Linguistic Deficiencies

I have heard or read several times during my life that the aboriginal peoples who inhabit Arctic regions use many different names to describe snow. When your survival depends on it, it must be very important to understand and describe to others all the different kinds of snow, fresh wet to powder dry, soft to icy hard. I wonder what it means that our modern urban culture has so many synonyms and slang terms to describe sexual relations and sex organs. I understand the interest in the topic, but why so many names. We also have a lot of ways to describe people for whom we have a low opinion: jerk, nitwit, moron, dope, nimcumpoop, and so on. Why do we seem to need so many names for stupid people or for what we cover up with underwear?

I think our culture needs special names for at least two forms of snow. I never know how to describe these forms, and they come up in conversation often enough that it would be convenient to have names for them.

The first is a form that inhabitants of northern climates who drive cars are familiar with. It is that clump of hardened sticky wet dirty icy snow that clings to the wheel wells or mud guards on our cars and trucks. People who have never lived in snowy areas may not know what I am talking about, so I have included a photo below. In the main, you can live your life ignoring this stuff, it eventually falls off, but if it doesn’t fall off on the way home, you have to clean or kick it off your car if you don’t want it melting in your garage overnight. That wet clump of melting snow, ice, road dirt, oil, salt, sand, is an awful thing to step in. As it melts it can get into all kinds of thing you were trying to keep dry. We need a name for that clump. The best that I have heard so far is “crut”, a variation of “crud” I think. The word has a lot going for it, it’s short, easy to spell and the sound of the word expresses both the nature of the substance and our feelings about it quite well. But maybe others have better candidates.

There is a second form of snow that is probably universally despised even more than the “crut” in our cars’ wheel wells. I am referring to the mound of packed road snow that snowplows leave across our driveways after they clean a street. Talking about what snowplows leave across our driveways is a favourite topic of conversation here in Canada after every snow storm. But we have no name for that mound, and it’s such a linguistic nuisance to keep calling it that “mound that the snowplow left”. Why don’t we have a name for this? I have included a picture of half a mound at the end of my driveway. I ran out of arm strength about halfway through shoveling yesterday.

Frankly, I am amazed that we here in Canadian cities put up with this. It’s bad enough having to clear the entire length of the driveway, but at least that’s freshly fallen clean snow, often just fluffy powder, but the “stuff that the snowplow leaves behind” is always dense, heavy, and usually deeper than what actually fell out of the sky. I find it incredible that we don’t insist that the road service crews clean away our driveway openings after plowing a street. Before amalgamation with Toronto, the City of North York provided exactly that service. A smaller plow, equipped with a swinging blade, followed the larger road plows around all day, and the operator dropped the blade long enough to clean off driveway entrances. Why would we do it any other way?

Fantasy Cars

Having participated in grassroots motor sports for most of the last 20 years, I count a fair number of car nuts among my friends. It’s not surprising then that conversations and e-mail exchanges occasionally turn to cars and what exotic cars we’d permit ourselves if we won a lottery. Desires run the gamut, of course, but other people can write their own blog. I’ll just tell you what I would spend my money on if my ticket came in a winner.
First, I’d sell my ’08 Vibe. There’s nothing wrong with this car, nothing at all, but I have no feelings for it. The first thing I would do is replace it with a cheap “grocery-getter”, as a friend puts it. I’d put a limit of about $4000-$5000 on this purchase, any 4 to 5 year old small car would do, a Toyota Yaris, say, or Hyundai Accent maybe, something narrow and short that would not force me to clean out the garage to make room for it in winter. This is the kind of vehicle you need to get groceries, go to the dentist, stop by Dairy Queen, the usual daily routine. The only maintenance I would do on this car is to do oil changes and maybe service the brakes. The moment it needed anything else, I would trade it in immediately on the next grocery-getter.
This is extravagant, of course, maybe even obscenely so, but since I would have lottery winnings collecting some meagre interest in the bank, it’s an extravagance that I would permit myself. Besides, by making relatively good used vehicles frequently available to the second-hand market, it would be my small way of helping out those who need relatively reliable cars but who don’t have much money, e.g., students, people who have lost their jobs, penny-pinching cheapskates. I think of this as my small contribution to the redistribution of wealth, my own little Bill Gates moment.
But what I would also do with my winnings, automotive-wise anyway, is to become Hertz’ dream customer. You see, although I enjoy driving and enjoy testing different cars, I detest owning cars. I don’t enjoy having to worry about upkeep. I hate doing my own maintenance. Somehow, lying down on a cold garage floor trying to undo some damn bolt that’s seized into place and for which I don’t have the correct tool lost its appeal as I got older. If I didn’t have to, I would never do that again, and if I won a lottery, I could pretty much guarantee that I wouldn’t. I am also reluctant to have my cars maintained by others. It's not easy finding reliable technicians, and anyway they need appointments and that means planning for bus rides, pick-ups, etc., all things about car ownership I would not put up with it if I didn't have to.
For a guy like me, renting is ideal. I could drive a wide variety of cars and never worry about changing the timing-belt or spark plugs, or even washing the damn things for that matter. I'd never buy another windshield wiper or air filter. My local Canadian Tire store has been remodelled and now I can't find air filters on the shelf anymore, you have to wait at the parts counter and order one, so buying an air filter has been transformed from a 2-minute walk-by shopping experience, like picking up butter say, into a 15-minute wait in a place I don't want to be experience, one more aggravation to do with car ownership. As a result, I don't buy air filters there anymore.
Nowadays, rental companies have all sorts of interesting vehicles to rent. On a recent trip to Nova Scotia, we rented a Volvo S40 T5. There is no way I would ever buy a car that fancy, worrying about its upkeep would keep me up at night, but renting one for a week is a treat.
I would walk into Hertz outlets for miles around, and all the counter staff would know me by name. “Hi Rob”, they’d say, “Wanna try out a Lexus this week?” “Sure Jim”, I’d reply, “sounds like fun!” And now and then, Dave (I made this name up), the Regional Manager, would call me and offer a free upgrade to a "Premium" model for no extra charge, just because I was such a good customer. "Thanks, Dave", I'd say, "Can I pick it up Tuesday?". "No worries, Rob", he'd answer, "I'll have it delivered."
The reason I would choose Hertz, by the way, is because after 30 years of occasionally renting car during vacations or weekends away, they are the only rental company that have always had a car waiting for me when they said they would. I have tried nearly all the other car renters, and despite reserving cars well ahead of the appointed time, they have all, at least once, greeted with, "Sorry, we don't have any cars for you." I find it extraordinary that any of them are still in business, frankly, so screw them.
If I won a lottery, my fantasy would be to never own a car again, other than the cheap replaceable grocery-getter. Other lottery winners can buy themselves the BMWs or Lotuses of their dreams, bully for them, but my fantasy is to rent.

Two wheels good, four wheels better

For some reason, North America does not seem to hold two-wheeled transportation in high regard, at least that’s how it seems to me. I think this applies to both human-powered and mechanized versions. This is quite at odds with the rest of the world, where bicycles, scooters, and motorcycles are used daily by millions of people for transportation. But in the main, in North America, they are considered playthings.
 
The other day I was stopped at a traffic light next to a guy on a motorcycle. He was dressed in office attire, his motorcycle had two hard-shelled saddlebags, a windscreen that extended up far enough to disrupt the worst of the wind, he sat nearly straight up on the frame, and the engine was very quiet. It idled quietly and pulled away quietly too. I couldn’t see any decals so I don’t know the engine size, but visually it appeared to be smaller than the usual motorbike I see around.
 
He looked like a reasonable guy with a quiet and comfortable commuter motorbike, and it occurred to me it was probably the first one I had seen in years. What I usually see on the roads around here are either great big loud Easy Rider wannabies with leather fringes and metal studs or young bucks hunched over testicle-crushing sport bikes with rear tires twice the size of the front ones. In other words, what I mostly see on the streets are toys.
 
Why does our culture marginalize and infantilize motorcycles and bicycles? It makes no sense. They are perfectly reasonable methods of transportation, especially so when compared with automobiles that usually have only one occupant. This applies to small scooters too. They are quite rare here in Ottawa, and what little advertisement I see for them seems aimed at their fashion cuteness or trendy colours that match your sunglass frames. So why can’t a 100 cc Vespa be a reasonable and adult mode of commuter vehicle.
 
I live in an Ottawa suburb and one of the crazy things I see out here are roadside bicycle lanes that are also used by city buses when they stop for passengers. The land that is allotted to curbs is immense, huge tracts of land that set off the nearest traffic lane from neighbourhood homes, streets so wide that it is dangerous for most humans to cross them at intersections, because it is difficult for many people to get across during the duration of one green-light cycle. So, predictably, there are hardly any pedestrians. All that land, but bicycles have to share the road with buses, while at the same time we have pedestrian sidewalks with almost no humans on them.
 
Lately, three-wheeled motorcycles are becoming popular. When I first saw one I thought they were a clever idea. With three wheels and a small motor, you would have a reasonable second vehicle for a household that could be used to fetch groceries, or go to the dentist or something. You could easily build a small useful cargo area on one. Instead, they are designed and marketed as sport “trikes” and cost well over $20,000. In other words, they are also toys.
 
I have nothing against toys. Everyone should own and enjoy toys, they make life fun. But somebody, somewhere, probably big name consultants, decided that people in North America don't want inexpensive lightweight personal transportation. They are probably the same consultants who nearly eliminated the hatchback from automotive showrooms, because, well, they decided we didn't want any. So for about a decade, the VW Golf was almost the only hatchback you could buy in Canada and the US, while the rest of the world was drowning in them. Then, about 10 years ago, they started selling hatchbacks again, and no surprise to me, people are buying a lot of them. I have never read any articles blaming those consultants for their previous folly.

So listen, you with the MBA, working in marketing for motorcycle, scooter, and bicycle manufacturers, stop listening to those idiot consultants your boss hired. They know nothing, their only interest is in stroking your CEO's ego to get more consulting contracts. They don't know a damn thing about what the average joe wants. They don't even know any average joes. Sell us some cheap useful bikes please.

Flowchart of Life

Burn Baby Burn

None of the big box hardware stores near me carry Hibachi barbecues anymore. It's the end of an era. Hibachis were inconvenient but inexpensive. Being made of heavy cast iron, they would last 3-4 years even though I neglected them completely. I would leave them outside all year long and only buy new grills when the old ones rusted. I never trusted putting the things on a pedestal so would have to crouch down to use them, and their cooking surface area was not very large. But the price was right, about $10 CDN or so for years, but the last one I bought in 2007 cost me $13 CDN. It’s still in the back yard, probably serviceable but it’s impossible to find grills that fit now.

I have tried buying the slightly more expensive round waist-high thin-metal charcoal barbecues, but I have never had one that lasted the summer. It takes one rainfall to start them rusting, and they go downhill quickly once that happens. I know, I know, if I protected them from the rain and cleaned them out regularly, they would last longer. But I will not do that. I don’t buy cheap $20 pieces of third-rate technology so I can spend my time maintaining them. To my mind, that would miss the entire point.

After cooking a meal, it takes a while for the charcoal to finish burning, and the barbecue is too hot to touch till the next day. By then, I am not thinking about the barbecue, I’m onto other things. If it starts to rain, I will not go outside and get wet just to save a $20 piece of cheap crap. I could buy a protective cover, but they can’t be used until the barbecue has cooled down, and by then I will have almost certainly forgotten about putting the protection on, and that plasticized cloth cover would end up being just another wasted purchase. I know I am not alone in this, because all my life I have been seeing rusted barbecues in people’s back yards and torn dilapidated protective covers cluttering up their tool sheds.

Now and then I look at the expensive propane and gas fired barbecues that are lined up for viewing at my local big box hardware store. I have noticed that their prices have been steadily increasing over the years. They now look like expensive sculpted appliances, which is what they are, of course. All that effort and money is spent on something that sits outside and is only used for 3-4 months of the year. I have tasted meat from those things, and it tastes as if it had been cooked indoors in the kitchen broiler. That’s no surprise, since that’s what they really are. With them, you don’t get that charcoal flavour, so why not just cook indoors and save yourself $500 and the expense of getting a gas hookup.

In television ads I see that you can buy entire sets of outdoor furniture to go along with the gas outdoor ranges. You can buy patio refrigerators and even outdoor sinks with hot and cold running water. Unless you live on a 40-acre estate so that your patio is 200 metres from the house, the majority of these outdoor “living areas” will be set up within 10-20 metres of perfectly good kitchens, dining rooms, and living rooms. And while the home owners and their guests are outside enjoying the redundant al fresco rooms and duplicate appliances, their indoor rooms are cooling in air conditioned comfort, empty.

Why recreate outside what you already have inside only to lose the charcoal taste in the process, which was the reason for the outdoor barbecue in the first place?

Try to open this

They used to package music CDs in a hard plastic sheath that I could never open without using a heavy-duty cutting tool. I would sometimes stubbornly try to pry my fingernails into the crevice between the two layers of plastic and invariably hurt myself. I might get a small flap opened, hoping to rip the entire package open using the exposed lip, but it never worked.

CDs must not be worth much to anyone anymore because they no longer use that wrapping method. I still buy CDs though, and they now come in a lightweight cellophane-like material that can be opened by first prying with a pencil or pen, things that can be quickly found almost anywhere. I no longer have to fetch my metal shears from the garage. But they continue to wrap flash memory cards in that hard plastic, so I guess those items are considered more important than CDs now. At first, the cards were expensive, but not so much anymore. Memory cards have a smaller footprint than music CDs, and I guess it would be easy for a thief to pocket one in a store. I can understand putting them in a package of larger dimensions, but isn’t a cardboard box good enough? That’s how they package ink cartridges for printers and they aren’t cheap. I have bought my last few memory cards via the internet, however, and I really don’t see any reason to worry about shoplifting in a mail-order purchase.

I recently bought some inexpensive battery-powered hand fans, though, and they came in the hard plastic too. The things are bigger than music CDs and cost $10, so why the fuss?

That hard plastic used to drive me nuts. It teases the purchaser, because it appears that it was meant to be removed easily, but that’s not the case. There’s certainly no sticker on the packaging that tells you to have a cutting torch handy.

It turns out that the material designed to be difficult to open, on purpose. I heard an interview on CBC radio with someone from a packaging company that explained how the package is formed. The sheets of plastic are sonically welded together, that’s why the seal is so tough and why I can’t pry the packaging apart with my bare hands. The spokesman said that the material is designed to be cut apart with a medium-duty cutting tool.

Now he tells me.

I would like to meet the inventor of the process. I’d sit with him, offer him lots of very salty peanuts and get him drinking lots of beer, an entire case of 24 maybe. Any brand he likes. Then I’d put him on a small 10-foot square deserted island surrounded by video camcorders. I would put an outhouse on the island and I would wrap the outhouse in a sonically welded hard plastic package. Then I would film him trying to get into the outhouse, and I would watch the video over and over again, and laugh and laugh.

The Payoff

It was inevitable and so it finally happened. I went into a store this morning and got my first seniors’ discount. The discount chain, Zellers’ gives 10% off to people 55 years of age and older on the first Monday of every month (I am 56 so am in fact a year late cashing in on this). I bought sunglasses, some chocolate, and replenished my underwear inventory, something that was much needed. To double-check, I asked the cashier, a 20-something woman, about the seniors’ discount and she said they call it the “55 advantage now” and leave out the “senior” part. Nice try, I thought, but I still know what it really means. Then I asked if she wanted to see my driver’s license, and she casually said no, which she almost certainly did not intend as an insult.

Sometime last week, I did a web search for seniors’ discounts and I was surprised how many clothing, hardware, and drug store chains offer them. It’s a little confusing because their discount days are all on different days of the week and at different times of the month. But sure enough, there are web sites that track all that for you, making it easier to plan purchases. Ten percent is not life-changing, but the money is better in my pocket than theirs.

On the way out of the store, I discreetly took a look round and saw lots of grey and white hair, but maybe that’s unfair, maybe that’s who shops at 11:00 a.m. on Mondays. I need reading glasses now, don’t play touch football anymore, and eat less fried food than I used to, but the payoff is that I can now get a deal on white cotton Stanfields.