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