Gifted Typist

I’ve always been a tad uncomfortable with the forced patriotism of “Canada Day.”

Flag-waving and nationalistic chest thumping runs contrary to the Canadian national character.

Canadians pride themselves on their understated, low-key, practical nature. We aren’t a terribly flamboyant or excitable people. (Unless there’s a hockey game.)

We don’t wear our pride on our sleeve and we don’t wave flags to express who we are, even though in our hearts we do know who we are.

So how does a low-key, quiet, polite Canadian express pride and patriotism on a day like this.

I would say that our strongest  expression of our Canadian-ness is our conviction of what we are not: American.

To the non-North American we appear similar to Americans in look, language and lifestyle. We are often mistaken in the same way that Austrians are mistaken for Germans or Kiwis for Aussies. (I would challenge your average Canadian to distinguish an Austrian from a German.)

But as Canadians we, protest vigourously. We are not American, we say. We are Canadian.

This is what makes us Canadian. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s a heart-felt and genuine expression of who we are. Or aren’t.

But that doesn’t look good at government-sponsored picnics and celebrations. And this is where is gets ironic because these celebrations are a genuinely American way of celebrating nationhood: flag-waving, anthem singing and hand-on-heart sentimentality.

That’s the American way. That is not the Canadian way. Yet almost by default, we adopt the ways of a nation we are eager to distinguish ourselves from.

I find this funny and endearing in a sort of awkward way.

I hope we are always a tad uncomfortable with the “forced celebrations” on this day.

It’s what makes us Canadian.

So Happy, er, Canada Day.

See my column here.

My neighbourhood is under siege. The European Fire Ants have arrived. They are little red ants that sting.

Actually they arrived some twenty years ago off the ships but only recently have people been getting up in arms about it.

These little devils set up colonies with multiple queens. So you can’t just kill them off by killing one queen.

Bloody little divas, they are.

I’ve never been bitten and I haven’t seen them on my property but neighbours have them so it’s only a matter of time.

… and like Princess Diana, we’ll probably remember where we were when we heard the news of the King of Pop’s death.

There are similarities: both were staging a come-back, both were global celebrities and both died too soon.

And everyone was shocked.

Of course, Jacko was deeply troubled and far more *out there* than Diana ever was.

But our generation grew up with him, from his early child-star days in The Jackson 5 to his blockbuster Thriller days.  That music still crackles with energy whenever I hear it.

Not sure I’m one of those *mourning* his loss. I wasn’t that attached.

But I am sad for him and I do wonder what might have been if he’d managed this come-back tour.

RIP Michael Jackson.

I must confess to you, my dear bloggies, that I’ve been cheating on you.

It’s true. I’ve been living a dual on-line life: One here on GT and the another on Twitter.

For the longest time I tried to keep the two worlds separate, like Jon tried to do on Jon and Kate plus Eight.

GT is still my first love, and Twitter is the mistress.

But as time’s gone on, Twitter has become a bigger part of my on-line life. Twitter’s fast and sexy.  It breaks the news to me. It’s there – always faithful and loyal – when I want it, a steady stream of contact. But when I don’t want it, I turn it off and it goes away.

I’ve met many of the local Twitterati at the Third Wednesday Meet-ups, Tuesday Twushi (Twitter + Sushi), at #halifaxchicks and Podcamp. We share much in common and without Twitter, they would have remained strangers.

I’m not leaving you, dear bloggies. You’re my first love. But I can no longer pretend that Twitter isn’t a part of my on-line life.

This is why I’m adding the Twitter widget in the sidebar.

I hope this doesn’t cause friction. I’ve felt the anti-Twitter vibe in the blog world. But it’s OK, the two can co-exist in peace and harmony if they try.

So let’s not have a big public bust-up like Jon and Kate. Let’s all try to get along, shall we?

Apparently our province has more centenarians than most other parts of the country.

The average number of 100-year olds is 14 per 100,000. In Nova Scotia, it’s 21 per 100,000.

I have personal experience of this. My own grandmother is 104 and in good health, except for her knees and her hearing. She’s getting forgetful. She forgets that her husband died three years ago and that her sister died 30 years ago.

But she always knows who I am when she sees me.

It’s interesting that this province has such longevity. On one hand, it makes sense. Lifestyle and environmental factors play a role. We have a slow lifestyle and change comes gradually here. There isn’t a big manufacturing base and our population is still under a million – meaning fewer cars and less pollution.

But there are contradictory factors too: we have some of the highest rates of cancer, cardio-vascular disease, obesity, diabetes, MS and poverty in the country. We also have the lowest disability-free life expectency in the country.

Go figure.

And in the pre-rust belt days, this province suffered from acid rain and air pollution that blew over from the Northeastern US.

My guess is that genetics have a big role in the number of 100-year olds.

My other guess is that in 50 years from now we won’t have such high rates of centenarians.

The lifestyle and environmental factors that produced today’s 100-year olds existed some 50 or more years ago.

Things are different today. Our kids suffer weigh-related medical conditions and our diets are based on processed foods full of salt and sugar.

Perhaps we should be investing more in the study of these centenarians so we might emulate their lifestyles and live longer.

Today’s the day:  Summmah.

It’s also the longest day of the year. Hooray.

It’s raining, but that’s OK, we’ve had a beautiful spring which is remarkable given the string of hideous springs we’ve had in these parts for the past 7 years: usually it’s three months of rain, fog and dampness.

So this typist isn’t complaining.

Long live summah!

Go to my Herald column here.

Organizing doesn’t come naturally to me.

Dunno what it is about me, but I can just walk into a neat room and make it messy – without even trying.

I do occasionally mount an assault on the mess, but it just comes back again. So I’ve learned to embrace it.

I am slob, hear me roar.

This is fine except for one thing:  I can never find anything. And when you have four slobs living under one roof, well, let’s just say the chaos becomes the enemy.

So I hired in Jane the Organizer for a bit of tough love.

This woman can stick-handle and score big with getting slobs like me to conform to systems, baskets and labels.

There’s more in the column, but I will say that our time together was productive and traumatizing – to me.

In the past, updating this blog has been traumatic as this humble typist grappled with the complexities of FTP, servers, deleting and replacing the correct files.

Such is the joy of having a blog of one’s own.

But since Wordpress 2.7, our world has become easier.

Now it’s just one press of a button on the dashboard and presto. She’s updated.

I don’t really notice anything on the front end, or the backend.

But security’s always a concern so hooray for WP 2.8.

Last year, the politicians of this province lavished $9M on something called Democracy 250. The idea was to engage young people in the democratic process.

They brought in two former premiers – old, grey-haired,  stodgy men – as co-chairs of this “celebration.” Typical of Nova Scotia politicians, these men have all the charisma of an aging vicar in a backwoods parish.

The old guys lectured on CBC radio and in the newspaper, oblivious to the fact that young people don’t listen to CBC radio or read the newspaper.

When invited to a discussion on social media and politics during the election campaign, not one candidate or politician or Democracy 250 official showed up.

During the D250 “celebration” the old guys went on junkets to look up important documents in London England.

There were also made-in-China T-shirts – in “celebration” of democracy. Jackets and sweatshirts too! The delicious irony of that went over their heads.

There was a “youth” concert viewed by cool youth as patronizing. They tried to imbue the concert with “cool” by calling it the D-2-Fiddy concert which made the whole thing look even more ridiculous.

They also held a masquerade ball in which no youth attended because it wasn’t really for the youth.

The website was designed in an 18-century scroll. Way to engage the youth, guys!

At the end of the “celebration” the junketeers and beneficiaries of the Democracy 250 largesse congratulated themselves on job well done.

And the voter turnout in the recent election was 58%, one of the lowest ever.

Give us our money back Democracy 250.

Link to my Herald column here.

That’s because the election noise is over. At last.

For American and out-of-province visitors, it went like this:

The old bumbling guys went out off the toe of our collective boot.

And the new guys got in for the first time ever. And the came in on a majority.

We live in a nice place here, but our politics are corrupt, in-bread and dysfunctional.

Now there is a chance to clean it up.

We can but hope.

OK, so the WHO has just declared a Swine Flu pandemic.

Not sure what to think.

Initial fears were calmed by the mild nature of the illness, but if it’s anything like the killer flu of 1917-18 the worst of it will hit in a second wave. Is this it? Or is this just the preparation.

So who knows?

WHO knows, I guess.

What are you doing to ready for this?

These were the search terms for a hit I had from Bostwana, Africa this morning.

It gives pause for thought. What, exactly, does a typist do?

The name of this blog came about in response to the dreaded cocktail party question:

And what do you do?

Um, erm, ahhhhh????

My resume is a dog’s breakfast. I’ve done so many things that don’t fall neatly under one professional designation or umbrella term. Other than “typist.”

So I would reply, “I’m a typist.”

“You mean you do data input work?” they would say.

“No, not data input work. I’m a typist.”

When I got “the look” I quickly rallied back with ” a very gifted typist.”

Not sure if it put them at ease, but it gave me a comeback, at least.

But on the question of what does a typist do, I’m at a loss.

Other than to say the obvious: a typist types.

What do you think a typist does?

There’s a petition going around asking Pixar to make more animated movies with girls who are not princesses.

In a letter to Pixar Linda Holmes points out:

Of the ten movies you’ve released so far, ten of them have central characters who are boys or men, or who are anthropomorphized animals or robots or bugs who are voiced by and imagined as boys or men. These movies feature women and girls to varying degrees — The Incredibles, in particular — but the story is never “a girl and the things that happen to her,” the way it’s “a boy and what happens to him.”

She say that girls also like to see themselves depicted as central characters in the animated blockbusters.

In Up, Ellie was one of those girls. She had the dream for adventure, but Ellie got old and died in the opening montage. She didn’t get to go to Paradise Falls. The movie wasn’t about Ellie. It was about Carl and Russel.

My understanding is that after the summer blockbusters of 2010 and 2011 — Toy Story 3 and Newt– you’re planning The Bear And The Bow, a Christmastime fairy tale rather than a summer adventure. And your first one about a girl — way to go!

The writer has nothing against Pixar flicks and she loved Up.

She’s just asking for more girls.

By scanning the reviews, I knew the flick Up would be good, but I must say it came as a surprise when the story of this grieving old man and his plumb eight-year old sidekick found its way into the heart of this crusty typist.

Let’s just say tissues were needed in the same way that tissues are needed whenever I open Robert Munsch’s book Love You Forever.

I’m generally not an easy-sell with these things. I find cheap sentimentality to be lazy, tiresome and cliche. And this makes me angry, especially when I spend good money and time on it.  Up managed to move without resorting to eash schmaltz.

It opens with a sweet montage covering of the life of 78-year old Carl Fredrickson (Ed Asner). We meet him as a child, learn of his fascination with aviation and we meet his sweetheart Ellie who shares a dream to go to Paradise Falls in South America. The rest is comes as a snapshot view of their lives together.

Next time we meet Carl he is  an old man grieving the loss of his wife Ellie, the loss of his old neighbourhood and the loss of his dream to go to Paradise Falls. So much loss. That’s when Boy Scout Russell appears at the door asking if he can provide an old person assistance so he can earn his “help an old person badge.”

Though a series events, the pair set out on an adventure to Paradise Falls, travelling  in the man’s house which is lifted into flight by thousands of helium-filled balloons. Picture perfect.

It’s a whimsical tale, rendered in a colourful, artistic animation that puts you in the mind of a circus or a fair (back in the days when they weren’t full of slimeballs.)  There’s adventure, suspense and villainy (voiced exquisitely by Christopher Plummer). There’s goofy humour in the gorky rare bird called Kevin and the dumb dog who appear along the way and help them though their adventures. All of this would be enjoyable on its own.

But it was the bitter-sweet observations on the old man’s compromises that moved me, the stinging regret and sorrow that he never pursued the dream to go to Paradise Falls. They saved money for the trip but something always got in the way: the car, house repairs, life.

How many of us can relate to that?

The old man confronts his regrets each time he opens the My Adventures scrapbook kept by his wife. But he can never turn the page and look at the chapter entitled “Stuff I’m going to do”. Carl can’t face his wife’s regret and lost dreams.

The moment of redemption occurs for Carl when he finally gets up the courage to turn that page. I’ll won’t spoil it here, but this moment is one of the most poignant, beautiful and tear-inducing of any moment in any animation flick, or non-animated flick, for that matter.

I could hear sniffles all around in this film and laughter, and at the end,  that rare thing in a movie cinema: applause.

I don’t often hear that.

But then I don’t often leave an animated film – or any film, for that matter – feeling so moved and satisfied by the sheer joy of the story.

See today’s column here.дивани

Just ask Susan Boyle.

She went for the dream, but didn’t see the steaming locomotive of fame and celebrity coming her way. And when it hit, she wasn’t prepared for the dung heap cargo of media intrusion, paparazzi and nastiness.

Now she’s recovering from emotional exhaustion in a clinic.

Her story is a morality tale for our times.

(And please, Google, don’t index her name and put this post on your first page!)