The Check Was in the Mail

If you’ve read this blog for a while, one of the threads that was left hanging was our claim on the damages of some of our furniture and belongings when we moved here. After nearly a year, that fateful day had arrived when we’d see the envelope arrive in our mailbox with our names on it from the moving company, a statement of what of our claim they were willing to repay in it, along with, of course, a check (or since we’re in Canada, a cheque).

Not quite. It’s not that they didn’t agree that they had crushed a beautiful coffee table, or that they had bent a set of metal racks for MIDI equipment so that they had to be discarded as junk. No, that was all in order. What was amiss was that the envelope was open (perhaps steamed) and the check that they claimed was enclosed was nowhere to be found. We called the company and left a message, telling them that the check was missing, to please stop payment on it (there was no number, so we had to tell them only what we knew), and to please cut us a new one. It’s hard to believe that after all this time, we find ourselves still waiting, this time because they couldn’t think of a more secure way to send money to us than a plain envelope and a loose check.

Ridiculous.

Beware of Geeks

We had just finished dinner when the phone rang. I knew after I answered and there was a moment of silence that I was getting a phone solicitation. I should have hung up right there. It was right near the end of Jeopardy, too, and a close game at that. Oh well.

Me: Hello?
Clueless Phone Caller: Hi, can I speak with <my name>?
Me: That would be me.
CPC: I’m calling on behalf of <a well-known phone company>, and I’m happy to tell you see that you are now able to get our Internet access.

Me: Gee, I have to say that I’m pretty happy with the service I’ve been getting with <a competing vendor>. It’s very high speed and I really like the extra bandwidth.

CPC: Yes, but what about our prices?

Me: Well, can you get me at least 4 or 5 Megabits per second downstream and no less than 1 megabit per second upstream? I’d also like to maintain a Static IP.

CPC: <short silence> Uhh, what’s a “Static IP”?

Me: Y’know what? Don’t worry about it. I’m really not interested, but thanks for calling.

CPC: (clearly confused and disappointed) Um, OK.

I know I know, I’m a geek, but if you’re going to be doing phone solicitation, perhaps a little coaching on what to do when your prospect asks a question that you are clearly unprepared to answer might be in order. It’s not that the guy didn’t know what a Static IP was, it’s that he asked me what it was. I wasn’t about to waste both of our times getting him up to snuff on some of the finer points of the service he was selling (and a request that maybe 1% of the population cares about).

One more Month to Sample

Pam and I were walking home from dinner (we were hungry, so we feasted on the delicious All-you-can-eat Sushi, Korean barbecue, tempura and Ton katsu at Shabusen, up the hill on Granville) when she pointed out that we’ve been in Vancouver every month of the year except for June. In a week and month ahead, we’ll have been in Vancouver for at least some period of time in every month of the year. (in mid July, we’ll have lived here a year - already!).

This is significant, because I’ve sometimes remarked that this city does indeed have a Jekyll and Hyde personality; actually it’s more an Apollo and Dionysus dichotomy. At any rate, what I mean is there is a brainy Vancouver, and then there is a more languid, epicurean Vancouver. These two faces make their appearance depending on the change of the seasons.

Here’s how it goes: Half of the year, the city’s residents must duck into a dry library, concert hall, movie theatre, book store or workplace to escape the continual showers. There, by the gas fire and sipping serial lattes and cappuccinos, we hunker down at our computer screens and notebooks, write novels and software, think deep thoughts about culture and philosophy, listen to countless new music concerts and go to documentary festivals into the sunset (which takes place at about 3 PM). In short, Vancouver assumes the role of Seattle of Canada. Maybe with a touch of Prague and Cambridge (OK, OK, I’ll stick with Seattle).

Then in late April, the city undergoes something of a metamorphosis. Like those mousey librarians of those clichéd movies (and episodes of ‘Love, American Style’ ) who remove their cat’s-eye glasses and with a twist of their head, unfurl their long, brown hair from the bun it’s been in since November, the city magically transforms into a Party Girl. Or, Surfer Dude. The beach beckons, and we leave work to take a long walk, or sip some Merlot (or beer). There are flowers everywhere, and a book is OK, as long as it’s surrounded by a picnic. The sun sets at 9 PM, so every day is potentially a little mini vacation. To be sure, it’s hard to sit inside at work when you really want to be wearing sunglasses and sauntering down by the water. Vancouver becomes Canada’s San Diego. Perhaps even a little LA and Cannes. (Oh all right. San Diego.)

In a little over a week, the Gamelan I play in, Madu Sari, is playing at Simon Fraser University (where we usually rehearse) in the afternoon, and then in the evening, we perform at the In the House Festival, where a series of people in East Vancouver open up their homes and back yards for a series of eclectic concerts and Burlesque shows. Well, maybe some of that Apollonian, intellectual side does last through in the Spring and Summer months.

The most notable thing about the Gamelan rehearsals at SFU lately has not been the fact that my bus trips to Burnaby mountain are no longer into the dark, but that we seem to be competing against the Marching bands of Bagpipers who are also practicing on campus (I assume for Graduation Ceremonies in month or so) . It is truly a multi-ethnic Ivesian (and in fact, I’d venture to say, typically Vancouver) experience to hear the duel between Javanese Percussion and Scottish Pipes.

The Power of Sarcasm

The extraordinary appearance of Stephen Colbert’s at the White House Press Club Dinner last month (which we can still offer him thanks for) was all the more remarkable for the fact that he unleashed his parody of conservative punditry not 20 feet from King George himself! The video has been played all over the Internet and the transcripts are all over the place, but I can’t help quoting my favourite bit:

“So the White House has personnel changes. Then you write, “Oh, they’re just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.” First of all, that is a terrible metaphor. This administration is not sinking. This administration is soaring. If anything, they are rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg!”

I’ve asked many the same questions: How did it happen? Why did the press club invite him in the first place? Was this their way of finally making it clear how idiotic the administration is through the mouthpiece of a comedian rather than a journalist? Were they expecting him to play nice and just be a little wacky? Nah, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s simpler. The people in charge of the invitations saw a few clips of Colbert’s show and didn’t get the joke. Apparently irony and satire is a bit too sophisticated for some of those on the Right. Colbert is playing a part, a sort of Proto-Fox News Pundit. He doesn’t really admire Bush or ‘Papa Bear’ (O’Reilly) or really think that Creationism is the Answer because Science is Just Too Hard… It’s all a persona! As they say in England, he’s “Taking the Mickey out on them!”

What made me come to this realization that they missed the satire is that it’s happened again. Today, Tom DeLay’s Legal Defense fund sent out a mass email criticizing a new documentary ‘The Big Buy: Tom DeLay’s Stolen Congress‘ by Robert Greenwald, whose previous film was “Outfoxed”. The email uses as its lead item, Greenwald’s appearance as a guest on Colbert’s show, when Colbert (again, in character) proceeded to give him a hard time. Now perhaps the Tom Delay Legal Defense fund thinks that the people that they are sending the email to are so dumb that they won’t get the joke. Or maybe they didn’t get the joke, either.

I wonder how long this can go on, with Stephen Colbert continuing to convince the Right that he’s on their side, all the while ripping them to shreds? Someone once told me that Margaret Dumont was so stupid that she thought she was doing dramatic movies with Groucho, and somehow managed to forget all of those times he insulted or tried to get a rise out of her. Maybe some of these guys are a throwback to that Dumont-ian blindness to a smarter, wittier Marxist (the ‘Brothers’ kind, that is).

Sick Days, Childhood TV and the New Apple Cube

On Thursday morning I noticed that I had a sore throat. By noon, I was weak, a little nauseous and sunlight was giving me a headache. At that point, it was obvious that I was running a temperature, so I went home early and went to bed. By nightfall it had turned into a pretty bad fever and chills, along with the usual cold symptoms. This morning I was still a bit feverish, but a bit better, and tonight I feel 100% better. Hopefully this recovery will continue and I’ll be back to work on Tuesday.

Tuesday? Yes, this weekend is a three day weekend that I would not be enjoying if I was still living in Boston. It’s Victoria Day, the first Monday before May 25th, in honour of Queen Victoria’s Birthday and the current reigning Canadian Sovereign, Queen Elizabeth II. Celebrating a British holiday is not all that new to me; I remember celebrating Boxing Day and Guy Fawkes Day (and isn’t it funny that Guy Fawkes has made a comeback in V for Vendetta ? ) but it does feel a little odd, given that we fled an ‘Imperial Presidency’, to be celebrating the birthdays of British Monarchs. Hey, it’s only a week before Memorial Day back in the US, so at least it makes up for that.

The Future with Strings Attached
With a day at home, I spent some time on email and phone, communicating with the office, but I did have a little quiet time to myself. I indulged my inner 5-year old. I watched some videos that I have gotten over the Internet of what was probably the first television show I was ever a fan of: Fireball XL5.

Fireball XL5, created by Gerry Anderson and his wife Sylvia, was a new genre of science fiction and action television that used marionettes on strings, brilliantly executed models, and clever cinematic techniques, along with an innovative use of an audio triggering mechanism attached to the jaws of each puppet’s face, so that the puppets automatically synchronized their speech movements to spoken dialogue. The show’s initial run was from 1962 to 1963, which means that by the time I saw it, the series was already over and in reruns. Nevertheless, I adored it, particularly the opening sequence (some frame grabs shown above) where the Fireball spacecraft took off through the means of an acceleration ’sled’ on rails, gaining speed on it’s vertical run until the track tipped up at the end like a ski-jump and as the the rocket leapt skyward. As a kid, I missed all of the goofiness, ignored the obvious strings and wires and black and white (the TV was black and white anyway), the fact that the voice of Professor “Matt” Matic was obviously an imitation of Walter Brennan, and the accent that Venus (Colonel Steve Zodiac’s sidekick and ‘romantic interest’) had was clearly not French, or any other language, for that matter. Commander Zero and Lieutenant Ninety at Space City (Fireball XL5’s home base) were hysterically wooden (well, let’s not be so tough on them; they were puppets, after all). Robert the Robot, a transparent robot copilot, had a fascinating computer-generated sounding voice that eerily foreshadowed what synthesized speech would sound like in the coming decades, albeit in that monotone that everyone assumed robots would speak. Still, it’s a wonderful and strange sensation to relive some of my earliest childhood memories of cinematic storytelling inside the Quicktime player window. I put this up there along with getting an MP3 of the obscure collaboration between Dr. Seus and the Great Gildersleeve, Gerald McBoingboing, which I also loved as a child. (I’ve recently learned that in animation historian Jerry Beck’s 1994 poll of animators, film historians and directors, the cartoon made from this story was rated the ninth greatest cartoon of all time, so maybe it isn’t entirely forgotten.)

Meanwhile, in Manhattan
This week Apple Computer opened a new store on Fifth Avenue, between 58th and 59th Street in New York City. Besides the fact that it’s one of the most exclusive addresses in the world, and the fact that it will be open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, the entrance to this subterranean retail establishment beneath 5th Avenue is a stunning 5-story glass cube, which was apparently designed by Steve Jobs himself. Here’s a photo from a couple of days ago:
I’m bettting that Steve Jobs never saw the film ‘Thir13en Ghosts‘, in which Arthur Kriticos (played by Tony Shalhoub of TV Show Monk fame) and his family are terrorized by an intricate mechanized glass house (powered by the ghosts trapped within it) that they are told they have inherited from their eccentric collector Uncle, Cyrus Kriticos (played by F. Murray Abraham).

OK, it was more than just a cube, and much of the glass had extraordinary calligraphy written on it, and there were cogs and hinges and other weird mechanisms, but even if he had just seen one or two scenes from that movie, I’ll bet Steve J. might have been put off from having customers enter and decend from such a creation.