HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2011-02-10, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2011. PAGE 5.
Canada’s most famous philosopher
Marshal McLuhan once observed that
“the name of a man is a numbing blow
from which he never recovers”. I don’t know
for sure if that’s true, but I do know that when
it comes to names some men (and women) get
hammered harder than others. Sir Reginald
Aylmer Ranfurly Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax
comes to mind. He was (no kidding) an
admiral in the British navy – ‘though I daresay
he never sailed a ship with an anchor heavier
than the name he trailed behind him.
His friends just called him Reggie.
Alanis Morrisette’s daughter won’t be that
lucky. The Ottawa-born songstress recently
had a baby girl. Mom’s announced that the
child’s name will be Ever Imre.
Ever. Imre. Let us try to calculate how many
thousands of times that child will have to stop
and explain her name to the curious.
“No, it’s not ‘Evelyn Marie’, it’s ‘Ever
Imre’. No, not ‘Emery’ – ‘Imre. That’s I-M-R-
E….”
A numbing blow indeed. Names are tricky
and volatile propositions. They’re like life-
long licence plates and deserve considerable
thought before they are bestowed. I remember
the look on my mother’s face when I told her
that my daughter’s middle name was going to
be Gabrielle. Mom was a pioneer-stock, rock-
ribbed Ontario Presbyterian – which is to say,
plain-spoken, no nonsense, no frills and
definitely no fancy-pants names like
‘Gabrielle’. I might as well have told her we
were naming the kid Jezebel or Nefertiti.
Mind you mom was a polite Canuck too, so
she didn’t say anything. Just blinked once or
twice and started humming quietly.
Just as well she’s gone to her reward these
20 years. If she had trouble handling Gabrielle
how would she do with names like Acacia,
Atlantis, Chevonne, Gulana and Quianne?
And that’s just the first line of the local girls’
hockey team.
Eco-consciousness looms large in the baby-
naming game. There are kids answering to
Sky, Rainbow, Snow, Spruce, Prairie and Leaf.
But that’s small potatoes compared to some of
the Big Concept kids’ names out there. Names
like Freedom, Infinity, Horizon, Future and
Diplomacy.
Only a matter of time before a skein of
triplets named Surely, Goodness and Mercy
shows up in the Maternity Ward.
Speaking of Surely, whatever happened to
good old names like – well, Shirley? And
Mary and Susan? And Tom, Dick and Harry? I
guess nowadays parents just want their kids to
stand out.
Which of course is the last thing most kids
want to do.
Let us all thank our lucky stars that we were
not born the offspring of stars – which is to
say, Hollywood celebrities. Celebs are the
folks who really take it into the stratosphere
when it comes to name-calling.
You think Alanis Morrisette’s daughter’s
name is weird? Tell it to Frank Zappa’s
children – either his daughter Moon Unit, or
his son Dweezil. If that’s still too tame for you
check out that potty-mouthed Vegas magician
Penn Jillette. He called his daughter Moxie
Crime Fighter.
The actor Nicholas Cage was practically
bland by comparison. He named his son Kal-
El.
That’s uh, Superman’s birth name back on
Planet Krypton in case you didn’t know.
No question weird names are weirdly hot
right now, but they are by no means an
exclusively 21st century phenomenon. Back in
the last century when Sir Reginald Aylmer
Ranfurly Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax was stiff-
upper-lipping his gin and tonics, he had a
contemporary named Sir William Walton. Sir
William was a famous British composer by the
time he died in 1983, but he had a bit of a
scramble getting there. In his youth he was a
typical starving artist who got by largely by
scrounging off the goodwill of Dame Edith
Sitwell. What he didn’t know was the Sitwell
family had a code name for Walton. They
called him “Lincrusta”.
Lincrusta was the trade name of an
embossed wall covering made of gelled
linseed oil and wood flour applied to heavy
canvas.
It was known for being exceedingly difficult
to peel off.
Arthur
Black
Other Views Be careful what you call them
So the Green Bay Packers won the
Superbowl. They weren’t my pick. I
thought the Pittsburgh Steelers were the
better team, but on Sunday, it was Green Bay
that prevailed. And so too did small-town
football fans everywhere.
The Packers have become the adopted
hometeam for many football fans who call a
small community home.
Situated in Green Bay, Wisconsin, the
Packers are the home team of one the smallest
markets in major professional sports, calling a
city of barely more than 100,000 people home.
With big television and sponsorship money
elsewhere, it has been suggested several times
in the team’s almost 100 years that they move.
Well, they haven’t moved and they aren’t
about to anytime soon, because of the
ownership structure. The Packers, unlike any
other team in American professional sports, is
owned by the community. The Packers are the
only team in professional sports that releases
its financial balance sheet every year.
The team is controlled by a seven-member
executive committee, which is elected by a 45-
member board of directors. The president of
that committee is the only member to draw
compensation from one of the most profitable
franchises in sports history.
There are hundreds of thousands of
shareholders who technically own the team
and the not-for-profit team’s earnings are
handed over to the Green Bay Packers
Foundation which helps to fund education,
civic affairs, health services, human service
and youth-related programs in the community.
It might seem like a strange model, but it
seems to work. If you signed your name to the
season’s ticket waiting list today you should be
in line for seats in about 100 years. Maybe. It
is not unheard of for season’s tickets to passed
down in wills in Wisconsin and to cut down on
wait times, children are being put on the
waiting list as soon as their birth certificate is
printed and while they’re still at the hospital.
It reminds me a lot of The Citizen. Not in all
respects, of course. If you’d like a subscription,
you can just swing past the office. To my
knowledge there’s no waiting list to speak of,
let alone one that may take a century. But the
community ownership the two organizations
share is something that people can be proud of.
When the community owns something, it’s
theirs and can work with the current of the
community, not against it, leading to happy
campers on both sides of the desk.
So while New York Yankee fans might have
had to endure the hirings and firings of former
manager Billy Martin based on the whims of
owner George Steinbrenner and while the
Toronto Maple Leafs are, well, the Leafs, and
there isn’t anything anybody can do about it,
the Packers can revel in the fact that they are a
franchise for the people, by the people.
So Sunday night’s victory was one for small-
town fans everywhere.
Closer to home, Canadians have seen hockey
towns like Winnipeg and Quebec City lose
their teams to cities with warmer climates, and
deeper pockets, only to fail by the handful. And
lest we forget when Wayne Gretzky left
Edmonton for Los Angeles, nearly descending
an entire country into deep depression.
There isn’t a small town in the world that
hasn’t lost something to a larger city centre, so
for the people of Green Bay to find a way to
hold on to their beloved Packers, improving
what was theirs, rather than seeking a solution
outside their city limits, it has been an
inspirational story that many of us can relate
to.
Community power
Wednesday, Feb. 2 was a day that will live
on in infamy in the minds and hearts of every
logophile the country over.
For several days we heard the word snow
added to every apocalyptic or cataclysmic
synonym in the Canadian English language.
Whether you thought the Snowpocalypse
was upon us, the end was near and the
Snowture had arrived (thats a snow-rapture for
those who didn’t know), Snowmaggedon, or,
my, and many others favourite, Snowtorious
B.I.G., or whether you, like me, just went to
bed and hoped it all blew over, Huron County
was battening down the hatches for a huge
snow storm of potentially 30 centimetres! That
might go over the top of a large pair of boots!
I tried not to get swept up in this whole
process because, let’s be honest here,
Wednesday’s weather antics were really Snow
big deal.
I was out covering a council meeting and
arrived home around 11 p.m. on Tuesday
evening.
There was some drifting on Base Line, but
there is always drifting on Base Line. There
was no snow in the air, no cataclysmic
dumping of the white stuff and no quirky little
snow-themed names that popped into my head
as I drove.
The only thing I could think of, as listening
to Led Zeppelin’s The Immigrant Song, was
that, as Ontarians, I think we’ve forgotten that
we do come from the land of the ice and snow.
I also began to remember public school.
I went to Robertson Memorial Public School
in Goderich. It’s now known as Goderich
Public School, which I consider to be an
incredible travesty and insult, but that will be
a story for another day.
Anyways, Robertson Memorial Public
School never closed.
We didn’t have buses, so there was a
mitigating factor, but even when the roads
were so slick with ice that we could have
skated to school (and one kid I knew did just
that) the school remained open.
I now realize the world is a different place.
School boards are shut down in expectance.
The Citizen editor Shawn Loughlin and I
have talked about this, how principals or
school board staff have to make the decision
early in the morning, and so they can be
forgiven, but, I was out on Tuesday evening
and Wednesday morning of the snowstorm-to-
trump-all-snowstorms, and it wasn’t that bad.
We’ve had worse days, even this winter.
But it didn’t frustrate me near as much as
when I got to the bank at 4:30 p.m. and saw
this sign:
“This branch closed at noon due to the bad
weather.”
Now, before anyone tries to guess where I
was, I live in Clinton, and don’t bank there,
and that’s all I’m telling you.
This frustrated me because the roads had all
opened at noon.
Now, if I was talking about some small
niche store that was in between towns and on
a closed road, I would have understood the
sign.
But this was a bank in an urban location.
One would think that at least two or three
people that work there would live in the town
surrounding it.
When I first saw it, I considered it a minor
inconvenience, but excusable, as the people
who work their might have children stuck at
home due to the weather.
It wasn’t until an hour later that I
remembered that all the schools in the Avon
Maitland District School Board were set to be
closed that day for professional activity.
My frustration at not being able to do my
banking was trumped by my frustration over
the wussiness of Huron County.
I remember going away to school and seeing
my roommates, now good friends of mine,
balk at the snow on the ground and think it was
insurmountable.
I laughed at their snowy fear.
Now they are no longer surprised when I
drive through flurries that they consider unsafe
and tell them, this is how I get to work.
They aren’t familiar with the lake effect and
the nice strong breezes that large open spaces
cause.
Unfortunately, what I once chalked up to
good old-fashioned Huron County gumption is
quickly becoming a personal trait.
Weather certainly isn’t getting worse,
according to the climate change experts, so
why are we having more and more people act
like the next winter storm is a nuclear attack?
With improvements like cellular phones,
safer vehicles, better winter tires and
supposedly reduced wait times for
emergencies, we should feel safer driving in
adverse weather conditions, yet we allow
ourselves to be held hostage by these storms.
And one final note on gritting your teeth,
whitening your knuckles on the steering wheel
and handling winter like the tough folks I
know we all really are: If you drive a vehicle
designed for off-road, or a vehicle designed to
overcome rugged terrain, odds are you should
be fine to travel 80 or 90 kilometres per hour.
It boggles my mind, and frustrates me to the
point of banging my head against the horn,
when I get stuck behind someone with a
much-more-winter-road-worthy vehicle than
myself driving so incredibly slow that they are
causing dangerous conditions.
I drive a car so light I can push it out of the
ditch myself. Unless you’re on a motorcycle or
in a car lighter than my go-kart (which, upon
reflection, I don’t believe exists on Canadian
roads), you should probably be able to
maintain the flow of traffic, if not the speed
limit.
Shawn
Loughlin
Shawn’s Sense
Snowtorious B.I.G. an overreaction
Denny
Scott
Denny’s Den