Wouldn’t you like to have this bathtub in your home?
Bush visits his wisdom on Halifax
The big news in Canada is, of course, the visit by George W. Bush — America’s 43rd president, and the first trained chimp to hold the office. In a speech to those in Halifax who weren’t actually marching in protest or burning him in effigy, he suggested that Canada should become more involved in his military actions in Iraq, offering the example of William Lyon Mackenzie King, Canada’s tenth prime minister of Canada. Quoting King, President Bush gave the somber advice, “To remain on the defensive is the surest way to bring the war to Canada.” I hope this was an opinion, and not an expression of US military policy.
It’s gratifying to know that the president’s speech writers have an awareness of Canadian history, but I think they might have skipped over these lines in the Wikipedia.com entry:
King hoped an outbreak of war in the 1930s could be avoided. He had met with Hermann Göring and Adolf Hitler, whom he said was a reasonable man who cared for his fellow man, working to improve his country in the midst of the Depression. He confided in his diary that he thought Hitler “might come to be thought of as one of the saviours of the world” and told a Jewish delegation that “Kristallnacht might turn out to be a blessing.” *
His writers may also have missed the part where King consulted with the spirits of Leonardo DaVinci, his dead mother, and his dog.
But besides those particulars, the reference to King likely struck a chord with all patriotic Canadians, particularly those who channel the spirits of the dead. The art of public speaking, I think, is all about identifying with your audience.
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It’s all so clear to me now
I woke up quite early in the morning recently with a startling revelation. As the raving lunatics in b-grade sci-fi flicks often say, “It’s all so clear to me now!” They also often say something about eating brains, the end of the world, or “It’s a cookbook!” I’m not hungry at the moment, and the end doesn’t appear to be nigh, so I’ll focus on the “it’s all so clear to me now” part.
The reason that I’m having so much trouble with these story ideas is that they’re not funny at all. So now I’ll either start fresh with new story outlines, or make small changes to the existing ones that will make them funny. It’s easy. I’ll just replace the protagonist with a one-legged dwarf who eats nothing but chili. If that’s not funny, I don’t know what is.
Lunch break blogging
It was my lunch break. I opened Blogger. I stared at the vacant text box and thought about what to type in it. I stared longer. The box failed to fill with words. No matter how hard I stared at it, no words appeared.
Fifteen minutes later, my lunch break was over, and I closed Blogger. Then I opened it again and typed this.
Next time, I’ll write about something.
Rumours of sofas and fireplaces
Within the walls of the cube farm, even the simplest of events can cause a stir. Like the time when someone brought in samosas. The entire sixth floor rejoiced and ate of the samosas. Then there was the time when they handed out free promotional CDs. CDs with interesting product information for everyone! And more recently, when they closed the bathrooms on this floor, curiosity led to rumour, rumour led to bigger rumour, and bigger rumour led to people walking into walls due to overstimulation.
The bathrooms were closed for not a couple of days, but two weeks. Two weeks! This was no small repair, but a major renovation. We could only imagine what wonderful changes awaited our bladders when the bathrooms finally reopened. Gold-trimmed fixtures? Wood panelling? Comfey sofas? A nice fireplace and decorative sculptures of scantily clad individuals caught in mid-frolic?
Finally, the day came that they reopened the bathrooms to the general cube farm populace. Breathing the heady fumes of drying paint, we entered.
Well, it was a bit of a letdown. They’d replaced the faucets and slapped a new coat of paint on the stalls and taken a very long time to do it. On the bright side, the intrigue brightened our small lives, and for two weeks we had regular exercise hiking up one floor. It wasn’t, in retrospect, a complete waste of time — the cubicle drones were able, for a short time, to pee in the very same fixtures as the executives. And that’s worth something, isn’t it?