Last week, while Jess and I were having dinner, the subject of the derivation of the word grog came up in conversation (mainly because I babble about such things).

To my understanding, grog is a drink that was served on board ships of the British Royal Navy from the eighteenth century forward until the rum ration was discontinued in 1970. A fellow named Admiral Vernon who, unusual for an admiral, had worked his way up to a commission from below deck, starting as a midshipman, was concerned with the vicious cycle of rum, drunkenness, brutal corporal punishment that resulted from the daily ration of half-a-pint of rum, twice daily, issued to men aboard British naval vessels. He ordered that the rum was to be served diluted with water, and with a bit of sugar and lime juice depending on availability and merit. The men thought they were losing out (they didn’t actually get any less rum, so their dissatisfaction was unfounded), and so contemptuously christened the new drink “grog” after a nickname given to Admiral Vernon on account of the trademark grogram cloak he always wore.

Now, I was blissfully convinced that I knew where the term came from, but Jess questioned whether I might not be embracing a folk etymology for a much older word. So here I am, reference works on my lap, doing Serious Research.

The Canadian Oxford Dictionary (199 gives a definition and derivation of grog as follows:

grog n. 1 a drink of spirits (originally rum) and water. 2 informal any alcoholic drink. [said to be from ‘Old Grog’, the reputed nickname (from his grogram cloak) of Admiral Vernon, who in 1740 first had rum served to sailors diluted rather than neat]

Okay, that’s remarkably close to the version I know (which, by the way, I originally got from the Pusser’s Rum website. These folks put out the original recipe British Navy rum, have done since 1979, and it is very worth trying.). I do, however, notice that it clearly says said to be from. More research is necessary.

Next, to The Sailor’s Word-Book, compiled by Admiral W. H. Smyth in 1867:

GROG. A drink issued in the navy, consisting of one part of spirits diluted with three of water; introduced in 1740 by Admiral Vernon, as a check to intoxication by mere rum, and said to have been named from his grogram coat. […] The addition of sugar and lemon-juice now makes grog an agreeable anti-scorbutic.

Well-established: Grog is tasty, supposed to prevent scurvy, and was introduced to the navy in 1740 by Admiral Vernon. Not well-established: the origin of the word. It’s still said to have been named from the coat. Who, exactly, keeps saying this?

Perhaps I should try a different tack; trying to find an earlier mention of the word. Jess seemed to hint that I could go as far back as Chaucer. I shudder to say it, but Wikipedia (which I only ever use as a springboard to more credible source materials) suggests that a book written in 1718 by Daniel Defoe (The Family Instructor, Part 2) seems to use the term to mean some form of rum drink produced in the West Indies. It appears my cherished folk etymology has a chink in its armour.

A cursory search for “grog and mead”, which I am still prepared to believe refers to two drinks that reached the heights of their respective popularities at least a century apart, indicates that only renaissance faire types use the phrase. I’m not going down that path.

This is worthy of further research, and while I continue to search for the true origins of the word grog, I would appreciate any offer of help. If you have an idea of where I can find actual earlier mentions of the term, I would appreciate you leaving a comment.

Consider this scenario. My phone lights up, then sings at me that I have received a new text message. I reach over to the algebra textbook where the phone rests to pick it up. From my toast-butter-enhanced fingers, it slips to the floor. The Motorola logo appears on the screen. After it reboots, there is no trace of the text message I have just received.

I wish this were an isolated occurrence. No—I wish it were a hypothetical scenario. The trouble is, it happens far too often (at least, each one of the very few times I drop or jostle my phone). The cause is multiple levels of design fail.

Design fail, which used to be called major design flaw, is something that plagues all sorts of endeavours. Most people are familiar with its effects, but completely oblivious as to its causes or how to prevent it. Of course, lots of vinyl banners have been printed over the years with slogans like Total Quality Management, Six Sigma, and ISO 9001, in an effort to delude someone into believing that quality assurance was an industry practice. Perhaps the best use of these banners would be to smother the exploding laptop battery fires that have been the rage in recent years. It’s painfully obvious in light of the quality of hardware and software products that we use on a daily basis, that quality assurance is quite the mythic beast indeed.

This isn’t a surprise. I have never seen a correctly-used Ishikawa diagram outside of the examples used in tutorials on the subject. Scope creeps across a project like ivy across a New England university campus. The bathtub curve looks like it’s been filled to the brim with bubble bath. Advanced, exact metholologies exist—but they languish in the hands of C students leading teams of engineers trained seemingly in the absence of the overhanging vision of a collapsing bridge driving them to strive for design perfection.

The direct cause of the problem with my phone is that there is a shade too much tolerance between the battery cover and the battery. As a result, any excessive force disconnects the battery briefly, resetting the phone. This is a hardware design fail. Since my phone (the Motorola Q9h) runs Windows Mobile, it is constantly doing unnecessary things instead of preserving its state (and my treasured text messages), which is a software design fail.

Now, most software today is written by people who grew up with the idealized notions of infinite memory and very fast computers. None of them seem to have read, or even heard of, Knuth or Hofstaedter. When I was a boy, you needed to keep your executable files to a good 64K upper limit, and treat memory like it didn’t exist. Otherwise, you were writing bloated software that would take an eternity to run and probably crash your machine. Nowadays, the endless churning of hard drives is the telltale sign that superhuge programs are shuttling superhuge, mostly empty, data structures around, so big that they require endlessly expanding swapfiles, slowing the fastest processors mankind can engineer to the speed of a tiny, overworked electrical motor.

If I recall correctly, it was the 1957 Lincoln Mercury that shipped with a completely faulty (borked, in modern quality terminology) electrical system. The responsibility lay with the consumer to diagnose and fix the error. This seems to be the theory behind Open Source software: here is some free broken software, if you fix it, send us the fix, and everyone can have less broken software as long as they spend all of their time applying patches. Don’t even ask about documentation.

A whole decade ago, the cellphone I had had a similar battery problem to my current superphone. It was made by a Finnish pulp-and-paper concern that I guess makes cellphones on the side. The homebrew workaround that I used then was a torn business card inserted between the battery and the phone. So today, I’ve inserted a piece of thick cardboard between my loose battery and its cover. Based on a series of twenty whacks on the knee, my problem is solved. Based on how easy it was to solve, it should have been caught in the design process, and a small foam spacer added to the design.

Of course, you could go to extremes: seal the battery inside the phone, reduce the moving parts (buttons and whatnot) to a bare minimum, and ensure that all the software loaded on the phone is reliable and from trusted providers by strict control, including but not limited to the ability to remotely disable offending software or hardware. I mean you’d have to limit sales of that product. It would just fly off the shelves.

I don’t know if the human race is ready for that sort of thing. You would have to entirely overcome the basic tendencies of the species that built a town at the base of Mount Vesuvius, hung baskets of people smoking cigars from giant hydrogen balloons, and sailed a couple of billion dollars right past big red target Mars. No easy task. The organization that accomplishes that should probably just be given the keys to the planet.

Or at least monopolistic market share.

Yesterday, in case any of you missed it, was the launch of the iPhone 3G. This brought the device, which I am assured by the best authorities is as important an invention as the wheel or the aeroplane, to many untouched markets around the world, including the Canadian market. Thousands of unwashed neophiles lined up outside stores all over the country, itching for a chance to snatch up their iPhone and start scratching up its polycarbonate surface with their data-hungry fingers.

I, for one, did not. Because iDon‘t want one.

Let me clarify: I certainly participated in the madness. I have a dear friend (the incomparable jessrawk) who lives in an area of town where people were lined up in folding chairs the previous night in numbers enough to buy out the entire store‘s assigned stock of iPhones, even at a limit of two per person. She was distraught until we realized that a) I work in a mall, and am one of the first five people to enter the mall in the morning on a regular day, b) the mall where my office is has no less than four dealers authorized to sell the device, and c) mall security is far too strict to permit people to camp out inside overnight. Therefore, in the morning, I sauntered off to work without my knapsack, bearing instead a folding chair to set down in line in front of the Rogers store (being the one most likely to have the most intelligent service).

A quick reconnaissance survey indicated that the technoruffians already in line were clearly going to steal my chair if I just left it there, or ignore it entirely, which would be worse. So I went upstairs to my desk and convinced my ex-Lebanese-military workmate to go for an extended washroom break, with my chair for company, until his relief showed up. I then quickly texted my friend to get on the next bus to the mall. Around twenty minutes later, I had my operative back in the office, and happy texts arrived, jubilant that I had helped secure the last 16GB black iPhone in the shop. A job well-done.

While running coffee down to the iPhone line (yes, I did that too), I learned that Rogers (the only company in third-world Canada to offer a 3G network, and thus the ipso facto holder of the iPhone monopoly) was offering a 10,000-free-text-message plan for the iPhone. I wavered for a moment. Did iWant an iPhone?

That‘s a difficult question to tackle, and may come as a surprise to the vast majority of you reading this. In fact, the question may make no sense at all to a great deal of you. Perhaps you don‘t understand where I‘m coming from. At the risk of alienating those of you who do, I‘m going to explain why I haven‘t been salivating over the iPhone 3G release date, didn‘t book the day off to stand in line, and politely declined offers to reserve the coveted device.

Although I hardly qualify as a neophobe, it would be a real stretch to classify me as an early adopter. It is true that, in general, by the time the hundredth monkey has learned how to wash the potato (whether that potato is Linux, cellphones, Twitter or QRCodes), I am already having fries and a salad. In many cases, I, in fact, turn out to be a never-adopter. Something different motivates my desire to snap up technology as it becomes available, and I consequently don‘t get excited about the same developments as everyone else. There are also a fair amount of old machines I keep around, in active use, and not out of nostalgia. These seeming contrasts have a common denominator in my eyes. What it boils down to, essentially, is ease of use.

Now I have even more of you scratching your heads, and possibly Steve Jobs tearing out his hair. (By which I mean, someone is tearing out his hair on his behalf, because he is busy ensuring everything around him is symmetrical.) Because isn‘t the iPhone supposed to be the ultimate user-friendly device?

That‘s just the problem.

Would it surprise you if I told you that I have never owned an Apple product? Oh, I‘m quite familiar with the benefits of MacBooks Pro, Air and their tabletop siblings. In fact, back when Macs were the unpopular symbol of being unable to operate a computer I stood up for them, pointing out that the Motorola processors churning away inside their superior architectures put PCs firmly in the pocket calculator category. More recently, the facet of Steve Jobs‘ design vision that most appeals to me is the emphasis on aesthetic integration; the Apple offerings all look as good as they perform well. They are an exercise in symmetry, harmony and refreshing minimalism. And they do everything the average person is looking for them to do. Who wouldn‘t want one?

Well, I don‘t own a single working computer with an intact case. Even my laptop (which is no longer exactly portable) has been disassembled, reassembled, and hovers in a state somewhere between the two. Although there are people quite adept at performing these feats with Apple products, I‘m not entirely sure why. My treatment of my machines derives not only from my desire to modify them as I see fit, but to experience them as they are, without the trappings of cases, metal, plastic, or even front panelling.

I want, most of all, to meet any machine on its own terms, without any barriers. Any attempt to make a machine more “user-friendly” or “intuitive” is a step away from that for me. I do not only have a Command Prompt window up at work, I am often running DEBUG, turning to the raw simplicity of machine code to cut through every intervening level, even on a thin client a whole country away from the server I am directly manipulating. I eschew TextPad for copy con, X Windows for vi, prefer the assembly language capabilities of my TI-83 to its graphing function, and do operating system installation with an FM radio pressed up against the computer so I can hear the data being transferred, the hard drive motors whining, the signals being sent.

So what am I going to do with a shiny plastic rectangle that doesn‘t even have a removable battery?

Happily, I‘m going to benefit from the changes it has brought to the plans available to me and my little Motor Q9h. The 6GB data plan that Rogers quickly announced to prevent an iPhone sales fiasco applies to all 3G devices, including my current one. If I can‘t get the 10,000 text messages offered to the iPhone users, I can at least shift my most-texted contacts into a plan that permits me to actually have unlimited use, as I behave is the case to start with. I can keep editing Excel and Word files, read PDFs and use MSN to my heart’s content. And I can continue to benefit from my pile of four fully-charged batteries that fit my phone.

The way I see it, iWin.

It’s time for me to stop neglecting the arts.

That might sound funny, coming from someone who possesses a climbable stack of oil paintings, more pencils than pairs of underwear, and uses a Moleskine as a wallet. But it’s true. I haven’t been doing my part to appreciate and promote the arts, and I’d like to change that.

To this end, I secured an interview with the very talented, very busy Aram Faghfouri and her glass of Cresta Blanca. A brilliant visual artist, digital photographer, and close personal friend, Aram was born in Tehran, moved to Canada via Greece at a young age, and currently lives just across the river from Ottawa in the province of Québec.

Anyone who’s seen your art can tell you’re a talented artist. Can you give an overview of the media in which you’ve worked?

I am a digital photographer. I prefer to capture whatever I see as I see it. I work in Adobe Photoshop. That is my baby; without it I have Photoshop withdrawal. In Photoshop, I am able to let loose with my imagination and give it what it needs to stand out above the rest. I usually take several angles of the same object, whether is it a person, building, or whatever, so once time comes to edit the photo, I have several different points of view to work on. I sit down and choose the best angle. I pop on some tunes that go with the vibe I am in at the time, and let the music and my imagination run wild.

It’s clear that you’ve chosen to concentrate on photography, at least at the moment. Why?

I don’t think you have to be brilliant at something, whether be it painting, photography, drawing, etc. to be called an artist. I think to be able to create something out of nothing, or to take something, say a wedding, and capture a different point of view—that is art. To make something your own, that is art. I concentrate on photography because it is the essence of life. You can write a thousand words to describe a moment. You can paint it, you can draw it; but when you take a picture of it, and you take it from an angle no one else would have thought to, that is what it is all about. To make someone else see what you saw then, to capture the moment, to embrace the feeling through a picture, that my friend, that is the power of photography.

How would you describe your artistic philosophy? What (or who) are your influences?

To take a picture of whatever the subject, and to take it as the moment is happening. That to me is art. I cannot stand the “posed” look. If I am there to take your picture, I am there to take that “moment” and hold on to it for life. You want to look back and recapture memories of the moment. You don’t want a hundred pictures of everyone smiling and posing for the camera. To take a picture of a building, you would be correct in assuming almost anyone would take the same angle since it is just a building, but there are so many different ways of capturing the true beauty in something, and I have found I am gifted in bringing out the truth in a picture. What are my influences? I thrive on being different. I don’t want to fall into the crowd and possibly get lost. I want to make sure that when you look at a photo, you would be able to tell which one was taken by Aram. Slowly, but surely, I am attaining that.

What inspires you?
A smile. To get that smile out of a client within a second of laying eyes on the finished product. That is what inspires me. Another thing would be to create something bigger and better then the last project.

What keeps you going; what motivates you to continue producing?

When I am down, stressed, whatever the case may be, my only salvation is to get lost in photography.

Your partner, Pat, is also an artist. That must make for an interesting relationship. How does that contribute to your inspiration?

Pat is beautiful. Inside and luckily for me, outside as well. [Laughs] He really does inspire me—always so fascinated with my work, encouraging me to pursue photography and my dreams. To be able to know I have that kind of support on my side, it only gives me more strength to want to dive right in.

You’ve done work for different people and organizations over the years. What were some of your favourite projects, and why?

Iceberg. A six–member Ambient Electronic Jazz band, I started working with them back in 2006. It was my first time out in public working live with a huge crowd. I was used to working in the studio, or on-my-own time projects; but to work with something so big, it really pushed me to the edge in a great way. I experimented. It was so beautiful to see what I captured every time throughout the three years I worked with Iceberg. It was great fun to go back and view my work to date, and even more exhilarating to go through the band’s reaction to each project. I learned a lot of valuable lessons that I will carry with me forever.

There’s this almost universal stereotype of the starving artist, or having to have a “day job” to supplement your art. How do you respond to that?

It is a very scary world out there if you choose to pursue your passion in art as a full-time career. I can tell you that is the number one reason why I am still working in a field that is not related to my passion. But nothing is attainable without years of hard work and effort. If you want it so bad, one way or another, day job or no day job, you will get what you are after.

The City of Ottawa has been characterized as kind of rocky ground for artists, what with the lack of cultural funding and support. How do you deal with this? Does it affect you? Is it different because you’re across the water in the Outaouais?

I am very lucky that the Québec Government treats all businesses with the utmost respect. Whether you are opening a hair salon or you want to be an artist, you have their support. As a photographer, I can say I have had a very warm welcome in the Outaouais area, and I have had the honour of them being able to pick out Aram’s work above the rest. I have to stick to my previous answer: if you want something that bad, with the right work, the sky’s the limit, help or no help.

Given the current municipal administration, is there a War on Art in this city?

It is a sea of sharks out there. I cannot say I keep tabs on the world of Art. I enjoy truth; there is nothing beyond that for me when it comes to Art. Go get what you want. If you have worked hard, it will be proven, war or no war. You cannot get mixed up in current affairs to stay on top, you are what you create. If it is done right, there is nothing that can stand in the way of that. It comes down to what the people want and there is no war that can change that.

What advice would you give someone trying to become a working artist in today’s environment?

Don’t get caught up in politics, create from your heart and soul. You must be able to recapture the same feeling and be able to smell the same air that you did when you were creating it. That is the only way you will succeed. Grab what you want, make it clear it is yours, and go as far as you need to go to be seen. Never give into what is considered “good” vs. “bad.” Art is not subject to how good you are, it is what you can create, so never let it hold you back from making something yours. Then you will be seen.

Where do we go if we want to see more of your work?

Aram Designs, FaceBook or MySpace

I strongly encourage you to peruse Aram’s work on her various websites and wherever else you can find it. If you require her professional services, Aram Designs is really the first place you should go. Enjoy!

I’ve tried to get this point across in a number of different ways to my dearest friends. Just plain invitation didn’t work. Explaining, coaxing, cajoling, pleading, bargaining, grovelling and pretty much everything short of bribery has turned up null. So I’m changing tacks.

The short of the matter is: if you are on Twitter, you are awesome. If you’re not, you have some explaining to do. I want answers.

I should exempt some folks from having to defend their failure to use this vital evolutionary tool: The illiterate, those with no mobile devices whatsoever, the entirely antisocial, people who are neither interesting nor interested. And that about covers it.

As for the rest of you, I want you to defend yourselves. What gives? How long did it take you to take up e-mail or get a touchtone phone? Are you still attached to your telegraph key? Your smoke-signal rug?

I suspect that some of you think that Twitter requires some kind of commitment, like Facebook, which it doesn’t. But I’m not sure. In fact, I am quite devoid of any idea why someone would not use Twitter, and would like someone to let me in on the secret.
I’m waiting…

I suppose it will be judged by some as “too little, too late,” but my high-school buddy Joe Tang just pled guilty to ten counts of fraud yesterday in a San Francisco courtroom. Story is here and here.

As I’ve said before, I haven’t seen or heard from the guy in a good decade or so. It’s a shame; he’s a fun guy — from what I read he didn’t lose any of his legendary sense of humour, confidence or disarming charm in the courtroom either.

The time for speculation is past. In the eyes of the law, and the American people, and according to his handwritten statement himself, he’s guilty. We’re all spared an embarrassing and wasteful judicial circus, and the attendant personal humiliation of someone willing to admit wrongdoing.

Of course, admission doesn’t erase a criminal act. It does, however, inspire the quality of mercy. And I hope the justice system is similarly inspired. Joe, current events besides, was a good friend of mine once. He still is, in my mind. And by all accounts a damn good violinist.

Do you have a superhero role model?
Lots of kids pick superheroes as role models. Whether the choice is made consciously or not, it makes far more sense, if you work out the pros and the cons, to aspire to be Superman or Wonder Woman or Batman than to wish you were a police officer, copyright lawyer or exactly like your parents. But, just as not everyone can be an astronaut, there are most probably important differences between your role model’s backstory and your own that make it impossible to achieve these goals. For example, likely you are not the sole survivor of a distant planetary explosion, or the Amazon princess daughter of a Goddess. And, although your parents may have died before you finished puberty (a basic requirement for becoming a superhero), it’s highly improbable that you witnessed their violent murder in an alleyway.
Now, when I was a kid, we had the Greatest American Hero, which was kind of a shaft as far as superhero role models went. Grey pyjamas and ineptitude are not as inspiring now as they seemed then. Maybe this is why the world is a glut of network administrators, call centre employees and bloggers today.
By the time I was purchasing my own comic books, DC Vertigo was in its prime. If only the world could be saved with monologues, Molotovs, magic and methamphetamines! All that produced was a lot of high-school students wearing crushed velvet skirts and fishnet everything else. Oh, and trenchcoats.
Having seen Iron Man reminded me that there’s one superhero role model we all seem to have forgot: Tony Edward Stark.
Tony Stark lost his parents at an early age (and for those young people reading this, killing your parents doesn’t seem to have the same effect, so don’t try), but instead of reacting by wearing a lot of spandex and adopting sleep deprivation as a life philosophy, he did what the rest of us would do: turned to liquor and loose women. Despite this, he was able to hold down a day job. Like Bruce Wayne, he was a capable scientific mind with a home lab. Unlike Bruce Wayne, he did not adopt stray cats that lost their parents in circus tragedies. He gambles, drives his own car sometimes and shows up late to important events.
In essence, with an absolute minimum of lying to oneself, it’s very easy to identify with him.
Normally, this sort of person would not get to be a superhero without a severe accident involving nuclear radiation (Incredible Hulk, Fantastic Four, Spiderman, etc.), but Tony Stark achieves superherohood by virtue of his own hard work, to get out of a personally dangerous situation, and only uses his powers altruistically as an afterthought.
Maybe I’ve finally found a viable superhero role model. Of course, my parents are still alive, so I’ll never actually be a superhero. But there’s a bottle of Jack Daniels in the kitchen, and I think I have just about enough parts in the spare room to make a flying robot suit, if I’m not overcome by fumes in the process.

Happy Earth Day!

Like the majority of people who read this blog, I live on Earth and call it my home, although I have yet to receive a citizenship application. Probably what makes Earth such an a popular choice as a permanent home, or a vacation destination, is its environment. Milennia of political instability, cultural confusion and oppressive taxation are all balanced out by the sheer abundance of fresh water, tasty vegetables, clean, fragrant air, and breathtaking vistas, with your choice of a wide range of climates.

Lest you believe otherwise, due in part, possibly, to my tongue-in-cheek post regarding the Sea Shepherds and their quest to save harp seals from savage cruelty by getting arrested, I love the environment. We each have a personal responsibility to take care of it, to the same degree that we use it, like a library, church, the Internet or any other socialist democratic organization. I consider this a fact, rather than a belief, and so am rarely found wearing a uniform, zipping around in a carbon-neutral corn-based Zodiac, harpooning whalers. But I will pick the environmentally-conscious alternative when it’s practical, and vigorously encourage others to do the same. I don’t own or drive a car; it’s not purely an environmentally-motivated choice, but I’m conscious and glad of the positive effect on the world around me.

The educational vogue, as I was growing up, was emphasis on environmental responsibility. We didn’t have science class for most of elementary school; we had Environmental Studies. Greenpeace were heroes; whalers were universally vilified. We watched a then-twelve-year-old Ben Affleck lie naked next to his hypothermic captain in Voyage of the Mimi. Stories of sperm-whale-penis barstools and spades thrust through intestines for that precious byproduct, ambergris, were so vivid they have stayed with me for twenty or more years.

And looming over it all, cheerfully warning us of our demise, like the Yoda of environmental Jedi, was Dr. David Suzuki.

Dr. Suzuki was sort of a hero of mine for a while before the age of ten. I still agree with his message: that an environmentally-sustainable culture is attainable, but we’re not doing enough to make it happen, and that the effort needs to be as much, if not more, personal than political. Some have accused him of being more show than substance, but popularizing the ideas is really the most important step of the whole process. That’s why Silent Spring was an important book. That’s why Greenpeace and the Sea Shepherds are important organizations. Bringing the reality into the public eye is enough to create positive change (assuming we’re not suicidal as a species).

So when Dr. Suzuki said that we were like frogs being boiled slowly, I took it to heart; but I didn’t really believe that climate change was a one-lifetime reality. Those were the years when 28 degrees Celsius was the hottest it got in Ottawa, for the last three days of August each year. As I write, it’s mid-April, the snow is barely melted, and the temperature is already 25. We’ve gone from four seasons to two: The Day After Tomorrow and Mad Max. I regularly refer to US Department of the Army Field Manuals to keep myself healthy in weather conditions that routinely exceed human body temperature throughout the summer. So I guess, Dr. Suzuki, that I owe you a Coke.

I always liked the idea that I didn’t have to become a vegan nudist to save my planet. As supportive as I am of vegan nudists’ lifestyle choice (no pictures, please), I could never embrace it due to a catatonic fear of bees and a strong love of eating meat. The idea of four-thousand-year-inbred cow herds roaming the American continent also mildly frightens me. But Dr. Suzuki, an avid fisherman, can say that we’re killing our planet, and at the same time be seen on television eating raw sea urchins with his daughter. That’s the kind of mentality that resonates with my West Coast roots.

A couple of years back, I saw Dr. Suzuki on a billboard; he was holding something that looked like a white curly fry. Actually, it was one of these new Compact Fluorescent Lightbulbs. Delighted as I was that Tesla could finally claim victory over Edison, and at a fraction of the electrical power, something troubled me. I don’t have to replace the bulb for a good eight or ten years, fine. It provides whiter light at a fraction of the carbon cost, fine. But what this scientist, environmentalist and fellow fisherman is holding in his hand, at the end of the day, is a tube of mercury vapour.

Now, I’ve read the Ontario Provincial Government guidelines on eating freshwater fish, and mercury’s much more of a problem in fish you yourself catch than it is in the commercial fish you buy at the store. For eight or ten years, this thing is going to be sitting in my ceiling (and I haven’t had one burn out yet!), and then… am I taking them to the Waste Disposal Depot? Am I throwing them into the garbage to leach toxic metals into the ecosystem? Or am I stockpiling them for posterity?

Luckily, I’m not the only one who thinks of such things. Local blogger ecochick brings good news: the Home Depot is leading the charge in providing safe recycling for these absolutely wonderful, but potentially lethal, lightbulbs. I’m proud that they’re looking out for the biggest home of all.

I’m sure someone, somewhere, who styles themselves a capitalist or some such archaic term, frowns upon all these little things we are doing to heal the wounds opened by our coal-happy past two centuries. They’re not good for the oil economy, you see. But I see hope for industry, economy and environment alike, as we cure each of our self-inflicted environmental ills. I believe Piet Hein, Danish scientist, philosopher and poet, said it best in his poem, The Only Solution:

We shall have to evolve

problem-solvers galore -

since each problem they solve

creates ten problems more.

I’ve only been out of high school for a decade. Now, assuming I spent the regular length of time in high school (I believe it’s called a sentence), I’m not a very old man. My grey hairs are still well-hidden, and I chuckle with delight when I find one. I have been thus far spared the thin lines that are destined to assail the lips and face of seasoned tobacco smokers like myself. The crystal in my hand isn’t due to flash red for another two years.

Yet somehow, despite my legitimate claim to the tail end of youth, I find myself thinking old curmudgeon thoughts. It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly when I became the sort of hat-wearing, crumpled old man who thinks about these things in this way.

Two observations from today’s outings will serve to illustrate my point:

Observation number one: As I sat down on the bus, on my way to lunch with a work colleague, I was about to pull out my still-newish Moleskine and jot some potential blog notes, or a poem, or a furniture design idea. Instead, despite the Japanese pop music I keep blaring in my left ear, I became a hapless eavesdropper to the conversation of the two girls seated behind me. Although I’m unable to quote verbatim, I shall attempt to convey the flavour of their conversation.

Blonde Girl: “I think he thinks I just do pills with Steve all the time.”

Other Girl: “You don’t do pills that often. Like, once in a while.”

Blonde Girl: “Yeah, like I think that it’s ’cause I was over at Steve’s, and he did two pills, and Trevor did two pills, and I had one pill, but then Steve’s mother came in and I was like trying to hide it but I did not comprehend what was going on. I got so hot. Then I gave the other pill to Steve, and he had it, and he was like totally ripped.”

Other Girl: “Yeah, I think he’s more bothered by how much time you spend hanging out with Steve.”

Holy Ghost of Charlton Heston, this girl does more pills than my grandmother! I think I know a pharmaceutical technician who comes into contact with less medication than she does. Unnamed gentleman, you are right. This girl does just do pills all the time. Nice legs aren’t everything; drop her like Tijuana contraband.

Now, in my day, and maybe this is just me being old, you couldn’t find four people her age who were all doing pills. We didn’t even say “doing pills.” Maybe you could find two who were crushing and smoking Ritalin or something. Three if you knew a lot of people. But four? No way. Pot yes, pills no.

Observation number two: Later, dressed more appropriately for the weather, my wife (equivalent-to) and I went to a local city playground to let our three children run wild. When we arrived, there were no less than fifteen adolescent girls playing on the play structure. For clarity’s sake, I don’t mean prepubescent; I mean these girls were practically out of school and capable of choosing their own wardrobes. And what they chose was only marginally modest.

So I’m sitting on a park bench, smoking my pipe, trying to watch my children play, and instead I find my field of vision filled with what I can only hope were eighteen-year-old girls engaged in feats of acrobatics. And instead of being a young father Twittering on his smartphone in the park, I am suddenly, unwittingly, Aqualung.

They left as a group, when their leader said it was time to leave. I can only assume she was their leader because she was taller and carrying a clipboard.

The immediate thought that entered my head was, what are teenage girls doing on a children’s playstructure at three o’clock in the afternoon? If it was a school exercise, then that was a very young teacher. They weren’t wearing uniforms, thankfully, so it wasn’t a team of some kind. Searching my memory, I failed to find a single instance of this occurring when I was their age, although admittedly I am not female and did not often hang around city parks.

Only after they left did I venture to pull out my Moleskine and write a note; about how uncomfortable the bench was, and how I should design a new one.

Before someone says it, let me tackle the obvious answer: this isn’t a symptom of “becoming one’s parents.” Historically, I tend to agree with my parents. I think, however, that I might be slightly more severe than they on the subject of today’s youth.

Maybe I’ll just chalk it up to my inherent conservatism and stubborn world-view, and ignore that nagging itch in my left hand. Seems like the mature thing to do.

Characteristically romantic Canada has taken this seal hunt business and plunged it back into the eighteenth century with a swashbuckling episode of piracy on the high seas.

You may be accustomed, as I am, to the same boring news items about the annual seal hunt that occurs somewhere on Canada’s east coast. Seals get clubbed and skinned alive and whatnot by seal fishermen wearing black wool caps. Environmentalists, drifting offshore in colourfully-named boats, take videos of this. The videos are sent to Sir Paul McCartney, who writes angry letters to the Canadian federal government. The Canadian federal government issues a statement saying that it received the letter, and not much else. The cycle repeats.

Whatever your opinion of the seal hunt, there is a fine Canadian tradition of steering the media focus away from the seals, hunters and camera-happy environmentalists. This year, we’ve taken a cue from the success of the Internet and jazzed up the whole affair by the addition of: pirates.

The gist of the story so far seems to be that the Dutch-registered vessel Farley Mowat is alleged to have sailed too close to the seal hunt without a permit (yes, the Canadian government charges admission), prompting the ever-vigilant RCMP to board them, brandishing submachine guns and hauling them off to jail to stand trial. The captain of the vessel claims this was an act of piracy, as they were in international waters (which will be confirmed by the GPS equipment seized by the government), and that the crew and observers (environmentalists with video cameras) were stripped of their possessions and thrown out onto the street. Paul Watson, leader of the Sea Shepherds (who bears a striking resemblance to a walrus, especially with those tusks) backs up his captain, although he wasn’t aboard, or nearby. Farley Mowat, Canadian naturalist author and native of Saskatchewan, for whom the boat was named, was available for comment, and supports the seal hunt protesters so far as to put up their bail money.

It is perhaps notable that, as related in his book Owls in the Family, as a young boy Mr. Mowat would snare prairie dogs by means of a hand-operated noose placed around the exit holes of their underground burrows, which serve much the same function as seals’ breathing holes in the subarctic ice. I guess that was then, and this is now.

Let’s have a look at the flag that Paul Watson’s group, the Sea Shepherds, flies on their vessels.

Nope, no pirates here.

So… a Dutch vessel flying that flag sailing at least very close to Canadian waters, possibly inside them, is boarded, by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Although they almost certainly are not, we can imagine them wearing their trademark bright red coats, as the last seriously-armed agents of the Crown who do so, descending from ropes onto the deck of the Farley Mowat, submachine guns tucked under their arms.

No. No, that’s not right at all. Give them sabres and cutlasses. That’s better.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, arrayed in the red coats of the British Crown, brandishing sabres and cutlasses, alighted on the deck of the Dutch motor vessel Farley Mowat. Demanding to see their letters of marque authorizing them to sail these waters, they were met by an unarmed crew some of whom barricaded themselves below deck. A struggle ensued, and possibly a swordfight.

Am I the only one who finds it terribly amusing that a foreign vessel in Canadian waters, or at least close enough to videotape people and seals on the coast, is boarded by authorized agents of the Crown and calls it an act of piracy?

Let’s examine the definition of piracy, from The Sailor’s Word-Book (Adm. William Henry Smyth, 1867): “Depredation without authority, or transgression of authority given, by despoiling beyond its warrant. … By common law, piracy consists in committing those acts of robbery and depredation upon the high seas, which, if committed on land, would have amounted to felony, and the pirate is deemed hostis humani generis.” Well then, really the only answer to the question lies in where the vessel was when it was boarded. Thankfully, those records are safely in the hands of the… boarders. Oh, dear.

To further confound matters, the Canadian government has a history of keeping the Rule Britannia alive by boarding foreign vessels in questionable circumstances. In 1995 we seized a Spanish fishing vessel harvesting Turbot in an area where we like to fish. The Spanish government, predictably, accused the Canadian government of piracy, despite an established reputation for ignoring international law in their fishing practices which more closely fits the definition given above. The issue at that time was, once again, where the vessel was: whether or not it was inside or outside the 200-mile fishing territory limit.

Canada is admittedly not very good at defining its borders, externally or internally. We’ve been arguing with the Russians for ages about whether we or they have claim to the North Pole, somewhere beneath the Arctic Ocean. And on all our wall maps, in all our atlases in high school, the all-too-squiggly border between Labrador and Quebec, which is on land, was footnoted as “under dispute.”

Dear God, and we’re boarding civilian vessels, armed with submachine guns?

I’m mildly curious to see how this plays out. Oh, I already know what happens to the seals. I just want to know whether or not Farley Mowat will be forever remembered as a pirate financier, and of course what happens to the walrus man.

Recommended listening: The Last Saskatchewan Pirate and The Mountie Song by The Arrogant Worms.