Fifty Shades of Black (7 page)

 

 

Of Canaries and Chickens

Y
ou know the metaphor about the canary in the coal mine? Well into the twentieth century, underground miners carried caged canaries into mine shafts, where they kept one eye on the birds as they went about their work. When the canary fell off its perch, the miners downed tools and scrambled for the exit. Canaries are ultra-sensitive to toxic gases. If a canary had trouble breathing it indicated a carbon monoxide buildup that could eventually kill the miners.

Now, suppose you lived in New York City and on the morning of January 22, 2013, you decided to put your caged canary in front of an open window for a spot of fresh air. The bird would probably fluff up its feathers against the chill but it wouldn't croak. The Air Quality Index in New York on that date was a (relatively) healthy 19.

If, however, you lived in Beijing on January 22, 2013, and you plunked your caged canary in front of an open window . . .

Well, only a fool would have opened a window in Beijing on January 22, 2013. And if you did you'd be shopping for a new canary rather soon. The Air Quality Index for Beijing on that date read a staggering 755.

Let me repeat those figures. New York 19; Beijing 755.

How bad is air pollution when it hits 755? We don't have adjectives to describe it. Officially, China deems any reading above 300 as “hazardous.” The World Health Organization judges a reading of 500 to be more than twenty times the level that's safe to breathe.

Nobody has a category for 755.

Here is what happens at that level: You cannot see across the street. Flights into and out of the city are cancelled due to zero visibility. Highways are closed for the same reason. Small animals are in distress; birds fall out of the sky.

And if you're a human you are, quite literally, on life support. Without an air purification system it is virtually impossible to breathe.

It didn't take an Al Gore visionary to see this coming. China has been exploding industrially, socially and commercially for decades. Canada has six cities with populations over a million; China has one hundred and sixty. More than twenty million live in Beijing. Worse, the city sits on a low, flat plain surrounded by mountains and thousands of factories. On windless days, Beijing is a massive cauldron of pollution.

Can China turn this around before it asphyxiates its citizenry? It's possible. China still enjoys the privileges of totalitarianism—which is to say the leaders can make things happen without going through the messy dance of democracy.

But you have to acknowledge a problem in order to deal with it, and historically despots are myopic when it comes to radical change.

One of the latest government responses came in the form of an official condemnation—not of the pollution outrage, but of reporters talking about the pollution outrage. A Chinese Foreign Ministry official blasted such reports as “not only confusing but also insulting.”

The only insult in this sad story is the massive gang rape China is perpetrating on the planet. I don't know how canaries are faring in Chinese coal mines these days, but it's obvious the Chinese chickens are coming home to roost.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Part Three

Human, Nature

 

 

Here's to Henny

A wife says to her husband, “You're always pushing me around and talking behind my back.” He says, “What do you expect? You're in a wheelchair.”

I
was a stand-up comedian in a Vancouver nightclub for one night.

Scratch “one night”—about three minutes and twenty seconds. But it felt like it went on all night.

That's the one thing the audience and I agreed upon. They jeered and they hissed. They made unkind references to my lineage and addressed me in terms usually reserved for unmentionable parts of the anatomy.

What they did not do is laugh.

I have dog-paddled in shark-infested waters; I have let a live tarantula walk up my arm. I even mock-grappled with wrestler Gene Kiniski but I have never felt as desperate and lost as I did for those three minutes and twenty seconds in front of a hostile nightclub audience.

Not surprising. Studies show that the greatest fear for most people isn't falling off a cliff, being struck by lightning or getting mauled by a grizzly—it's standing up and speaking out before a roomful of strangers.

That applies to you and me, perhaps, but not to Henny Youngman.

The American (actually he was born in Liverpool, England) King of the One-Liners stood up in roomfuls of strangers virtually every day for over seventy years. He never took vacations or a weekend off. His audiences ranged from the
David Letterman
show to dinky wedding receptions in whatever hotel he happened to find himself. The film critic Roger Ebert remembered: “I once ob­served Henny Youngman taping a TV show in the old NBC studios. We got into an elevator together. It stopped at the second floor, a private club. A wedding was under way. Youngman got off the elevator, asked to meet the father of the bride and said, ‘I'm Henny Youngman. I'll do ten minutes for a hundred dollars.'” He also did nightclubs (two hundred nights a year), the odd movie and a regular gig on
Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In.

Youngman's humour was rapid-fire, machine-gun style. His act was only fifteen or twenty minutes long but he could cram a hundred different jokes into that time frame. Nobody ever complained about the length of Youngman's performances. Their sides were aching too much.

Youngman's wife, Sadie, was the butt of a lot of his jokes—including his trademark gag: “Take my wife—please!”

He had others:

“My wife said to me, ‘For our anniversary I want to go somewhere I've never been before.' I said, ‘Try the kitchen!'” Or: “Last night my wife said the weather outside wasn't fit for man or beast, so we both stayed home.”

In fact, Youngman was nuts about Sadie and she returned the ardour. They were married for over six decades and toward the end when her health declined he had an intensive care unit built into her bedroom because she was terrified of hospitals.

Sadie died in 1987; Henny ploughed on for another decade, finally closing his remarkable one-man show in 1998 at the age of ninety-one.

Henny could spark laughs anytime, anywhere from anyone, but it never went to his head. For Henny it was a job. “I get on the plane. I go and do the job, grab the money and I come home and I keep it clean. Those are my rules. Sinatra does the same thing, only he has a helicopter waiting. That's the difference.”

“Keeping it clean” was a big deal for Henny. I met a young comedian who got to sit beside him on an airplane once. The kid asked Youngman for his secret. “I keep it clean!” thundered Youngman. “All these young punks with their sewer mouths and their gutter jokes—stupid! Sure they get laughs but they don't get asked back because they offend people who don't like bad language. Best advice I can give you, kid—KEEP IT CLEAN!”

Then without missing a beat, Youngman buttonholed the flight attendant and said: “Now where's my #%$ing scotch?”

 

 

Caution: Boobs on Display

G
ot milk? You bet we have. More than six billion men, women and children drink that familiar white liquid produced from the glands of mammals every day on this planet. We downed 720 million tonnes of the stuff last year and there's no sign that our thirst is slaked.

And—aside from for those who are lactose intolerant—that's a good thing. Human breast milk is tailor-made for tiny humans but milk products of all kinds are healthy and plentiful and we don't just rely on two-legged mammals for our supply. We've guzzled our fill of milk from cattle, sheep, goats, yaks, water buffalo—even horses, reindeer and camels.

As for how we get the milk from the gland to the customer, well, that's changed a lot over the years too. I can remember when milk came to our doors in milk wagons hauled by patient, shuffling teams of horses. The one-quart bottles clinked and clanked as the wagon rolled along. Each bottle had a cardboard stopper and a tulip-shaped flare at the top, which is where an enterprising brat, if he tiptoed out on the porch early in the morning, could find the cream. Mmmmmm.

The horses were eventually retired and the milk wagons morphed into milk trucks that performed the same function. Then some bean counter worked out that it would be more profitable to have the customers schlep to a store and pick up their own supply of milk. Adios, milk truck.

The containers changed as well. The quart glass bottles were retired in favour of clunky, rigid polyethylene jugs, which in turn were replaced by soft plastic bags. After that came plasticized cartons in various sizes from quarter-pint (sorry, I'm a geezer)—all the way up to a two-litre version. I think that's how milk is sold in Canada these days, although I haven't been down to the corner store for a while so there may be yet another incarnation.

I also haven't been to downtown Pittsburgh, and that's a pity, because there's a milk delivery revolution going on down there. It's a big old ice-cream van that's been renovated. Each working day it winds through the streets of Pittsburgh with a giant pink fibreglass breast on top—complete with a rosy nipple that blinks.

It's called the Milk Truck, natch. Its purpose: to make life a little easier for breastfeeding moms. Inside there's a cozy lounge where mothers can find nursing supplies, breast pumps and a welcoming, non-hostile atmosphere. The crew, decked out in saucy milkmaid costumes, also responds to distress calls from nursing mothers in need of some privacy to pump breast milk during the workday.

The Milk Truck was the inspiration of Jill Miller, a Pittsburgh conceptual artist who created the idea as a commentary on attitudes to breastfeeding in public, then discovered that the Milk Truck was filling a real need.

But not for everyone. Ms. Miller was astounded to find that a substantial portion of the public is actually offended by the sight of women nursing their babies.

“We think nobody cares,” she told a reporter from (really)
Bust
magazine, “but some people—predominantly women—are for some reason fully enraged by the thought of a woman feeding her baby in public.”

Call me a slavering pervert but I think the sight of a nursing mother and child is about as beautiful as life gets. Tim Hortons customers lining up for their double-doubles wearing pyjamas and hair curlers—THAT'S offensive. But I digress.

I'd love to see Pittsburgh's Milk Truck rumbling down my street sporting a fibreglass breast with its nipple winking away.

And for any passerby who took offence? It would just prove that the real boob wasn't on the truck.

 

 

Got Beavers? Leave
'
Em to Cougars

W
haddya gonna do when a mob shows up? A gang of fat little furry critters, buckteeth, flat tail, who mind their own business, vegetarian, non-aggressive, whose biggest fault is constructing unsolicited hydro preservation projects, usually in the middle of nowhere?

Well, you can make them the symbol of your nation and put their portrait on the back of the nickel. Or you could hunt them almost to extinction and turn their furry pelts into a high-fashion haberdashery statement.

We Canucks did both to the beaver. First we chased it, with traps and guns and clubs, from the sandy shores of the St. Lawrence to the shell beaches of Haida Gwaii, then, noticing that in our quest for furs we had accidentally discovered a country, we honoured the beast responsible with a little long overdue respect.

Well, sort of. Actually what happened is, High Fashion, as is its fickle way, grew tired of beaver hats, leaving trappers no very good reason to keep killing them. So, before the last beaver was turned into a homburg, we stopped. And the beavers, left on their own, did the thing that they're second best at—making little beavers. After two or three centuries there are once again plenty of beaver from Canadian coast to coast, and that includes at the end of a hiking trail in Dunbabin Park on Salt Spring Island.

Which in a long-winded way brings me to my point: we've got beavers in Dunbabin Park and we don't know what to do about it. Normally, the answer would be “why do anything?” Salt Spring's a live-and-let-live place and we've got plenty of trees . . . what's the problem? Well, the problem is these are uncommonly ambitious beavers. The park trees these beavers are chawing on are not trembling aspens and willowy poplars. They're chowing down on the trunks of giant cedars, some of them more than a metre in diameter.

They haven't felled any of the big trees yet, and Parks staff has draped the damaged trunks with narrow-gauge chicken wire to discourage further demolition, but a lot of people are upset at the prospect of a park being flooded and clear-cut by a work crew of non-tax-paying aliens operating without a permit.

Which is ironic, because a human work crew with all the requisite permits recently clear-cut a swatch of forest just outside the park boundary, including by my count, at least thirty mature cedar and fir, which still lie a-mouldering on what's left of the forest floor.

But THAT clear-cut is legal and above board—even if it did do ten times the damage that a beaver colony could ever do.

And of course, the beavers aren't the aliens—we are. But being polite and quintessentially Canadian beavers, they'd never be so rude as to point that out.

I remain hopeful. I know it will take at least six months for Salt Springers to agree on ANY course of action vis-à-vis the beavers. In the meantime another couple of unlicensed aliens are prowling our forests—a pair of mature cougars. Cougars don't pay taxes either, but unlike beaver, they're not vegetarian.

I think if we just step back for once and leave it to Mother Nature . . . it might all work out.