Nuts & Mutton

In the meantime, for your edification and entertainment, a little amuse bouche

Unless you’ve been living in a cave (Howdy Osama!) for the last while, you’ll know that St Patrick’s Day came and, thanks be to goodness, went this week. I have complicated reactions to the tsunami of shamrockery that greets Ireland’s patron saint on this side of the pond. On the one hand, I can’t help applauding and envying the wholehearted and innocent way people throw themselves into it, not giving a rat’s ass if they look like putzes all decked out in green. On the other hand, I hate the whole thing with a deep and abiding hate. Bock had a lovely Paddy’s Day rant over on his site, which says it all, and in language I dare not use on this occasionally family-friendly site. Interesting sidebar on the New York Patrick’s Day parade. I’ve never been able to trace the quote, but I remember hearing St Patrick’s Day described as the day on which the nabobs of New York stood on Fifth Avenue to watch their servants march by. (Thank you, Conortje for reminding me of that lovely song for Ireland.) The Corrs also have a version of it, but I prefer Luke Kelly’s.

Compare and Contrast
Mid-week, I was researching attitudes to disability in the Chinese culture for a speech I was drafting, when I came across this blog post, about a young Chinese woman who has refused a government disability pension, despite having been born with her feet facing backwards.

“I can run faster than most of my friends and have a regular job as a waitress in the family restaurant,” she says. “There is no reason to class me as disabled. I’m like everyone else – except of course that I put my shoes on backwards.”

It’s an interesting find, in itself, but even more so in a week when I also had this emailed to me by Google Alerts. (I get Google Alerts on all the topics likely to be of use to me in speeches.)

Emma, said: “I’m a student and don’t have time to exercise” she said “We all want to lose weight to stop the abuse we get in the street, but we don’t know how.”

Serendipity
When the following quote, from Andre Maurois, popped up in my email—yes, I get a quotation by email every day, too! Tools of the trade, okay?—it seemed fortuitous, especially in light of my preceding post:

Often we allow ourselves to be upset by small things we should despise and forget. We lose many irreplaceable hours brooding over grievances that, in a year’s time, will be forgotten by us and by everybody. No, let us devote our life to worthwhile actions and feelings, to great thoughts, real affections and enduring undertakings.

Also this week …
My desk became famous on two continents. I don’t actually do all that much blogging there, as that is primarily my work desk. I prefer to blog in the sunroom, aka the Foredeck, and I am helped in doing so by a wonderful little app called Dropbox. Although I can sync my Macbook Air (on which I blog) with my PowerBook (on which I work), I find it so much easier to just drop any items that catch my fancy into Dropbox and then open them up when I am blogging. Btw, the gasometer in the picture on my wall, has become this:

The First Husband snapped it, while he was exploring Dublin on his own last year (I was hanging out with My Skinny Cow Sister and having a grand old time!) We have a shared history with Dublin Gas, so he knew I would be pleased to see that the gasometer lives on, if in very different guise. Ain’t progress grand.

We have two national newspapers here in Canada, Globe & Mail and the National Post. (Of itself, I find that a bit gigglesome, coming from a tiny country that has nine national dailies and the same number of Sunday papers.) The Globe is fairly middle of the road, veering rightwards on all things fiscal, while the Post is unabashedly right-wing, having been launched by that bastion of Canadian conservatism, Conrad Black—now serving time in a US slammer for enriching himself at the expense of his shareholders.

The First Husband and I get both papers delivered every morning and, if I had to choose just one, I would probably pick the Post, despite its conservatism. It’s not as smug as the Globe, has better writing overall, and, last but not least, it has my favourite cryptic crossword, which I think is lifted from the Daily Telegraph in Britain. I did give up my subscription for a whole year, once, while the paper carried the syndicated column of the skinny bitch who will not be mentioned by name on this blog but, as soon as they turfed her, all was forgiven and I went back into the fold.

Part of the Post’s charm is its letters page. Unlike the Globe, which seems to favour a select group of grousers, the Post’s letter writers are a great bunch of splenetic flat-earthers, and their morning bitching is a highlight of my day, always good for a laugh. Yesterday, however, I didn’t know whether to shriek with laughter or horror, as I read the following missives, which had been posted on the website of the Post’s comment pages, and were being given star-billing in the middle of the letters page:

The lives women enjoy today are the direct result of the advances made by men.

Women can join the military today because a soldier no longer needs to be a blood-thirsty testosterone-charged brute able to wield a 40-pound broad sword to hack the limbs from his opponent face to face. She can sit in the comfort of a room on a ship and push a button that launches awesome fire power and think herself a warrior.

Women can “bring home the bacon” because you no longer have to have the sheer machismo to stare down a wild boar with a sharpened stick. You sit at a desk rearranging numbers and think yourself a master of the corporate jungle.

They can travel the world because crossing the ocean is no longer a three month life-threatening ordeal of searching for land no one really believes is even there, and most of the murderous indigenous peoples have been pacified. Now they’re too eager to see you arrive with your tourist dollars and make you feel like an adventurer.

They can snowboard down mountain sides for fun, because getting to the top is no longer a two-day trek in wool coats.

The power, machismo, innate engineering ability and sometimes sheer stupidity of men were the absolutely necessary elements that conquered the Earth and developed technologies that rendered what were once life-threatening undertakings mere hobbies by comparison for women today. Women enjoy the freedom of having had all the heavy lifting done for them.

But even as women revel in that freedom, men, or perhaps more accurately “manhood,” are suffering from their own success. The programming that led men to strike out across an ocean, or to say “yes, I believe I can take down that buffalo with a sharpened stick,” makes them at their core less well adapted to this soft, easy, collectivist, feminized world. Worse, they’ll get little but grief from the women they raised out of the drudgery any time they dare to rock the boat with reminders of the manhood that got us all here.

This little piece was signed by Fred_001. Three guesses as to what I think his surname is …

The cherry on the cake was the response to Fred from a little remora fish named MikeMurphy:

Fred: well said. Feminists, particularly the gender-branded variety want more and more and constantly whine about their gender as an underclass of victims. For them it is not about equality but domination.

I’m assuming these whingers used pseudonyms, because their wives would kill them if they saw what they wrote.

The First Husband and I have returned from a blissful week in Florida, a break from the tedious, unrelenting slog that has been this year’s winter in Ontario. High points of the trip were meeting up with SMB of Words of Wisdom from a Smart Mouth Broad and a side trip to Key West—in that order.

I was nervous as hell about meeting “your blogging friend,” as TFH kept saying—shades of my mother and “your little friend,” generally accompanied by a snooty look. After all, what could a Smart Mouth Broad find in common with a rapidly aging relic of the 1970s? But I needn’t have worried. Not only did SMB and I get on like the proverbial house on fire, but our respective spouses (dragged along like security blankets in case it all went horribly awry!) bonded over their mutual disdain for all things blog- and Twitter-related—not to mention their inability to get a word in edgeways once we started yakking. SMB is exactly like her blog—quick-witted, impulsive, opinionated, and very, very funny—and her Harley Stud is the sweetest man alive. They were a great couple to spend an evening with, and I’m hoping they will take us up sometime soon on our invitation to visit us in Ontario. It may not be as sunny as Florida, but we do have Niagara Falls within a short driving distance!

After all that, Key West was a bit of a letdown. Okay, I exaggerate … a little. Key West was fine, but the trip there was a bit of a chore, as I did all the driving from Boca Raton—best part of 200 miles, while TFH sat huddled in the passenger seat, a cold-sodden lump of misery, hacking and sneezing in between dozes. A wee bug he’d picked up on the plane had turned into a full-blown cold and fever, and he was definitely not his usual sunny self. Sidebar here—for a man, TFH is not that bad when it comes to being sick. He doesn’t think the world is coming to an end just because he’s off his feed, unlike many of his gender, but he will insist on filling me in on the details of every symptom, which drives me nuts. On the rare occasion that I get sick, I like to crawl off to a quiet hole somewhere and just die quietly. Which means I’m not the most sympathetic of nurses, as both TFH and #1 Son will hasten to confirm. But I digress.

As fate would have it, it was biker week in Daytona and, apparently, the bikers like to make the loop down to Key West as part of their pilgrimage. So the town was packed with them and their bikes, which they tooled up and down Duvall Street, revving like crazy. Which was pretty damn’ noisy. And unlike SMB, none of the biker chicks I saw was wearing Keds and pearls. Sloppy Joe’s, the bar Hemingway frequented, was packed with bikers, so we gave that a miss.

But we did join the crowd that gathers in Mallory Square every evening to see the sun set—as SMB says, as though it was something that only happens on rare occasions rather than every day! Actually, it was pretty special … sun setting over the Keys and all that … but the crowd actually applauded when the sun disappeared under the horizon. How crazy is that? I can imagine applauding when it comes back again the next day, and from another quarter—phew, it’s back—but setting?? Fortunately, TFH kept his mind on the camera and managed to get some pretty spectacular pictures of the whole thing—including an actual “red sails in the sunset” shot.

We also managed to hunt down a Panama hat for me, which I’d been chasing all over Florida with no success. I couldn’t believe it—in a state dedicated to easing the retirement of old geezers, nobody seemed to know where I could find a Panama hat. But we finally got one, in a store called, appropriately enough, The Mad Hatter.

As you can see from the palm tree over my left shoulder, it was pretty windy on Mallory Square before the sun set, so I was hanging on to my precious Panama for dear life, bingo flap waving in the breeze.

We flew back to Canada on Saturday, leaving sunshine behind us, to be greeted by cold, rain, thunder and lightning. The airline also left behind our luggage, which did not make it here until Sunday afternoon, when a nice man delivered it to our door. But we brought home with us memories of a great week, incomparable hosts, and a terrific rendezvous with a fellow-blogger. Thanks a million, Smart Mouth Broad. You’re a peach.

Oh yes—TFH also brought that damn’ bug back with him, which he’s still not managed to shake. *Sigh*

Duchess has posted a very funny tale about her experience of waiting for the Gas company to deliver and wire up a cooker (that’s a stove for our North American friends). It brought back such memories of my eleven years working with the Dublin Gas Company—which qualify me, by the way, to confirm that every word Duchess wrote and the guys from Monty Python acted out, are gospel truth.

I started working with the Gas Company as PA to the Chief Executive, who had been brought in from outside to try and drag the company, kicking and screaming, into the 20th century. It was a condition of my appointment that I was not allowed to join one of the company’s unions, because I would skew their productivity payout or something. Nothing could have suited me more; while it meant I would not get paid for overtime, it also meant that some tinpot little dictator of shop steward could not tell me when and if I could work. Don’t get me wrong; on the whole, I think unions are a good thing, especially when a union rep is all that stands between a conscientious employee and a bullying middle manager or supervisor. But the Gas Company unions were a special case.

First of all, there were thirteen of them. Seriously, thirteen unions for one company employing around 1,200 people. There was the major union, to which about 75% of the employees belonged; another middling-sized one, which was always trying to poach members from the big guy. Then there were the other eleven, the so-called craft unions, which represented the electricians and plumbers and carpenters—anybody who was not a gas fitter or a clerical worker. Some of these unions had only five or six members, and they were the most bolshie of the lot. If anyone above the rank of assistant to the assistant of an assistant supervisor looked sideways at one of them, a picket would be thrown up and the whole place would go out on strike. I nearly caused a general strike myself when someone passed by my office and saw me standing on a chair to screw in a light bulb. Apparently that was the sacred duty of one of the craft union members. Actually that would be two members—one to hold the ladder and another to screw in the bulb. Where do you think the “how many [blanks] to screw in a lightbulb” jokes came from?

Over the course of time, I moved on from my job as PA, first to become Press Officer, and then, just to get away from the arse for whom I worked, as Consumer Service Manager. Since the Gas Company was in the throes of switching over from towns gas to natural gas at the time, it would be, our public relations consultant said as he tried to talk me out of taking the job, like working as deck-chair attendant on the Titanic. He was wrong; iceberg wrangler on the Titanic would have been a doddle compared to my new job. You would not believe the abuse I and my poor secretary had to take, day after day, week after week, as the conversion slowly wound on its way. There were sacks full of letters, screaming phone calls, and people turning up in person, foaming at the mouth with rage.

In the end, we survived, as did the Gas Company—but only just. The company ended up being nationalized and I took a rich redundancy package which eventually paid my way to Canada. But thereby hangs another tale. Out of all the sturm und drang of my brief sojourn in the trenches, I took away with me one, glorious letter that I received from an irate gas consumer—one who actually had a sense of humour. I have it still and would like to share it with you. It reads thus:

Dear Ms Ryan: It is now some time since I had a series of quite pleasant conversations with your secretary. I am the chap who originally wrote to you objecting to the literary standards of your company’s correspondence, incidentally. The upshot of this has been that I am no longer bothered by occasional letters from New Dublin Gas (In Receivership) telling me that the part(s) needed to repair my heater which was, in fact, banjaxed by the men who were attempting to convert it (book in one hand and scimitar in the other, like the muslims of old), that these parts were temporarily out of stock and every effort was being made to expedite their delivery – in short I haven’t heard from you all in a long time. Are you all right?

Was it something I said? Are you trying to find or invent a word indicating a longer time than ‘temporarily’ or a somewhat more leisurely process than ‘expedite’? Is everyone off on an adult literacy course?

My jury-rigged heater watches with apprehension as the evenings grow longer and the howling of the first timber wolves of autumn is heard on the evening air. Will it be able to cope with the coming winter? Will a kind man from New Dublin Gas (In Receivership) ever arrive, like sleeping beauty’s prince, to fill the aching hole in its entrails with a new thermostat? And what of Ms Tessa Ryan – has she been overwhelmed by the sheer weight of her responsibility (a job combining the logistics of Horatio on the Bridge with the corporate image of a herpes virus)? Do let us know! My heater and I are eagerly awaiting the next episode. It’s so much cheaper than renting a TV.

Best wishes.

You may bet your bippy that he had a brand, spanking-new heater on his doorstep in the shake of a duck’s tail! At absolutely no cost to him.

The above video was submitted by a kid in his 20s for an AARP contest, U@50, and came in second. It’s simple, yet striking.

Since these are our kids, it would be quite an indictment of us if they are indeed a “lost generation.” As the mother of a 25-year old, I have to say that I’m awed by him and his friends. At that age, I was a slacker in a dead end job, thought I was nature’s gift to humanity, and had a very high (and completely false) opinion of my own intelligence. It took impending motherhood to get me off my arse, when I was well into my 30s. If I had had his work ethic, intelligence, and creativity right out of the starting gate, who knows what I might have accomplished by now?

Thanks to Ruth Pennebaker, over at The Fabulous Geezersisters, I’ve become enamoured of the Margaret and Helen blog.

Judging by the hundreds of comments on each post, they seem to be causing quite a stir in the blogosphere. Like Ruth, I strongly suspect this is not really written by two octogenarian ladies who’ve been pals for 60 years. (Shades of that “I’m in love with my best friend” blog that sucked a lot of people in last year, and turned out to be the genesis of a book.) But I don’t care; it is hilarious. And, as you might expect, I just LOVE what they have to say about She Who Must Never Be Mentioned again on my blog.