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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2012-04-05, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, APRIL 5, 2012. PAGE 5. It’s safe to assume that no one alive has ever seen a quagga. The last specimen died in an Amsterdam zoo in 1883. Quaggas, a kind of a half-zebra, half-horse combo, used to roam southern Africa in huge, dense herds but they’re extinct now, just like T. Rex, the Dodo and e-mail. Beg pardon? E-mail? Extinct? Well, almost, according to Atos, Europe’s largest IT firm. The company claims that 90 per cent of e-mail messages sent among its employees are a waste of time and money. Accordingly, Atos employees – all 74,000 of them – have been ordered to ditch the e-mail and go back to the telephone. E-mail was supposed to boost office productivity; in fact, it’s behaved like cholesterol, clogging the arteries of the business machine. Think of all the crap e-mails you get. Think of the millions of people who, like you, take time out to at least glance at their crap e-mails. Studies show useless e-mails can cost a company of 1,000 employees as much as $10 million a year. Ah, well. We’re getting used to extinctions these days. Tyrannosaurus Rex terrorized the river valleys of western Canada for a couple of million years during the Upper Cretaceous period before flaming out, whereas, say, the Polaroid Land Camera barely lasted 60 years (1948 – 2007) before being flung into the landfill of history. And remember the pager? Back in the 1980s it was hard to find a doctor or a salesman who didn’t have one clipped on his or her belt. One or two rappers ever went briefly pager-crazy in their performances. Then along came the mobile phone to gobble it up. R.I.P. noble pager. And who doesn’t have a Sony Walkman gathering dust at the back of a drawer? When they first appeared in the early 80’s Walkmans drove a stake through the heart (or the centre hole) of phonograph LPs. Then, just a few years ago along came a mutation called the iPod and the Sony Walkman went straight to the Museum of Quaint Artefacts. It had lots of company. The Palm Pilot, born in 1997, was a wonder of its time. Imagine having all your contacts, an accurate calendar and personal notes in one handy gizmo! With a touch screen and a personal stylus to boot! What could possibly improve on that? A company named Apple for one. Hello iPhone; adios Palm Pilot. Then there’s the Atari 2600. Customers snapped up more than 30 million of those to play video games like Pong, Pitfall and Combat. For all its fame Atari lived for only seven years: 1977 – 1984. All these techno dinosaurs share two characteristics. Number one: they were each once on the very knife-edge of surging technology, worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Number two: their collapse was utter and lightning-swift in evolutionary terms. Thirty years for the Sony Walkman. A decade for the Palm Pilot. Seven years for Atari. And now we’re watching the titanic struggles (which look increasingly like death throes) of Canada’s own BlackBerry. Just a couple of years ago it was the world leader in smartphones, commanding over 50 per cent of the American market alone. That share is now down to 10 per cent and circling the drain. But evolution’s like a baseball game: it’s not over until the last at-bat. Back in the mid- 1990s, a company named Apple was on the ropes too. They appointed a guy named Steve Jobs as CEO. They did alright. As for e-mail, the prognosis isn’t bright. “The younger generation has all but given up on it” says a feature story in the London Daily Mail – in favour of social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Why? Instant- messaging feels more ‘immediate’. Messages don’t languish unread in somebody’s inbox. In fact with Twitter, it can feel almost like you’re having an actual, one-on-one conversation with somebody. A face-to-face conversation. You can remember what that was like, can’t you? Comments: arblack43@shaw.ca Arthur Black Other Views Whatever happened to e-mail? It doesn’t seem like that long ago, but a YouTube video I saw last week made me realize just how much time has passed since 1995. In 1995 Alicia Silverstone was the object of this 13-year-old’s affection as she starred in the movie Clueless. She was the most beautiful girl in my world. Now in 2012, Silverstone’s Clueless co-star Brittany Murphy is dead after a drug overdose, her other co-star Paul Rudd is a highly- bankable movie star and Silverstone herself is feeding a baby named Bear Blu food she’s just chewed herself by regurgitating it into the baby boy’s mouth like a bird. Ten-month-old Bear Blu knows the food is coming when his mother leans her face down to his, so he opens his mouth and prepares for what looks like a French kiss from his mother. Nope, it’s just lunch. Silverstone has earned her fair share of critics as a result of this parenting maneouver. She has been accused of everything from poor parenting to grossing people out, but for me, a man who has yet to have any children, I’m left simply to wonder, ‘what happened?’ In just over 15 years, Silverstone went from being the beautiful 21-year-old girl of my dreams to a woman sitting on a couch in sweatpants holding a baby boy named Bear Blu (a name he’ll no doubt thank her for years down the road) and she’s chewing up his food before spitting it into his waiting mouth. The hardest part for me is that while she’s going through this absurd ritual, she still looks good! I have a hard time believing that 1995 Alicia and 2012 Alicia are the same person. I think part of me knows and the other part just can’t accept what my eyes are seeing. Silverstone has not commented on how far she plans to take the premastication (the official name of the practice), but what happens when little Bear Blu has to go to school? When his teacher drops a small carton of milk in front of him, is he going to look up at her confused and hungry? Who knows? I can’t tell if Silverstone is doing her infant son a service or a disservice. From a traditional standpoint you have to think that you’re taking time away from the young man where he could be learning how to eat food himself. But I’m not here to question Silverstone’s parenting ideas, I’m here to lament about what I’ve lost in the deal and that’s one of my first loves. From now until the end of time, whenever anyone mentions the name Alicia Silverstone, I won’t think of the beautiful blonde who stole my heart in 1995, I’ll think of the crazy mother feeding her child in what looks like a scene from a National Geographic special. And that’s robbery. It’s not the kind of robbery I can report to the police or that I can call my insurance company about, but it’s robbery nonetheless. And while in this space it’s all about me for at least once a week, I can’t help but wonder what is to become of Bear Blu. As many of us have learned over the years, the internet isn’t written in pencil, it’s chiseled in stone. And if you post something, only to take it down a minute later, you can believe someone was able to capture it in those 60 short seconds. So there poor Bear Blu will be, getting fed by his mother mouth-to-mouth style for the rest of eternity. If his name won’t be enough to earn him a hard time on the playground, a quick spin through YouTube will be sure to do the trick. Clueless parenting There is no cable in my house. We use other means to see our favourite television shows and, to be honest, I find myself better for it. I find myself spending more time doing more interactive things and spending more time being involved in interesting stories and less time passively absorbing them. There are some downfalls to not having cable however. Last night (being Sunday, April 1), for example, Ashleigh wanted to watch the American Country Music Awards and, because we live in Canada, she couldn’t stream it on the internet and obviously couldn’t watch it on the television. Fortunately, she will most likely be able to see the recaps and the highlights and low-spots sooner rather than later. One of the reasons I’m very glad I don’t have cable is because of the lunacy of politicians in Canada. Attack ads were recently played by the Conservative Party of Canada targeting Bob Rae: the interim leader of the third-place party in national politics. That ad, which touts Rae’s failure as the Premier of Ontario, was followed by another proclaiming the incredible actions of Stephen Harper’s government with dramatic images and music to show the viewer that this is really important stuff. I saw this on the internet which means that, aside from the production values (and I’m talking about the cost of making these festering piles of refuse, not how great they look or sound), there wasn’t any money spent to get the word out there. Had I watched these ads on television, I would have likely been moved to yank the cable right out of the wall. Either way, this is throwing bad money at a bad cause that demonstrates a complete lack of forethought and logical thinking. Beyond that it’s downright dirty. This attack ad is just twisting the knife in the Liberal’s side after the Conservative victory. It is literally kicking someone while they’re down and there will be retaliations. That means that good, hard-working Canadians are going to be asked to open their wallets and support the Liberals in their attempt to try and trump this attack ad just as campaign donations created the existing ads. Rae has already pledged to fight fire with fire and I have to ask where will it end. When will money be put towards good causes instead of slandering the names of political opponents? If, as the commercial says, Harper is so intent on erasing the deficit (and reducing it was definitely one of the major points in his amazing second ad), then why not take the money it cost to produce a completely useless attack ad three years ahead of an election and put that towards the growing cost of running Canada? It sickens me to see this kind of crass behaviour from the people who run our country. The first attack ad plainly states “Bob Rae wants to be Prime Minister” (And really, who doesn’t want to be Prime Minister? Heck, if I could get in I would try to see certain Health Ministers from Ontario pay back the money they wasted, I would see Harper pay for these ads from his own pocket and then I would probably abolish the party system with the hopes that this nonsense could never happen again. Imagine that; people researching and voting for an individual instead of a colour). Now, I’m not a military strategist or political genius, but it seems to me that, when you’re looking to undermine an opponent, you don’t waste your time trying to face down a party with approximately 21 per cent of the sway your own party has. I think Harper must be stuck a couple years in the past. Not only would that mean the attack ads would be timed logically, but it would also mean they were targetting the right people. Had the ads focused on the NDP – and, let’s be honest, between non-French speaking representatives from the heart of Quebec and other MPs who look like they’ve never seen a razor in the mirror, there is a lot to work with – the ads would have made sense. Now people will say that Harper isn’t making these on-the-ground decisions he’s simply leading the party and setting goals. Someone else is responsible for these ads. Well to those people I say look at Harper’s past: he brings a hard-party line and anyone who doesn’t follow is thrown under the campaign bus. Just ask Helena Guergis. Sensible or logical or not, the ads are an abomination. We are supposed to be Canadians. We are viewed on the world stage as soft- spoken, polite and intelligent. We are supposed to be the cool-headed counterpart to our neighbours to the south but these kinds of actions throw a dark stain on the image that Canada has cultivated. If the Conservative campaign machine has so much money that they can afford to start attacking people three years before an election, maybe they should look at putting some of that money towards the policies they keep insisting are important. Or better yet, maybe we could take that money and research ways to save our beloved penny. Maybe a new metal could be found that is less expensive than the current composition of the Canadian penny or mint production could just be subsidized. Shape up Harper, or ship out. Canada may have had enough of the Liberals, but I think we’ve all had more than enough of this underhanded political mind-set that does nothing but cost money and perpetuate pointless discourse. Shawn Loughlin Shawn’s Sense Denny Scott Denny’s Den Did I miss an election being called?