Category Archives: Social Constructs

If you watch the BBC’s flagship car/motoring show, Top Gear, you’re probably familiar with the character of The Stig.  He’s the tame racing driver who does the high speed test laps of cars featured on Top Gear, as Clarkson, the Hamster and Captain Slow can’t get around the track consistently.  The Stig also trains the celebrity guests, who drive a hot lap in the Star in a Reasonably Priced Car segment.

(If you’ve never seen Top Gear, here’s a link to their website.  Search for an episode and come back:  We’ll wait for you.)

The running gag with the character of The Stig since 2003 has been his anonymity, in which, the British media, the BBC, the production company and the show itself have been willing co-conspirators.  It adds to the slightly silly and iconoclastic bent of Top Gear.

Now, Ben Collins, in a roundabout way, has come out as the White Stig.  The BBC tried to get an injunction stopping Collins’ autobiography from associating Ben Collins with the character of The Stig and the BBC got shut down. 

The unfortunate part is that now a lot of non-gearhead/petrolheads know about Top Gear and The Stig.  It used to be our little secret:  A private handshake between the lads. 

If you could appreciate a piano being dropped on a Morris Marina out of a clear blue sky, or caravans being used as conkers, hung from construction cranes, then you were part of the club.  Oh and the news and reviews of the cars of course, then you understood the essential nature of Top Gear.

It really isn’t about the cars, more to the point, Top Gear is about enjoying automobiles, aside from their essential nature as transportation, but as their cultural identifiers, shorthand, or captions to a group of people.

For instance:  A BMW M5 with rubber-band 30 series tires and $10,000 worth of rims tells me you are a complete idiot who most likely does not have even the basic motor functions of a brain stem.  But you have a lot of money.

If your ride is a 1985 two-door Ford Tempo GL with running boards, neons and gradient tint rolling on 18 inch spinners, then you should be sterilized for the Good of Society and permanently banned from the Accessory aisles of Canadian Tire. 

However, if the same car has been restored to original glory, complete with the dog-vomit coloured upholstery, then you understand the essential irony of the car.  You actually have a mind:  A sick one, but one worthy of consideration.

At the same time, if you can react fondly to the Fiat 850 hatchback, or the 1972 TR6, without the kneecaps on the bumpers that ruined the 1974, then you grew up across the street. 

Incidentally, if you own an SUV and live in an apartment or high rise condo, without a rural address at the end of a logging road, you are unworthy.  Especially if your SUV is either a Land Rover or a Cadillac.  Please proceed to the fitting department for your personalized asshat.

That’s the thing with cars.  They touch weird nerves in unusual ways at deep, elemental levels that are hard to define, impossible to communicate and confusing to write about if you don’t have the peculiar genetic makeup that tags you as a gear head. 

That’s also what appeals to us about Top Gear.  It’s OK to be a petrolhead and why, at the end of the day, it’s sad that The Stig has been unmasked.

Some say that his left nipple is shaped like the outline of the Nurburgring and that he suffers from Mansell’s Syndrome.  All we know is we call him The Stig.

Sundays are a bit of Television wasteland.  You want what was called “chewing gum for the eyes” and thank you Frank Lloyd Wright for the appropriate quote:  No content beyond basic laugh, giggle and the occasional “omg!”  When you spark up the box and want to veg out for a few hours you are not looking for intellectual challenges, or shows that make you want to commit mayhem. 

Depending on your point of view, our media is either the precursor of where our society is heading, or, it is a fearsomely accurate mirror that shows us as we truly are.  Being enlightened cynics, we vote for the reflection of the current state of society.  Like all mirrors, including the fun house variety, what shows up, isn’t always what we want to see.

Shows like Party Mamas on Slice give us a frightening insight into what is considered acceptable parenting.  Two synopsis should suffice.  A girl wants a Sweet 16 and by the time the show is over, there’s a live elephant, a thousand guests and several dozen costumed dancers.   Mom spends, by my estimate only, upwards of $50,000 for a Sweet 16.  In another episode, one kid (he’s 13) wants skydivers, race car drivers and Ultimate Fighters for his Bar Mitzvah.  Dad, winning the Type-A Award, makes sure that almost all of it happens.  Price?  Again a guesstimate, around $50 Large.

Now, good for the parents that they can afford the tab:  No issue there.

But the offspring?  Not only do they have no idea of what things cost, but they don’t care.  They want it.  They want it now.  If it isn’t what they want, they sulk, cry and whine.  Meanwhile the parent units hijack what would be considered modest, but minor events in a youths’ life and add their own self-absorbed grandstanding and design sense of the absurd in thick, tacky layers over the whole proceedings. 

Which, in many ways, parallels the anecdotal stories of the so-called Helicopter Parents endlessly hovering over their issue as they negotiate the first tentative steps of adulthood.  There are plenty of stories about fretful parents attending Junior’s first job interview to ensure the company does the right thing.  Further stories of Mom/Dad hassling the college Dean because the vile Professor is making precious Jared/Melinda do homework and actually research their papers.  I mean, how dare they actually give our child a B.  That will hurt their GPA and their children will never get into (Name of Famous School Here) in the MBA program.

A colleague at work has volunteered to coach a house league soccer team for 11 year olds.  It’s a recreational league, non-touring, non-competitive league.  It’s for fun for the kids.  Last night was the first practice.  There is no assistant coach, no manager, no parents offering to help drive, or even just give a hand from time to time.  The league has a problem with a shortage of coaches, so my colleague is coaching two teams. 

But there are parents who are willing to criticize the drills, the practice, the organization, the uniforms, the time dedicated to their particular child, the condition of the field and the distance between the goals.  There are parents quite willing to loudly complain about the weather and for that matter the shoelaces of the other players.

My colleague, fortunately, has good hearing.  Every time someone opens their mouth to complain, he asks if they would like to help out with the organizing, coaching and logistics in a polite stage-whisper that could probably be heard in another area code. 

Oddly enough, by the end of practice, most of the Helicopter Parents had shut their traps.  The children?  They had fun, learned a few things about soccer and got to run around outside for an hour or so.  My colleague is still the sole coach, manager and logistician.  None of the Helicopter Parents have stepped up to help.

None of which is particularly surprising. 

I’ve been shooting film and digital since shortly before Jesus got his Journeyman Carpenter’s papers and joined Local 1221.  Occasionally, I get a good shot or two off, then there are other times you stumble upon an image.  Here’s two that fell into the viewfinder in the last couple of weeks.

Aikenhead’s Drug Store is in downtown Pembroke, Ontario.  In a previous life in radio, I used to do their commercials on the air at CHOV Radio and I always wondered if they understood the curious correlation between their name and their business.

Meanwhile, yesterday, this shot almost made me drive into the ditch.

Yes, it is real.  No, there was no Photoshop or other artistic license.  Yes, there is a L’il Stool House on Hunt Club Road, just west of Merivale Road.  You can stop laughing now you dirty-minded son of a gun.   

If you choose to save a copy of these for your own personal use, all I ask is the usual credit of © 2010 David Smith.  

Over a few dozen years our house has developed a holiday tradition that we would like to share, but it takes a bit of backstory for the non-Canadians.  CBC Radio has a program called “As It Happens”, which is a newsmagazine type of program.  If you’re not familiar with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, you can listen live online at www.cbc.ca/radio  The CBC is somewhat like the BBC, or NPR, but with more skill and less political agenda. 

Every year on their last show before Christmas, or on Christmas Eve, “As It Happens” runs a Christmas story, narrated by the late Alan Maitland.  The story is “The Shepherd” by Fredrick Forsyth, a short story Forsyth wrote for his wife in 1976.  The narrative is the story of an RAF jet fighter pilot flying from Germany back to his home base in the UK on Christmas Eve 1957.  His aircraft has multiple failures enroute and is eventually lead to a fog-shrouded runway at a disused RAF wartime base by a shepherd aircraft (an old DeHavilland Mosquito) piloted by a mysterious figure.

“The Shepherd” is not really a Christmas story, in that there is no Pere Noel, Scrooge, Tiny Tim, or magical reindeer, just a solitary jet pilot struggling to get home for Christmas.  The twist at the end of the story is that the Mosquito shepherd aircraft has the registration of JK (Jig King) and guides the now crippled Vampire fighter to the fictional RAF Minton as the Vampire runs out of fuel moments after landing on the fogged-in runway.  The pilot, the narrator of the story, attempts to find out how and who shepherded him down.  The answer is the mysterious Johnny Kavanagh, (not Jig King!) who flew the same missions in the war, shepherding crippled bombers home from the North Sea.  Except Johnny Kavanagh went missing in his Mosquito on Christmas Eve 1943, vanished over the North Sea.

That short arc of the story doesn’t really do it justice, nor does the describing it as being read by Alan Maitland.  Radio storytellling, when done right, to paraphrase Garison Keillor, goes directly from the solid to the gaseous form without going through the liquid state.  Keillor should know:  His Lake Woebegon stories on “A Prairie Home Companion” routinely weave and paint pictures in your head more vivid than any that can be committed to film, tape, DVD or flip book doodles.

I first heard “The Shepherd” in 1979, sitting the control room at a small-market radio station up the Ottawa Valley, filling in the hours as the new guy who worked the crap shifts, like Christmas, New Years and so on.  Ever since, I think I have missed the reading only a time or three.  Every year we tune in “As It Happens”, turn the lights down and listen.  We don’t read a book, answer email, or have the TV on.  We actively listen to the radio the Old Skool way.

Every year the hair stands up on the back of the neck, as the story reaches it conclusion, with the quiet “Happy Christmas” from Joe the Mess Steward.

Every year we take a moment to recover from a brilliantly crafted story, told so well as to sublimate from solid to gas to indelible pictures in your head.

Perhaps that is the real meaning of Christmas traditions.  Shared emotions and experiences that are unique to the people who share them, repeated over time.   

“The Shepherd” is our Christmas tradition.  Merry Christmas.

With the new job, I’m taking the transit again.  There’s no real sense in taking the car downtown, as there is no upside in paying some wall-eyed, illiterate Elbonian $15 for the privilege of ignoring the thieves who go from vehicle to vehicle looking for something to steal.  Everywhere the signs say “We’re not responsible for damage, even if we do it, you have video of us doing it and we try to sell your car seats back to you at 5 pm, we’re still not responsible” in both official languages.

This is an improvement over Toronto where they zing you $40 for the privilege of stealing from your car while you’re at work.  For $60 they won’t damage your car deliberately.  Seventy gets your car urinated on by a street person who is certified not to have the Black Plague, but that’s Toronto and different rules apply in the GTA.    

The alternative is public transit.

Ottawa has a very nice transit system compared to several of the cities I’ve been in over the years.  Toronto has a mammoth system of busses, streetcars, heavy rail, light rail and subways to move a million or more folks around twice a day packed like the Clearasil delivery to a junior high school.  New York has a multisensory affront that works despite itself, much like New York City.  Washington D.C. uses their metro as a soma dispenser, aerosolizing benzodiazepines through the tunnels to keep the inmates placid.  Chicago figures that if we have to move you around, we might as well defy gravity, good sense and aesthetics of any sort beyond the Meccano style of industrial design.  Los Angeles’ defines public transit as “take your own car”:  The LA Bus (singlular tense) only runs on days that contain the letter M, between the hours of 2:00 pm and 2:15 pm from the garage to the nearest 7-11, then back. 

Off-shore, the transit in Frankfurt, Heidelberg and Budapest are icons of sleek efficiency, medical cleanliness and relentless precision.  You could have open heart surgery in the Budapest Metro, it’s so clean and odds are the driver of the metro is a former cardiac surgeon, who now makes a living wage as a train driver.  Viet Nam’s transit consists of being strapped to the pillion of a 60cc Honda Charly scooter with a basket of dysenteric ducks, a leaking 40 pound propane tank, the driver, his extended family and two officers from State Security while everyone smokes foul Cambodian cigarettes.

Ottawa, being the National Capitol, has a captured audience of government workers who toil in a few square miles on either side of the provincial border.  Consequently, the transit is set up to bus the drones to the hive at 8 then back home to the burbs at 4. If you miss your connections, you have to stay downtown.  The street-meat smog-dog carts close precisely at 1345 by government fiat and the rest of the stores are shuttered at 2.  If you are trapped downtown after 5 pm, you might as well find a nice stairwell that is out of the polar winds.

The O-Train, which I take every day, is a German-Canadian co-production of Bombardier, called the Talent.  It is what is known as ‘light rail’ meaning a stiff breeze makes it sway.  The O-Train uses a discarded Canadian Pacific freight line that went close enough to downtown that it could be considered service to ‘downtown’ if you use the area code as your sole measure of distance.  Yes, it does stay in the 613, so that’s near downtown isn’t it?  Kingston is in 613 too, so Kingston is in Downtown Ottawa as well, despite being a two-hour drive away. 

The maintenance of the tracks consisted of taking the abandoned shopping carts off the rails and pushing a burnt-out 74’ Econoline Shaggin-Waggon van off to one side.  Grafitti artists were given biker meth, a pallet-load of spray paint cans in unnatural colours and told to decorate to taste:  They did.  I have no idea who or what OrekTRON is but his compatriot OrekWES tagged The Home Depot at Greenboro in response to OrekTRON at Bayview station.

The O-Train waddles worse than a bunch of overweight nuns on a two-week absinthe bender.  The rails are so poorly maintained they resemble a trigonometry problem.  Switches, which at least conceptually, allow trains to go to other tracks, are designed so that any speed above a walking pace will derail the whole works into a ditch or off into the orphanage playground.  Despite the lack of money for maintenance and the temporary nature (temporary meaning it has been running as a proof of concept since 2001) it actually works. 

I can drive from home to the downtown in 45 minutes.  I can take the O-Train and be at the same place in 12 minutes.  Several thousand of us make the same decision every day, deciding that taking the car downtown is madness of the first order.

Where the O-Train falls over is connecting to anything else.  Ottawa spent a zillion dollars twenty-five years ago to create the Mighty Ditch, a dedicated bus transitway that was blasted out of the Nepean sandstone of Ottawa, about thirty feet below grade.  In this they run city buses with the frequency of every eleven seconds during rush hour, then rent it out as camping spaces in the off hours.  The O-Train connects to the Mighty Ditch at Bayview Station and you transfer to a bus to rocket through the downtown core.  If you miss your stop, you might wind up in New Brunswick.

There wasn’t quite enough foresight to consider putting rails in the Transitway while they were digging the ditch, which is now messing up the potential expansion of the O-Train to the East and West.  The estimates have added another couple of billion to the cost.  The other large addition is a proposed transit tunnel under downtown.  Twenty-five years ago we could have punched a hole underground for a few hundred million, connecting our smallish downtown together, out of the weather.  But that would be an example of common sense and was immediately shelved for ‘further study’.  At the time Ottawa had four levels of government that insisted they would never talk to each other.  The Feds, the Province, the Region and the City.  I’ve left out the NCC on purpose. 

The National Capitol Commission is its’ own peculiar reality chartered to ignore everyone, including themselves, with the kind of legal powers that make Idi Amin sigh longingly for the Good Old Days.  The NCC does whatever it wants, in secret and you are not permitted to comment, let alone disagree.  The NCC says so, which makes agreement regarding the underground transit tunnel impossible, as the NCC is the sole authority regarding anything under, in or over government buildings from the core of the planet to the sun, plus 40 miles in any given direction. 

The NCC doesn’t want to hear about the downtown transitway tunnel as they might be asked to pay for some of it.  If the other levels of government dare continue, the NCC will simply wave the “heritage designation” card claiming eminent domain over the entire subsurface of Ottawa.  After all, former Prime Ministers may have discarded a gin bottle somewhere and that historical artifact must be preserved and studied in situ for generations to come.  No, you may not dig a transitway for fear of disturbing important cultural and historical artifacts that frame the Canadian Experience.

Which brings us back to the lack of foresight we enjoy here in Ottawa from our multiple levels of governmental finger-bangin’.  By the way, I haven’t even mentioned the cross-border follies:  The National Capitol has a significant presence in Gatineau, which is in the province of Quebec, so take our current level of bureaucratic orifice probing and double it for any project that could potentially make things better for people trying to go to work.

In the meantime, the Ottawa politicians muddle about bumping into microphones, beeping and mooing about how terrible the tax bill will be and how complex the problem is becoming.  The problem is easy to fix, the bureaucracy is the stumbling block. 

Having settled in front of the moron cabinet for a well-deserved evening off, engaging in entirely passive recreation, I’ve noticed something profound:  We have the media we deserve.  If you believe North Americans are kind, generous and supportive, then a short sweep through the current offerings should change your mind. 

Considering that Canada has been sucking the business end of the thousand channel pipe for more than a dozen years, one would think that we have a diverse and fascinating range of entertainment offerings.  Yes, the Doc Channel exists, but how many times can one person watch The Parrots of Telegraph Hill without longing for an early demise? 

The problem is, as always, money.  Advertising agencies buy time on a station or channel based on the audience numbers.  If you have 1,200,000 people between 18 and 59 years of age paying attention to the program, then a 30-second commercial might very well be of interest to at least a small portion of that audience that will sign up for, buy or try whatever it is the ad agency is flogging for whatever client.  Fair enough, that’s how advertising has worked since the advent of the newspaper and moveable type:  The media has the attention of a group of people for a length of time and ad agencies give the media money for access to that group of people.

Where it all goes pear-shaped is market segmentation.  Our media has changed dramatically in my lifetime.  There used to be two or three newspapers, a handful of radio stations and at most four television channels in any given market.  Consequently media had to appeal to a mass audience, which explains why Ed Sullivan was popular.  If you didn’t like the plate spinning Serbians you knew that Senor Wences would be on later and you waited a few minutes to get your entertainment fix. 

Today, we have the attention span of a ferret on amphetamines.  If we don’t get that shot to the joy button in a few seconds, then we punch the remote and go someplace else. 

For this I look at the Children’s Television Workshop, creators of Sesame Street.  The CTW mantra was to keep the young’uns from getting bored by doing something/anything visual at least once every three seconds, tickling the visual cortex of our brains, keeping our attention up so we could learn about near and far, brought to you by the number 6 and the letter M.  We’ve bred at least two generations on the three second rule, which explains why media has become so segmented:  We demand stimulus and if we can’t get it right now, then we’re changing the channel.

Which leads us to our thousand channel universe of hyper-segmented media offerings, where there is absolutely nothing on worth watching.  We’re producing more media than ever before in the history of the planet and there is barely a tenth of a percent that is actually watchable for more than five minutes without wanting to do damage to someone. 

Many years ago, 1978 or so, at a radio station conference I attended, a noted speaker, media futurist John Parikhal, observed that radio was becoming a mood drug.  You wanted to feel upbeat, you listened to a particular station.  You wanted to relax and unwind, you listened to another station.  Parikhal’s thesis was that radio stations that offered a wider range of mood options would have larger audiences overall and consequently, more revenue. 

He was right of course, then the lab experiment got loose and mutated.  If you want to feel superior, watch any number of the reality shows that include challenges and catfights.  Wish to be awed by technology that give you a gee-whiz moment with violence?  There’s a half-dozen channels for you.  Want to watch food-porn?  There’s a whole slew of offerings that are utterly respectable in polite society. 

Convention porn?  About half the offerings on our local provider are of that nature, but mainstream advertisers haven’t quite made the leap.  “This hour of the Bangkok Biker Babe Strap-On Channel brought to you by La-zy Boy:  If you’re going to buff the bishop all evening, then there’s nothing more comfortable than a durable and washable recliner from La-zy Boy….”

Which leads us back to getting the media we deserve.  Just as an experiment, take your remote, start at channel 2 and hold down the up arrow.  See if there is anything you actually want to watch by taking a two-second slice of everything that is available.  So far, my favorite channel is still the Lobby-Watch channel.  If only we lived in an apartment building.

The buffet is full of food, but none of it is food you want to eat. 

It would seem that Canada is very gently, very quietly, with great subtlety, invading the United States.  Twelve Timmy’s are open now in New York City.  That’s right, Timmy’s, the ubiquitous Canadian icon is making it in New York.  (You can now sing “If you can make it there…” if so inclined.  I eschew showtunes, thanks)

Tim’s, for uninitiated south of the 49th, is a coffee and donuts chain.  In the US, the closest equivalent is Dunkin’ Donuts with some notable exceptions.  Up here, if there are two dirt roads that cross at a four way stop and more than three houses, there is likely a Tim’s. Tim Hortons (there is no apostrophe anymore) has close to 3,500 locations with new ones seemingly opening hourly, selling coffee, tea, donuts, sandwiches and other ‘quick service’ menu items.  There is even a Timmy’s at the Canadian Forces Base at Kandahar Air Field, in Afghanistan.

For a while, Timmy’s was part of Wendy’s, which explains why you see so many Timmy’s next to a Wendy’s, but now Timmy’s is a separate company.  In fact, up until last week or so, TDL, the holding company, was a Delaware corporation for tax purposes, but now it’s come back home too.

Crossing the border into the US meant you couldn’t have a good coffee unless you went to St. Arbucks, or Tully’s.  In Ohio and parts of Michigan you could find a Tim Hortons and as a Canadian, it was very much a taste of home. 

With the opening of the new stores in the Big Apple, it is important to pass on some of the informal history and social conditioning attendant to Tim Hortons:

Ordering:  Figure out what you want before you actually get to the counter.  For God’s sake don’t stand there with your mouth open pondering the imponderable for seventeen minutes:  The menu isn’t that big. 

A double-double is two creams and two sugars, or a triple-triple.  The size?  Extra-large is the one that grownups get.  There is also something called a half and half, which is half hot chocolate and half coffee.  They do serve tea, either steeped or fresh brewed. 

A note about the Iced Cappuccino, or the IceCapp.  It is manufactured in a slushie type of machine, the first five ingredients being sugar, glucose, milk, coffee and ice.  IceCapps are notorious for causing skull-splitting ‘ice cream’ headaches that will make you beg for a fast, violent death.  The seasoned IceCapp veteran knows that slow and steady is the way to go.

For food, the Dutchie or the Apple Fritter is always good, so is the Maple Dipped.  You want a salad with baby arugula and balsamic dressing?  Go someplace else.

Timbits are the holes out of the donuts.  You can get them in 10, 20 and 40 counts.  The 40 is a road pack for longer drives.  Done correctly, the children will fall into a sugar and insulin coma within the hour.  Unfortunately, during the hour, the sugar rush will have your issue caroming off the headliner like a superball thrown into a restroom stall.  There are trade-offs.

Social Constructs:  In a sit-down Tim’s, there are always the local elder folk who seem to cling like barnacles to their seats.  In most small towns the Tim’s is the social hub to meet, greet, conduct business, interview employees, go on a date, pick paint samples, plot the overthrow of a distant African republic, read the paper, write sermons, share lies, tell stories, gossip, play “Spot the NFH (Not From Here)” and complain about the weather. 

As a NFH going into the local Tim’s, you are entitled to internally scoff and perhaps even very quietly remark on the lack of branches in the family and genetic trees indicated by the locals’ visual aspects.  Don’t do it out loud to the person behind the counter:  They’re related to everyone else in the Tim’s and can have your spine broken in a moment.  All it takes is a wave to their cousin Gord, the great hairy monster in the overalls, who is manhandling a 64 ounce Thermos the same way you have trouble with a demitasse cup.

Incidentally, if you are lost, asking the counter person how to get back to the highway, is better than military-grade GPS directions.  They’re locals:  They know.

Roll-Up-The-Rim-To-Win.  From February to May, more or less, Tim Hortons runs a contest, which as the name implies, means you can roll up the rim of the paper cup (after you’re done drinking the coffee please) and possibly win various prizes.  With the opening of the New York City stores, there is a move afoot to change to contest to Roll Up The Fuckin’ Rim Ta Win, Ya Fuckin’ Asshole!

I humbly suggest that the expanded NYC game name might be inappropriate in markets outside the 212 area code.

Camp Day, usually in June, takes the one day coffee sales and gives the money to the Tim Hortons Children’s Foundation.  They run six Tim Hortons Camps for disadvantaged children.  The Tim Hortons Children’s Foundation was set up in 1974, after the untimely death of Tim Horton.

Yes, dear reader, there was a Tim Horton.  He was a hockey player, most famously as #7 for the Toronto Maple Leafs.  He had four Stanley Cups and was known as quite possibly the strongest player going in his era as a defenseman.  I had the honour of shaking his hand many years ago as a kid, at the Gardens.

As an aside, in “Wayne’s World”, the Mike Myers film, the donut chain “Mikita’s” was modeled after Tim Hortons, using Stan Mikita from the same era of the Chicago Blackhawks, instead of Tim Horton, as Tim Hortons wouldn’t go along with the product placement.

Now, my American cousins, you have been schooled in the world of Timmy’s.  Tim’s.  Deadboy Donuts. Tim Hortons, or even Tim Horton’s.  Welcome to the family.

I like clever practical jokes:  The good ones that take time, planning, effort, craft and skill.  There has to be a sense of mystery, astonishment and a sizeable dollop of “Howthehell did they do THAT?” at the end of the day. 

Outside of Ottawa is a ‘burb called Constance Bay.  For the longest time the big event in Constance Bay was getting drunk on the May 2-4 weekend and watching the sun set.  It used to be a cottage community, back when Ottawa ended at Britannia and Bill Teron was dreaming about a planned community in the far west end.  As Kanata and Ottawa expanded, Constance Bay was absorbed into the metro area with the attendant gentrification that comes with it.

One of the effects of gentrification is the establishment of a ‘business district’ and the need for a group of grasping merchant-class to promote the business area with signage, petitioning the city with their urgent, nay economically desperate, requirements to point the unwashed motor travelling hordes to the business district. 

After the appropriate time and much contortionist ass-kissing, the sign was put up.

Constance Bay does have places to worship, eat, shop, launch boats and, of course, buy fuel.  It would seem they also have other attributes in the community that are not normally advertised.  By the way, the photo is not retouched.  It’s from the Ottawa Citizen July 10th 2009.  You can read the whole story here.

The joy of the sign is that the added panel matches the others perfectly.  The spacing and margins are spot-on.  The use of ‘international-style’ ISO graphic symbols, although not official, is a perfect representation of the bland stick-figures that populate our graphic world.  Of course the actions being depicted at one time or another have likely happened in Constance Bay, so there is no hint of misleading advertising, which is important, especially for public signage.

The truly subversive pleasure is the skill, stealth and craft exhibited by the creators of that sixth icon:  Perfectly done.  I doff my metaphysical hat to the participants.

Welcome to Constance Bay.  I’m sure you’ll like it.

There is a constant in this world that the only constant is change.  I can’t deny that, as I’ve changed jobs.  Still a geek, still fixing other peoples’ network woes when their desires exceed their abilities and still working with the technology that is beyond the leading edge. 

For those of us who live out there, we call it the Bleeding Edge as occasionally the technology turns around the cuts you a spare orifice just for giggles.  Invariably there is no documentation, no troubleshooting guidelines and very few people to call on to help you when the technology goes off into its’ own dark corner and behaves badly.  That’s the nature of what I do for a living.

When a few of us get together we swap war stories and show off our fresh scars then the talk turns to testing.  Testing, be it software, technology, or even simple things like, water, food, or sharpened sticks, is a critical step in developing something.   Testing helps keep crap products off the shelves, but so many manufacturers consider testing to be a needless expense that gets in the way of a good press release and a snappy PowerPoint presentation.

Which explains why there are so few really good products out there.  Invention of a whole new "thing" is difficult.  As an intellectual exercise, think about what we consider ‘new’ inventions in the last five generations.

The microprocessor?  Nope, it’s just miniaturization of tube and switch technology, gone solid-state and excruciatingly small.  You can make a computer out of tubes, switches and wires:  The original ENIAC was precisely that and it took a whole room of gear to add two numbers together.  Your computer is a direct descendant of ENIAC, except it is very small, and blindingly fast, but still relies on switches as logic gates. 

Programming is a direct descendant of Babbage’s Difference Engine.  The mental manipulations of Lady Ada Lovelace created the symbology for the very first programs for a mechanical calculation machine that only existed in Charles Babbage’s head.

Television?  Not at all.  TV is simply a method to show moving pictures to a lot of people at once, a refinement of Marconi for transmission combined with the moving picture.  Moving pictures go back to Eadweard Muybridge and his zoopraxiscope.

Supersonic Jets?  An evolution of daVinci, Bleiriot and the Wright Brothers original work.  DaVinci even postulated a rudimentary turbine, which is the heart of a jet engine.  There were significant changes during WWII, as wars tend to accelerate innovation, but it all goes back to the originators.

Pharma?  For thousands of years the village shaman or apothecary knew that a tea of foxglove would help those with ‘weak hearts’.  Foxglove contains digitalis:  The inventor of ‘medicines’ is lost unto time.  We’ve refined it and gone all scientific.

Genetically Modified Organisms?  Not by a long shot.  We’ve been cross-breeding plants, animals and humans for several thousand generations.  The Macintosh Apple does not actually exist in nature:  It is a hybrid, a cross-breed like the Labrador Retriever, or a green eyed Persian cat:  GMO’s are just more precise about things. 

Nuclear power?  Sort of.  Nuclear power is, at its essence, using fission to make heat to boil water to make steam which spins a turbine attached to a generator to make electricity.  Weaponizing nuclear energy is nothing more than an evolution of black powder; a very small quantity of something that goes high-order quickly creating a Very Big Bang. 

Electricity we knew about as far back as the Baghdad Battery, which was a primitive wet cell.  Westinghouse, Tesla, Edison and the rest improved and commercialized electricity.

X-Rays go back to the Curies, Roentgen and the original discovery of pitchblende as some kind of weird dang stuff that nobody really understood.  X-Rays needed film to prove their existence, which was Nicephore Niepce’s area of expertise, reproducing a drawing onto a pewter plate coated with bitumen of Judea, circa 1765.

Cars?  Gottlieb Daimler and the gasoline engine, but that was the size and fuel: Watt and others created a locomotion device using steam, but the use of a piston, pressure differentials and mechanical linkages to do work goes back so far that nobody can put a tag on it.  Archimedes perhaps?

Which, in summation, means there really haven’t been any amazing inventions in the past several hundred years.  We’ve refined things, polished the apple to a glossy shine and even found unique ways to utterly destroy ourselves, but we haven’t invented anything truly ‘new’ for a long time.

The point of this posting is that we don’t test things anymore.  Nobody takes a few days to look over a ‘new’ invention and see if it is as wise and good as the PowerPoint says it is.  Usually the first draft isn’t.

I have a new mobile phone now.  A nice one, from an international, well-known company in Waterloo, Ontario.  There is a problem with it.  The keys are just that tiny little bit of a millimetre too small to be used effectively by humans with normal sized fingers.  I have fingers that might even be considered small for a male of the species, so it isn’t as if I am trying to punch the keys with the blunt end of a sausage.

Someone, somewhere in the chain of design and testing didn’t hand off a prototype to another person to see if it really does work, as intended, by a wide range of folks with normal sized fingers.

Which is a damn shame, as I really want to like this technology.  Now, I merely accept it as vaguely useful.