HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2015-07-16, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, JULY 16, 2015. PAGE 5.
Want to find out if your marriage
is strong like bull or flaccid as
a pyjama drawstring? Here’s a
simple test.
Take your mate to Ikea. A psychologist at
California State University says if your union
can survive that, chances are the two of you
will be blowing out candles on your 60th
wedding anniversary.
Professor Ramani Durvasula says a visit by
wannabe life partners to the iconic Swedish
furniture store can make or break the
relationship. She often goes herself (solo) with
a clipboard in hand. “It’s like psychology
porn” she says.
A furniture store as a marriage breaker –
who’da thunk it?
Professor Durvasula says the trouble usually
starts in the kitchen section. It begins as a mild
difference of opinion over the dishwasher and
ends in a screaming match about who does the
most cooking or who never cleans out the
fridge. When she can get their attention,
Professor Durvasula asks couples who have
bought furniture to report back to her after they
take it home and assemble it.
That’s when the heavy matrimonial
bombardment really starts. Relationships can
usually skate through minor assembly jobs like
coffee tables and book cases. It’s the more
complicated items that take their toll. Like an
Ikea wall unit called the Liatorp.
“That’s the divorce maker” says the prof.
Odd that one company can swing that kind
of weight – but then Ikea is no ordinary
company. It’s big, for starters – 353 stores in
46 countries. It offers 12,000 products and
sells $25 billion worth of goods each year.
And now let me introduce a miserly drunken
Swede by the name of Ingvar Kamprad. He is
81 years old, lives in a modest bungalow and
drives a 15-year-old Volvo. He looks like a
bum, drinks like a fish and pinches kroner like
a Swedish version of Scrooge McDuck.
Parsimony is not the only trait Kamprad
shares with the iconic waterfowl. He, like
Scrooge, is very, very rich. The seventh richest
person in the world, worth $15.7 billion. That’s
because ‘way back in 1943 he formed a
furniture company and named it with the first
letters of his name, Ingvar Kamprad, the farm
he grew up on (Elmtaryd) and his home town
Agunnaryd.
Put that all together, it spells IKEA.
Kamprad has forsaken his village in Sweden
for a villa in Switzerland, but it’s a potting
shed, as villas go. And Kamprad continues to
live as if he were waiting for his old age
pension cheque to come in. He still wears a
shabby raincoat and scuffed shoes and he still
favours the bus over a chauffeured limo. In fact
he was recently denied entry at a gala evening
celebration because security guards refused to
believe that the grungy hobo who’d just got off
a bus could possibly be a guest at their swanky
event.
Kamprad was there to pick up a
Businessman of the Year award.
Moving into his ninth decade, Kamprad has
loosened his grip on the IKEA reins and
handed them over to his three sons. His long-
suffering wife Margaretha stands by him even
as he goes off to ‘dry out’ three times a year.
And yes, their villa is furnished with IKEA
products. Assembled by Ingvar. Without input
from Margaretha.
Obviously there’s no Liatorp wall unit in the
Kamprad household.
Arthur
Black
Shawn
Loughlin
Shawn’s Sense
There’s very little secret in the fact that
I’m into several ‘fandoms’, as they are
called, including comic book characters
and television shows.
A fandom is the entirety of a group of people
who enjoy a particular show, series, book or
film.
I’m part of a lot of them. There’s Doctor
Who, The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars (and not
Star Trek and, yes, there is a difference) and
several comic book heroes.
One of my favourite comic book
heroes, Deadpool (of, most notably, the comic
of the same name) is a bit quirky as far as
comics go.
First and foremost, he is aware of the fact
that he is a comic book hero. He breaks the
fourth wall all the time.
So when the Deadpool movie, starring Ryan
Reynolds, was announced, I was happy.
Reynolds is the perfect actor to play Deadpool
because of the comedy that denotes the
character.
One of my favourite panels from his stories
is a direct reference to Spider-Man. He says,
“Shhh, my common sense is tingling,”
(compared to Peter Parker’s Spider Sense
which warns him of oncoming danger).
I always laugh, every single time I see it,
because it seems to point to something that’s
becoming more and more true the more time
goes on: common sense is pretty much a
superpower anymore.
Take, for example, Shelburne’s “Country
event”.
Shelburne, N.S., was set to hold a special
Founder’s Day weekend starting today.
Originally, the weekend was set to hold a
special Red Neck event which was apparently
going to be based around TV’s Duck Dynasty.
Now, love or hate the show, if you don’t
think there are some similarities between the
show and rural Canada, you are lying to
yourself.
People took offense to it (you know
what, it’s not just death and taxes anymore,
there are three constants: death, taxes and
people over-reacting to benign things) and it
was changed to the Shelburne County Country
event.
Regardless of what the Canadian Oxford
Dictionary may say (which defines redneck as
a derogatory term), I’ve always thought it to be
an honorarium.
To me a redneck is a person passionate about
their beliefs and someone who earns their
keep.
Regardless of my belief, the belief of some
people, including Ed Cayer, a Shelburne
resident, is that redneck may hold a racist
undertone to it.
No, people aren’t using redneck as a racist
remark, but he thinks that because of Duck
Dynasty, people will equate redneck with
racist or homophobic remarks.
Now I consider myself a fairly liberal (small
‘L’ liberal) when it comes to letting other
people live their lives.
I don’t care what people’s beliefs are,
what they do in the privacy of their own
home or even who they voted for in the last
election. None of that is my business as
long as someone doesn’t go out of their
way to change that. And trust me, I really don’t
care who you go home to, who you vote
for or if you do or don’t believe in the Bible.
I’m a firm believer in letting people live their
lives.
That didn’t stop me, however, from dressing
up like a member of the Duck Dynasty crew for
Halloween a few years ago.
I donned my best camo outfit (I use it for
paint-ball and Airsoft. Much to my great
shame, I’m just a poser when it comes to
camouflage), tossed on a grey-ish beard and
toted around a fake shotgun (where
appropriate, it didn’t come to any pictures or
interviews with me).
Why? Well I did it primarily because I had
the fixins for the outfit at home. The only thing
I had to buy was a beard and some spray paint
to finish the costume. I’m a big fan of
costumes like that. If you can get the point
across without spending hours crafting it or
hundreds of dollars on it, well that’s what
Halloween is all about.
I didn’t do it because I, in any way, agreed
with the views shared on the show.
One of the big problems Cayer had with the
event was a television personality look-alike
event which is based on a “popular reality
television show”. He believes it will lead to
many people looking like Duck Dynasty
characters and lead people to believe racist or
homophobic remarks made by members of the
reality programming.
Hold on, my common sense is tingling.
Rednecks have existed long before this show
and will persist long after and I doubt very
much that they all hold the same beliefs given
that they are so widespread.
And, let’s just take that idea and spread it a
little further.
Am I suddenly going to start officiating
weddings and running church services because
one year I dressed up as a priest from a
vampire movie? No. Are people who dress up
as skeletons and zombies suddenly going to
start attacking living humans? Am I going to
develop the ability to turn into a car because
once upon a time I dressed up as a
Transformer? Am I going to start hunting
ghosts because I had a Ghostbusters costume
one year? (The real ones, you know, Bill
Murray, Harold Ramis, Ernie Hudson and Dan
Aykroyd.)
No. No one is going to, barring some kind of
magic spell that is too often a script gimmick
on television, turn into the character whose
costume they are wearing. Heck, if they did,
events like Comic-Con would be
simultaneously much cooler and much more
terrifying.
The simple fact is people aren’t going to
become racist because of a television show.
Either they saw the show, or, in this case,
donned their camo costume or they weren’t a
racist or a homophobe and still aren’t. I hope
that, like me, they genuinely don’t care what
other people do as long as it doesn’t affect
them, and putting on a costume isn’t going to
change that.
So let’s all start using a little common sense
so that it’s more... well... common.
Denny
Scott
Denny’s Den
The sad side of life
Some people may or may not know this
about me, but I’m a documentary junkie.
I guess it goes hand in hand with being a
journalist, but I love true stories. There is so
much to learn about the world and its people,
without even scratching the surface of our
imaginations. (That’s not to say we shouldn’t
use our imaginations, but you know what I’m
saying.)
When I read a book, it’s always some form
of non-fiction – whether it’s a biography, a
sports story, true crime or community and
culture (my personal favourite) I just find
myself enthralled by being able to relay
something I read and found fascinating,
knowing that it actually happened.
Having said all of that, I recently watched a
documentary called Requiem for the Dead:
American Spring 2014. It’s an interesting
concept (a story told entirely through news
footage and the social media accounts of those
involved) about a worthwhile topic (the
astounding number of gun-related deaths in the
U.S. in just one season – Spring of 2014).
I didn’t particularly like the documentary
(there was no narrative whatsoever – it was
like me trying to tell you a story by taking a
pile of photographs and dropping a new one on
the table every three seconds in some sort of
story-telling order and leaving it to you to put
it together) but it woke my girlfriend Jess and
me up to the world of camera phones and
social media that admittedly we didn’t really
think existed: sad social media.
Now, of course, “sad” social media posts are
nothing new. Many have heard, or seen with
their own eyes, people posting about being
dumped, or being caught in a custody battle, or
fighting with someone – all things that
shouldn’t be blabbed about – and posting it
online for all the world to see.
What I’m talking about it a different kind of
sadness – profound sadness.
Because the stories of Requiem for the Dead
are told only through social media posts, while
watching, you have to stop yourself and
remember where these images came from.
A picture of a coffin containing the body of
a dead teenager being loaded into the hearse...
that someone posted to Instagram. A selfie
taken by a grieving young man and his wife
(sad looks all around, of course) on the way to
a funeral... posted on Twitter. A mother who
lost two children (one killed the other, then
himself) letting her feelings flow... on
Facebook.
These are some of the most intimate and
personal moments that will ever occur in one’s
life, all for the wrong reasons, and they’re
being immortalized. Why?
Camera phones and social media have been
interesting developments for the good things in
life. They have connected friends and people
have relived experiences for months, if not
years after the fact. I know I have done exactly
that recently, looking back and smiling at
pictures of me and my team from last month’s
Ride to Conquer Cancer.
I like to relive that moment because it was
happy. But funerals, I thought, have always
been a notorious no-camera zone, unless we’re
talking about documenting the funeral of a
celebrity, an American president, a war hero.
I have been to lovely funerals. I have seen
beautiful flower arrangements on caskets and
stood in front of gravestones on warm, breezy
days. I’ve even spoken at a few funerals –
given what I thought to be moving and apt
eulogies for people I loved. But that, under no
circumstances, means I’d want to go back and
relive it – physically or remotely.
Other Views
How do you spell discord? I.K.E.A.
A comic character had it right