A great typo

One of the good things about being in a job where I spend much of my time either reading or writing is that I catch a lot of spelling and typographical errors. I even commit the odd one myself.

Sometimes these typos are the innocuous-albeit-annoying ones like teh instead of the, or -toin instead of -tion in words like association. At other times, though, the misspellings create malapropisms that are just plain funny. I've lost count of the number of times I've read about people who have tried to diffuse tense situations instead of defusing them... or the never-ending they're/their/there, it's/its, you're/your or born/borne. And don't even get me started on affect/effect or licence/license.

I think I have a new favourite. As is my wont (not want), I was reading through the comments on a recent CBC News article online. One of the posters wanted, no doubt, to talk about the vicious circle of paying higher rates for a lower level of service on his cellular phone. But the spelling gremlins got there first and our hero ended up referring to a viscous circle.

Ewww.

I couldn't stop myself from thinking about how Gary Larson would have drawn a cartoon to illustrate something like "Gerry suddenly found himself drawn into a viscous circle". Mmmmmmm... imagine all that cartoony goodness.

And, for a bonus point: isn't a spell checker something a wizard should use to make sure his charms are up to snuff? Okay, okay... I suppose a spelling checker isn't much better; imagine a checkers piece rhyming off words like "perspicacious" or "accommodate". How about an "orthographic verification routine"?

Oh, the heartbreak...

You know, sometimes life just gives you a good swift kick in the teeth, even when you don't deserve it.

Over the years, I've grown used to living in towns that have sports teams that start losing shortly after my arrival. I grew up in Saskatchewan, so I've seen the ups and (ahem, mostly) downs of the Roughriders. My NFL team has always been the Oakland (don't ever call them the Los Angeles) Raiders, who haven't done much of anything since Super Bowl XVIII over twenty years ago. I lived in Boston (Celtics/Bruins/Patriots). Hamilton (Tiger-Cats) and Edmonton (Eskimos and Oilers) came next. And of course, now I live in Toronto where the Maple Leafs are now in season 41 since their last Stanley Cup, Toronto FC will finish the MLS season in the cellar (with the longest scoreless streak in the history of the league), the Jays finished well out of contention and the U of T Varsity Blues are on track to become the losing-est college football team in Canadian history.

And then we have the All-Blacks. I'm not from New Zealand - never even been there - but the way these guys play rugby intrigued me well before I ever played the game. When I did start playing, NZ were the champions of the first-ever Rugby World Cup. Most people spoke of them with a kind of awe. And awe-inspiring they were: strong, tough, inventive and entertaining to watch. And how can you not love any team, in any sport, where there's a traditional war chant/dance before the match?

The poor All-Blacks are, however, not immune from my little personal curse. After winning the inaugural RWC in 1987, they haven't won it since. The only tiny consolation is that arch-enemy France have never won. The sting isn't entirely gone, though, since France has spoiled the All-Blacks' tournament a couple of times, most notably a 1999 contest which some call one of the great rugby matches of all time.

This weekend the All-Blacks managed to break my heart again. Despite being the team to beat in this year's World Cup, they got, well, beaten by (*sigh*) France, 20-18. NZ missed a couple of kicks, and to my dying day I will argue that the pass to Michalak that led to the final French try was forward... but the final result is the final result.

I don't really hold anything against France. It was the French who taught me to love the game, after all. But do they have to crush my haka-chanting, black-jersey-with-silver-fern-wearing heart?

[a word of warning to the wise should suffice: the first person who says "it's only a game" gets a punch in the mouth)

*****
On a cheerier note, something quite funny happened to one of my server friends the other night. A customer asked her what the word "reciprocity" meant. Before she could start to explain the meaning of the term, the customer asked her whether it was a Canadian word. At this point, my friend just started to laugh; it struck her funny that an American would have no idea of the concept of reciprocity. I suggested that the customer might understand it better if put in terms he could understand, i.e. the opposite of unilateralism... but we both thought it better to just leave the poor guy alone.

I know, I know: it's not fair to blithely label all Americans as ignorant of their own language, as well as global politics. But it sure feels good.

The *real* World Cup is on!

Mmmmmm.... rugby...

The Rugby World Cup started last week. I'm in heaven. An Irish company called Setanta Sports is carrying all the matches - plus a whole bunch of other rugby (union and league, but no word of sevens yet), soccer, Aussie footie, hurling (!), Gaelic football (!!) and other stuff. A must-have, at least for the four-month minimum subscription.

Adding the channel to my cable TV lineup was a foregone conclusion, although I had to convince the people at the Rogers call centre that since they were advertising the channel on air, they really *should* have it in their subscription system. It took about five tries, with five increasingly-baffled call centre employees, to finally add the channel to my account.

Now my only concern is that the tournament is in full flight just as all my regular must-watch programs are starting up for the fall season. Good thing I have two PVRs.

Jazz is good for you

No, it's not good for you like, say, broccoli or a good night's sleep, but a group of researchers are studying how the experience of improvised music could serve as a model for collaborative work in other areas.

Quoted in a newspaper article, U. of Guelph professor Ajay Heble says: "A group of people who may have never met, who know very little about one another - may not even speak the same language - can create inspired music. What makes it work and what does this tell us? These are the kinds of questions we are asking." You can read the full Globe & Mail article here.

I can see it now: instead of butting heads with management representatives at a bargaining table, I'll just walk in with a horn and call a couple of tunes. Maybe the choice of song would even have some effect on the tenor of negotiations (pun completely intended): perhaps The Meaning of the Blues if things are going badly; In Your Own Sweet Way if I'm feeling conciliatory; All Of Me for concession bargaining; My Favorite Things during the initial stages when each side presents its initial wish list; Old Folks when we discuss pensions... my mind is spinning with possibilities. I'll leave it up to you as to when I might play a tune like You Don't Know What Love Is or (ahem) Oleo.

And oh yes... Todaybour Day is Labour Day! (sorry for the *-gasp!-* US spellings in the linked cartoon) I think Bennedetto is one of my favourite Homestar Runner characters.

Chairs

I am one of those people who appreciates having a chair to call my own. It gives me a sense of belonging; an attachment; a home away from home if you will. It's a place where I have at least a certain measure of, not necessarily control, but perhaps droit de regard over the things that go on around me. And come on, what man can resist being told that "that chair over there is for you"?

In the past few weeks, this agreeable experience has happened to me not once, but twice. The first time was at the very end of June, just before I started my summer holidays. After months of griping about how my office chair was broken and how I needed a new one, it finally arrived:

It's very comfortable, and I can work at my desk all day - if I have to, that is.

Those who know me well know that I like to find a watering hole close to my place of work. It's a good place to sit and decompress from the travails of the day, meet and chat with friends, to meet people, to flirt with waitresses... you know, a real neighbourhood-y place.

I've been a regular at this particular bar on Front Street pretty much since the day it opened about five years ago. I've stuck with them and they've stuck with me. After months of teasing about how I should have my own designated spot in the place, they finally came through.

Yes, they put a plaque on one of the chairs designating it as mine. It was immediately pointed out to me that if any other bar patron named Keith comes in, I'll be out of luck.

Being a regular at a bar is just fine with me, as long as no one ever confuses me with that other famous barfly from TV:

Hmmm... come to think of it, I am starting to look a little like ol' Norm - although you're not likely to catch me wearing a tie too often. Okay, maybe he's a bad example. How about Morn from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine?

Nope, not much resemblance there, right? Right?

My summer vacation

Ahhh... there's nothing quite like the impending end of a summer holiday to remind one that summer holidays are entirely too brief.

This year was much like any other. I spent a week at Humber College at a jazz workshop. I've been doing it for the past six years or so, and it's always entertaining. It's a great opportunity to network with a goodly number of Canada's best jazzers. Just before the Humber workshop there was the annual Toronto Jazz Festival; I was able to get to a few shows, including Metalwood (check them out), guitarist Mike Stern with my favorite (living) electric bassist Alain Caron, and buddy and former Saskatonian Jon Ballantyne.

Also as in past years, it took me a little while to pry myself away from the office. This year, though, it was more because of events and less because of me not being able to disconnect. Of the four weeks I've been officially out of the office I actually did some work for about a week. I do get the time back, though, so it's not like I've done myself out of anything.

One of my work-related activities involved a quick two-day trip to Montreal. My responsibilities kept me there for the full two days, but the meetings were interspersed with lots of downtime, so I was able to catch some of the Just For Laughs comedy festival, as well as Nuits d'Afrique and a snippet of the big international fireworks competition. Mind you, just walking along any of Montreal's major streets is a mini-vacation in itself; the city is sufficiently unlike any other in Canada (or North America, for that matter) that one feels the same dépaysement as one does when vacationing in another country.

Another pseudo-tradition is the time spent catching up on all things Potter. I saw Order of the Phoenix - twice - and read Deathly Hallows - yes, twice. Apparently there is a big international academic conference on Harry Potter here in Toronto in the next couple of weeks. I don't know whether I'll be able to catch any of it, or see any of the conventioneers, although my downtown location (work and home) virtually guarantees that I will bump into some conventioneers at some point. And don't worry, I won't spoil the ending of the HP novels for you - unless you ask me to, of course.

In other news: after years of threatening to do so, I finally got around to getting a busker's permit. Now the question becomes: will I use it? Stay tuned.

In other other news: I read a scary snippet online the other day. Apparently the city of Salzburg has just launched - no, I'm not making this up - a cable TV channel that runs The Sound of Music 24/7.

*shudder*

Just one more reason I'm glad to be living in Canada.

Is it an emergency if it happens all the time?

A brief rant:

I frequently use taxicabs to get around. More frequently than I'd like, to be honest, but that's another story.

There are only so many things a guy can do to kill time while riding in a taxi, so I've spent a couple of seconds looking at the customer's "bill of rights" as set out by the local taxi commission. A customer has the right to ask the driver to turn the air conditioning on and off; to direct the driver on the route to be taken, and a bunch of other motherhood-type rights.

One expectation we clients are also allowed is that the cabbie will only use his/her cellphone in an emergency. So why is it that nearly every cabbie I've dealt with over the past year or so has a headset welded to their ear? And why is it that they are all so deeply engaged in conversation all the time? I can't figure out to whom they could possibly be talking for such long periods. It strikes me that all the attention they are paying to their long, voluble and (sometimes) high-volume conversation is attention that they are taking away from, you know, the "driving the vehicle and keeping the client safe and comfortable" part.

Nearly every time I get out of the cab at the end of a ride I promise myself I'm going to write to the commission and complain. I've yet to do it.

*harrumph*

We've arrived on the world stage

It's official, in my books at least: Toronto is now a true soccer city.

What leads me to this bold declaration? Simple: this afternoon, not long after Toronto FC's defeat of FC Dallas, I saw a very drunk TFC supporter weaving his way down the sidewalk in front of Union Station.

Replica jersey? Check.
Scarf? Check.
Shaved head? Check.
Vacant, dazed expression? Check.

The only things missing to make this genius a true yobbo, in my books at least, were a) evidence of a recent violent encounter with a partisan of the opposing team; and b) handcuffs. Mind you, it would probably be pretty difficult to find a Dallas fan here in Toronto...

What I found truly odd about this particular dude was that he was traveling - if you can really call it traveling, he was pretty loaded - by himself. Normally, your garden-variety hooligan tends to prefer to travel in packs. Well, this is Toronto FC's first season after all, so I suppose this guy could just be an early adopter.

In other sporting news, Canada's men's rugby team lost to New Zealand's All Blacks yesterday. It was a squeaker; the final score was, er, only 64-13.

I'm sure the Canadians are thrilled with their performance, though. The All Blacks are the New York Yankees, the Montreal Canadiens, the Edmonton Eskimos and the Oakland Raiders all rolled up into one team. Playing respectably - and the Canadians did play a very respectable game - against the All Blacks is a significant feat. Way to go, boys.

Life imitates art yet again

How cool is this? We first heard about it on television in the late 60s; then in the late 80s we actually got to "see" it. Now in the 21st century we finally have documented medical proof of a humanoid - a human, in fact - with green blood.

Who cares if the phenomenon turned out to be completely medically explainable? Having green blood is just totally, undeniably cool. I'm glad to hear that the dude in question has made a complete recovery, but I sure hope somebody took some good photos.

I get the feeling that Trekkers around the world are starting up betting pools on when medical science will find the first humanoids with magenta-coloured Klingon blood (remember Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country?) or quadrophonic hearing like the Andorians.

Last month we learned that NASA scientists are looking - I mean actually looking - for a planet in the 40 Eridani system that could conceivably support life. Any longtime Trekker knows that 40 Eridani A (it's a trinary system, dontcha know) was posited by Gene Roddenberry as the main sun of the planet Vulcan. Think about this: we're going out to look for something that just might exist, for the sole reason that a popular, albeit completely fictional, TV program says that's where it is. Cool. Bonus points for being 16 light-years away.

In the meantime, physicists continue to work on 3-D printers - crude replicators, in other words, although they can't yet synthesize food or drink - and they've been working on teleportation, with some limited success, for years.

And people look sideways at those of us who enjoy science fiction?

*scoff*

When pictograms go wrong

It's been pretty well established that the now-ubiquitous practice of using pictograms on signs instead of perfectly good words came into its own at Expo '67 in Montreal, when Paul Arthur decided that drawing stick men and stick women - among other things - would be easier than writing "the washrooms are over this way, pal" in forty or fifty languages. And since the 1972 Olympics we've all spent too much of our valuable time figuring out the, er, clever pictograms that have been developed to represent each of the Olympic sports. You know, come to think of it, I can't remember what the pictogram for synchronized trampoline looked like, although I expect I can hazard a guess.

After that convoluted introduction, on to today's craziness. We just bought a couple of new Dell laptops for the office. Said computers came in the standard (read far too big) cardboard box, with more cardboard and a disturbingly large and environmentally hostile amount of styrofoam padding. The computers were each wrapped in a protective bag with the following gem printed on it:

After cogitating on this for a moment in its proper context, it eventually came to me that this pictogram is meant to say something along the lines of "It's probably not the best idea in the world to stick your head in this plastic bag". Then I started thinking about some of the other things that the original artist might be trying to say:

- If you're choking, don't whack yourself on the back of the head with a cafeteria tray.

- When on an airplane, don't lie on your back and try to poke your head out the window if you feel the need to cough.

- When trying to fall asleep, don't wrap your fingers around your throat - you'll probably end up opening your mouth too wide and you'll start snoring, and I mean really, who can sleep with all that snoring going on?

- If you want to catch some Z's while riding in a car, make sure your shoulder strap goes behind the pillow. Sure, if you hit something your face will go straight into the dashboard, but won't you be more comfortable without that silly shoulder strap cramping your style? And oh yes, before I forget: to keep your head from doing that stupid bob-bob-nod-whoops thing, just put your hand around your throat and you'll be just fine.

I think I must have been bored at the office today.

PS I saw today that the American Idol 2007 tour (where people get to hear all the losers again, just in case anyone's forgotten why these ninnies were voted off the show in the first place) is starting soon. The main sponsor for the tour is: POP-TARTS! Honest, folks, I'm not making this up...

Good, Evil and the Internet - assorted musings

Once again, it's been quite a while since my last post. There are quite a number of reasons/excuses, but none of them really matter. I'm back.

Last week's shooting at Virginia Tech got me thinking, as did the somewhat predictable reaction of the media - mainstream and otherwise. Although I'm a great fan of the immediacy and "democratization" of the fourth estate as offered by electronic and online news services, there are some significant disadvantages, namely the immediacy and democratization.

Allow me to elucidate. Since the earliest days of news reporting, the challenge has been not so much to get the best reportage, but rather the most immediate reportage. Print reporters for newspapers and magazines were, of course, the first to adopt the first-person - or even the second-person ("you are there") school of reportage, with the emphasis on superficial reports of the actual event and marginally more interest in the effect of said event upon the people who witnessed or experienced the event. The creation of what we think of now as the "modern" or electronic media, i.e. radio and television, led to the next logical step: the roving microphone, followed several years later by the "creepie peepie" or handheld (if you can call anything that weighs over fifty pounds handheld) television camera, perpetuated the rush to be first on the scene and first with stories, sound and pictures.

Here's where the first problem lies. When a media organization, whether it's NBC or CBC Radio or the New York Times, first gets its grubby hands on a snippet of information, I would submit that there needs to be someone looking at the material and exercising what we in Canada might tend to call "sober second thought" before publishing or broadcasting it. News organizations in particular live for the scoop, that elusive and largely illusory moment when one organization gets the story out first. Too often, though, the push for the scoop means that the first information about an event is too sketchy to be useful or even meaningful. If there's one thing we should have learned by now about any catastrophe that's being reported online or over the air, it's that the first few reports from the scene are nearly useless and often contradictory. So much for immediacy.

The mainstream media (MSM) seem to be always a step or two behind the man on the street in terms of adopting new technologies that can or could be applied to reportage. That's not necessarily a bad thing. The biggest problem with the democratization brought on by the Information Age is that people begin to think that whatever they publish themselves is The Truth. The great forum that is the Internet quickly degenerates into a bedlam of half-baked theories, pontification and - I love this word - codswollop.

A.J. Liebling, who was himself a better-than-average war correspondent, once summed it all up by saying "freedom of the press is limited to those who own one". God only knows what he would say now, when a free e-mail account and access to a computer can potentially expose any idiot (yes, including me) and his/her thoughts to billions of eyeballs. It is to weep.

The other much-loathed (at least by me) facet of the democratization of news is the ability to instantly spew random thoughts under the guise of "comments". To return for a moment to the event that spawned this screed, the VT shooting, I would turn your attention to the comments that have been posted on any news website that allows them. One would have to search far and wide to find a greater collection of uninformed and yet deeply felt opinion on nearly any subject, whether or not it has anything to do with the actual news event in question. Reading some of the comments to a recent Alan Freeman story about the VT killer made me laugh, shake my head and seethe, not necessarily in that order. Readers' rants on this single and innocuous article ran the gamut from violent anti-immigration diatribes to equally violent anti-Big Pharma rants, to wildly polarized bleating about gun control (pro and con, of course), to pro-American, anti-American, left-wing and right-wing political posturing, to moping about the sad experience that can be life away from home when you're in your late teens.

Here endeth my rant on News and New Media.

I think perhaps the biggest reason why I've been cogitating on the VT massacre is that it's made me reflect on some similar traumatic events that I have experienced. Almost exactly twenty years ago I was a faculty advisor in residence at a US university and was involved in a situation that had many similarities to the VT shooting. But for the intervention of a few key people, most notably the campus police, the school's administration and the student's parents, things might have gone very badly indeed.

In December 1989 I was in France when I started to hear sketchy news reports about a shooting in Montreal. It wasn't until several hours and many frantic phone calls later that I learned that the shootout had occurred at the École Polytechnique, and not at McGill University where a close friend of mine was studying at the time.

Some years later, as a TV news producer, I felt twangs of guilt after assigning a colleague to cover the school shooting in Taber, Alberta, and over the years I worked and talked with a number of colleagues who had covered events like the Oklahoma City bombing, the conflict in Rwanda and the Branch Davidian standoff in Waco.

Mere months ago I heard about the shootout at Dawson College, where my Montreal friend had worked for several years, and where her husband works now.

Like my Blogger nom de plume namesake Voltaire, I often think about the nature of good and evil. Like Voltaire, I reject the concept of using "isms" as a crutch to help explain the universe and the actions of the people inhabiting it. In the end I think both Voltaire and I would agree on a marginally less "big picture" view of things, and work to improve those things over which we have some element of control. We will never be able stop bad things from happening to good people, but for all that we shouldn't stop trying.

Yikes. I got all philosophical and sermon-y there for a moment. Maybe I'll sign off now and post something a little less uplifting later on.

Playin' at The Rex

The Rex Hotel is one of the best-known jazz clubs in Toronto. It would be impossible to name all of the great players who have graced the entirely-too-small stage over the years. The beer is cheap, the food is pretty good, and the people in the audience are always appreciative. The best part about The Rex is that it's not just for the greats; the managers always reserve a big part of the schedule (and it's a pretty ambitious schedule, with several acts every single day of the week) for local amateurs.

Count yours truly among the local amateurs. Along with photography, my other Expensive Hobby™ is playing jazz saxophone. I've been playing for over thirty years; it's a great way of relieving stress, having fun and meeting people. For the past two or three years I've been playing with a group of other amateur jazzers, and a couple of weeks ago we played a Sunday afternoon gig at The Rex for friends, family and whoever happened to stagger in that day.

You can see and hear the band by clicking here.

What's the plural of apocalypse?

What's next, locusts?

The street directly in front of my office was closed yesterday for much of the afternoon and all evening. Why, you ask? Because, dear reader, the CN Tower - which for many years has stood like a silent sentinel over Canada's largest city - went insane and decided to wreak havoc on its nutty citizens. The weapon of choice: killer ice cubes from outer space.

Okay, well, they're not really ice cubes. And although 1200 or 1500 feet is pretty high up, the ice isn't really coming from outer space either. Still, the chunks of ice that were falling for those few hours were definitely heavy artillery. At last word no humans have been hit, but a number of cars and buildings have taken significant damage. Take a look here and here.

Mercifully Torontonians are actually getting used to having to make adjustments for this sort of crazy event. I think that secretly, many long-time Toronto residents are still mightily embarrassed of the days when the then-mayor called in the Armed Forces to help the city shovel its way out of what was a marginally heavier than average snowfall. Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying that people are brighter now than they were eight or nine years ago. They're just taking things in a (slightly) more stoic manner. People in Toronto still don't know how to deal with snow or ice on their streets and sidewalks, but there's less panic.

Many businesses let their employees go home early on Thursday when the storm started. In retrospect that was a lousy idea, since the effect was that everyone was trying to get home at the same time as the storm was at its peak. I talked to a cabbie who told me that it had taken him three hours to get from downtown to Pearson airport (normally a 25-35 minute ride from Union Station).

Friday was a fairly normal, albeit snowy, commute to work. Then the temperatures got a little milder, and sheets of ice began to fall from many tall buildings, including the aforementioned tower. People in the downtown core went into full adaptation mode. In the past number of years we've had any number of real or imagined disasters, starting, I suppose, with September 2001. Over time we've become almost inured to the reality that from time to time our routines are going to be disrupted by life rearing its ugly head in some way. It's funny that we're now reacting to deadly blocks of ice, launched from great heights, with near equanimity; at the same time it's almost uplifting to see that people are refusing to let things get too much in the way of them living a more or less normal life.

On a related note, I should point out that I have not watched Global TV or read the National Pest for a few days now. I do, though, fully expect that another "in-depth investigation" by CanWest Global's crack journos will reveal that the CBC - yes, the CBC - is actually to blame for the falling ice. I can see the clippings now: "Heat from CBC's transmitters in the CN Tower caused the ice to detach in deadly sheets, falling faster than CBC television's ratings onto the poor citizens below. [...] CanWest Global is investigating reports that the Crown corporation had another of its extra-double-secret taxpayer-funded smoking lounges hidden in the aerie-like surroundings of the CN Tower [...] CBC president Robert Rabinovitch has refused to confirm or deny whether the MotherCorp is in fact responsible for global warming, as CanWest Global has alleged for many years."

To be honest I was almost speechless when I saw the Post's so-called investigative story. It's a prime example of slow-news-day "gotcha" journalism, i.e. a story that's not a story, stuck on the front page for want of anything else worthwhile. Although I have spent a fair bit of time in the Canadian Broadcasting Centre 0ver the years I was unaware that these smoking lounges were still operating. I do know there used to be more of them, but now most smokers just go outside where they stand in well-demarcated "paddocks" painted on the sidewalk.

In watching the TV version of the "story" it becomes clear that the original focus was the gap between provincial and federal anti-smoking legislation, i.e. that provincially-regulated workplaces have banned smoking for any number of years whereas federally-regulated industries (like broadcasting, banking and interprovincial transportation, among others) have not gone so far as to implement a full-on ban. This reminds me a bit of the day, not all that many years ago, when the Alberta legislature was declared a non-smoking building, with the little-known exception of the Premier's office. Guess who was still a smoker at the time. [not to reveal any secrets, but his initials were Ralph Klein.]

I'd love to know who the genius was at the editorial meeting who stuck up their hand and said "heyyy... the CBC has smoking rooms... we could really embarrass them and make ourselves look really smart!" Guys, you might want to stick to showing reruns of House if you want to keep your ratings up; your investigative journalism leaves a little to be desired.

The past month in review: Train Wreck City!

It's been over a month since my last rant. And oy, what a month! One hardly knows where to begin:

- A NASA astronaut manages to reach outer space without the trouble and expense of a ship.

Lisa Nowak was arrested and charged with the attempted murder of fellow astronaut Colleen Shipman. All for the love of yet another astronaut, William Oefelein. I suppose the only positive element to this story is that at least it all happened on Earth. Had this Peyton-Place-in-space happened on the International Space Station or on the Moon or Mars or somewhere, which court would hold jurisdiction? Whose laws would apply? Samuel T. Cogley (from the Star Trek episode "Court Martial") hasn't even been born yet...

- A multi-millionaire (or is she?) ex-Playboy centrefold dies under mysterious circumstances.

Ah, the late, lamented Anna Nicole Smith. Depending on whose bleating you're paying attention to, she was either a postmodern Marilyn Monroe or one of the most addle-pated humans ever to grace the planet. Her demise will fuel conspiracy theories for years to come.

A small confession: when I read the news of Smith's death, I immediately thought of Colonel Tom Parker's famous (albeit apocryphal) utterance upon learning of Elvis Presley's death: "Good career move". Kinda funny but kinda sad at the same time.

It's been said that one of Anna's favourite sayings was "How do you like my body now?" Something tells me that about now she probably wouldn't like the answer to that question.

- Britney Spears - still the odds-on favourite for a Nobel Prize this year.

Yikes. Let me see if I can condense Brit's career and personal travails to date. *ahem*

- Becomes Mouseketeer.
- Meets first love Justin Timberlake and lifelong nemesis (and way better singer) Christina Aguilera.
- Has obscenely successful pop-tart career, showing that style still beats the crap out of substance.
- Dumps (or is dumped by) Timberlake. I forget who did the dumping, and in the end it doesn't really matter.
- Gets married.
- Gets divorced. (it's about here that the insane-chick gene appears to begin asserting itself)
- Takes up Kabbalah.
- Starts behaving more and more erratically, on stage and off.
- Public lip-lock with Madonna starts tongues wagging (I know, I know: poor choice of metaphor)
- Gets married again. Courtship with new hubby fully documented on reality TV.
- Gets pregnant, has kid; shows that her parenting skills leave much to be desired.
- Gets pregnant again and has second kid.
- Dumps and humiliates (if that's possible) second hubby Kevin Federline. Bonus points for (allegedly) dumping FedEx by text message. Extra double bonus points for doing it while said FedEx is on live TV!
- Somehow loses all of her underwear, self-control and self-respect at the same time.
- Strikes up a friendship with professional train wreck and role model Paris Hilton.
- Becomes more famous for flashing photographers and visiting dodgy nightclubs than she was as a performer.
- Checks into rehab; checks out of rehab within 24 hours. Either a miracle cure or the world's lamest attempt to rehabilitate her rapidly-declining image.
- Shaves head and gets two (more) tattoos.

What's next? I'm beginning to think that some newspapers/magazines are going to have to set up a Britney desk, just as they have city, political, and international desks. This girl is a walking (okay, staggering) entertainment section (with or without garish photos) all by herself. And as much as I lament the sad fact that any news organization should know better than to get within 500 metres of anything remotely Britney-ey, the sadder fact is that the public keeps eating it all up with big spoons. Shame on us all for enabling this all-too-public train wreck to continue. Can someone rent this girl a copy of A Star is Born (any version - even the Streisand version) or find her a biography of Judy Garland or Liza Minnelli or something?

- The Conservatives show that they really, really want to be Republicans after all.

Stephen Harper's Conservative government has some freakin' nerve. After spending more than a decade in opposition and doing everything possible to scuttle any effort to respect the Kyoto environmental accord, now they're going after the Liberals in a series of negative TV ads. Let me state this as simply as possible: they're berating the Liberals for not being able to do what the Conservatives never wanted them to do in the first place. Somehow - magically, I suppose - the Conservatives are now trying to paint themselves as the champions of the environment. "Poor stupid Stéphane Dion", they seem to be saying; "he didn't meet the Kyoto targets. Why would anyone want a Liberal government again?"

Until this week. All the opposition parties got together to push through a private member's bill meant to force/cajole/embarrass the government into at least trying to attain the targets set in the Kyoto protocol. A protocol, mind you, that was criticized heavily in 2002 by a certain Stephen Harper as, and I quote, "...essentially a socialist scheme to suck money out of wealth-producing nations". So now Harper is in a rather unenviable position. He now says he believes the environment is important, and his party is now busy lambasting the opposition for not "getting the job done", although the Conservatives were most decidedly *not* on the Kyoto bandwagon from 2002 until, oh, about a week ago. The Conservative spinmeisters must be burning the midnight, er, whatever you can burn at midnight now that isn't fossil-fuel-based, to get out of this shining example of pretzel logic.

Oh, and to come back to the negative ads. I may be wrong, but I'd dearly love to believe that Canadian voters are just a little too smart, and a little too nice, to react to this kind of blatant manipulation. It's not like the Conservatives never did anything stupid (*cough*, GST, *cough).

Whew! There now; that did my curmudgeonly heart a world of good, to get all that off my chest. We now return to your regularly-scheduled Sunday, already in progress.

Psychic machines

I've noticed this before, but have never dared commit it to writing: machines can read our minds.

All of us have experienced this before. Anyone who has owned a car, or any other (relatively) expensive bit of gear, has had a gremlin that mysteriously vanishes as soon as the car arrives at the shop for repair. I submit to you that gremlins are in fact imaginary beings that Man, in his arrogance and species-centric view, has invented to explain away the simple fact: machines can read our minds.

I have had inklings of this in the past. How else to explain how the transmission on my car mysteriously decided to withhold any and all access to third gear within hours of me telling a friend that I was planning to sell it?

In my last post I mentioned that my iPod Shuffle was misbehaving and was headed for the scrap heap, in favour of a shiny new one. Within five minutes of me posting that statement, the offending instrument stopped behaving like a petulant child, and it's been running like a top ever since. That didn't stop me, I hasten to add, from going out a buying a new iPod. I'd better destroy the old one just in case it decides to go all Christine on me and start running people over, or deafening them or something equally unspeakable.

Hey! Wait a minute. After reading these past couple of paragraphs, it strikes me that perhaps these inanimate objects can't actually read minds, but in fact are listening to me, or reading my online posts. After all, if I apply Occam's razor to my current situation, it's more plausible that a machine could have physical senses than extra-sensory perception, right? Hmmm... maybe I should start writing these posts in Pig Latin; do you think machines can understand Pig Latin?
I-ay ure-say ope-hay ot-nay.

Death of a giant

Yesterday was a day of ups and downs for me.

Plus side: a nice relaxing Saturday afternoon, and my favourite Starbucks wasn't too crowded.

More plus side: A very pleasant evening with a friend (and hey, I even got my Joni Mitchell DVD back!)

Even more plus side: A terrific concert by Michael Occhipinti at the Glenn Gould Studio, and second-row seats!

Not-so-plus side: my iPod Shuffle appears to have given up the ghost. After a bit of reading up online, it turns out this problem is not uncommon. There are even a couple of fixes, but said fixes don't appear to be working. Sooooo... I guess I'll buy one of the second-generation Shuffles (you know, the ones that look like an aluminum matchbook - and for those of you that don't know what a matchbook looks like, you're far too young to be reading this!) to tide me over for a while. Now that the iPhone is out, or I suppose I should say nearly out, I fully expect that the next generation of iPods will move to the hey-where-did-all-the-buttons-go style.

Really awful side: Upon getting home from the concert last night, I went online to surf through my Google Alerts as is my habit. It was then that I read the news I've been dreading for some time now: my musical inspiration Michael Brecker died yesterday.

This image is from Michael's website. You can read the New York Times obituary here.

I was first introduced to Michael's playing by one of my oldest friends, Colin Traquair, at summer camp. Like most teenage saxophonists, I was attracted to dazzling technique, and hearing Michael play on Heavy Metal Bebop was quite literally a life-changing moment. Over the years I listened to more and more of Michael's playing, and was continually amazed, not just by his command of the instrument, but also by his gift for giving shape to his playing. Whether it was just playing a line as part of a horn section, stepping up for a brief solo, or standing alone on stage for an entire evening, Michael knew how to give exactly the right emotional colour to whatever he was called upon to play.

Michael has been called the single most influential saxophonist since Coltrane. It remains to be seen whether Michael will actually surpass his own spiritual mentor in the pantheon of jazz saxophonists. I would argue strenuously that in terms of the sheer breadth, volume and quality of his contributions, Michael is as deserving as anyone of the title of greatest jazz saxophonist of all time.

As a saxophonist myself, my sound, my technique and my soloing style (such as they are) aren't immediately identifiable as "Breckerish". That said, it would be fair to say that a single question has motivated nearly every note I've played for the past twenty-five years or so: "I wonder how Mike would approach this?".

To best honour Mike's memory, I'm going to encourage people - including you, dear reader - to participate in Canada's Unrelated Bone Marrow Donor Registry; in the US, contact your nearest hospital or consider a donation to the Marrow Fund's "Time is of the Essence" fund, which was established by Michael and his family.

If you've never listened to Michael play before (I was going to say "if you've never heard Michael play...", but if you've listened to any pop music since the late 70s that's pretty much impossible) there are a few tunes or albums you should probably give a listen to:

Manhattan Transfer, Operator: a good old-fashioned R&B solo. Short and sweet.

Brecker Brothers, Heavy Metal Bebop: If you don't own this album, along with Back to Back or Dave Sanborn's Taking Off, you don't know anything about New York jazz from the mid-late 70s.

Donald Fagen, Maxine: thirty-four seconds - 16 bars - of perfection. I tell people this may be the most complete saxophone solo ever. I still get goosebumps listening to it.

Steps, Fawlty Tenors: A live recording of a great Don Grolnick tune. Give a listen to Recordame too for a great take on a sometimes-tired standard.

Steps Ahead, Both Sides of the Coin: In a previous post I referred to Zinédine Zidane and his ability to make a bad play - or even a hack - look good. Mike does the same at 3:23 of this tune. The first time I heard this recording my jaw dropped: "They actually kept that take?" But now I can't imagine that tune, and that solo, any other way.

There are too many others to mention. Goodbye Mike; I'll miss you.

A random observation

I saw the news on the wires the other day about the "big stink" in New York City, and how many people are ascribing it to as-yet-unknown goings-on across the way in New Jersey:

http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/20070110_new_york_blames_new_jersey_for_stench/

Imagine, if you will, a really big elevator, with the states of New York and New Jersey inside. An unpleasant smell permeates the air. Each state looks at the other, eyes narrowing.

And in the background, a bad instrumental arrangement of "Girl From Ipanema" plays over the speaker.

It's the stuff great sketches are made of.