderful eccentricities, creations and obsessions of Canadians from East to West. The CBC needs to hear that from the real people, the people who pay the taxes that keep the CBC going.

2007-01-21T18:38:00.000-05:00

What makes us Canadian? Snow…and lots of it.
It snowed last Monday. It snowed through the day and through the night. As I walked out of my workplace on Monday and had to clean off my car, I took a deep breath. This was a situation where the actual action was worse than the anticipation. The snow was heavy and there were mounds and mounds of it. Cleaning off my car was a real workout.
I drove through greasy streets at an overly cautious forty kilometres an hour and I was sure that more macho drivers were swearing at me. As I drove back to work an hour later in the dark, slipping and sliding and again crawling over the College Street bridge, I had to face a new and unexpected truth about myself. I was glad. I was excited that it had snowed.
It has finally occurred to me that winter without snow is no winter at all. I thought that I would love and be thrilled with such a winter. What has happened to me? Can I say that I have finally and irrevocably become Canadian?
A Globe and Mail article revealed the fact that most immigrants tend to identify themselves with their ethnic group first and their Canadian nationality second. We may have Chinese Canadians, African Canadians, Italian Canadians and Irish Canadians. Is it then possible to have American Canadians?
Quite frankly, I find myself referring to the people below the border as them and the people above the border as us. At first, this was something of a shock to me but as the years rolled by and as I realized that I had lived in Canada longer than I had ever lived in the United States, this seemed like a natural progression.
While my New York accent has toned down, it certainly has not faded away as my friends and work mates constantly remind me. Yet, the days when I spelled the word, colour as color are long gone. I have even given in to the our in the word, neighbour. I must admit that writing a cheque is problematic as I always want to write a check and I am always tempted to throw an extra c in somewhere.
This was all inevitable but when did I start to like snow? I could delude myself by arguing that walking my dogs in the woods on a hard-packed surface of snow is far easier than sinking in the mud or sliding on sheets of ice. Actually, that’s not a delusion; that’s true. I’m comfortable with the assertion that snow looks a lot prettier than brown fields although my lawn was eerily green up to a week ago.
No, I truly began to like snow when I discovered that I could cross country ski and love it. We live in a place where we have easy access to lovely trails and we can whoosh around to our hearts’ content. Compare that with life in my hometown of New York City where the snowiest silence you can hope for is finding a quiet corner of Central Park.
Now that the snow is here and the children are playing with it, I’m going to get out in too and I hope to enjoy it like any other true-blue Canadian. After all, it is the patriotic thing to do.

2007-01-08T22:06:00.000-05:00

A Hot and Fat Future?
I watched two documentaries over the Christmas holidays – Super Size Me and An Inconvenient Truth. Super Size Me tells what happens to a young and very healthy man when he eats nothing from but McDonald’s food for thirty days. He gains thirty pounds in one month and even begins to suffer liver damage.
An Inconvenient Truth is a documentary made by former Vice President Al Gore on the issue of global warming. His film shows that global warming is occurring at a greater rate than was previously predicted and that the vast majority of scientists agree that global warming is not a natural occurrence and is a real phenomenon that is the product of the human race’s activities on Earth. If this trend continues, global sea levels could rise by more than 20 feet with the loss of shelf ice in Greenland and Antarctica, flooding and destroying coastal areas world wide. There will be more heat waves, droughts and wildfires. By the year 2050, the Arctic Ocean could be ice free and over a million species could be driven to extinction. According to this scenario, in less than 50 years, we could either be very hot or underwater.
Then there’s the exposé of Super Size Me that reveals the increasing problem of obesity in the United States. This isn’t only an American problem. According to a recent study done by Ipsos Reid, obesity among Canadian children has tripled in the last twenty years and more than one third of children and teenagers in Canada are obese. One third to one half of all Canadian adults are overweight and this figure seems to be increasing steadily.
These two documentaries were definitely an antidote to my happy Christmas television watching. This is not a nice future that we’re looking at; we’re all going to be hot and fat. The question is what we do about it, you and me.
Looking out my window at the 200 odd light bulbs glaring away in all their Christmas glory does not make me a real friend of the Earth and my house seemed mildly festive in contrast to some of the others that I’ve seen. I don’t even want to think about the quantity of shortbread cookies, fruit cake and trifle that I’ve consumed over the past two weeks.
Guilt is one of my addictions. Perhaps you don’t suffer from it the way I do but if you do, guilt without action is a waste of emotional energy. You might as well light up every room in the house and eat twenty pieces of bacon with a big smile on your face.
Finding ways to change makes more sense. There are little things that we can do without it hurting too much such as recycling and reusing when possible. Walking more and driving less is a hard goal to achieve when you live in a rural area but planning your trips to the store so that you drive less wouldn’t cause too much pain and it would save money on gas. Eating nutritious home cooked meals goes a long way in keeping your diet more sensible.
The most important thing is to let our governments know that we do care about global warming and the health of our children. If we are expected to behave like responsible citizens of the planet, industry should be expected to do so as well. We need more environment-friendly cars. According to Gore, Asian vehicles are ahead of North American ones when it comes to fuel efficiency. Why are we behind them?
We need to start spending money to save our future and our governments have to stop thinking of global warming as some kind of left-wing plot. Partisanship has to stand aside because global warming is real. In spite of what some media pundits claim, scientists are convinced that it’s real and hiding the truth will not help big business when people are too busy trying to stay alive to buy their products. Otherwise, we’ll be one hot, fat and finally extinct species and that, my friends, is really bad for business.

2007-01-05T11:45:00.000-05:00

Ahhh, the holiday season.
It just never fails
to excite me.

2007-01-05T11:34:00.000-05:00

Are Milestones really Milestones?
The shadow of death certainly hung over the Christmas holidays. Both James Brown, the Godfather of Soul and former president, Gerald Ford died on Christmas day. Then on the Saturday following Christmas, Saddam Hussein was executed.
For baby boomers, this feels like the end of an era. Soul music was an integral part of my adolescence. Songs like I Feel Good and Say it Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud were part of a decade that went from civil rights to women’s’ rights. James Brown was a big part of the background music of my generation
As I moved into my twenties, the Watergate scandal took over the news and I remember sitting with my parents and watching Richard Nixon resign. My whole family was shocked to see a president resign in such infamy to be replaced by Vice President Ford. It was unthinkable.
Now over thirty years later, Saddam Hussein’s reign of terror has ended in the midst of terror and chaos. As a follower of the blog, Baghdad Burning (which has been published as two books of the same name), I’ve been given a new perspective of how unimportant this death is to the person on the street. Iraqis deal with death everyday. Riverbend (the pseudonym for the author of the blog) says that nowadays Iraqi families feel lucky when the corpse of a loved one is identifiable. In her entry of December twenty-ninth, she writes about how differently she views death, particularly those of American soldiers.
When she first started writing in 2003, she agonised over the death of each soldier. She sympathised with them because she felt that most of them didn’t want to be in Iraq and were probably unsure why they were there at all. Now she speaks of the tens of thousands of Iraqis who have been killed by militia, secret police and American soldiers. She wonders why American deaths are more important than those of Iraqi citizens. Is it because there are fewer of them, she asks.
It is equally significant to wonder about the deaths of celebrities and why they have an impact on our lives. Obviously, I never knew James Brown, President Ford or Saddam Hussein. I just don’t move in those kinds of circles. So I wonder why I’m supposed to lament the deaths of the first two and celebrate the death of the latter as some sort of liberating event. Maybe it’s because the media tells me to or because the world is a far smaller place than it used to be so that we feel as if we really know people that we have never met. Maybe these deaths are more of a media event than a real milestone.
January 1, New Years’ Day, is also supposed be a milestone – a new year, an opportunity for change. The fact is that people are still dying in Iraq and will continue to do so throughout 2007. People are dying in Darfur and probably will continue to do so throughout 2007. The AIDS pandemic in Africa will also be the same story. The changing of a single digit in the annals of time never seems to change much. For all the furor of the new millennium, mankind has continued slogging through the same maze and has fallen into the same pits. Both the Western and Eastern continents will be paying the price for September 11, 2001 for a long, long time. That was the devastating milestone of my generation. In fact, if we look back on the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, the powder keg that kicked off World War I, that fracas cost the lives of millions for most of the twentieth century, almost one hundred years of wars and conflicts that have been the seeds of the conflicts of this century.
A milestone that I like to look at is the changing of the guard in South Africa. Though by no means a bloodless revolution, it ended apartheid in a far more peaceful way than anyone could have imagined. Many people of my generation remember when Nelson Mandela was released from prison as a moment of hope. It is that kind of moment that I am praying will be forthcoming in 2007. I look forward to a moment where North America and the Islamists of the Middle East as well as the Sudanese government see some form of compromise in ending the slaughter presently taking place in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Darfur. That would be some milestone! Happy New Year, readers.

2006-12-29T14:48:00.000-05:00

Last month, I had the privilege to hear Stephen Lewis speak at the Quebec Provincial Teachers Association Convention in Montreal. He was a very engaging speaker with many heartbreaking stories to tell yet there is one story that I came away with that continues to haunt me:

Lewis spoke about the horrible massacre that took place in the Ivory Coast where thousands of children were attacked and had arms and legs cut off. The Canadian Foreign Minster, Lloyd Axeworthy, was visiting a hospital and went from bed to bed talking to the patients. He sat down next to one little boy and asked him, “What do you want? What can we do for you?” The little boy answered, “I want to go to school.” That was the major theme of Lewis’ talk: the vast number of children who want to go to school right across the African continent and the vast number of children who cannot go to school because of school fees.

Last summer, the Manchester Guardian published a statement about school fees in Africa by the Minister of Education of Ghana, Papa Owusu Ankomah, “…an estimated 77 out of 94 poor countries, mostly in Africa, still charge some type of fee for basic education. Fees consume nearly a quarter of a poor family's income in sub-Saharan Africa and pay not only for tuition but also indirect costs such as parent-teacher association contributions, textbooks, compulsory uniforms and other expenses.”

Ankomah spoke of the amazing results that can happen when school fees are lifted. When Ghana abolished its school fees in 2004, enrollment went from 4.2 million to 5.4 million. These kinds of results have been repeated in other countries:

“In Uganda, primary school enrolment grew from 2.5 million in 1997 to 6.5 million in 2000; in Kenya in 2003, it jumped from 5.9 million to 7.2 million; and in Tanzania, enrolment more than doubled from 1.4 million to 3 million. Our collective experiences are living proof that abolishing school fees may be the single most important policy measure to dramatically transform school enrollment.”

Education does more for children than teach them to read. In his speech, Lewis emphasized that going to school releases children from child labour and it gives them the chance to play with other children so that they can have a normal childhood. More and more schools provide AIDS prevention education so that these children will have the information that they need to avoid becoming another statistic in the spiraling number of Africans contracting HIV.

Presently, the Stephen Lewis Foundation has a Grandmother-to-Grandmother initiative that allows Canadian grandmothers to raise money and support grassroots organizations that help African grandmothers who are the only ones left to raise their grandchildren as AIDS has killed their children.

I wonder if a school-to-school initiative might be another way to raise money for school fees for children in those countries who still have such fees. One Canadian school could adopt an African school and fundraise to assist children in overcoming this barrier. Teachers could adopt teachers. There could be a mutual advantage in this as children could share letters and artwork so that they could have a better understanding of a culture so different from their own and this interchange could take place between teachers too.

Meanwhile, we could advocate for the abolishing of school fees in favour of better means of financing. A press release from UNICEF states "We live in a world where children whose families cannot pay for tuition, uniforms, desks, pencils, books and building repairs are shut out of classrooms. And yet we also live in a world that ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child a decade ago, a world that recognized free and compulsory education as the right of every child. Governments have both a legal and a moral responsibility to fulfill that obligation."

We may not have a cure for AIDS but we can help children to go school. This is something that governments and people all over the world can implement if only the will is there.

This Christmas, it would be nice to think beyond our own children and grandchildren who are iffy about this school-thing that is a basic part of their lives. Giving the gift of education to millions of children across Africa who are hungry for education and who are hungry for a real childhood could be the greatest gift that we Canadians could give. Merry Christmas, readers and a very Happy New Year!

2006-11-26T13:49:00.000-05:00

"But Names Will Never Hurt Me"

I'm just back from the hospital and I have to write my column and I have to get over being mad at the world. I have been witness in the past two weeks to some very aggressive cyberbullying and verbal graffitti that I have seen hurt people tremendously.

Who the hell wrote that stupid rhyme about sticks and stones? Words hurt. They hurt like hell. Words have tremendous power. They start revolutions, they act like a conduit for hate and they can spread hate as wide as a continent.

For a variety of reasons, I cannot write about what I have seen though I should be able to write about what I have seen. Nothing is better than exposing hatred, racism and sheer stupidity to the light of day so that it can be seen for the rotting pile of excrement that it is.

My silence has to do with protecting people who are the victims of these nasty and cowardly acts. They shouldn't be made to suffer any more than they have.

I hate when people hide behind the Internet and masquerade who they are as they rub their hands in glee and go after others. It is beyond cowardly. Yet this is the negative side of communications technology: people who haven't the guts to look others in the eye and express the crap in their brains get to communicate that crap far and wide hurting others.

You just have to hope for the power of Instant Karma.

Staying Sane over a bad few weeks

2006-09-24T12:10:00.001-04:00

Staying Sane
The past week has been a strange time of hellos and goodbyes for me, all of them negative. I suppose that it is true that the older you get, the less comfortable you are with change and that it is also true that the more things change the more they stay the same.
The shooting at Dawson College was a wake up call that yes, these things do happen here. I remember the shock that I felt when fourteen women were gunned down at the Ecole Polytechnique in 1989 and then three years later at the shootings at Concordia where four members of the Engineering faculty were killed.
What is so shocking is how hatred can poison a life to such an extent that the human mind is cut off from the evil of ending life. For Valery Fabrikant of Concordia, professional grievances outweighed the rights of his colleagues to live. Marc Lepine’s hatred of women drove him to kill Engineering students because they were “all feminists”.
Now, we have Kimveer Gill from Laval whose love of guns and hatred of his own life drove him to fulfill his wish to go out in a blaze of glory. He may have gotten his wish but as someone recently said to me – and I will be forced to censor the colourful language – it’s tragic that an eighteen year old girl had to die and that so many people had to be maimed because one young man couldn’t keep his life together.
Then in the midst of all this madness, there was my own little tragedy; I almost feel ridiculous writing about it on the same page as this massacre. My cat, Willa, who has been a constant companion for the last ten years, disappeared. We checked with the SPA and dropped her photo off. We walked through the woods near our home calling her name and one week later, she’s still gone.
I don’t know if she was hit by a car or if she ate poison or if someone simply liked the look of her and took her home far away. We took her home from the SPA about ten years ago and she was a faithful friend to me whether she was jumping in my lap when I watched TV or lying by my head all night purring too loudly.
Yet while I have castigated myself for mourning the loss of my cat while there are parents out there mourning the loss of a child, I feel that that this is the nature of our struggle to make our lives liveable. To me, insanity may be either a chemical or learned inability to see reality as it is. We need to be able to perceive the positive and the negative aspects of our environment clearly.
Through the years, it has become plain to me that there are small things in our lives that make our short time on this Earth beautiful, even if it’s only for a few moments every day. It may be a cat or a dog or a friend or even the person from whom you buy your morning coffee every day. They are all entities that touch us in great and small ways that make it a joy to be alive. They are what keep us sane.
I will miss Willa very much because her quiet way of showing affection to me was a comfort when the bigger issues of this world upset me and when the trials and tribulations of daily life wore me down. None of us like to say goodbye and no one likes to see a good thing end.
I would love to convince myself that she just may come back in another week. Even more, I would like to believe that tragedy happens elsewhere to other people but that would be insane. It happens everywhere and all we can hope for is that we can be that reason for living for someone else at some point in time and have friends beside us when tragedy strikes

Billy Bragg

2006-09-24T12:10:00.000-04:00

I went to see Billy Bragg this week and he was just wonderful. He also did several amusing acts of crowd control. I suppose that after years of being heckled, he knows how to deal with drunks and idiots.

I was disappointed that he didn't sing Levi Stubbs Tears as it was the song that introduced me to him. I love the first line:

"With the money from her accident, she bought herself a mobile home"

It just sucks you right in. It's one of the best songs about domestic violence around. I think he's playing in Toronto tonight. Enjoy, Torontonians.

Two Wrongs Will Put Everything Right…Right?

2006-03-20T13:01:00.000-05:00

Newsflash: An Iranian newspaper, Hamshahri, has received over 700 entries for its contest to find the best Holocaust-related cartoon. One entry supports Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s view that the Holocaust was a myth. It depicts a circle of nine Jewish men entering and leaving a gas chamber that shows a counter reading "5,999,999," implying that Jews have inflated the number of Holocaust victims. Another cartoon shows Jews lining up and entering a gas pipeline.
Yes, there’s certainly nothing like laughing to bring people together and what better way to unite the world than running a contest like this every year. Maybe next year, Hamshahri can run a contest calling for cartoons on the killing fields of Cambodia. The year after that, there’s always Rwanda and with any luck, Darfur will be good for a few more laughs.
History is a gold mine of slaughter and human misery. Just ask the aboriginal people of North and South America. Their massacre over hundreds of years should supply the entire world with lots of laughs and lots of fodder for hysterically funny cartoons. Monty Python had an enormous amount of fun with the Spanish Inquisition (“Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!”) Nazis were absolutely adorable on Hogan’s Heroes. Blood, guts and gore are a lot of fun.
Yes, folks, you are probably wondering if I’ve lost my mind. Join the club. I am most definitely wondering if I have lost my mind when I see this headline: Iranian Paper Holds Holocaust Contest. I surely must be hallucinating…yet sadly, I am not.
Many people agree that the cartoons that made fun of Islam that were published in a Danish newspaper were objectionable and ill-timed. To make fun of someone’s deeply held religious beliefs shows a high degree of xenophobia and an even higher degree of poor judgement. In plain English, it was stupid, really stupid. I saw them, thought they were poorly drawn and they reminded me of those horrible World War II cartoons that made caricatures of the Japanese people, showing them to be insects.
In order to have an enemies, you must make them less than human. People have been calling each other dogs, pigs, rats, etc. for years. Frankly, these members of the animal kingdom command greater respect than some of the human butchers who have pranced across history, slaughtering millions, only to die in humiliation. The recent demise of Slobodan Milosevic comes to mind. The Butcher of the Balkans killed and maimed throughout the Nineties, only to die in a jail cell and perhaps by his own hand.
I think that these cartoons - whether they make fun of Jews, Muslims, Africans, North Americans or whoever - are tools to propagate hatred so that those who thirst for power may pursue whatever path is necessary that will enlarge the scope of their power. The people of this world are just putty in their hands.
Isn’t there anyone who will stand up and say that he or she has had enough of the hatred that is being disseminated around the world? Perhaps, loving our neighbour is just a stupid pipe dream.
As in the novel 1984, we are constantly proving that two plus two does make five. Two wrongs do make a right and the more wrongs, the merrier. It may be entirely possible that we will blow everyone up in the process of proving this but prove it we will.

Theme Months May Actually Teach Us Something

2006-03-04T09:19:00.000-05:00

As we move from Black History Month in February to Women’s History Month in March, people may wonder why we need these months at all. There definitely are a lot of theme months and some months even do double duty. In the health areas, we find Breast Cancer Awareness Month, Family Health Month and Physical Therapy Month. Minorities have American Indian Heritage Month, Hispanic Heritage Month and Polish Heritage Month. This doesn’t even begin to look at all the weeks such as Freedom to Read Week (this week, by the way), Teen Reading Week and School Bus Safety Week. As a librarian, I’m always looking for a decorating theme to highlight some good books but surely, this isn’t a good enough reason to bury the calendar under a myriad of themes.
As far as the History and Heritage months go, they may make up for the enormous gaps in how history is taught in our schools. Our teenagers are taught world history in Grade 8, Quebec and Canadian history in Grade 10 and World History again in Grade 11 but only if they opt to take it. It’s really hard to get into much depth when you run from Ancient Egypt through World War II in one year.
Then, once we get out into the working world, the most history that the majority of us come into contact with is a movie that will probably make many errors to keep the plot going. I have no problem with that. Movies are usually produced to entertain and make their backers a lot of money. No one is too worried about educating the public.
Over February, there were some good documentaries on Black History on a few television stations and a few movies that got me interested in reading books on the topic. I’ve often found the same to be true for women’s history. The fight to achieve one’s rights makes some pretty dramatic reading and there are more than a few heroes in the American Civil Rights movement and in the Nineteenth Century Suffragette movements in Great Britain, Canada and the United States.
Many of us know who the American suffragette, Susan B. Anthony, was but what about Canadian women like Nellie McClung? Because of McClung’s tireless efforts, Manitoba was the first province to give women the right to vote and run for public office. She was a bestselling author and worked for a wide variety of social causes. Another memorable Canadian feminist was Agnes Macphail. In 1921, she was the first woman to be elected to the House of Commons. Macphail promoted workers’ rights and pensions for seniors.
These women are an important part of Canadian history and many of us don’t know their names because we flew through Canadian history in a race to get to the end of term so that we could pass the provincial exams. Luckily, many teachers are finding ways to give students the chance to go deeper into Canadian history through research projects and we can only hope that teenagers come out knowing more than what year the British North America Acts were passed. Dates are quickly forgotten but a good story will be remembered far longer.
So don’t be so quick to roll your eyes when a month is chosen to promote a health or historical theme. It may be an opportunity to learn something that you didn’t know before and it can’t hurt any of us to smarten up a bit.

Being Funny Can Be Hazardous to your Health

2006-02-13T15:23:00.000-05:00

I’ve spent the past week reading about the cartoon controversy and the ensuing demonstrations and burning of embassies in the Middle East. Once again, I am challenged in this blog to add to the media frenzy with something more articulate than “Oh, wow” or “Yikes!” Frankly, it’s not easy because I could get into trouble. Luckily,the trouble that I will get into is not life threatening.
Critiques of some of my blogthat were meant to be funny have come in the form of mildly cajoling emails and one or two Letters to the Editor. I have been castigated for making fun of people who shop early for Christmas presents and for my continuous jibes about the College Street bridge in Lennoxville while it was being repaired. What I thought were gently humorous digs at every day life issues were taken quite seriously by readers and though I apologised for offending these readers, I did not apologise for writing my opinions and for describing my own observations of the world. Any columnist worth his salt welcomes this kind of criticism because it means that the blogs are being read and discussed
What I find completely frightening is what happens if a cartoonist, columnist or newspaper editor does not gauge his reading audience well and goes out of the bounds of what is thought to be good taste or appropriate standards. It’s a new world out there. Salman Rushdie wrote a book and received a death sentence for what he put in it. Do authors and cartoonists deserve to die because they express beliefs that are considered blasphemous by others?
I also wonder about the innocent victims of this controversy. I cannot understand why the embassies of these countries were burned down and why their industries are being boycotted. The guy who works on the floor of a Danish cheese packaging plant has absolutely nothing to do with the cartoonist who drew the controversial cartoons yet he is losing his job because that cartoonist and his editor didn’t use some common sense.
Anyone in our society has to recognize that there are lines that we all draw concerning free speech no matter how liberal we think we are. No sane person would allow a six year old to watch a pornographic film or a hard-core violent film. Most of us would think that the photos that the American soldiers took in the Abu Ghraib prison as a joke were horrible. Our society does not look kindly on jokes that humiliate minority groups or women or for that matter, jokes about the Holocaust. It’s something that you don’t put in a newspaper.
In Canada, we have used the expression, the Two Solitudes, to describe English and French Canada. This is nothing compared to the Two Solitudes that our world seems to have been divided into. Many people within the Middle East feel that it is their people who are dying in Iraq and Afghanistan and now the West is kicking their most sacred icons and principles that go beyond discussion: their religion, their deity.
In the West, we are used to making fun of everything, literally everything. Our stand-up comics crack jokes about God, racial groups, sex, you name it. We pride ourselves on the much cherished freedom to discuss and make fun of any topic that we want to. Yes, it’s a relief to live in such a world but in reality, the world we live in is a much smaller place as some Danish cartoonists found out in the past few weeks.
Whether we like it or not, there is another solitude out there and they don’t think that we’re one bit funny. This is a truly frightening reality and one that we will be dealing with for years to come. Both sides have got to start talking to one another instead of screaming; we have to find out about one another instead of aiming guns or cartoons.

Some things aren’t funny anymore; they are serious, deadly serious.

Frolicking is Over Thanks to Global Warming

2006-02-13T08:13:00.000-05:00

I guess I won’t be cross-country skiing any time soon and neither will you. Yes, January thaw came and stayed for all of January and it slipped right into February. It kind of took the wind right out of January Thaw’s romantic sails.
In the course of a long and argumentative life, I’ve debated with people over the existence of January Thaw. I’ve always known there to be an island of sanity in our climate - that window of opportunity to walk outside and feel the breeze on one’s face without pain. It’s like a weather-holiday after Christmas yet there are many unbelievers. I consider these people who don’t believe in January Thaw to be like those Bush supporters who believe that global warming is a bunch of nonsense.
Yet this year, it’s hard to deny global warming and when you have rain almost every day, you can’t call it much of a thaw. It’s a New York City winter that has moved up north and is here to stay. It may not be painful but it certainly isn’t very much fun. An Eastern Townships winter implies a certain amount of frolicking in the snow with the aid of snow-frolicking tools such as skis, sleds, fancy sleds (GTs), snowmobiles and snowshoes.
This winter, I have aged 30 years as I do the shuffle down my driveway to my car and I’m not the only one. Several gentlemen of my acquaintance have admitted to doing some shuffling of their own for fear of breaking an arm, leg or hip and these guys are under fifty. If we have winter after winter like this, we will need to get ice climbing shoes just to walk outside.
The summers are getting hotter, the winters are getting warmer – call me crazy but I believe in global warming. President Bush claimed in a 2001 speech that the climate runs in patterns – he says it gets warmer for awhile and then colder. It’s just a natural pattern. I think that this is all wishful thinking on his part. Nobody wants to tell millions of Americans or for that matter, people in up and coming developing countries such as India and China, that they can’t drive an SUV, that gas will never be affordable again and that the future doesn’t have limitless possibilities. The big surprise is that we may have to limit ourselves so that we have a future at all.
Like many Canadians, I will be curious to see how long Canada remains signed on to the Kyoto Accord now that the Conservative Party is in office. In addition, Prime Minister Harper may decide that he no longer needs the services of Rick Mercer to cajole Canadians into figuring out ways to help Canada meet its goals in reducing greenhouse emissions. Of course, it is industry that should be the real target and no Prime Minister wants to tug on the coattails of big companies about how much they’re chugging into the air. It doesn’t matter whether he or she is a Liberal or a Conservative. It’s much easier to go after little people.
Meanwhile, it may be time to throw all our snow frolicking stuff into this summer’s garage sale, stock up on some very good umbrellas and shoes with excellent traction. Winter just isn’t what it used to be.

2006-02-03T07:26:00.000-05:00

Relaxation in a bottle…and dishes that sparkle too
Modern technology never fails to excite me with the new tools it comes up with to make my life easier and better. Just last weekend, I was shopping at the supermarket and I realized that we were running out of liquid dishwashing soap. I noticed that one brand, a name brand, was on sale and that it came in a wide variety of scents: cucumber, lemon, etc. Then I noticed the very last one, aromatherapy…and the label said anti-stress!
Now, just imagine the multi-tasking possibilities here! I can actually wash a pot and relax at the same time. Yes, there’s a sucker born every minute but the bottle is on sale and promising me that those scented bubbles will fight my stress. How can I resist? Can this be false advertising? Not in Canada.
Ever since childhood, there’s a side of me that…now, this is hard to confess to such a wide audience, but here goes: there’s a side of me that likes commercials. I’ve always known why. Commercials have happy endings and I want to believe that happy endings are possible.
Sixties commercials never failed to have happy endings. If the lady switches to the right brand, everything is right. If the neighbour’s sheets on the clothesline are cleaner than your sheets, you listen to her advice, buy the detergent and then your family really, really loves you. Buy that whitening toothpaste and you get the boyfriend, the big job, the trip to Florida and the luggage. Commercials make life seem so simple. If you have the money, there’s always an easy solution.
Life is very busy these days so if a dishwashing soap can lull me into a state of bliss two steps up from comatose, why should I resist? Of course, it’s all fun and games till we find out that the secret ingredient in the soap is illegal.
All kidding aside, stress is a very real problem. Just the other day, a friend passed on a news headline to me that says that most teenagers are so stressed out and depressed that if they were in this condition twenty years ago, that state of mind would require professional help. Nowadays, we just accept it.
One journal states that the rate of teenaged depression may be as high as 20%. It does go on to say that many of these cases will be short-lived but if you think of the pressures that teenagers are under between school, sports, extracurricular activities along with the strain in relationships among family and peers, this figure is not so surprising.
After all, we expect sixteen and seventeen year olds to pick an area of concentration in CEGEP. I barely know what I’m doing with my life now. How can we possibly expect kids to figure out what they want to do at such a young age when they can barely decide which jeans to wear to school? That’s stress.
Now I know better than to suggest that if we get teenagers to wash our pots and pans with anti-stress aromatherapy dishwashing detergent, their stress will go down the drain with the grease, dirt and grime. I don’t think this one has a happy ending.
Advertisers will keep stressing our kids and us out because we can never have enough and all the bottles of aromatherapy soap won’t make us stop and realize that maybe, just maybe, there are a lot of whistles and doo-hickies that we really don’t need.
If we’re not stressed, we’re not spending.

2006-01-24T16:35:00.000-05:00

Anglophones: The Invisible Voters of Quebec

About two weeks ago, I received a phone call from a nice lady who was working for one of our local candidates. She asked me who I was voting for.
“I’m sorry but I never discuss my vote.”
“All right, then, but I hope you make the right decision.”
“I’m sure I will.”
As I hung up the phone, I thought, “I just lied.” Even now, I’m not sure that I made the right decision last Monday because, apart from the debates that I watched before the election, very few of the candidates vied for my vote or working to tell me, an English-speaking Quebec voter, why I should vote for him…except for Mr. Harper.
For the past few weeks, Mr. Harper’s television commercials exhorted me to “stand up for Canada.” These commercials reminded me many times of the Liberal Party’s wrongdoings and repeatedly urged me to trust Mr. Harper as a leader. Sure thing, that is what I’d expect - but what about the Liberals? What about the New Democratic Party? For that matter, what about the Bloc? Where were they?
During the debate, Mr. Layton urged us not to vote strategically but it is more than evident and not surprising that our federal candidates campaigned very strategically. Anglophone Quebeckers were unimportant and were to be sacrificed for more significant constituencies in Ontario and British Columbia.
As a television watcher, I suppose that I should be grateful. I was spared all the cheesy advertisements, the sincere appeals to patriotism and the promises of a better tomorrow but as a voter, I still feel hurt. I feel inferior. Harper loves us but nobody else does. You’d think that even Mr. Duceppe would have tried to convince us that his vision of a sovereign Quebec was a really, really good one but he probably knew better. He assumed that there was no chance Anglophones would buy that one.
The Liberals probably thought that we would vote Liberal because Mr. Martin is one of us, a Quebecker so why bother convincing us of what we already know. As for Mr. Layton, the NDP have long given up on us. You didn’t see so much as a poster in Lennoxville, a university town that could be ripe for a few votes from the stereotypical university leftie. They seem to have some sort of misguided thinking that Quebeckers are allergic to the NDP. On the other hand, you have to hand it to the Green Party. At least, they weren’t so cheap as to count the cost of a few posters.
Those of us English speaking Quebeckers who care about the future of our country made it our business to figure out what was really behind all the promises and party platforms. We then made our decision as best as we could. I think, however, that it is sad that three out of the four national parties did not even think that English Quebec was worth a few television commercials and in some cases, a few posters. This last election may bring a new meaning to the slogan, Je me souviens.

2006-01-13T16:54:00.000-05:00

Next Christmas, No Electronics
This is my New Year’s Resolution: I will never, never, never (may I repeat never) give anyone an electronic present for Christmas again. No one will get anything that requires the installation of software (not compatible), the connections of cables to a computer (not compatible) and the transfer of music from one electronic device to another (it sounds like mush!) This is my gift to me next Christmas and to you. If you had a similar experience to mine this past Christmas, you may not have come to the realization so I am here to help you come to your senses.
There is something about electronic devices and computerized contraptions that bring out the frustrated and ready-to-smash-dishes side in a tired human being no matter what age that human being may be when said doo-hickey does not function the way it should at 7:00 AM Christmas morning.
By the way, how many of us feel like highly functioning computer technicians at 7:00 AM Christmas morning? I know that I don’t. I also know that I don’t want to even try to feel like one. I want to open gifts and enjoy them without the gift putting me to work. In fact, electronic gifts are not the only culprit in making Christmas mornings less than relaxed. Remember electric trains? What about Lego sets? All these gifts do is force you to work and work and work some more.
I have to make breakfast so why do I want to be a computer technician, architect and/or engineer at an ungodly hour of a morning that is a holiday? Parents, next Christmas, let’s put the holiday back into holiday and give our kids gifts that require little thought on our part.
Actually, that’s the beauty of what ever comes in a Christmas stocking. Chances are, it goes on your feet, hands or head or you can eat it. The stuff is usually small, simple and pleasant. The work comes with the bigger gifts. This is certainly not an easy problem to solve. Clothes are no good because chances are, they won’t fit. You will have to go back to the store and fight crowds of like-minded cranky people who are returning gifts.
Video games that don’t hook up to a computer may also seem like an easy if expensive solution but think of the noise and blood-guts-and-gore factors. What’s so pleasant about getting the latest video game to work so that your beloved young ‘un can kill hundreds of cyber-people? Remember peace on earth, good will toward men? Can’t we spare a little good will for all those animated types who are destined to get the bullet over and over again?
Honestly, I think it’s back to wind-up toys for me…or dolls. I don’t care that my children are young adults. Next year, they’re getting dolls and I will blissfully send them back to their rooms to play with their new acquisitions and let me get another hour’s sleep. Better yet, if they’re so mature, maybe it’s time that they make breakfast.
Next New Year’s Day, I will wake up and not have to figure out a thing except where I put the Tylenol and Alka-Seltzer. That sounds like an easy one to handle. If every day could be that simple, it would surely be a Happy New Year.

2006-01-13T16:43:00.000-05:00

Bridge Blues Revisited In the Darkest Month of the Year
Ah, January, the month that weighs in on those of us who suffer from SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder). For the light-starved among us, January makes us really, really…well, sad. Christmas is over, the coloured lights are coming down and springs is more weeks away than I want to think about.
No matter. This Monday, I trudged into the car and turned the key in a cavalier fashion. I hummed along to the music on my speakers until I hit the traffic. It was déjà vu of the most horrible, horrible kind. What did I see before me? The College Street Bridge had one lane closed again.
You see, as the school term came to a close and as I knew that the January blues would hit me in two short weeks along with the long-term indigestion of too much holiday feasting, there was a small hope on the horizon, the hope of a two lane bridge and the five minute drive to work that I had known and loved for the past ten years.
Yes, I have cast my eyes heavenward and asked God to give the world peace, to release those who were kidnapped and to keep an eye out for my aged parents. It just seemed to be a teeny-tiny bit presumptuous to ask the Supreme Ruler of the universe and the Creator of all things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small, to expedite the repair of one small bridge. That would seem a trifle selfish and piddley considering the weightier questions that exist in this complicated world.
Yet, surely at this point in time, I have reached traffic hell in the middle of January and nothing short of a bona fide miracle will bring about the completion of that bridge and the triumphant moment (cue the orchestra!) when the nice men in hard hats pack up their equipment and go away, very far away.
Unfortunately, my public kvetching is earning me a link with that bridge that might stay with me for years. People greet me and say, “How do you like the bridge? It’s almost finished.” Age, willpower and my mother’s stern upbringing helps me to refrain from saying, “Are you crazy? Almost doesn’t count!”
Last week, when both lanes were open, my husband warned me not to get too excited. He pointed out the equipment on the side of the road and the covered signs. In my heart of hearts, I knew that he was right. I knew that the construction workers were on holiday and that in a matter of days, the signs would be uncovered, and the equipment would be back sitting idle in a closed lane while I sat swearing in my car waiting for the one open lane to move.
Yet I had an unrealistic hope that the work was finished and that they just didn’t have time to take their equipment away. In my little fantasy, on January 9th, they would just bring all kinds of trucks that they would schlep the equipment up and into, and go off singing something like, “Heigh-Ho, Heigh-Ho, it’s off to Tadoussac, we go.” Then they would drive away and all this construction work would be a dark memory.
Ah, January, it leaves you no illusions. Once the temperate January thaw is over, we will descend into the deep freeze and those poor guys will just have to work a bit faster. Ha-Ha, did you hear me, boys, faster!
Meanwhile, I hope that my car doesn’t stall in the middle of that one open lane. Then those construction workers might be using the same sort of strong language about me that I’ve been using to describe them.

All The Little Christmas-es

2006-01-05T20:11:00.000-05:00

Happy January 6th. In case you didn’t know it, it’s a big day around the world. For many, it’s Epiphany. It’s the Ukrainian and Armenian Christmas. It is also the birthday of Haile Selassie who is the Messiah of the Rastafarian religion.
In Ireland, January 6th is both known as Little Christmas and Women’s Christmas. It is the last day of Christmas holidays for children and as Women’s Christmas, it’s a day when men take over all household chores and give women the day off. Friends of mine from Cork tell me that the bars are full of women out for a good time. Then on January 7th, the tree is taken down and Christmas is officially over.
I’m looking at my tree and heaving a ponderous sigh. While our tree is not a big tree, there are a lot of decorations on it and all must be put away the right way, my way. You see, I’m not obsessive about many things except keeping CDs and DVDs in alphabetical order (I am a librarian after all) and putting away Christmas decorations so that they don’t get scratched and are easy to put up the following year. This is why I very uncharacteristically ask for no help when undoing the Christmas tree. I don’t want to have to explain and defend my methods. I just want to get the job done right with as little havoc and destruction as possible.
Putting up the tree is usually festive with the soundtrack for the Charlie Brown Christmas show wailing away in the background and family members finding prominent places on the tree for their favourite ornaments. Taking down the tree is definitely a time for blues. You don’t want something too depressing, for example, an old Leonard Cohen album might make you feel positively suicidal considering the fact that you may not have seen sunlight for weeks and that your body is dehydrated from all the beer, wine and/or champagne that you’ve been swilling as opposed to good, healthy water. No, you want something a little bluesy but upbeat – maybe some B. B. King or Bonnie Raitt.
Then once the right music is selected, all the boxes for the Christmas glass balls come out with their appropriate lids placed underneath. Then the glass balls are removed first so that they don’t break while every thing else comes down. These boxes go at the bottom of a big carton because next year, the glass balls will be the last thing to go up. Then all the ornaments go in plastic bags and are twist tied shut. The strings of beads that I use for garlands go in sealed sandwich bags and are placed on top of the ornaments. Then the stockings and room ornaments go on top of those in the big box because those will be the first to go up next Christmas a good two weeks before the tree.
Finally, the lights are wrapped around these nifty plastic thingies that we bought that are specifically for keeping Christmas lights from getting tangled and knotted. These are a good invention, folks, go out and buy extras as the amount of grief that they have saved us over the years is enormous.
Now, Christmas is over and the long, dark night of the soul, January and February, have begun. With that in mind, I break three different New Year’s resolutions and crack open a Guinness. Happy New Year.