HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2011-11-17, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 2011. PAGE 5.
I sometimes wonder if our planet is the asylum
of the universe for disordered minds.
– Goethe
Ever get the feeling you’ve been
shanghaied into showing up at the
wrong cocktail party? Or perhaps
downloaded onto the wrong planet?
It’s the little jarring signs, such as finding
yourself living next to a nation which is in the
process of selecting candidates for Supreme
Leader – and the contenders are as bizarre a
collection of nutbars, fruitcakes, Flat Earthers
and tin pot fascists as you could find this side
of the bar scene in Star Wars.
Or hearing the news that baseball fans lined
up to pay $250 a pop for a half-ounce of clay
taken from the baseball diamond where Derek
Jeter got his 3,000th major league hit last
summer. Other mementoes from that game
available for purchase: 30 baseballs used
during the game ($2,000 each); first, second
and third base ($7,500 per bag) and one pair of
Jeter’s sweaty socks ($1,000 – all prices USD,
no HST).
How about the results of that survey
conducted by London’s Museum of Science
last month? It asked 3,000 Britons to list
things they absolutely could not live without.
According to science, the correct answers
are: air, water, food, sleep and sex. According
to the British survey results air, sleep and sex
don’t even make the top 10. Four absolute
indispensables that do: the mobile phone,
internet connection, e-mail and Facebook.
No wonder increasing numbers of citizens
can be seen jaywalking down the streets
staring off into space and jabbering to
themselves like lunatics.
Oh, sorry. Those are Bluetooth customers.
First time I saw a guy decked out in a
Bluetooth earpiece in a restaurant I thought I
was witnessing the victim of a hideously
botched plastic surgery experiment. The
gizmo gives off a whiff of robot and always
struck me as the ultimate in ubergeekdom, but
hey, I’ve still got vinyl records, so what do I
know?
Speaking of whiffs, are you familiar with the
work of Christopher Brosius? No? Where have
you been, child?
Christopher Brosius is a New York
parfumier – he manufactures perfumes. Some
people – especially Christopher Brosius –
think that he’s quite possibly the most talented
and innovative perfume maker in the world.
He’s come up with some doozies, alright.
Brosius specializes in fragrances that invoke
memories of childhood – hence his offering of
phials and atomizers that dispense scents of
Green Bean, Baseball Glove and (my
favourite) Clean Baby Butt.
But that’s minor league stuff for Christopher
Brosius. Like a psychic bloodhound he’s got
his nose high in the air sniffing the next
perfume frontier. A perfume so subtle, so
evanescent, so exclusive…that no one will be
able to smell it.
He’s already got a name for the wonder
fragrance. He’s going to call it “Where We Are
There Is No Here”.
Perfect. Especially for a perfume maker with
a website called “I Hate Perfume”.
I think I might have managed to hang on to
my few remaining marbles had I not come
across another news story. DYLAN TAKING
UP THE PIPES the headline reads: “Oh,
please, God – no. Bob Dylan and the Scottish
bagpipes??? The Marquis de Sade couldn’t
have thought that up.”
As a man with an impeccable Scottish
pedigree (Clan Macgregor) and a mouldy
collection of Bob Dylan’s first LPs let me
declare my bias right up front: I think Dylan
wrote some of the best popular music of the
20th century – but he hasn’t uttered an
intelligible lyric in the past 30 years.
Theoretically that makes him a good match for
the bagpipes, which when played properly still
sound like a hyena being waterboarded.
And yet Dylan travels the world constantly,
playing sold out concert after sold out concert,
during each of which he comes on stage,
ignores the audience, mumbles and growls
through a medley of his hits in the wrong key,
singing the wrong words, playing in the wrong
tempo…and leaves the stage to a standing
ovation. Pretty soon he’ll be doing all that –
and playing the bagpipes.
A French philosopher by the name of
Augustus Saint-Gaudens once said: “What
garlic is to a salad, insanity is to art.”
Perhaps some day Dylan will write a song
about that.
Not that we’ll ever understand him when he
sings it.
Arthur
Black
Other Views Stop the world, I wanna get off
It’s surprising to me in this what-have-you-
done-for-me-lately culture that has been
cultivating in recent years that there are still
some who have long-term memory. But it
seems that a lot of the time these memories are
being used for evil, as opposed to good.
Take, for instance, the situation going on at
State University in Pennsylvania. Long-time
head football coach Joe Paterno has recently
been dismissed from the job he has held for
over 60 years, an unprecedented tenure in the
highly-competitive world of American college
sports.
Paterno, who will be 85 years old in
December, was dismissed amidst allegations
that he covered up child rape allegations filed
against his former defensive co-ordinator Jerry
Sandusky in 2002. Sandusky has now been
arrested and charged with 40 counts relating to
eight underage boys over a 15-year period.
Upon hearing the allegations in 2002, Paterno
went to the school’s Athletic Director, instead
of the police and the information never came to
light.
Several of those involved have been
dismissed, including Paterno who said he
would retire at the end of the season, but the
university didn’t want to wait that long as
Paterno is being seen as an integral cog in the
cover-up machine.
This led, of course, to a riot involving over
1,000 Penn State students last week, saying
that the man who supposedly took an eye
witness account of a man engaging a sex act
with a 10-year-old boy in the university’s
shower facilities and helped to sweep it under
the rug, deserved to go out on his terms.
One news source reported that when it was
announced that Paterno had been dismissed
“students gasped and hushed” and “women
began to weep.” These people must not have
little brothers or friends with kids.
Students on the scene were quoted as saying
that they felt ‘lost’ without Paterno and school
president Graham Spanier, who was also fired
for his connection with the scandal.
It seems a little selfish to me coming from
students going to one of the best universities in
the United States. If they feel lost, think of how
that young boy, one of many, must have felt
getting raped in the shower by a man in his 50s,
but hey, these students don’t have a coach for
their football team or a school president. You
have to feel for them, don’t you?
This spectacle reminded me of the trial that
found Dr. Conrad Murray guilty of involuntary
manslaughter in the death of Michael Jackson
earlier this month.
Thousands of people spent days outside the
Los Angeles courthouse in support of Jackson,
some quitting their jobs to support the late pop
star on a full-time basis.
This came after Jackson, a man who had paid
out millions of dollars to the families of
children he denied abusing took on a new life
when he died in 2009. All of a sudden after
Jackson’s death, his transgressions had fallen
by the wayside and he was seen by millions as
a man eaten up by fame, the media and his
greedy family and one of the greatest artists the
world had ever seen, not the man who
allegedly held sleepovers with underage
children and dangled his own child over a
fourth-storey balcony in Berlin.
You have to wonder what has happened to
the moral compasses of some. Of course none
of us are perfect, but there are varying degrees
of wrongdoing and you really have to question
at what point some are turning a blind eye to
what happens at one end of the field because of
someone’s accomplishments at the other.
A hushed crowd
Let it never be said that I only deal in
extremes. I don’t only write about the
absolutely practical or the absolutely
political.
This week I want to address something that
has really been bothering me for weeks, but
has finally come to a head. My gripe is people
not going to work.
It all started with the “Occupy” movement.
I’m all for a more equal distribution of
wealth. I believe education is overpriced and
that there is a dramatic inequity in the control
of wealth in the first world, but sitting in a park
and either proving you have a lot more money
to burn than you claim to or proving you lack
a basic concept of debt and finances isn’t
going to change the world.
All it’s going to do is make it harder for
other lower- and middle-class people to do
their jobs.
Be it the police officers who recently had to
spend time sweeping through a London park
to take down tents or the tax dollars that are
paid by people like myself to councillors in
those cities to discuss the matter and try to
come to a resolution, someone who doesn’t
control a disproportionate amount of wealth is
going to be inconvenienced.
I recently, through social media, got into a
heated discussion about this situation.
The argument basically was that the debate
will result in changes and is resulting in
changes because of how much of a media
spectacle it is.
I have to disagree.
I look at these protestors, the ones who
aren’t targeting their perceived oppressors, the
ones who aren’t getting in the way of the big
business that prevents a more equal
distribution of wealth and a creation of a better
class of jobs.
They are just finding a high traffic area and
occupying it.
As a member of the 99 per cent they keep
going on about, I have to sit back and have a
chuckle.
If they were really part of the 99 per cent of
people who barely get by while the one per
cent sit in their ivory towers, how do they find
the time to sit in a park for days, weeks or
months?
I can barely afford to call in sick as I need to
make ends meet, pay bills and try and make a
dent in my self-inflicted school debt.
I say self-inflicted because I made the
choice to go to school.
A late-20s or early-30s individual
complaining because their education was too
expensive is like someone buying a Porsche
and then complaining because they picked too
expensive a car.
There are opportunities out there for
people who don’t want to incur school debt.
They can work a job they may not be fanatical
over to save up money and pay for some
if not all of their education debt ahead
of time.
They can attend college instead of university
for a compressed timeline and be workforce-
ready in two or three years versus four or five
or they can seek an apprenticeship.
However, this is getting a bit off-topic. I just
feel that anyone who claims to represent me
shouldn’t be taking weeks off work to
participate in a well intended, but poorly
defined and poorly executed protest. I
wouldn’t do it, so they aren’t doing it on my
behalf.
Now, just so you know that this isn’t a
column dedicated to my problems with the
Occupants and their unconventional protest, I
have a bigger problem with people who call in
sick or miss work with less-than-honourable
intentions.
I’ll admit that, while at university, I was
prone to missing work whenever a good road
hockey game broke out or my roommates
decided it was time for some wild and zany
outing, however I never “skipped” work.
I took a job where I would be able to
miss a scheduled shift and make it up later. I
worked at a 24-hour call centre. People
(American people that is) called me when
they had problems with their phones, wanted a
new phone, or just wanted to yell at
someone.
It was a perfect student job.
Come in, sit down, read a text book while
you calmly tell people that 90 per cent of their
requests were out of your realm of influence.
Once, for five minutes an hour, sell something
to someone and try not to feel guilty if you had
to “upsell” them on something else.
If I missed a shift, I could just cut short on
some sleep later in the week and work a night
shift.
Now I have a career.
Now, when someone says “play video
games all day,” or “come hang out for the day,”
I say to them, I have a career.
They say call in sick, citing the job in school
where I often was able to just say I’m not
coming in today.
I’ve grown up, and while I won’t be so
hypocritical as to say don’t skip work to
someone who has a job like my call centre
one, I will, and have, frowned on my friends
who have called in sick to their careers for
frivolous reasons.
It’s something you may be able to get away
with in high school and a few years after that,
but once you’re on your own, paying your own
bills, it’s time to start having some pride in
your work and showing up for it (hopefully on
time).
I don’t care if it’s a protest, a video
game release or just goofing off for the day.
The only time you shouldn’t be at work
is when you’re a danger to others (as in
contagious). Otherwise, get out of bed, down a
pot or two of coffee and take pride in your
career.
Shawn
Loughlin
Shawn’s Sense
Denny
Scott
Denny’s Den
It’s time for my kick at the can