unflamable fliers

Who came up with the idea to make nonsense useless? For one: the "Real Estate" advertiser. 


We get these "flyers" in the mail box every day (and not much else) .

The only thing the paper could be used for is to light a fire but it will not burn. Some genius has figured out that you might continue reading if the page won't ignite? Give me a break here! 

They soak the paper in fire retardant? I noticed the venerable "Globe and Mail" is also soaking the front page in some form of suppressant but the interior pages burn like a house afire. I ain't about to buy an over priced house in the Nanaimo area or need any tools from Home Hardware in the short term but i should and used to be able to light a fire with the pages.

What are we supposed to do with this "paper"? 

Recycle it with our old NiCad batteries?

The glossy nonsense will smolder for a bit and then extinguish itself.

Then some of the "flyers" are stuck together. My shakey morning fingers work away as I drool on the pages. They have gone to the trouble of gluing the stupid adds together!

And making them "fire safe"!

Where do people like that come from?


Ken LeDuc

Cotten eyed Joe

"I've been a Miner for a Heart of Gold

And I'm gettin' Old!"

I look out at the paridise I live at and wonder: "Why me?".

"Some get the Gravey" I guess.

My fellow ranters are dropping like flies. (that's been going on for some time)

With the internet working well I can find other decent ranters like Monbiot but I'd rather do it head to head.

Where have all the people gone?

Gone to keyboards every one.

(or cell phones or iPads)

Sheesh! So have I.

De real ting is missed terribly here. But I guess this will have to do for today:

Major changes have come down lately. Not just for the Polar Bear.

The "Occupy where ever" dismissed by most media has my interest just now.

What worries me is: Success in that movement means a bit 'o chaos for a while.

Maybe I will need to wander away from my Den and pay attention to the goings on in "real time"

'Course I am not expecting anyone to want to "Occupy" Cassidy

And I can't drive anymore over .05

I don't trust the police to notice that I can:

1) Run a skillsaw or a chainsaw or a backhoe

2) Type and spell check one of these entries

3) Keep a construction crew busy (and get no "call backs")

running well over .08 most of the time

Oh well.

Sincerely,

Cotten eyed Joe

Orange You Noticing?

I certainly am.

What? What now, Mike, you’re probably thinking, and why “orange” in the title again?

Well, the orange is the point. What orange this time? Not the orange safety gear, though that continues to assault us on every street in the dominion, every hour of day or night. Nor is it the humble orange imported great distances to our food shops, though that is another wasteful enterprise furnishing us with food we don’t need.

It’s an overarching orangeanity, an orangitude, an orangitint everywhere, all over the place that vexes me.

All over everyday places and the oddest places. A post-election joke about about Jack Layton getting Stornoway painted orange, NDP colours, ha ha, not really ha.

In the bathroom of a fancy hotel (for me fancy is any three-star hotel) I stayed at recently, I gazed into the mirror at my knobby old body, and the thing looked definitely healthier, the skin darker toned…orange! They do this with the mirror somehow! They orange you!

The style section of the Saturday Globe and Mail, the only newspaper I regularly buy, has invested heavily in orange. Orange clothes, orange hair on the models (no, it isn’t auburn, isn’t brown, it’s freaking orange), orange backgrounds if they can’t get it in anywhere else. In fact there is orange, glossy orange colour, in every section of that newspaper. 

Furniture has darkened and reddened, gone from brown to orange. Just try and find any other colour in wood furniture.

Why is all this orangeification happening? Don’t be surprised that I have a theory. Or two. The simplest one is that an ugly world both merits and gets an ugly colour. To put it more fully, things are really bad right now, right? The dominos of national economy are tumbling one after the other—Greece, Ireland, Spain, everywhere. China is muscling its way up into top-dog power; the Americans are out, and are freaking out, getting ready to go completely berserk. (Phone me for details. Better yet, duck). All industrialization, all technology, all production is now shaped to one aim: to do away with human employment.

And the response to all this horror is to daub all surfaces with a colour not quite crimson for danger, nor cheerful yellow for “wake up and sniff the coffee”. The colour is orange, the mood is grim, the message is get yer head down, bad moon rising. Not the fire next time, the fire this time.


Mike Matthews

Link to Rant within a Rant

This large poster is part of an "Art" exhibit found in the "Labyrinth"  under the high points of Buda, Budapest, Hungary. The underground system of caves there is probably more of a "Maze" than a laryrinth and the exhibit is a well done spoof  - but I was most impressed. I should not attempt to impose my impression of this experience - the exhibit speaks for itself. But it should be on everyone's "To See" list.

if you click on the image it gets big enough to see

Another labyrinth we are all walking is the Maze of  (sometimes) confusing evidence and opinion regarding the short term future of the planet.

One blogger/author/thinker has caught my attention lately:

http://www.monbiot.com/

While I have yet to accept his notion that nuclear power is a nessessary stopgap he does examine some of the dangers of ignoring any option and some of the dissadvantages of persuing any particular solution Holus-Bolus such as "Green" renewables.

The overwhelming power that the human has sacrificed to it's greatest god ever, "Maman" (Money), has set us on an "Highway to Hell".

As Jethro Tull sang:

"God He stole the Handle" (Brake handle in this image)

"And the train, it won't stop

Oh No: It won't slow down."

So we have seen the enemy.

Now what?




By Ken LeDuc

Water You Doing?!!

By Mike Matthews

This one is inspired, is started, kicked off by a particular experience, but then most of my rants work that way. Something crawls under your skin for a long time, and one day it finally erupts, an explosion of rage. Lucky you that it comes at you here via the printed (we still call it printed) word. Lucky you that I’m not standing in front of you, gibbering and spitting, shitting my pants with rage. Lucky for both of us that we have Kim for me to send my rant to. 

Wife and I had taken our seats for what turned out to be a brilliant, thoroughly artistic, intelligent, wonderfully resourceful production of a big old solid play by George Bernard Shaw. We sat in a comfortable modern theatre in a big west coast city. In came the audience clump by clump, twos and threes. Many of them, most of them maybe, with gray hair. And, several rows below us, in trooped a threesome as old as the others but looking younger and looking worse, because each of them carried a plastic bottle of water. 

I am too civilized to shout imprecations in a theatre, unless I am on the stage. I did think about finding these simpletons at the intermission and scolding them. I didn’t do it; I spent the intermission looking at the program and chatting about how splendid the performance was. I am too civilized, too frightened of my wife.

You are thinking that it was those plastic bottles of water that roused my fury, water carried in plastic bottles. And yes, like most people I disapprove of plastic water bottles.

Of course it’s evil to carry things about in plastic containers, containers that come from that oil-based industrialization that maims and poisons the earth we live on. 

My fury when I see plastic water bottles does not come just from that; it comes from the simple fact that the people who carry water with them don’t need that water. Uh huh.Think about it. When did you last need a drink of water and not be able to get it from a tap?

You don’t need that water! A few million people in Africa need that water, but you don’t.

 I used to run marathons. In three or four hours of steady toil, most of us took gulps of water at the water stations, two or three times in the race. That was all we could slow down for, and it was plenty.  At the end we’d have lost weight from dehydration, but that was not something to get excited about.

I don’t remember anyone ever walking away from a marathon toting a bottle of water. I’m sure that it is different now.

It’s easy to abuse water, use too much, not care for it, exploit it, spoil it, mishandle it, waste it. But when you abuse my patience, you pay.

NOT A TSUNAMI

Unless you think of time as a "Big Wave".

I've been bothered by the videos and images of the coastal towns in Japan as the tsunami hit.

I have built some houses and worked on boats so watching an ocean going vessel surging down a street crushing buildings has added to my normally trivial nightmares:

Would any structure I have worked on withstand?

No.

Can we actually build structures to survive such events?

That would depend on the relative strength of the event.

It does not hurt to try to earthquake proof buildings nor to consider and implement safe siting of any new developement and while you are at it keep your boat well off shore during a large earthquake.

Let's face it:

Some of us will be caught with our "pants down".

Most "Disaster Preparedness" advice tells us to have a bit of food and water somewhere and a "plan".

In the days of Cold War Nuclear Threat the advice was: "Duck and Cover" which has now been modified: you should no longer crawl under your desk but hunker down beside it because that is where survivors are found - near but not under a sturdy peice of furniture.  

And "running outside" can also increase risks. I would likely still "run about" if there was time for that.

Sensible "preparedness" might still include ducking and storing water and food.

One consistant affect of disaster is: loss of information. You can survive quite a while without food and in our locale most of the year there would be water within walking distance. But not knowing if the people you care about are ok  and not being able to inform them of your own situation would be difficult for most of us who are used to instant access.

One possibly useful adition to your "Grab Bag" might be a hand held two way radio (cell phones and wi-fi communications immediately overload even if infrastructure survives).

Part of everyone's "plan" should be a common meeting point.

I'm going to the car park by the highway in Cassidy: Nanaimo River right next door and hopefully the pub and beer and wine will stay open (note to self: bring cash. Credit and Debit cards will still be good for scraping your windshield).

Ken LeDuc

Chop the Sticks, Eh?

It came to me very specifically one day, one lunchtime, in Guelph. Yeah, Guelph, Ontario. We were visiting there a couple of days, trundling through the good downtown bookstore and meeting a university student, daughter of a friend, for coffee and catch-up.

At lunch we went to a Chinese restaurant, your typical Canadian Chinese restaurant, a bit upscale, big and busy, and it had a smorgasbord. That is a great thing in a Chinese restaurant; it means you can load your plate with just two or three items, the gyozas or ribs or whatever it is that you really want to indulge in. Skip the chow mein.

We indulged, and we took our plates to a table and picked up our tools. And I looked around and saw that there were no chopsticks in anyone’s hands, no chopsticks on any of the tables. Just knives, forks and spoons. It was a Eureka moment.

For I knew that it could be, and that there were people, proprietors of restaurants and customers of restaurants, who could make it happen. A meal, whether of rice or dumplings or meat or vegetables or fish or noodles or any darn thing, could be eaten quite handily with knives, forks, and spoons. And here was a town that knew that.

Out west they don’t know that. We don’t know that. Look around you on the BC Ferry. On every sailing you see people slobbering into those giant Dixie cups and pulling up noodles with chopsticks, pushing them up the sides of the cup and then sucking them the rest of the way home.

It is not that I am disgusted by this spectacle. I can watch people eat in a messy way, or not watch them. I am a messer myself, Mikey Messer, like MacHeath in the song. And I have nothing against noodles. It’s just that chopsticks are no good for eating noodles, and any food that comes out of a cup or a bowl should be eaten with a spoon. Food that comes on a plate should be cut up with a knife and pushed onto a fork. Knives, forks and spoons have evolved over the centuries, and they do a good job with any food. Chopsticks don’t. Humans eating with chopsticks look like animals performing in a circus. Though not as dignified.

You are wondering if I am questioning the skills and wisdom of the all-wise East. I am not questioning the skills. If you practice hard with chopsticks for many years, you can do a not-too-messy job of eating messy, bitsy-bitsy food.

What I question is the wisdom. 

Look at it this way. When Marco Polo came back from Asia, he brought noodles,

but no little sticks. He ate the noodles by wrapping them around his dagger. To help him in this enterprise, those clever Italian designers devised the multi-pronged instrument that we use today.  Some parts of Asia never got the news, and some parts of the West insist on aping the backwards parts of the East. All too often, the blind lead the blind.

By Mike Matthews

Diss. Continued

By Mike Matthews

By now you understand that one, this one, rants because he has a complaint to make. He cannot find the appropriate person to complain to, and even if he did find that person, he might not get the satisfaction he needs.  To be honest, he needs to hear his voice out there shrieking, whether or not he gets justice, recompense for injury, satisfaction. He likes to hear himself yelp.

This yelp is about discontinued items, and perhaps you will savour this rant because it will remind you that you too have suffered when some product or service becomes unavailable, denied to you for no other reason than that disregard for the individual  that we find in every last freaking corner of this vast arena full of accidental and inspired mudballs that we call our universe.

Burns chili. When I arrived in this crockamurphy town I commended the supermarket, which shall be nameless, because though I have many complaints about its ownership and practices, I esteem it, I like it. I buy most of my grub there. I commended these folks for having Burns chili con carne on their shelves. I even wrote a letter to the newspaper expressing my approval. (You see that ranting is not my only weapon in the arena of civility that we all toggle and struggle in).  What do you think happened one week after my letter, copied to the supermarket, appeared in the newspaper? The supermarket shelves were utterly free and clear of Burns chili, that’s what.

I don’t know why they discontinued the product. Maybe Burns stopped making the stuff, or stopped supplying it in B.C. Burns, after all, is or was resident in the ghastly kingdom of Alberta, where so much of the evil in Canadian life originates…but let’s not go down that road. Not in this rant. Point is, the product, a product that I particularly desired, was discontinued.

That was only the first of several outrages. Next came the garlic juice. 

Garlic juice. Yes. Is there such a thing? Yes, probably there is, somewhere, but not here, because they discontinued it. Exed it, sent it away. You are wondering what on earth it is, or was, and why I care. Well, it was a lovely little grocery item, garlic juice in a small bottle, handier and more versatile than any other sort of prepared garlic. However, the grocery people are too blind, ignorant and clueless to pay attention to their stock, their products, just as the manufacturers are too blind, ignorant and clueless to push and promote their wares, so off it went to markets in Brazil or Czechoslovakia.

Plantain is available at several of our local food stores, but is always in danger of discontinuation. If they think that too few of us hail from Nicaragua or Costa Rica, they will discontinue plantain. They are itching to do it. Already they have made it a discontinuous item in the produce department, not always available, or present there next to the bananas, but too green to be used. They want to be rid of it.

The Hudson’s Bay got rid of Ageless, a lovely cologne that leaves an old briar rose person smelling like a tender young grapefruit. That’s the Hudson’s Bay in Nanaimo, sent the scent back because “it wasn’t selling here.” It was all I could do to keep from vaulting over the perfume counter and throttling her. I had to make do with vividly imagining doing that.

Hey! Here’s yet another one, discovered just today. Carpet shampoo. Can’t find it in either major supermarket in my neighbourhood, despite hundreds of yards of soaps and cleaners of every sort, some green, some deadly gassy, some lilac-scented. Did someone ask “carpet shampoo?” with eyebrows lifted. Well, sure, for heaven’s sake, it’s been a staple of modern housecleaning. Usually you squirt it on the dirty patches of your wall-to-wall, then vacuum it up a few minutes later. The remaining dampness evaporates, leaving you with cleaner carpet. So it seems we are no longer interested in cleaning our wall-to-wall. I suppose we are replacing it with wood flooring. Yeah, when the money comes through. 

You probably think I am nuts. Well, I think you are not noticing how often something that you took for granted, an everyday kind of food item, a helpful domestic product, a tool, a particular style or brand of garment, maybe, something not important in your life but something you have taken for granted would be there when you need it, is suddenly gone. Out of stock, not available, just missing.  Discontinued.

This little ranter thinks that the filthy people who decide to discontinue things should be captured and put to death. This mild-mannered little would-be murderer understands that that is not possible. Hence, he rants.

By Mike Matthews

Orange You Forgetting Something?

Mike Matthews

Two tourists are painting a picturesque ruined castle, a half crumbled stone tower on the coast of Italy.  What is out of place in this photograph that I saw in the New Yorker magazine is what swats us in the eye: these painters with their backs to us in the foreground of the picture are wearing big bright safety helmets. They are a quarter mile away from that stone tower. Yet it makes sense for them to wear helmets; probably they bicycled to the spot.  What doesn’t make sense is for those honking big helmets to occupy the foreground of the photo. Fault here lies with the magazine editor. 

Here’s another scene.  Not far from my house I see a fellow  working at a neighbour’s house, up on the roof with shingles, tools, and so forth.  Wearing  his orange safety vest.  I figured it out: should he fall from that roof and lie stunned, helpless in the yard in the ample shrubbery, the search party would locate him more quickly because of the bright orange and chartreuse vestment. 

Here’s a spectacle observed while walking my dog. A woman doing some sort of work up on a high roof is wearing a nice big crash helmet.  I was puzzled, for I understand the function of helmets being to protect the head, and hence advisable for those who work beneath falling objects. We wore them working underground when I worked, summer job, in a mine.  Wearing one when you work high in the air suggests that you do not understand the direction in which gravity works. That, frankly, is dismal.

Recently I came across the aftermath of a big traffic accident. Many cars were damaged, badly damaged. Police cars, ambulances, and fire trucks were at the scene. Lots of us idle onlookers gathered to gawk. A fellow walking slowly back and forth at the perimeter of the scene was stopped by a police officer , who did not shout but spoke in an intense, meaning ful  voice:  “where’s your safety vest?  

”It’s in my car!” came the reply, in a husky, slow voice. There was something a little wrong with this man.

“Well, get it on!” was the fierce reply from the cop. 

“I can’t; I can’t get into my car!” cried the man. The cop just looked bewildered.  Turns out this slow-walking chap 1. had a concussion,  2. had just wiggled out from behind the bent steering column of one of the wrecked automobiles at the scene.

Turns out the police officer could not see a problem. Could not see that the problem was the police priorities.

Only one of these examples is fiction, by the way.

I believe that you can see the problem. I believe that you do not need me, little red eyes and whisky breath , shouting in your face.  I believe that you are reading this in your home or in your somewhat private workspace because you do not want me, an unpleasant, old, cranky, shrill-voiced person, up close to you and on your case.  And you without your helmet or your orange safety  vest.

Out with the Old?

November 01, 2010 at 5:13 PM

A recent magazine advertisement touts Subarus as old reliable automobiles, pointing out that there is a very high proportion of old Subarus still on the road. The photo illustrating this ad shows a dashboard with an odometer reading in the two hundred thousands. So why did we take our good old Subaru out to the wrecking yard at the edge of the city to get squished like that?  When a giant yellow machine squashed our faithful old car flat last fall, its odometer reading was just over two hundred and twenty-five thousand.

Why did we do it? On the way back to town, sitting in the back of the dealer’s courtesy vehicle, I’m pretty sure I saw at least one Subaru on the road wearing a black armband.  Didn’t I?

Okay, the Subaru was getting old. About fifteen years old.  An old car means greater gas consumption. Substantial carbon emissions. That is where our new, younger car comes in. The Subaru had been a faithful, steady performer, had never needed serious repairs, never been in a real collision.  However, I don’t look around me carefully when I am driving. I bash into pillars in parking garages.  In ten years I had bumped, dinged and scraped the Subaru front, back and midships.

The salesman intent on selling us our new vehicle acknowledged that we had very little going in trade-in value.  But he had news for us.  We could get maximum value from our old car at just the point where we purchased a new car. We would surrender our Subaru to the B.C. Scrap-It program and receive a generous allowance of money, provided we purchased a newer, younger, cleaner vehicle. Our friendly sales guide was able to show us the numbers.

Ooh!  That did it.  Let’s sign up right now; let’s just do it.  We did. Faxed away our eager response, got the okay two days later, signed the papers, surrendered our 1994 Subaru to the big yellow crusher, drove home in a 2005 gas miser.

There were some ominous moments.  The auto wrecker was not easy to find, behind the back of the beyond, down a dead-end road, hidden from sight by tall, dark fir trees. Why would that be?  The fellow who took our car, a laconic cowboy type, seemed decent enough. Did he enjoy conducting vehicles to their violent deaths?  Herding the wide-eyed, frightened four-wheeled creatures through the last moments of their lives, bringing them face to face with the giant machine whose name is Nemesis, whose nature is Doom?

The lady doing the paperwork in the office seemed as bemused by this business as we were. The regulation that the cars are to be crushed in their entirety, that nothing, no part of them, is to be removed or salvaged, bothered her.  “We had an old Mercedes in here with lovely leather seats, well cared for.  Seemed awful to crush it, but that’s the rules.”

We like our new car.  Clean, comfortable, modish colour, good sound system. However, watching our granddaughter watch the animated movie Robots recently, we heard one of the evil characters in that film declare that it made more sense to manufacture new machines than to repair the old machines. We found ourselves thinking about the Scrap-It program. We had not thought about the program when we bought into it.

It makes car-buyers like us happy. It makes car manufacturers and dealers happy, by creating turnover, getting older cars off the roads, newer cars off the car lots.  Is this good?  It’s good for business, good for General Bullmoose.  George Monbiot suggested in a Manchester Guardian article last year that “scrappage schemes are nothing but hand-outs for the car firms, resprayed green to fool the incautious buyer.” He points out that “up to a fifth of an automobile’s emissions are produced during its manufacture.”

How does a Scrap-It program look in less prosperous parts of the world, where automobiles are harder to come by and are maintained and fixed with a view to keeping them going indefinitely? How would it look to our parents? Our grandparents?

How will it look to our grandchildren?

 by Mike Matthews

Waves and Hulls

Waves and Hulls:
Just finished Susan Casey's "The Wave" and it got me thinking about some waves I have met.

We were in a 42' Monk through all these waves.
Scarey #1 was nothing really on the horizon. We were running past Ballinas and had just phoned in to be picked up in Nanaimo in an hour or so.
Looked to me to be about 4' South East swell and a few days earlier we had survived "6 metre North West Swell with 3 - 4 ' South East wind wave and 40 knot outflow from the inlets" according to the Marine forecast off Cape Caution.

So what could these small waves in the Salish Sea have to do with us?

Maybe because of the number of hours standing by the captain off Cape Caution and willing us through the next basher while wiping the windshield I was watching (quite relaxed) as we nosed into an unusual series and the bow went under the third wave. We had certainly had green water over the pilot house in the big swell but something about this series was totally different. For one thing it blew the Helmsman's window in and water and broken glass flooded the cabin. Now we were staring at the next waves with no glass.

What I wish to record:
I think the wave period (or related wave length) related to the hull's length is more important than the significant wave height.

I'm way out of my depth here but that is what I saw.

Ken LeDuc

Batteries and chargers and cordless tools: What a bunch of nonsense!

Batteries and chargers and cordless tools:

What a bunch of nonsense!

You buy a Makita or Milwaukee - should be top of the line and I guess they are whatever passes for "top" these days -DeWalt was pretty good a few years ago but somebody in marketing probably figured out that you really do not want to build a durable tool (most sales are gifts to folks who imagine they might someday need a drill or a saw).

I use these tools every day.

Over the years I have purchased and used all name brand tools and I have a bin full of drills and dead batteries. Lately all manufactures seem to favour the 18 volt Lithium.

'Course Milwaukee won't fit Makita and vice versa. No charger or battery you owned then is any use today.

I saw this coming early on and asked the people I work with to "standardize" - buy all the same tools - Makita  would be my choice and at that point I had the 24v NiMh drill and saw combo. Both drill and saw are fine but the batteries cost more than a new 18v lithium combo.

"we will give you the tool -you will buy the batteries"

The ubiquitous cell phone or ipad system is probably an even greater disaster because more consumers contribute. The world wide "Talk and toss"  or "free blackberry with each purchase" has few tangible results beyond the mountain of high tech trash produced.

An old Motorola charger will not even charge a newer motorola phone let alone any other make. Somewhere I read that the European Union was threatening to legislate compatablity of all cellular battery/charger combinations.

Let us take that idea further:

All portable power should be standardized.

one well engineered/well manufactured battery!

One charger

World wide

Ken LeDuc

The Link

I'm guessing the year was 1974.

"How I wish I was in Sherbrooke now!"

The picture is of the M.V. "Link" which I bought from my Basement Landlord, Michael.

"She was broad and fat and loose in her stays."

In fact The "Link" was quite narrow for her length: 36'  overall length and 9' beam. Just a bit "loose."
The Chrysler Crown power plant was not the first engine in the boat and not the last, but when Mike keyed it up it hummed like a good thing.

The smell of old bilge and the hum of the Crown got to me and I said: "You want $1500 for the boat?"

Mike said: "For you one grand."

I was now the captain of a nicely sized boat complete with a "C" license.

I was also zero on the "learning curve" regarding salt water navigation but no stranger to danger.

As this blog evolves I hope to pass on some of the details I have learned running various types of craft in various types of water.

My first lesson was: Exactly what is "Slack Tide?" 

Obviously high and low tides turn at predicted times in an open ocean environment. Some narrows also are well documented and any mariner with a working chronometer and a copy of Canadian Hydrographic Survey's "Tides and Currents" should be just fine out there.

However, when you run a boat into an area where C.H.S. has no data you take some chances: Lagoons tend to have a water level which may or may not have anything to do with high or low slack tide. When "Slack High" is at the mouth water pours into the lagoon. During Slack Low water pours out. A river running into the lagoon at high tide can be a creek running out at low slack.

Ken LeDuc

Whose Car IS That?

My subject today is BMW’s. As you know, they are a well-made German automobile, and expensive. I do not hate them for being the kind of car that only wealthy people can afford, even if the sort of wealthy people who own them tend to be thoughtless, shallow twits.

The BMW’s that I hate are seagoing BMW’s, for this expensive European import is part of the carscape in this province, and as such it finds its way onto the BC Ferries. Here is where the hate comes in: comes in when we are just a little way out and there’s oh, just a little choppiness on the ocean and that alarm in the BMW goes off. For these cars usually have an alarm that responds to a little agitation with a “high-pitched” hooting or mewing or caterwauling or yowling or howling. Yeah, the Beamer is a screamer.

It is not by the way, the only screamer. Several other brands have alarms, but the BMW is the car most likely to spoil your voyage on our Supernatural seas.

You know how it goes: you have driven madly from Vernon or Kamloops or, God! Quesnel! and you got a richly deserved four-hundred-dollar speeding ticket on the Coquihalla. You got to the ferry, and you sat and sat in the lineup and finally crept on board, and now you just want to stay in the car on the car-deck for a little down time, a little snooze maybe, before you go upstairs for coffee from you don’t want to be told where and a dish of greasy chips and reformulated fish or a big Dixie cup with chopsticks sticking out of it. The ferry starts up and that chirpy American girl hectors you to come up and enjoy all the on-board excitements, the Bread Garden meals, the facilities with disabilities, just ask any crew MEMber. She can’t help the way she talks; and you will ignore her until it is time for offLOADing. You settle back, you recline the seat, relax. Yeah. Maybe a snooze.

The ferry is out of the bay now, the water is more open, a zephyr breeze raises three-inch wavelets on the surface of the sea. HWEANHH HWEANHH HEWEANHH. There she blows! And thus she shall continue, with brief intermissions while the BMW alarm system rests and gathers its juices for the next four-minute assault on us.

The announcement asks “the owner of BMW licence number AMK107 please return to the car deck….” You know the futile routine. Nothing is gonna happen. The alarm might run out of juice and stop doing its thing, or at least take a rest till we get to The Fingers, near Departure Bay. If the owner shows up at all, he will shrug and kvetch his way out of it by proclaiming that he has no idea how to turn it off.

BC Ferries could deal with the Beamer beeper if they had the balls. Just post a sign at the ticket booth, maybe another at the on-ramp: “If your car alarm sounds during the voyage, our deck crew will strike your vehicle with sledge hammers until the noise stops.”

What would take more doing but be more fun would be a big mobile sling that could amble around the car deck and hoist the beeper over to the side of the ferry, then hurl the effing Beamer out into the ocean. The sound made by the car hitting the water would be a very nice sound, a “fwormk.” Quite a big “FWORMK.” I believe that is the correct spelling. Then the car would disappear neath the waves forever, and if a couple of yuppies were in the car, or had clung to it desperately trying to stop it being slung out to sea, and thus shared the fate of the vehicle?

Even better. 

Mike Matthews