Coming Up for Air and Tired Old Phrases

I’ve had to neglect blogging for much of this month, because I’ve been working very hard. It’s hopefully going to work out in the end, but this is one of those times where I have to keep intoning that mantra “It’s Only Temporary.” So, while today was one of those picture-perfect days we in Vancouver get in the spring and summer, I must confess that I only saw it via the occasional peek at a the KatKam webcam from my windowless office. I might as well have been underground, instead out in the place that has once again been named by Mercer Consulting, Number 4 of the ‘Top 5 quality of living ranking for cities worldwide‘. While I am proud of the fact that my home is once again up there with Vienna, Zurich, Geneva and Auckland as one of the best places to live, I have to admit that for us personally, for a variety of reasons,  it’s been a very tough past couple months. However, I’m looking forward to beautiful sunny days with cool breezes, local strawberries and asparagus, walks along the False Creek seawall and the return of the Farmer’s Markets on the weekends. The fountain in the park across the street is flowing again, and the tulips are out in full force. I just have to be sure to get out and enjoy all of those things. After all, they are all only temporary as well.

Heard Often. Way Too Often

To keep an eye on our former country, Pam and I have tried to catch one of the network news channels from the US each evening over dinner, so we keep switching between TiVO recordings of Brian (Williams), Katie (Couric) and Charlie (pronounced the way Sarah Palin did in the puff-piece interviews he did her, as the sharp, twangy CHAR-ly, Gibson). I’ve been noticing an annoying tendency by both the reporters as well as the public (and politicians) for using the same phrases over and over again. Here are a few that I’ve just about had enough of:

Come Together
What does that phrase mean? Aside from the sexual double-entendre, as far as I can tell, it means to have a public meeting where  problems like gang violence, racial strife and poverty are all magically overcome by an aura of good fellowship. Sorry, I’m not buying it. It’s an empty phrase uttered over and over again in front of TV cameras by people who have no idea what they are saying.

Bipartisan
Until recently ‘bipartisan’ used to mean something. I think it meant that both of the big, iconic US political parties support something, as opposed to its more common opposite, ‘partisan’ (which now that I think of it, could have been Monopartisan). Now,’ bipartisan’ is uttered by politicians meaning (depending on which side they are on)  ‘Something I wanted but never got’ or ‘Something we should all look like we are trying for even though we really don’t want it anyway’.  Like Lite and Fat-Free or Sustainable, it’s an now a meaningless word held aloft like a flag of victory or rag of defeat.

Wall Street always followed by Main Street
It used to be that you could say ‘Wall Street’ and everybody knew that it referred to the New York Stock Exchange, as well as the other business and organizations in that general geographic area of Manhattan. Now, like Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum or Flotsam and Jetsam, it has become a stupid shorthand for the hostility between the rich and connected in the Financial Services Sector vs. Middle America. Like two squabbling children, we are supposed to make sure both are taken care of, but not to let the other get jealous or sulky. I hope they break up the idiom before it becomes another ‘prim and proper’ or ‘tooth and nail’.

Bailout
‘Bailout’ originally meant ‘an act of loaning or giving capital to a failing company in order to save it from bankruptcy, insolvency, or total liquidation and ruin’. (Wikipedia). Now it’s almost become a joke phrase, meaning  Free Money.  Enough, already. It’s never funny.

…and the word or phrase that I’ve found the both the most ubiquitous and annoyingly imprecise on the news these past months:

Transparent
I’ve heard this word used so many times, I’ve started doing the old Pee-Wee’s Playhouse shtick (well, not screaming real loud, but saying ‘ding!’) every time it is uttered.  I think it was to suggest that like a glass house, the operations and decisions of an organization (such as the Federal Government) were to be easily apprehended by the public, typically by using a Web Site or some other publicly accessible medium. Wasn’t that what C-SPAN was supposed to do? (except of course, nobody but the wonks and fanatics bothered to watch it). Again, like ‘Come Together’, Transparent is another word or phrase overused to the point of meaninglessness.

There are others, but these are the ones that come to mind today. I’m sure that in a few weeks I’ll be sick of ‘Torture Memo’ and ‘Pandemic’, because they’ll have been made just as meaningless through repetition by that time.

Higher Ground

I got outside today, for the first time several days, since for a long while I was too weak even to get much further than the bathroom. The air was mild, and despite a good deal of clouds, there were what they call here ‘Sunny Breaks’, which are those (sometimes brief) moments when the sunbeams break through and everything lights up. Today, they lit up the crocuses. Yes, March 1 and Spring has Sprung in the Lower Mainland. Despite some snow on the mountains (and I heard that some friends even went cross-country skiing on Cypress Mountain today), we are soon going to be back to ‘The Other Vancouver’, which is just fine by me. The good weather also was appreciated by the Realtors who were running a couple open houses on our street today.

We Were Lucky to Move Where and When We Did

When Pam and I moved to Canada, we said that it was because of Bush (who I often refer to as WPIUSH). I also wrote that it was because I looked ahead to a future that looked to be unpleasant, because of poor decisions by the US government in the near term having an effect on our situation as future retirees. While that dim future referred mainly to the US Federal budget deficit, it also was due to the greed and corruption that we saw, and I definitely could feel some sort of collapse coming. Mind you, I had predicted that a great economic disintegration would be coming (cue Sarah Connor looking at the coming storm at the end of the first Terminator movie), but my timing put it roughly around 2015, so I was off by a few years, but it looks like I got pretty close. I’m not that thrilled that the chickens have come home to roost a half a decade or so earlier than I thought.
While I feel that we were smart to leave when we did (as we could now probably not afford to), what I didn’t count on was the fact Canada was also the right place to go, in many ways.

This past week, Fareed Zakaria wrote a piece for Newsweek, called The Canadian Solution. Warning: I’m going to get dangerously close to smug here, but will try to hold back if I do.
According to Zakaria, our new home is in surprisingly good shape these days:

Guess which country, alone in the industrialized world, has not faced a single bank failure, calls for bailouts or government intervention in the financial or mortgage sectors. Yup, it’s Canada. In 2008, the World Economic Forum ranked Canada’s banking system the healthiest in the world. America’s ranked 40th, Britain’s 44th.

Canada has done more than survive this financial crisis. The country is positively thriving in it. Canadian banks are well capitalized and poised to take advantage of opportunities that American and European banks cannot seize. The Toronto Dominion Bank, for example, was the 15th-largest bank in North America one year ago. Now it is the fifth-largest. It hasn’t grown in size; the others have all shrunk.

So what accounts for the genius of the Canadians? Common sense. Over the past 15 years, as the United States and Europe loosened regulations on their financial industries, the Canadians refused to follow suit, seeing the old rules as useful shock absorbers. Canadian banks are typically leveraged at 18 to 1—compared with U.S. banks at 26 to 1 and European banks at a frightening 61 to 1. Partly this reflects Canada’s more risk-averse business culture, but it is also a product of old-fashioned rules on banking.

The article goes on to laud Canada’s better housing market (and it doesn’t even have to note that there was no ‘Sub-Prime’ mess here, either). The other day we learned that Obama’s “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act” deals with Health Care, because the number 1 reason that an American goes bankrupt is because of a major medical problem. Not needed here, and as I found during my recent illness, the stories that some US politicians and others make that we have to wait forever to get to a doctor or get sub-standard health care are utterly false, in my experiences. Just this past week, I walked (slowly) 3 blocks to our local clinic, waited about 20 minutes to see a doctor the first time, and 15 minutes on my return visit. My blood tests were done in 3 days, and didn’t cost me a penny.
Zakaria goes on to notice the other good news for those of us in Canada:

The government has restructured the national pension system, placing it on a firm fiscal footing, unlike our own insolvent Social Security. Its health-care system is cheaper than America’s by far (accounting for 9.7 percent of GDP, versus 15.2 percent here), and yet does better on all major indexes. Life expectancy in Canada is 81 years, versus 78 in the United States; “healthy life expectancy” is 72 years, versus 69. American car companies have moved so many jobs to Canada to take advantage of lower health-care costs that since 2004, Ontario and not Michigan has been North America’s largest car-producing region.

Of course that last bit about Ontario producing most of North America’s cars is also not such good news, as the dire straits of the auto industry have hit that province at least as hard if not harder than Michigan.

Even the immigration policies that Pam is learning in detail these days, as she studies to become an Immigration Consultant, get some attention by Zakaria:

The U.S. currently has a brain-dead immigration system. We issue a small number of work visas and green cards, turning away from our shores thousands of talented students who want to stay and work here. Canada, by contrast, has no limit on the number of skilled migrants who can move to the country. They can apply on their own for a Canadian Skilled Worker Visa, which allows them to become perfectly legal “permanent residents” in Canada—no need for a sponsoring employer, or even a job. Visas are awarded based on education level, work experience, age and language abilities. If a prospective immigrant earns 67 points out of 100 total (holding a Ph.D. is worth 25 points, for instance), he or she can become a full-time, legal resident of Canada.

Zakaria notes that companies have begun to notice, and that Microsoft situated their latest research center here in Vancouver.

At any rate, I’m not trying to gloat or hold our good fortune over the old friends and family we left behind in the States, but perhaps they can now understand why we don’t seem to have the same level of dread and panic when we talk about our economic prospects that they do. Canadians right now seem to be more confident, and less likely to respond emotionally to the news (partly because our news is also less sensationalistic). Given that we have better safety nets, including health care, a stable banking system, and even our food inspection system, which caught the bad peanut butter when it came to the border, that’s not all that surprising. Pam and I find ourselves continually shaking our heads as we watch the Evening News from the major US TV Networks, sometimes in relief, and sometimes in bewilderment that things in the country we left have gotten so bad.

Too Much of a Good Thing

You can have too much of anything, be it snow, holiday days off, or time spent indoors by the fire sipping hot chocolate. All of these things are good things, until you have too much of them.  The snow has definitely outstayed its welcome in Vancouver in 2008/09. It is certainly the most I’ve ever seen in the relatively short time I’ve lived here. It’s not only the depth, but the duration and repetition that has us going more than a little stir-crazy. It’s been 22 days of the white stuff on and off, but never melting away, since the first of it fell on December 13. (I learned from Frances Bula’s blog about the city that the record for Vancouver is 33 days in 1964/65.) Pam and I have despaired that each time we discuss venturing out with the car, to make a trek down to meet my brother, or even just fill the tank, sure enough, the flakes start to fall some more and we shelve our plans yet again. We’ve been out, trudging down to Granville Market and back with provisions more than a couple of times, but our lack of snow tires and the treacherous roads have kept the car underground and unusable.

Things that I have learned from this Snowmegadon, as others have referred to it:

1. The city of Vancouver has 47 snow ploughs. Yes, in Canada it’s spelled ‘plough’, not ‘plow’ as it is in the States. They are getting 5 more snow ploughs before the 2010 Olympics, which will bring the number up to 52. That’s for the whole city.
2. Roofs here were not made for this kind of snow accumulation. There have been many collapses, although most of the serious ones I’ve heard of involve northern Washington state, rather than BC, but I’m sure that there have been several.
3. YVR (the Vancouver Airport), despite being voted Best Airport in North America in 2006 and 2007 is also not made for this kind of weather. It has periodically had to shut down. There have been many stories of people spending days (and sleeping there at night) during some of those shut-downs. Luggage has piled up. Who wants to bet it won’t get that high a standing in next year’s vote?
4. Rats don’t take a snow day holiday. Pam and I saw one in the snow:
   Ratty in the Snow

I’m sure that I’m putting on weight from all the cooking I’ve been doing. Tonight it was Thai-Style yellow Curry. Last night it was Swedish Meatballs (if we were going to have Scandinavian style weather, then by golly, we were going to eat that way too).  Late December and early January has seen Pot Roast, Roasted Lemon-Herb Chicken, Pizza (all from from scratch) Souvlaki-style Pork (from Costco),  Kasha Varnishkes (Buckwheat Groats and Farfalle for those who aren’t familiar) French Toast, Buckwheat Pancakes, and other assorted homemade culinary projects like applesauce and sweet pickles.

We’ve also gotten to bed later and later and slept in later and later, until I finally said the night before last that we had to adjust back to PST, rather than the roughly Hawaiian time zone that we seemed to be living in.

Now, with the holidays officially over, I’m hoping that we can escape our condo and get out and about. Besides, blogging about the weather is almost as boring as being cooped up for the past 22 days.

Snowbound with George on Christmas Eve

You always assume that things will turn out as planned, but sometimes they don’t. Pam and I had all but packed our suitcases earlier in the week for a trip to visit with my brother and his family in Seattle, as well as my parents, who were going to be visiting from Baltimore. Mother Nature had other ideas.

The fact that Canada is enjoying the first coast-to-coast ‘White Christmas’ in 40 years is not lost on me, and it is pretty out there. Pam and I had a nice time walking in the first of the snowstorms, and it looks like storm number three, which started last night, will dump nearly as much on us.

The car is not ready to drive on these kinds of roads. We don’t have any snow tires, as we don’t drive that much to begin with and neither of us use it to get to a workplace (unlike the days when I was working in Burnaby for IBM). Snow tires are not usually needed here.

So, here we are, like hibernating bears in our cave, looking out at the snow. Well, not exactly like bears in one key respect: Hibernating bears don’t eat, and I’ve been cooking like crazy. I roasted a chicken stuffed with herbs and lemon (an old Jamie Oliver recipe that I’ve committed to memory), and yesterday did a large pot roast with carrots, parsnips, turnips and potatoes.  This afternoon I baked a tray of oatmeal muffins (after also baking a bunch of cookies earlier in the week). We’ve also got some steaks in the freezer, and since Granville Market is closed for the next 2 days, we’ll probably eat those as well, along with some of other food in our larder, which we stuffed full just in case the weather did get worse.

The other thing I did, which I do nearly every year, was watch Frank Capra’s movie “It’s a Wonderful Life”.  For me, it transcends movie making to become a piece of art, the same way that some Norman Rockwell illustrations do. I keep finding new details in it, the way you do with any great piece of storytelling or music. There’s always some little motif or passage here or there that after the 10th hearing/viewing you suddenly realize is referred to or echoed in some other place. Capra’s film also has a lot more resonance now, when the news reports from the States earlier in the evening eerily echoed (or presaged?) the talk in the movie of people being foreclosed on their homes because of not being able to pay mortgages, runs on banks and acts of charity. How many people might be, this evening, needing to draw upon charity for the first time in their lives, the way that George Bailey had to?

I noticed that a week or so again, Wendell Jamieson of The New York Times wrote a fascinating reassessment of the film, and actually found it to be essentially a big fat lie, something that he first suspected when he was shown the film at school when he was 15 year’s old:

“It’s a Wonderful Life” is a terrifying, asphyxiating story about growing up and relinquishing your dreams, of seeing your father driven to the grave before his time, of living among bitter, small-minded people. It is a story of being trapped, of compromising, of watching others move ahead and away, of becoming so filled with rage that you verbally abuse your children, their teacher and your oppressively perfect wife. It is also a nightmare account of an endless home renovation.

Holy Cow!  Believe it or not, his opinion of the film’s messages actually gets harsher still:

Many are pulling the movie out of the archives lately because of its prescience on the perils of trusting bankers. I’ve found, after repeated viewings, that the film turns upside down and inside out, and some glaring — and often funny — flaws become apparent. These flaws have somehow deepened my affection for it over the years. Take the extended sequence in which George Bailey (James Stewart), having repeatedly tried and failed to escape Bedford Falls, N.Y., sees what it would be like had he never been born. The bucolic small town is replaced by a smoky, nightclub-filled, boogie-woogie-driven haven for showgirls and gamblers, who spill raucously out into the crowded sidewalks on Christmas Eve. It’s been renamed Pottersville, after the villainous Mr. Potter, Lionel Barrymore’s scheming financier.

Here’s the thing about Pottersville that struck me when I was 15: It looks like much more fun than stultifying Bedford Falls — the women are hot, the music swings, and the fun times go on all night. If anything, Pottersville captures just the type of excitement George had long been seeking.

…

Not only is Pottersville cooler and more fun than Bedford Falls, it also would have had a much, much stronger future. Think about it: In one scene George helps bring manufacturing to Bedford Falls. But since the era of “It’s a Wonderful Life” manufacturing in upstate New York has suffered terribly.

On the other hand, Pottersville, with its nightclubs and gambling halls, would almost certainly be in much better financial shape today. It might well be thriving.

I checked my theory with the oft-quoted Mitchell L. Moss, a professor of urban policy at New York University, and he agreed, pointing out that, of all the upstate counties, the only one that has seen growth in recent years has been Saratoga.

“The reason is that it is a resort, and it has built an economy around that,” he said. “Meanwhile the great industrial cities have declined terrifically. Look at Connecticut: where is the growth? It’s in casinos; they are constantly expanding.”

In New York, Mr. Moss added, Gov. David A. Paterson “is under enormous pressure to allow gambling upstate because of the economic problems.”

“We ease up on our lot of cultural behaviors in a depression,” he said.

What a grim thought: Had George Bailey never been born, the people in his town might very well be better off today.

Well, I’m not sure that the raunchy Vegas-like Pottersville is any better than the Biff Tannen’s alternate Universe town of Hill Valley (which doesn’t get a rename, despite the similar bizzaro treatment) in Back to the Future II.  I’ll bet that a few choice grotesque zooms on the landscape of Pottersville would have horrified the rest of us as much as it did George Bailey rather than thrill him that that his town was less boring with him not in it. Capra perhaps didn’t want to hit us over the head with the message, so it didn’t escape the 15-year old Mr. Jamieson’s cynicism.

Anyway, apt or not, I still find it a great piece of storytelling, even if it teaches us all the wrong things. Jamieson is not alone in his disdain for the film. Besides the fact that the movie was considered a financial flop (too expensive to make, didn’t make back what it cost), Charles Affron on filmreference.com says:

The impetus and structure of It’s a Wonderful Life recall the familiar model of Capra’s pre-war successes. Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Meet John Doe. In each of these films, the hero represents a civic ideal and is opposed by the forces of corruption. His identity, at some point misperceived, is finally acclaimed by the community at large. The pattern receives perhaps its darkest treatment in It’s a Wonderful Life. The film’s conventions and dramatic conceits are misleading. An idyllic representation of small-town America, a guardian angel named Clarence and a Christmas Eve apotheosis seem to justify the film’s perennial screenings during the holiday season. These are the signs of the ingenuous optimism for which Capra is so often reproached. Yet they function in the same way “happy endings” do in Moliere, where the artifice of perfect resolution is in ironic disproportion to the realities of human nature at the core of the plays.

Maybe I should have just watched Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer instead.

Happy Solstice, and Wassail!

The snow is still coming down as I write this, at past midnight. It has been snowing since mid-day and shows no sign of letting up. Pam and I decided we would celebrate both this unusual (for Vancouver, anyway) weather, as well as the Winter Solstice (which I blogged about back on the 9th of this month) by going out into the weather, embracing the whiteness that is enveloping our city.
We took a route that had been cited in the Secret Lantern Society’s Winter Solstice Lantern Festival web site, from the Laurel Street overpass (that lets you go from 7th Avenue all the way down to the False Creek seawall). The scene was one of those magical winter nights, when everything is transformed by the falling snow and Christmas lights:

At the end of our walk, we ended up joining some of the other Solstice Celebrants on Granville Island. Here’s a video that I took of some of our trip. The Flip camera did a fair job with the dim light. I exported the video, converted it to DV format and edited it in iMovie:

We returned home to a feast of roast chicken (I had roasted it just before we left), mashed yams and cabbage cooked with double-smoked sausage. We were hungry, and tired, but the food and a little red wine hit the spot.
The only thing we didn’t have was actual Wassail, but I did find a recipe online at The Accidental Hedonist:

Wassail
2 pints and 1/4 cup brown ale (winter ale and scottish ale will also suffice)
3-4 cinnamon sticks
4 cloves
Zest from 1/2 lemon
4 apples
1 1/2 cups brown sugar
1 cup port
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground all spice
1/4 teaspoon ground cardamon
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees F.

In a large sauce pan, pour in 2 pints of ale. Add the cinnamon sticks, lemon zest and cloves and bring to a simmer over low heat.

Take an apple, and score it with a knife around the circumference of the apple. Place in a baking dish. Repeat this step for all of the apples. Cover with one cup of brown sugar, 1/4 cup of ale, and all of the port. Cover baking dish and place in oven, cooking for 30 minutes.

While apples are baking, place remaining sugar and spices into the sauce pan, ensuring it’s well mixed.

When apples are done baking, place entire contents of baking dish into sauce pan. Allow to cook over a low heat for another 30-40 minutes.

Serve hot, one-two ladles into your favorite mug.

Serves 6-8

Here’s to the beginning of Winter, but at the same time, the start of the Earth’s journey back to longer days ahead of us.