Fifty Shades of Black (16 page)

 

 

Errors and That Typo Thing

I was a good typist; at my high school typing was regarded as a secondary female sex characteristic, like breasts.

—Margaret Atwood

I
'm not surprised that Margaret Atwood was a good typist. She's great at everything she does. Me? I'm a lousy typist (my breasts are no hell either) but I don't fret about it because when it comes to typing, Fate has given all of us, ept and otherwise, a great levelling device.

The typo.

Anybody, saint or sinner, genius or journeyman, can make a typographical error. It's simply a mistake made in the typing of a document or other printed material. Now, thanks to that infernal computer Nazi called spell-check, typos are even easier to make.

Yew sea wad eye mien, daunt ewe?

Typos are usually meaningless but occasionally hilarious. Not long ago the
Toronto Sun
ran a short item apologizing for an error. “Incorrect information appeared in a column,” the piece began. Unfortunately it ran under a boldface headline that read “CORRERCTION.”

A college catalogue description for a course in Shakespeare: “Intensive analysis of Hamlet, Macbeth and Anatomy and Cleopatra.”

A luncheon menu: “Today's special: Dreaded Veal Cutlet.”

And the
New York Post
is a two-time loser. On Monday it ran a story that said: “Sergeant Alfred Blaine is a twenty-year defective on the New York police force.”

The next day it ran a correction: “Sergeant Alfred Blaine is a ­twenty-year detective on the New York Police Farce.”

My favourite typo occurred nearly 150 years ago. It was made by a German chemist studying the iron content of vegetables. In transcribing data from his notebook, the chemist ascribed thirty-five milligrams of iron to each one hundred gram serving of spinach.

Big mistake. He should have put a decimal point between the three and the five, i.e., 3.5 milligrams per one hundred grams.

It was only a dot—the smallest typographical mark you can make—but it transformed a so-so green into a miracle muscle-builder and eventually gave us Popeye the Sailor Man:

 

I'm strong to the finish

'Cuz I eats me spinach

I'm Popeye the Sailor Man.

 

The popularity of the Popeye comic strip increased American consumption of spinach by over 30 percent.

So. If we had Truth in Advertising?

 

Me muskels is hard

'Cuz I eats me chard.

 

Nah. Just doesn't sing.

 

 

The Not-So-Grand Ole Opry

I don't like country music, but I don't mean to denigrate those who do. And for the people who like country music, “denigrate” means “put down.”

—Bob Newhart

I
'm not quite as dismissive as Mr. Newhart is on the subject of country music. I have more of a love-loathe relationship with the genre. I love the simple honesty of a Hank Williams
père
tune, the stately grace of a Carter Family ballad and the intricacies of anything finger-picked by Doc Watson. I loathe the hokey, flag-waving, rhinestone cowboy maudlin crap into which so much country music has descended of late.

Maybe it's the artists. Perhaps it's the audiences. What has ­seventy-two legs and twenty-three teeth?

The front row of a Willie Nelson concert.

It's easy to make fun of country music because so much of it is excruciatingly bad but that doesn't mean it can't be taken seriously. Recently, a scientific paper appeared in the pages of the
Review of General Psychology
, the very title of which must have tweaked a few scholarly eyebrows. The paper was called “Cheatin' Hearts and Loaded Guns.” It wasn't a smackdown of country music; it was a sober investigation of what those hurtin' songs really mean. According to Robert Kurzban, the paper's author, “Country music feeds our desire to learn about things that carry high fitness consequences in the world.”

That's convoluted psychobabble that really means country songs are morality tales. They tell the listener what happens when you go off the straight and narrow. All those mournful yodellings about trucks and gals and bars and jails aren't really about trucks and gals and bars and jails, they're actually musical instruction booklets full of advice about human survival and sexual reproduction.

Sexual reproduction? You bet.

How about Loretta Lynn's “Don't Come Home a-Drinkin' (With Lovin' on Your Mind)”?

Survival? I give you “I Been Roped and Throwed by Jesus in the Holy Ghost Corral.” Not to mention “Drop Kick Me Jesus, through the Goalposts of Life.”

On a more secular plane, country songs address the eternal verities like Heartbreak: “I Got Tears in My Ears from Lying on My Bed Crying on My Pillow over You.”

Or the even more magnificent Garth Brooks lyric from a ditty called “Papa Loved Mama”: “Papa loved mama, mama loved men; mama's in the graveyard, papa's in the pen.”

Alcohol looms large in country music. Witness the songs “80 Proof Bottle of Tear Stopper” and also “I Want a Beer Cold as My Ex-Wife's Heart.”

Failed relationships are prominent too, as in George Strait's “All My Exes Live in Texas.”

Occasionally a country song comes along that manages to turn a double play. Here's one that addresses gambling and heartbreak: “I Gave My Heart a Diamond and She Clubbed Me with a Spade.”

Personally, I prefer the simpler titles such as “Bubba Shot the Jukebox” and also “Velcro Arms, Teflon Heart”—but I've always been an incurable romantic.

It's a macho world, is country music, but some of its biggest stars are women and female sensibilities are beginning to make inroads. A singer by the name of Miranda Lambert croons a vengeful little ballad that includes these lines: “Slapped my face and he shook me like a rag doll. Don't that sound like a real man? I'm gonna show him what a little girl's made of. Gunpowder and lead.”

A little too John Wayne–ish for me. I prefer the caustic wit of Deana Carter's song “Did I Shave My Legs for This?”

Professor Kurzban, the man behind the paper “Cheatin' Hearts and Loaded Guns,” insists country music survives because it “satisfies an informational need.” Well, maybe—but it's funnybone fodder too. Hard to improve on a title like “Walk Out Backwards So I'll Think You're Walking In.”

Cole Porter, eat your heart out.

You know what happens if you play a country music song backwards, don't you? Your girlfriend returns, your pickup is un-­repossessed, your hangover disappears, your dog comes back to life and you get a pardon from the warden.

 

 

Shoo Fly, Don't Bother Me

I
am walking in the woods with my dogs. I am peaceful. Centred. At one with the Great Green Goddess. I spy another couple walking down the path. I know them slightly and we pause to chat.

But something is amiss. We palaver amiably enough but they seem ill at ease, unwilling to meet my gaze. They look to the heavens; they study their shoelaces. They crane to the east and they peer to the west. They will not look me in the eye.

After several awkward moments we part company and I am left with my dogs to wonder—a forgotten slight? Something I wrote perhaps? A few hundred yards down the trail my hand brushes across my thighs and I solve the mystery.

Oh crap. My fly's open again.

I don't know if it's a harbinger of impending geezerdom or mere wishful thinking, but I find my fly seems to be at half-mast more often of late. Odd, when you consider that “doing up your fly” is something all lads are supposed to master before they get out of knee pants. Doubly odd, when you consider that a gaping fly is a no-win condition. Mortification all around.

Geoffrey Chaucer and his Middle Ages pals didn't have to worry about accidental breaches in their breeches. They wore codpieces—a kind of sliding manhole cover (think of it as a man bra but with only one cup).

Codpieces were functional but less than subtle, fashion-wise. Along about 1700, tailors came up with what they called a “fall front”—a flap of fabric that functioned something like the breechclout that North American Indians had figured our centuries before.

When you think about it mankind has never had a rock-solid solution for the codpiece/fall front/button/zip fly problem. What complicates the conundrum is that men are lazy slobs. We want to get 'er done with a minimum of interruption and inconvenience. Women don't have a fly problem because they sit down and do the job properly.

And obviously, women don't have an open fly problem either. If they did, they would doubtless have come up with a diplomatic, non-humiliating way to say, “Hey, buddy . . . your fly is open.”

Not that there haven't been some splendid attempts. General euphemisms for informing someone that their clothing is in need of adjustment abound. I'm rather fond of “Paging Mr. Johnson . . . Paging Mr. Johnson . . .” I'm also intrigued with the idea of putting on a big black studly voice and rumbling, “I'm talkin' Shaft—can you dig it?”

“Security breach at Los Pantalones” isn't half-bad, nor is “Our next guest is someone who needs no introduction . . .” But personally, I prefer the individual touch—warnings custom-crafted for the poor schlub with the open portal problem.

For a dishevelled computer nerd: “Excuse me, but you have Windows on your laptop.”

For vegetarians: “Don't look now but the cucumber has left the salad.”

For rock fans: “Attention, attention . . . Elvis Junior has left the building.”

For nautical types: “Now hear this: Sailor Ned's trying to take a little shore leave.”

For airline passengers with a fly problem: “Time to bring your tray table to the upright and locked position, sir.”

For lovers of classical literature: “Quasimodo needs to go back in the tower and tend to his bells.”

What's also missing is a suitable retort to the news that your fly is open. Usually it's a mumbled “Oh, geez, thanks eh?”

Pretty lame.

Winston Churchill knew how to handle such a situation. Using the facilities in the House of Commons one day during his final years in office, Winston turned from the urinal to the washstand, only to be confronted by a fellow MP who fluttered about trying to tell him the bad news as delicately as possible.

“Ah, Sir Winston, you should know . . . ah, that is to say, er. You . . . um . . . oh dear. It seems your flies are open.”

“What of it?” growled the ninety-year-old Churchill. “Dead birds don't fall out of nests.”

 

 

Best Job in the World

I
've had a lot of jobs in my life, but I still remember my first one with great fondness. I started out as a newspaper editor.

The Editor's Chair is not usually offered to a greenhorn kid with no relevant experience but this was different—I owned the newspaper. I was also the Publisher, Advertising Manager and (lone) Feature Reporter.

I'm fairly certain the editorial departments of
The Globe and Mail
and the
Toronto Star
didn't lose a lot of sleep over the launching of my periodical. It only lasted for a single edition, peaking at a circulation of one. It consisted of one front page that featured a news flash hand-printed on kraft paper and accompanied by a (very bad) drawing of something with feathers. The headline: UNUSUAL BIRD SPOTTED ON MR. RUTHERFORD'S LAWN.

Well, whaddya expect? I was nine years old.

I didn't last long as an editor but that first bite of the newspaper bug proved highly infectious. In the years that followed I tried on a lot of different hats—farmhand, seaman, English teacher, salesman, actor, radio commentator, television show host . . .

And here I am again—back in the newspaper business. Only a columnist this time, nothing as exalted as the editorship, but still.

Mind you, I have a ways to go to fill the shoes of Newt Wallace of Winters, California. Newt's been in the newspaper business since 1947, and he operates at a journalistic level even more fundamental than writing or editing. Newt delivers copies of the
Winters Express
to customers on the same route he's trudged pretty well every publishing day for the past sixty-six years.

That's right, Newt Wallace is a paperboy—if you can call a ninety-three-year-old guy who delivers your paper a boy.

He was delivering papers even before that. He had his own route at the age of twelve back in Muskogee, Oklahoma. Then he did a stint in the navy, accumulated a bit of a bankroll, heard there was a small paper for sale way out in Winters, California, hopped a train to check it out and bought the
Winters Express
, lock, stock and printing press for $12,500 back in 1946. He ran the paper and delivered the copies until 1983 when his son took over. Wallace senior tried retirement, found it didn't fit and asked for his delivery job back.

“I don't hunt or play golf,” Newt told a reporter. “I deliver papers.”

Is he going to give it up now that he's heading for the century mark? Nope. “He tried to quit,” his son recalls, “but I tell him, ‘Show me three friends who are your age, retired and still alive.' He thinks about it and then he goes back to his desk.”

The news business is like that—it gets in your blood.

If I ever grow up I'm going to apply for a paper route too.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Part Six

Believe It or Not . . .

 

 

Mmm, Mmm! Cricket Cacciatore!

A
re you a Chicken Marengo fancier? How about Steak Delmonico? Or (let's go über-gourmet) what do you say to a plate of Canard à la Rouennaise?

Sounds like you really like your meat. Well, savour it, you crazy carnivore, because your meat-eating days are numbered. It comes down to simple math. Global meat consumption in the developed world has doubled—let me say that again—doubled—since 1992. Meanwhile, the global population of meat-eating humans is jackrabbiting skyward every year. It all adds up to an unsustainable equation. Even McDonald's can't flip enough burgers to fill those gaping maws.

Which leaves us with, what—an unleavened future of bean burritos, lentil casseroles and Eggplant Zucchini Gratin?

Relax. The End of Meat does not mean we all have to become vegetarians. We haven't even begun to tap the biggest, infinitely sustainable, guilt-free source of protein on the planet.

Bugs.

No, wait—don't turn that page. It's true that we North American pantywaists find the idea of eating bugs repugnant, but we're a little behind the terrestrial curve on this one. Almost 80 percent of the world's population enthusiastically ingests insects on a regular basis. In East Africa, the midge fly is a delicacy. In Japan, even the emperor Hirohito was a big fan of boiled wasps with rice. They eat fried silkworms in Korea, Cambodian men turn to crispy tarantulas for a shot of natural Viagra and in movie theatres in Colombia you can buy a bag of fried leafcutter ants (their Spanish name means, literally, “big-ass ants”) in place of the usual popcorn. The edible insect menu is endless and varied. On a recent trip to Thailand and Vietnam, I passed sidewalk stalls offering all manner of creepy-crawly taste delights including scorpions on a skewer.

And why not? Insects are high in protein, low in fat and cholesterol and a ready source of vitamins and minerals. Plus, you don't need a five hundred acre ranch or a two-storey pig barn to raise grasshoppers or crickets. I've got a decent free-range herd of the critters in my backyard.

You think eating bugs is sacrilegious? Guess again, Pilgrim:

“Even these of them ye may eat: the locust after its kind, and the bald locust after its kind, and the cricket after its kind, and the grasshopper after its kind.”

Leviticus 11:22.

Here's the kicker: don't worry about adding insects to your diet—they're already there. An Ohio University study says we each, unknowingly, eat one to two pounds of insects every year.

It comes in our food, processed and unprocessed, and thanks to our agricultural practices it's unavoidable.

But is it dangerous to our health?
Au contraire
.

“They're actually pretty healthy,” says Dr. Philip Nixon, an entomologist at the University of Illinois. “If we were more willing to accept certain defect levels such as insects and insect parts, growers could reduce pesticide usage. Some of the spraying that goes on is directly related to the aesthetics of our food.”

Don't know about you, but I'm sold.
Bon appétit
and pass the crickets!

I don't know whether to start with a wing or a leg.