Category Archives: Humour

Sep 30 2013
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Culture, Humour

Sitting up for the real truth

The truth has gone to ground

The truth has gone to ground

In the immortal words of Fox Mulder, the fictional FBI agent in the ‘90s cult TV show, The X Files, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. I used to turn that aphorism on its ear: Just because they’re out to get you, doesn’t mean you’re paranoid.

At the time, that seemed to make more practical sense to me as I watched not one, but two, of my employers go bankrupt overnight, victims of shadowy forces they barely perceived, let alone feared.

Lately, though, I’ve come to believe that Mr. Mulder had a point. Conspiracies swirl. Threats are extant. The men in black wear double-wide sized 9s and stand at the foot of my driveway, sifting through the confetti my shredder produces.

Oh yeah. . .the truth is out there people, but trust no one to tell you exactly what that is. (Is it coincidental that the actor, David Duchovny, who played the G-man is exactly the same age as my wife, to the date and year, and that she finds him oddly off-putting? I think not. There’s more to this than meets the eye. But, I digress).

Let’s talk about sitting.

Just released is another in a long line of studies that “prove” that resting on one’s derrière for long hours a day is not only bad for you; it will actually kill you as surely as an assassin’s blade.

Late last year, The Guardian had this to say about the hazard: “Sitting for more than three hours per day cuts about two years off your life expectancy. . .Watching more than two hours of TV per day will cut your life expectancy down another year. An even bleaker discovery? Moderate exercise doesn’t seem to offset the effects of this excessive sitting either. ‘It’s not just about getting physical activity in your life,’ Dr. Peter T. Katzmarzyk of Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, told Businessweek. ‘Just because you’re doing 30 minutes of physical activity, what about the other 23.5 hours. Don’t just sit the rest of the day.’”

That sounds like good advice, until you consider the source: The globally interconnected medical establishment.

By now, it knows that most people don’t trust it. (How else do you explain the rise of homeopathy and the latent terror of vaccinations)? Therefore, most people will continue to sit around on their arses, watching, say, reruns of The X Files, despite, or, indeed, because of, the expert warnings.

That plays magnificently well into the hands of Big Pharma, who can expect record profits accruing from the drugs they sell to cancer-ridden, diabetes-debilitated patients, ministered to by – you guessed it – the medical establishment. Let the kickbacks commence.

But the conspiracy doesn’t end there. In fact, it’s diabolically nuanced. Think office furniture. Are you getting the picture?

Physicians know that a percentage of people, though in the minority, will actually heed their warnings and immediately shell out hundreds of dollars each for the latest, spiffiest “standing desk” and workplace treadmill so as to avoid stroking out at his keyboard. What’s in it for the doctors? Prescription and post-it pads for life. I kid you not. You can’t make this stuff up.

Yes, gentle reader, the dark confederacies are everywhere.

Just ask Jesse Ventura, former pro wrestler, Minnesota governor, author and occasional actor. (He actually played a man in black in several episodes of The X Files. So, he should know a thing or two about cover ups). “Hidden power, secrets, corruption,” he said at the top of his short-lived TV show, Conspiracy Theory. “You think you know the whole story? Think again. I’ve been a Navy SEAL, a fighter. I’ve heard things that will blow your mind. And now I think it’s time that you get the whole story.”

On the other hand, we may never really want to know the whole story.

The truth may be out there. But you can keep it to yourself, especially if it’s boring.

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Sep 25 2013
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Employment, Humour

Forget ‘slow pay.’ How about ‘no pay?’

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Help Wanted: Are you a self-starter, a go-getter, someone who takes care of business and, to paraphrase Bachman-Turner Overdrive, loves to work for nothing all day?

Are you young, eager, over-educated, underemployed, desperate to gain a toe-hold in the wonderful world of work? Are you at the end of your rope?

If this sounds like you, then look no further. We at The Ritual Abuse Corporation – one of the largest private employment agencies in the world – want to meet you. Our inboxes are on fire thanks the steadily rising number of our clients who are searching for someone just like you; someone who will fill a short-term, unpaid internship and whistle a happy tune whilst doing it. “Thank you mother,” you’ll croon, “may I have another?”

You must have heard about this. It’s all the rage in the post-apocalyptic, financially melted global economy.

According to an article a in the Daily Mail, out of the UK, a couple years back, “Firms across the country are increasingly relying on unpaid interns in a bid to cut costs in a tough economic climate, according to a new study. Bosses in the design and digital industry expect more work for less money, leading to fewer permanent staff members and more unpaid interns, according to think tank the Institute for Public Policy Research, which carried out a survey of 500 agency workers.”

More recently, Susan Adams, a staff writer at Forbes, observed, “As the ranks of the unemployed have swelled and the surplus of jobless college students and grads has grown, increasing numbers of people young and old have been signing on for unpaid internships, wanting to make contacts and accumulate résumé lines that can help them get paying work.”

Indeed, it’s a win-win for everybody – a joyful alliance between probity and exigency. Think of the opportunities that await you.

As an unpaid intern, everything is within your job description. On any given day, you might find yourself slinging coffee. When your bosses (a group which comprises just about everyone else in the organization) spill said coffee, you’ll be dispatched to clean up the mess. Think of the contacts you’ll make. Imagine the résumé lines you’ll be able to accumulate.

Of course, your employer also benefits from not having to book your wages and benefits (because, officially, there are none). That means it gets to keep its hard-earned cash in the bank where it’s been sitting for years.

That’s important, especially when you consider the natural oder of the universe, neatly summarized in a CNN Money piece late last year: “Just four years after the worst shock to the economy since the Great Depression, U.S. corporate profits are stronger than ever. In the third quarter, corporate earnings were $1.75 trillion, up 18.6 per cent from a year ago. . .That took after-tax profits to their greatest percentage of GDP in history. But the record profits come at the same time that workers’ wages have fallen to their lowest-ever share of GDP. ‘That’s how it works,’ said Robert Brusca, economist with FAO Research in New York, who said there is a natural tension between profits and the cost of labor. ‘If one gets bigger, the other gets smaller.’”

Still, you shouldn’t delay hitching up for the next available unpaid tour of duty. Storm clouds are gathering and pretty soon it may begin to rain on everyone’s parade. Consider one recent headline.

“Two former interns have filed complaints with government against Bell Mobility, alleging the telecom giant broke labour laws by not paying them for work they did for the company,” CBC News reported in June. ‘It felt like I was sitting in an office as an employee, doing regular work. It didn’t feel like a sort of training program,’ said Jainna Patel, 24, who was an unpaid intern with Bell for five weeks last year. ‘They just squeezed out of you every hour they could get and never showed any intent of paying.’”

In fact, that sounds very much like another species of unpaid labour that even we, at The Ritual Abuse Corporation, would never condone: entrepreneurship.

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Sep 24 2013
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Humour, Politics

A grim fable for the fiscally frightened

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“No fairy tales, please” – New Brunswick policy specialist Donald Savoie, a long-time advocate for debt reform in government, on public attitudes towards political promises during the run-up to next year’s election, Saint John Telegraph-Journal, Sept. 21, 2013.

Once upon a time, not so long ago, in the land between the rising and setting sun, there lived a troll under a covered bridge, next to Perdition Highway, known locally as The Road to Nowhere.

Unlike most trolls, who are fierce and lean, this one was lazy and fat. He spent a good deal of his time, days and nights, fantasizing about his next meal, which was, in fact, never very far away. So bottomless was his appetite that the villagers in the area called him Poor Black Hole.

“Look how hungry he is,” they would say. “He must have a tape worm.”

But no matter how much or how frequently they fed him, Poor Black Hole was never full. Indeed, he grew so big his bulk threatened to break the deck of the bridge above him; still, he couldn’t get enough to eat.

“I need more,” he would cry. “Can’t you see that I am wasting away.”

Clearly, Poor Black Hole had body image issues. But the villagers were too polite to mount any sort of intervention. So, they continued to empty their pantries and drain their cupboards in the hope – vain though it was – that he would finally shut up.

Eventually, the people’s plight came to the attention of the king, who worried that his subjects would soon run out of the staples they needed to survive.

“We must do something about Poor Black Hole,” he told his chancellor of the exchequer. “He’s sucking the life out of my tithe-payers. At the rate he’s going, there won’t be anything left for roads or schools or hospitals.”

The chancellor, a pragmatic sort of fellow, agreed. “It is a serious problem, o sire,” he said. “The circumstances are drastic and they require drastic measures. I suggest that the royal court stop giving the people their special dispensations whenever they demand. They only hand them over to the troll, anyway. Then, we should increase the levies on every adult man and woman in the kingdom and use the money to raise an army with which to vanquish the filthy beast.”

The king pondered awhile and then turned to his faithful servant and said, “I’ll get back to you,” whereupon he promptly fell into a deep slumber.

Days passed, then months, then years. And as the king slept, the people grew poorer and the troll grew fatter. Eventually, the bridge over Poor Black Hole’s head cracked and tumbled to the ground. He didn’t mind, just as long as his meals came fast and furious, which, of course, they did.

Meanwhile, other bridges cracked and tumbled to the ground. Schools closed. Emergency rooms shut down. Roads became impassable. Perdition Highway, long the most heavily travelled thoroughfare in the realm, failed under the weight of its traffic.

When the king finally awoke, he was dismayed and a tad rueful.

“I guess I should have gotten back to you earlier,” he told his chancellor, to which the weary factotum replied in a voice that was barely audible: “You think?”

What, the king demanded to know, could they do now? The treasury had been emptied, the courtiers disbanded. Worse, perhaps, the villagers were revolting on rumours that their royal favours were about to be cut off.

Their land was a shambles and they were in constant danger from foreign carpetbaggers and moneylenders. But they were entitled to their entitlements. Weren’t they? Apart from anything else, these were how they fed the troll.

“Maybe,” the king ventured, “we should just tell everybody to move. . .you know. . .lock the gates, haul up the drawbridge, shutter the windows before things get really bad.”

The chancellor furrowed his brow and, pulling a parchment from his satchel, declared, “Sire, it may already be too late. I have a report that indicates that the villagers are willing to go to extraordinary lengths to protect their state perks. . .apparently, they’ve started to feed Poor Black Hole something new.”

The king raised an eyebrow. “What’s that?” he asked.

Sighed the Chancellor: “Their young.”

And they all lived. . .well. . .must I spell it out?

The End.

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Sep 12 2013
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Culture, Humour

The 15-minute solution to (just about) everything

Fame is so fleeting, so cold in its remembrance

Fame is so fleeting, so cold in its remembrance

There’s more time than you think in 15 minutes. Just ask Stephen Harper, who claims to have written a book about hockey in daily quarter-hour increments over the past ten years. I have no reason to doubt him.

In 15 minutes, I can get a lot done. I can walk a mile. I can mow the back lawn. I can weed the front garden. I can start and finish my Pilates routine. I can hard-boil an egg. If life were truly organized the way an advertising agency bills its clients – with a tyrannical focus on getting results in bite-sized chunks of the hour – I might even solve the crisis in the Middle East or work out that whole cold fusion thing.

But, I must admit, the idea of penning a manuscript on Canada’s great game – or, indeed, on anything – in this fashion has never entered my mind. How would that work, exactly?

The prime minister comes home after a hard day of insulting the Official Opposition, grabs a quick bite with the wife and kids, retires to the study, dons his favorite sweater-vest, flips on an old Guy Lomdardo recording, taps the stopwatch sitting to the right of his computer. Go! Fifteen minutes later, it’s time for bed.

Is it really all that implausible? The math suggests the approach is remarkably efficient. Multiply 15 by 365 (for the number of days in the year) and you get 5,475 minutes. Now divide that product by 60 (for the number of minutes in an hour) and you get 91.25. So, that works out to be equivalent to one extremely long work-week a year, or about three months of full-time effort over ten. Not too shabby, at all.

We can’t yet know the quality of the project’s result (it’s only available to the reading public in early November). Still, the economy of its execution is impressive.

On the other hand, why Mr. Harper chose 15 minutes – and not, say, 10 or 20 – as the duration of his daily input remains a mystery. It could have to do with the importance of this unit of time in the popular zeitgeist.

“In the future,” Andy Warhol once said, “everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” There’s even a Wikipedia entry titled, “15 minutes of fame”, in which the author, or authors, report, “Benjamin H.D. Buchloh suggests that the core tenet of Warhol’s aesthetic, being ‘the systematic invalidation of the hierarchies of representational functions and techniques’ of art, corresponds directly to the belief that the ‘hierarchy of subjects worthy to be represented will someday be abolished,’ hence anybody, and therefore ‘everybody,’ can be famous once that hierarchy dissipates, ‘in the future’.”

Again, though, why 15 minutes?

A Los Angeles-based media and public relations company that actually calls itself “Fifteen Minutes” explains on its website, “In today’s world, anything is possible in fifteen minutes. Identities are built. Futures are shaped. Legends are born.”

Really? That seems like a mighty tall order for such a fleeting sweep of the minute hand.

Less ambitious, perhaps, is Christine from the U.S. Midwest who runs something called 15minutebeauty.com. “I’m a Pediatric Critical Care doctor,” she writes. “My husband is a professor at a huge university. . .I’m a mommy and a bit of a beauty addict. If left to my own devices, I could easily spend four hours getting ready each morning! Unfortunately, I am most definitely NOT a morning person, so I’m often running late. I need to squeeze a product heavy routine into. . .15 minutes!”

For its part, ABC Literacy Canada thinks a quarter-of-an-hour is just the right amount of time to wean junior off the gaming console. “Learning can happen at any time,” it declares on its website. Practicing literacy together for just 15 minutes a day has tremendous benefits for both children and parents.”

You can, among other things, “Create your own comic strip about your family. . .

Invent two new endings to your favourite book. . .Tell knock-knock jokes together while doing the dishes” and “find 15 things that begin with the letter ‘S’.”

Here’s one: “S” is for “Stephen Harper”, who wrote a book about hockey in daily quarter-hour increments over the past ten years, and who’s now enjoying his 15 minutes of fame for having done so.

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Sep 06 2013
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Environment, Humour

Musings on the remains of daylight

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Where I walk, almost daily, to feed my illusion of youthful vigour, the mall at the corner of Champlain and Paul Streets in Dieppe posts signs that cheerfully remind patrons about its program of “daylight harvesting”.

One finds a fuller explanation on its website, which boasts “Champlain Place is leading the way in energy efficiency. 2008 renovations. . .included skylights with photo sensors able to ‘read’ sunlight entering . . .and adjust the interior lighting system, shutting lights off when sunlight reaches the pre-determined level. It’s lights out for the environment!”

That last phrase may be understood in one of two utterly different ways, but as the summer begins to recede and the sun seems ever lazier, I prefer the more optimistic interpretation. After all, every last morsel of daylight is, as Martha Stewart might agree, a good thing.

Unless you happen to live or work near Tower Bridge in a certain European capital of ancient repute.

“Developers have promised urgent action to cover up the Walkie Talkie skyscraper being built in the City of London after an ultra-bright light reflected from the building melted a Jaguar car on a street below,” reports a joint piece from the Independent and Associated Press.

“The 160m tall, £200 million ($397 million) building has been renamed the Walkie Scorchie after its distinctive concave surfaces reflected a dazzling beam of light which blinded passersby and extensively damaged vehicles below. . .Company director Martin Lindsay left his Jaguar XJ for an hour opposite the building, and returned to find warped side panels and the smell of burning plastic. ‘They’re going to have to think of something. I’m gutted,’ he said.”

In fact, “they’re” working on it. In a statement, the developers – Canary Wharf and Land Securities – explained that “the phenomenon is caused by the current elevation of the sun in the sky. It currently lasts for approximately two hours per day, with initial modeling suggesting that it will be present for approximately two to three weeks. . .We are consulting with local businesses and the City to address the issue in the short-term, while also evaluating longer-term solutions.”

One of these might be to stop building skyscrapers with so much glass. England’s weather service reports that London – traditionally, a dark and dank metropolis – has experience a record number of glitteringly sunny days this summer. The cause, it says, is most likely climate change, which suggests that residents can, in the future, expect regular occurrences of charred cafe awnings, melted dashboards and burnt doormats up and down Fenchurch Street.

But London is not the only place where Earth’s G-class, yellow dwarf star is causing headaches.

“Alarmed by what they say has become an existential threat to their business, utility companies are moving to roll back government incentives aimed at promoting solar energy and other renewable sources of power,” The New York Times reported last month. “At stake, the companies say, is nothing less than the future of the American electricity industry. ‘We did not get in front of this disruption,’ Clark Gellings, a fellow at the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit arm of the industry, said during a panel discussion at the annual utility convention last month. ‘It may be too late.’”

The worry is that if roof-top solar panels continue to drop in price and rise in popularity – as they have in California and Arizona – the cost of regulated, distributed energy from more traditional, less environmentally friendly sources will shoot up, perhaps to unmarketable, unsustainable levels, forcing everyone back into the stone  age. As the U.S. Energy Information Administration reported in July, the solar segment of the electric power sector in that country is expected to grow by 79 per cent in  2013, and 49 per cent next year.

Should I worry? Does Cadillac Fairview, which manages Champlain Mall, realize that its daylight harvests are contributing to the decline and fall of western civilization? Or am I simply suffering from a mild dose of sun silliness?

It seems to be going around.

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Aug 20 2013
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Humour, Politics

We’d better step up our scandalous game

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There is nothing as disappointing, nothing that deflates the national self-worth as thoroughly, as a boring political scandal. We Canadians are lamentably proficient at manufacturing only the dreariest of all possible controversies.

Senator Pamela Wallin may or may not have bilked taxpayers tens-of-thousands-of-dollars either deliberately or unwittingly. Her colleague, Mike Duffy, improperly accepted a gift of $90,000 to pay off his debt to the Upper Chamber. Really? Is that all we got? Paper trails and chump change?

I’m sorry, but we’re going to have to do a lot better than that if we intend to enter the big leagues of global misconduct. Where are the illicit affairs, the love children, the hush money, the blackmail? Where are the tearful confessions, the bitter reproaches, the orchestrated displays of rehabilitation, the 24/7 news coverage?

More to the point, where is Anthony Weiner when we need him?

Mr. Weiner (pronounced “wee-ner”), you may recall, is the former multi-term U.S. congressman from New York’s ninth district who, in 2011, sent a picture of his underwear-clad private parts to one of his female Twitter followers. Initially, of course, he denied having done the misdeed. Then, at a press conference, he admitted that he had, in fact, “exchanged messages and photos of an explicit nature with about six women over the last three years,” adding: “To be clear, the picture was of me, and I sent it. I’m deeply sorry for the pain this has caused my wife, and our family, my constituents, my friends, my supporters and my staff. . .I lied because I was ashamed at what I had done, and I didn’t want to get caught.”

More recently, the apparently sexting-addicted politico, who is running for mayor of New York City, allows that he has continued his puerile ways even though they cost him his seat in Congress. In one of his tweets, under the nom de plum “Carlos Danger”, he reportedly describes himself as “an argumentative, perpetually horny middle-aged man”. Astonishingly, he refuses to drop out of the race.

All of which is enough to inspire The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg to marvel, in one recent issue of the magazine, “The saga of the transgressions of Anthony D. Weiner. . .is remarkable for many reasons. Chief among them is what the protagonist of the tale did not, as far as we know, do. He did not commit adultery. He did not break up a marriage, his own or anyone else’s. He did not employ the services of a prostitute. He did not stalk. He did not misuse public funds. . .He and his partners in sin have never been in the same room at the same time.”

In fact, he did nothing whatsoever except to reveal himself as a man who, in Mr. Hertzberg’s estimation, “is too unself-aware, too immature, and too narcissistic to be mayor.” Perhaps, but when it comes to processing scandals to remain perpetually in the public eye, this narcissist is a genius. Even the Brits could learn a thing or two from him.

Across the pond, reports that Prime Minister David Cameron’s “flagship law to end Britain’s lobbying scandals is a ‘useless dog’s breakfast’ and the Government should urgently postpone its current fast-tracked progress through Westminster, according to the head of the Commons committee that has scrutinised the reform. Graham Allen, who leads the Political and Constitutional Reform Select Committee, has taken the unusual step of recalling his committee ahead of MPs’ return to Parliament next month, to hold special evidence sessions involving leading figures from the UK lobbying industry.”

As Mr. Allen told the news source in an exclusive, “The new lobbying law is rushed and ridiculous. Instead of addressing the Prime Minister’s promise to ‘shine the light of transparency’ on lobbying, this flawed legislation will mean we’ll all be back in a year facing another scandal. It is a dog’s breakfast.”

Important? Sure. Boring? Absolutely.

For our part, we Canadians deserve far better from our public officials. It’s been some time since we’ve been truly outraged. This is late summer, after all. The weather shouldn’t be the only thing that stays hot and steamy.

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Aug 19 2013
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Humour

The search for intelligent life is alienating

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We sat, my wife and I, amid the purple Coneflowers and Black-eyed Susans in the garden, which we lovingly tend, idly discussing the news of the day – Egypt’s unravelling proto-democracy, the Senate expense scandal in Ottawa, Moncton’s summer road construction schedule – when, just above the tree line, a fleet of brilliantly white lights, appeared in the eastern sky. We shrugged with mild contempt and returned to our conversation.

That’s the trouble with ET. It’s not that he doesn’t phone home; it’s that he never phones ahead.

Apparently, he’s been conducting a lot of annoying, unannounced pop-ins recently. According to a Winnipeg Sun item in May, “More Manitobans than ever before reported seeing unidentified flying objects last year. A survey on UFO sightings in Canada released. . .by Ufology Research reveals there were 124 reported sightings in Manitoba in 2012, up from 81 the previous year and the most sightings recorded in a single year since records started being kept on the topic in 1989. Seventeen of those sightings emanated from Winnipeg, the report states.”

The “sightings” in the province were part of a growing tendency among Canadians to spy space aliens from the comfort of their patio furniture. In fact, the folks at Ufology Research counted nearly 2,000 reported sightings across the country in 2012  – more than double the number in 2008. Ontario boasted the most (822) and PEI the least (2). Oddly, as a per capita proportion of the population, New Brunswick ranked close to the head of the class (41).

In fact, this summer has been a busy one for alien-spotters in Westmorland County. On July 31 at 10:45 pm local time, two “credible witnesses” in Shediac “saw a series of reddish orange balls coming across the sky from the southwest, in a straight line,” reports Ufology Research on its website. “We’re on a common flight path for transatlantic flights here, but the men, retired engineers, could also see airplanes in the sky that had no connection to these objects. The sighting lasted about 15 minutes. No noise or other lights as you might see on aircraft; nothing but the balls of light themselves, about a dozen in number.”

Some weeks ago, the Moncton Times & Transcript lent editorial real estate to claims by residents near Pointe-du-Chene of seeing luminous objects hovering silently in the starry night. Were these a precursor of invasion or just a couple of Chinese lanterns that had slipped their moorings? The investigation, I assume, continues.

In any case, no less esteemed an expert on all things cosmological than astrophysicist Stephen Hawking – the size of whose brain pan is reputed to be second only to that of the late Albert Einstein – has suggested that if extraterrestrials exist, and if they pay regular visits to our humble orb, they may be “nomads, looking to conquer and colonize”. In a 2010 documentary for the Discovery Channel, he said, “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet.

The remark earned a mild rebuke from former Canadian defence minister Paul Hellyer, who told The Canadian Press, “I think (Professor Hawking) is indulging in some pretty scary talk there that I would have hoped would not come from someone with such an established stature. . .I think it’s really sad that a scientist of his repute would contribute to what I would consider more misinformation about a vast and very important subject.”

He continued: “The reality is that they’ve (aliens) been visiting Earth for decades and probably millennia and have contributed considerably to our knowledge. Microchips, for example, fiber-optics, they are just two of the many things that allegedly – and probably for real – came from crashed vehicles.”

In other words, the truth is not only out there; it’s all around us.

Meanwhile, as my wife and I continued to mourn the passing of intelligent life on Planet Earth, much less the universe, we watched as the fleet of white lights noiselessly transformed themselves into a flock of seagulls whose wings had caught the dazzling glow of the slowly setting sun.

We breathed a collective sigh of relief. Given the news of the day, we were in no mood for company.

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Aug 16 2013
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Humour, Politics

The lazy, crazy days of summer on the Hill

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Stephen Harper doesn’t strike me as a beach-combing, swimsuit-wearing type of guy. Nor do I imagine him to be much of a cracker-barreller, hanging around the local five-and-dime, good-naturedly swapping stories with the geriatric set. Someone told me he once wore a suit to a barbecue.

In fact, I have no idea how the esteemed prime minister prefers to spend his down time (does he have down time?), but the days of his annual furlough from Crazytown are rapidly running out. He’d better smoke ‘em while he’s got ‘em, for the fall legislative session promises to be. . .well, let’s just say, trying.

Goodbye Andrew MacDougall. We hardly knew ye. Then again, we hardly knew any of your predecessors, either. Seven directors of communications for the Prime Minister’s Office in seven years, in one door and out the other. That’s got to be some kind of record. For his part, Mr. MacDougall thanked his boss, thanked the media “for and interesting experience,” and praised his colleagues and staff for making him “look good”, especially when they weren’t screwing up.

Funny stuff. His acknowledged sense of whimsy will be sorely missed in Ottawa as he assumes his new responsibilities at a “strategic communications” firm in London, U.K., rescuing some other guy’s butt from the pyre of public opinion.

Really, though, does Fat City proffer a more thankless job than the one Mr. MacDougall leaves behind?

Just a moment; I believe it does.

The whereabouts of one Pamela Wallin are much on people’s minds these days. And by “whereabouts,” I mean her mode of conveyance across this vast land of ours. Is it a commercial flight from the nation’s Capitol to Toronto to Saskatchewan? Or is it the bus under which her Senate colleagues have thrown her?

Having already repaid $38,000 in improperly claimed travel expenses, Ms. Wallin must now pony up an additional $83,000. She says she’ll do it. But she’s not happy about it. Speaking to reporters in Ottawa this week, the embattled Senator had this to say about the independent audit of her spending by Deloitte:

“It is my view that this report is the result of a fundamentally flawed and unfair process. When appointed to the Senate in 2009, I was determined to be an activist Senator, one who saw it as her job to advance causes that are important to Canadians. When invited to appear publicly and speak on subjects including the role of women in public life, Canada’s mission in Afghanistan, and support for our troops, I saw it as my duty to accept whenever able to do so. Travel to these public speeches and appearances was, and is, in my continuing view, a legitimate Senate expense.

“However, in the Deloitte report, a number of expenses going back to 2009 that were submitted – and approved – by Senate Finance over a four year period have now been disallowed. Deloitte has wrongly, in my view and in the opinion of my lawyers, applied the 2012 changes made to the Senators’ Travel Policy retroactively. The result is that travel expenses, which were approved and paid by Senate Finance in 2009, 2010 and 2011 have, in a number of cases, been disallowed.”

Still, she added, “While I have serious concerns about the fairness of this process, I do not want to further burden the people of Saskatchewan, the Canadian public, or my Senate colleagues any more with this matter. . .I will pay back the full amount ordered by the Committee, including interest, once the final figure is given to me, and I will do so from my own resources.”

None of which prevents her confreres in the Red Chamber from clucking their pious disapprovals, even as some might frantically check their own records for evidence of unintended malfeasance. All of which raises a fresh batch of questions about an institution that can’t, for the ossified life of it, figure out how to regulate itself.

Over at the PMO, which Mr. Harper must re-embrace all too soon, the message remains crystal clear. As Mr. MacDougall told The Globe and Mail this week, “Our government will not tolerate the waste and abuse of taxpayer money. We expect that any inappropriate expenses will be repaid.”

It was, perhaps, his swan song, the title of which reads: “I’m outta’ here, and not a moment too soon.”

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Aug 08 2013
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Humour, Media

Regretting the errors of the summer sillies

So many retractions, so little time

So many retractions, so little time

It is a mystery that only the Gods who lord over the ink-stained wretches of the Fourth Estate may explain: Why is it that during the year’s slowest, silliest news season, editorial corrections seem to bloom like algae on a summer pond?

The Globe and Mail printed six of them in one day this week. Some were funny. All were the necessary.

“A July 27 news feature on Georgian Bay water levels incorrectly quoted Diane Ross-Langley saying it would cost $20,000 to fix the docking area,” one declared. “In fact, it will cost $200,000. In addition her husband’s name is Philip Langley, not Larry Langley as incorrectly published.”

Another reported that “A Saturday theatre review incorrectly said that in 1985-86, greenhouse gases ‘ripped a hole in the ozone layer.’ In fact, the cause of the breakdown in the ozone layer was CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) which were eventually banned.”

Then there was one correcting an assertion that “Ray Donovan” appears on HBO (it’s actually a Showtime product); one that retracted a statement that Canada is home to 14 million pets (the number is closer to 26 million); one that set the record straight on the headquarters of Berkshire Investments (Netherlands, not Boston); and even one that redfacedly admitted the paper got the name of one its writers wrong in the byline (sorry Christie, not Christine, Day).

I shouldn’t crow. Once, when I was barely a month past my probationary term at the Globe, I wrote a stock market item for the Report on Business section. The correction that followed was one column inch longer than the original piece.

Still, when the news is either non-existent or horrible (a kid-killing snake in Campbellton, N.B., has lead the front pages from Halifax to Vancouver all week), reading the squibs editors craft for damage control can be an oddly pleasurable way to pass the time.

The Huffington Post’s “Comedy” section makes an ardent study of them as they appear in newspapers across North America. Here, in no particular order, is a sampling from its archives:

“The Earth orbits the Sun, not the moon. Incorrect information appeared in a story on Page A1 in Wednesday’s Citizen.”

“Due to a typing error, Saturday’s story on local artist Jon Henninger mistakenly reported that Henninger’s bandmate Eric Lyday was on drugs. The story should have read that Lyday was on drums.”

“In the September profile of Chelsea Clinton. . .Dan Baer was mistakenly identified as an interior designer. He is a deputy assistant secretary for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labour at the U.S. Department of State.”

“On page 27 of Express’ May 6 issue, we conflated the superheroes The Atom and Ant-Man. The Atom’s alter ego is Dr. Ray Palmer, not Dr. Hank Pym. Ant-Man, whose alter ego IS Dr. Hank Pym, can talk to ants; The Atom cannot.”

“Readers many have noticed that the Valley News misspelled its own name on yesterday’s front page. Given that we routinely call on other institutions to hold themselves accountable for their mistakes, let us say for the record: We sure feel silly.”

Absolutely, and so you should. Still, you can take solace in the fact that you are not, and never will be, alone.

Consider the correction that followed a piece on The New York Times website last year: “An earlier version of this article misidentified the number of years E.B. White wrote for The New Yorker. It was five decades, not centuries.”

Consider, further, the hay Vanity Fair laughingly made with the blooper:

“An earlier version of this article misidentified the number of books Joyce Carol Oates has published. It is more than 40, not more than 40 million.”

“An earlier version of this article misidentified the number of good books written by Jack Kerouac. It is zero.”

“An earlier version of this article misidentified the number of Newt Gingrich’s marriages. It is three, not infinity.”

All of which may only prove the truth in the adage, “To err is human; to forgive is bovine.” Or, something like that.

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Jul 04 2013
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Humour, Society

The mysteries of life on Earth abound

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Nietzsche was wrong. God is not dead. But he is. . .well, uninteresting.

Or that’s what the latest issue of The Atlantic reports in a wee item entitled, “We’ve figured Out the Universe – and It’s Boring.” The magazine’s Rebecca J. Rosen, a senior associate editor, quotes several scientists suffering from mild depression, a not-yet-diagnosed malady I’ll call “post-Higgs boson syndrome.”

Having borne witness, last year, to the discovery of the particle that was supposed to explain everything (and, in fact, does, just as predicted) British mathematician Stephen Wolfram complained, “At some level I’m actually a little disappointed.”

Why? The formidable Stephen Hawking, the Director of Research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology at the University of Cambridge, put it this way: “The great advances in physics have come from experiments that gave results we didn’t expect.” Added Columbia University physicist Peter Woit, “I always felt the best possible thing. . .would be to not see the Higgs.”

All of which only proves what every nerd and geek knows in his or her ComiCon-drenched soul: Poets can’t hold a candle to scientists for unalloyed sentimentality.

But if the cosmos is entirely explicable, what are we to make of its constituents – specifically, this third rock from a yellow dwarf star in the suburbs of the average-sized galaxy we call The Milky Way? The mysteries that attend life of Earth show no sign of remission. If anything, they advance in perfect marching step.

Today, Egyptians rejoice at the removal, by their unelected military, of their duly elected president Mohammed Morsi. As the Globe and Mail’s Patrick Martin notes, “Historic Tahrir Square exploded in joy shortly after 9 p.m. Wednesday when, for the second time in two years, Egypt’s military leaders announced they have forced the country’s president from office, relieving him of his command and replacing him with an executive of their choosing. . .It was an odd thing to celebrate. Just 29 months ago, many of these same people had occupied Tahrir Square and cheered the prospects of democracy finally coming to Egypt. This warm night in July, they were welcoming back a military-led transition in place of a democratically elected president.”

Today, U.S. President Obama (who doesn’t know what to think about the latest developments in Egypt) is hell-bent on completing his man hunt for Edward Snowdon, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked specifics about American and British surveillance programs that target, essentially, everyone.

According to the Guardian this week, “The plane carrying the Bolivian president, Evo Morales, from Russia has been rerouted to Austria, following suspicions that (Mr. Snowdon) was on board, leading to a major diplomatic incident. The Bolivian foreign minister, David Choquehuanca, said French and Portuguese authorities refused to allow the plane to fly through their airspace. He added that rumours Snowden was on board were unfounded. ‘We don’t know who invented this lie. We want to denounce to the international community this injustice with the plane of President Evo Morales,’ Choquehuanca told Associated Press.”

Today, a new study from the World Meteorological Organization finds that the ten-year span between 2001 and 2010 was the warmest decade in 160 years. Says the WMO news release: “The world experienced unprecedented high-impact climate extremes during the 2001-2010 decade, which was the warmest since the start of modern measurements in 1850 and continued an extended period of pronounced global warming. More national temperature records were reported broken than in any previous decade. . .Global-average concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rose to 389 parts per million in 2010 (an increase of 39 per cent since the start of the industrial era in 1750), methane to 1808.0 parts per billion (15 per cent) and nitrous oxide to 323.2 parts per billion (20 per cent).”

Still, other research paints a somewhat different picture. In May, Scientific American reported: “The Earth is now warming faster than at any time in the last 11,000 years, but scientists do not understand clearly why the atmosphere has warmed less than they expected over the last decade or so – and more slowly than in the 1990s.”

God may be boring. We, on the other hand, continue to ignore His example.

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