HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2015-03-12, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, MARCH 12, 2015. PAGE 5.
Aguy just in front of me in the line up at
the coffee shop is sporting a Montreal
Canadiens hockey jersey with
SUBBAN and the number 76 emblazoned
across the back.
There are just a couple of things wrong with
that. This guy is half-bald, about 45 and
weighs maybe 130 pounds soaking wet.
Also, he’s white.
Last time I checked the Montreal Canadiens
defenceman P.K.Subban was in his robust
twenties, looked to weigh north of 200 pounds
and was built like a Newfoundland lighthouse.
Also, he was black.
What gives with the fan sweater thing? Do
wannabes don jerseys with stars’ names on
them in the hope that passers-by will mistake
them for the real thing? “Wow! Sid Crosby!
Pleased ta meetcha! I thought you’d be
taller....”
Or maybe they think the sweaters have
magical powers. It could be they fantasize that
wearing the sweater is like putting on a
Superman cape. Perhaps it will give them a
slap shot like Jason Spezza? The hip checking
savvy of Keith Ballard?
Whatever the motivation, they must be pretty
serious about it because official team jerseys
with players names and numbers on them
retail for upwards of $200 apiece. And some
fans can’t wait to shuck that jersey off and
throw it on the ice when their team turns in a
bad game.
Pretty dumb. But maybe not quite as dumb
as Victor Thompson. Mister Thompson is a
New England Patriots fan. More specifically,
he is a fan of Patriots quarterback Tom Brady.
So much so that he has had tattooed on his
head (he’s bald) – an exact replica of Tom
Brady’s football helmet. It features team logos
on both sides of his noggin, Brady’s number
12 and the word Patriots on the backside. He
also has RIDDELL, the name of the helmet
manufacturer, inked on his forehead.
Mister Thompson, who appears to be a few
yards short of a first down himself, is currently
doing time in Florida for possession of
synthetic marijuana.
Speaking of losers let me introduce you to
Robert Dee. Dee is a British professional
tennis player. Well, sort of.
The fact is, Dee has the unenviable
distinction of having lost 54 consecutive
international tour matches in a row (each in
straight sets). This underachievement
prompted the London Daily Telegraph to
proclaim Mister Dee as “the world’s worst
tennis pro”.
Wounded to the quick, Dee sued the
newspaper for libel. A judge listened to
testimony from both sides, deliberated
judiciously and declared that actually there
was ample evidence that Robert Dee was in
fact the world’s worst tennis professional. The
judge dismissed the charges.
And proving the old adage that you
should never get in a public dogfight with
institutions that buy their ink by the barrel, the
Daily Telegraph gleefully announced the
results of the lawsuit under the headline
“WORLD’S WORST TENNIS PLAYER
LOSES AGAIN.”
Arthur
Black
Shawn
Loughlin
Shawn’s Sense
Turning 30 over the weekend meant I
was bound to face some, “Jeez, I’m
old” situations sooner rather than later
but I didn’t think sooner would mean the day
after the milestone.
I was trying to impress upon a somewhat
younger acquaintance of mine how rare it is
for something to be happening, so I fell back
on the old idiom, once in a blue moon.
I know, it’s cliché, and, heck, it may even be
a bit dated but it gets the point across... or so I
thought.
The acquaintance had no idea what I was
talking about and asked me if it had to do with
cheese.
The entire situation left me realizing that if I
want to communicate with a younger
audience, I’m going to need to update some of
my idioms.
The following, in no particular order, are the
best I’ve found or created:
Never judge an app by its icon: Those
of us who have had the pleasure of growing
up reading books and newspapers and
magazines and who know that turning a
physical page will always feel better than
clicking or tapping the “next” page likely
know the old idiom of “You can’t judge a book
by its cover.”
The saying means that you can’t value
anything, be it a person or an actual
book, on the condition and content of its
outer shell.
With the relative scarcity of tomes, however,
it’s becoming harder and harder to say you
can’t judge any publication by its cover
because, more often and more often,
the cover is a tablet, a smart phone or
an e-reader.
To communicate with the younger
generation, we have to tap into that thing they
all have and seldom look away from: their
smartphones.
An app, or application, is what makes the
addictive devices run and some of the most
amazing ones have the simplest apps.
Therefore, you can’t judge them by their outer
shell.
You can lead someone outside, but you
can’t make them put their phone down:
Unless young folks happen to be an extreme
equestrian like my wife, they may have no idea
what the old saying “You can lead a horse to
water but you can’t make him drink” means.
Well, for me, the best modern analogy I
can find is trying to get technologically-
addicted individuals (and to be fair, there may
be as many of them in my age bracket as
there are in the younger brackets) to put down
their phone and really see what nature has to
offer.
I realize that the saying actually means that
anything, be it beast or person, will do only
what it wants to, but I think the infuriating
nature of the non-drinking horse is probably on
par with those people who can’t be led to new
experiences because their head is too far in
their phone.
You can’t see the picture for the
viewfinder: This one is close to home for me.
Given the amount of photos I take, I know the
danger of getting lost in the minutia of an
image or a situation and forgetting to look at
things as a whole.
This, of course, is based on the idea of not
being able to see the forest for the trees.
Essentially, the saying means that if someone
is too involved in the details of a situation, they
won’t see the situation as a whole.
Nowadays, the prevalence of cameras (be
they actual cameras or cameras through
phones or on tablets) has led to a phenomenon
where people are more interested in capturing
events and situations for Facebook or
Instagram than they are in actually living the
experience.
Last year, when my wife and I went on
our honeymoon, I left my camera behind.
With nothing but a point-and-shot digital
camera that’s older than most public school
students, we tackled two of the richest
cultural centres in Europe: Edinburgh and
Glasgow.
When asked why I didn’t take my camera
and bring back extremely-high resolution
images I said it’s because I wanted to
remember the trip, not have to look at the
pictures.
If you’re staring at life through the
viewfinder of your smart phone or your
camera, you’re missing a lot of other things
and not enjoying the entire situation.
Beauty is in the eye of the ‘selfie’ taker:
Selfies are pictures that the photographer takes
of themselves that, more often than not,
involves some fairly ridiculous faces.
The entire presence of this fad frustrates me
but it’s a perfect example of the old idiom
“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” because
I certainly don’t see any beauty in this
practice.
If you have something you want to take a
picture of, take a picture of it. Don’t shove
your face in the foreground, put on a pout and
snap the picture.
Anyway, everyone I’ve met who takes the
pictures hates their own selfies (thus leading to
them taking hundreds, if not thousands)
because they don’t like the way they look, or
they didn’t get the right angle, or so on and so
forth. Essentially, they can’t see their own
beauty because they are criticizing it.
Meanwhile, people looking at the pictures
(that aren’t I, given my hatred for the medium)
will tell the person they look great, beautiful,
fine, etc. and the subject of the selfie won’t be
able to accept it.
I think I’ll leave it there and invite readers of
The Citizen to send in their own modernized
versions of the idioms and clichés of lore.
Oh wait, I never finished my original story!
Well, I had to come up with some interesting
way to say the event we observed was one that
wouldn’t happen very often, so I turned to
sports:
Once in a Maple Leafs’ Stanley Cup win:
Once in a blue moon refers to something that
doesn’t happen very often, and, given that the
Maple Leafs are coming up on 50 years, 50
seasons without a Stanley Cup win, I figured
there was no better way to sum up a rare event.
“Gas is down below 80 cents a litre?
That’s a once in a Maple Leafs’ cup win
occurrence.”
“Snow to the bottom of the roof in one
storm? Once in a Maple Leafs’ cup win.”
So anyway, as I said, feel free to share your
own modernized idioms and sayings with The
Citizen and I’ll do my best to write another of
these in the near future.
Denny
Scott
Denny’s Den
A house in order
The idea that those who are most
deserving of help aren’t always
necessarily the ones who get it is far
from new. In Huron County, unfortunately, it’s
one that rears its ugly head almost every year
around budget time.
Specifically, I have heard it from Huron East
Mayor Bernie MacLellan on a number of
occasions. Whether it’s budget time or when
grant money is up for grabs, MacLellan has
lamented the fact that Huron East has almost
done too well managing its money, leaving
itself an ineligible, or at least an unattractive
landing spot for grant money.
At many Huron East Council meetings,
MacLellan has discussed the situation with
Chief Administrative Officer Brad Knight.
Because of the municipality’s good financial
standing and ability to pay for expenditures on
its own, the two have often theorized that it’s
this management (mis-management?) that has
led to a lack of grant money coming Huron
East’s way.
With this history in mind, it was no surprise
that it was MacLellan who made the exact
same case at the Huron County level last week.
MacLellan said, and he’s not wrong, that if
he, standing in the provincial government’s
shoes, heard a county crying poor that was
implementing a two per cent increase to the tax
levy while having over $35 million in reserves,
he’d have a hard time sympathizing.
The purse strings are being tightened at
every level of government, MacLellan said,
and only the more dire of requests can be taken
seriously when the grant money pot is getting
smaller and smaller all the time.
This same principle is applied at the lower
tiers, as Huron East Council has asked grant
applicants to submit financial statements. If
there is too much in the bank, argued council,
then the organization clearly doesn’t need the
help. It’s unfortunate, but in a weird way, it
makes sense.
At the Huron East level, MacLellan has
often said that if perhaps the municipality’s
treasury department, or its councillors had
done a worse job handling its finances, or
planning for the long term, perhaps it would
jump a few spots on the grant list.
Now, this is not to say that municipalities
other than Huron East haven’t done a good job
managing their money and that those facing a
large tax increase, Howick, for example, have
done a poor job balancing its books – there are
a number of factors at play in all situations – it
just shows the unfortunate grading system at
play when there’s money on the table.
In anything you do, you always hope that
you get as good as you give. Think of anything
in terms of energy transference; the idea that
the farther back you pull a slingshot, the
further it will shoot a stone.
The idea is on picture-perfect display in
baseball. If a pitcher throws a batting practice
pitch at 55 miles per hour, there isn’t as much
energy being transferred to the ball’s trajectory
off of the bat as there would be if the same
swing struck a fastball travelling at 100 miles
per hour. In the minds of humans, there is an
expectation that the amount of effort put into
something is the anticipated result you get.
When Huron East, again, for example,
balances its books and prepares to renovate a
building in 10 years, but then asks for a grant
that might help out a bit, that request often falls
by the wayside in favour of a municipality that
comes to an upper tier of government with its
cupboard bare and its hands out.
It’s not necessarily right, but it is, as they
say, the way the cookie crumbles.
Other Views
It’s time to update some phrases
Fan: short for fanatic