I managed one of the great verbal gaffes of the holidays on Christmas Eve.
We were opening presents with my in-laws. My brother-in-law gave us some new king size pillows, a welcomed gift since we recently bought a couple of sets of bedding without buying anything to put in the new pillow cases or shams.
My wife and I were debating whether to put the new pillows in the cases or shams, and which set. My domestic prowess made my father-in-law chuckle, prompting me to explain:
Until I married your daughter, I didn’t know the meaning of the word “shamâ€.
Ahem.
That’s a pretty bad (and completely accidental) double entendre, but it pales in comparison to two other blunders I’ve been privy to. For some reason, both are race-related, though not in a Michael Richards/Mel Gibson sort of way. These were just very poorly chosen words.
1) At a party a few summers ago, a friend was telling the group about a great bit of music she had heard that day down at Harborfront. It was performed by an Andean busker, who played panpipes and had brightly-coloured marionettes on a string from his foot, which he moved to make them dance about to the music. But she’d had a few drinks, and what she said to the group was how much she enjoyed “those dancing coloured people.â€
2) Friend of a coworker, in South Africa. He’d taken several rolls of film on his trip, and couldn’t wait to get back to Canada to have them developed. Of course, he told the mixed crowd, he wanted to get them developed properly, at a trustworthy photo place. “So you can bet I won’t take them to Black’s!â€
Again, these were not racially-motivated – they simply came out wrong. No knock on the poor sods who spoke them (and were both met with deathly, bewildered silence.) Also no knock on Black’s Photography or Andean buskers – I enjoy both. Still, they make me feel less bad about my own “shamâ€.
So, dare to own up to your own worst-ever gaffes?
Here’s one reason I’m glad I didn’t buy a condo or townhome that’s under construction.
Occupancy: DECEMBER 2006
Whaddya think? Looks about a week away from move-in, no?
For the first time in… well, ever, I got my Christmas shopping done at least a week before the holidays.
How did I do it? Well, I highly recommend marrying someone full of good gift-giving ideas. If you can’t swing that, online shopping helps; so does taking a day off of work and away from small children.
Anyhow, I’m feeling pretty pleased with myself, sipping eggnog and watching those local TV reports of last minute shoppers impaling each other with stilettos and slashing wildly through the mob brandishing an Extreme Elmo.
But there’s someone on my list who deserves something that can’t be bought at the Eaton’s Centre. At that’s what this post is about.
This post is about my father, Barry Arthur Gorbould, someone I’ll be fortunate enough to see on Boxing Day this year. And I can count on the fact that seeing my wife and me, along with his two darling granddaughters, is all Dad wants for Christmas.
See, Dad lives in a nursing home. There’s not much he really needs for Christmas, at least in terms of stuff. But it occurs to me there’s one thing he doesn’t have which I seem to have a lot of, and that’s a place on the internet.
Now, Dad never had much interest in the Internet, but I think he should be at least a tiny part of it. He’s from another era, but I live in a world where the ‘net sort of confirms your existence. But when I search for his name, it comes up empty, aside from the birth announcement for my youngest daughter (not a bad place to start, really.)
In hindsight, it’s remarkable that I’ve neglected to mention him in this blog until now. I want to fix that, in some small way, tonight. For better or for worse, much of what I am, much of what you read on this blog, trickled down from Barry Arthur Gorbould. I think he should be on the record.
There are many kind words people have used to describe Dad; in alphabetical order, some of them are: adventurous, handsome, impish, intelligent, kind, outdoorsy, patient, witty. On the negative side, his English schoolmaster once summed up his character by announcing to the world, “Gorbould, you are a lout.â€
I’m not going to try to tell you Dad’s life story in one blog post. That can’t be done for anyone. So instead, I want to tell you about one single characteristic that has left a strong impression on me.
Problem is, I don’t have a word for it. So I’ll tell you a story instead, and see if I can spell it out.
When I was around 10 years old, I got the screwball notion that it’d be really cool to have a secret hiding place in our newly-constructed home. Now, I had no concept of architecture. I was 10. I figured maybe we could just build a trap door under my second-floor bedroom, and have a little fort under it. I was delightfully oblivious to the fact that the kitchen ceiling was a foot below.
“Dad,†I said, “Can we build a Secret Room in my room?â€
And you know what he did? He got out the plans for the house – which he helped design – and took a look.
As it turned out, behind my bedroom closet was an empty, sloped overhang above the garage doors. Over the next few weeks, Dad cut a hole in the closet, built a plywood floor under the overhang, installed a light, drywalled the roof and added a piece of carpet and a cupboard door to cover the entrance. And I had myself a Secret Room.
For the next few years, the Secret Room was a great place to play with friends, escape when I was feeling angry, and hide stuff I wasn’t supposed to have. It was my very own place, where I was safe and in control of the world. It got pretty cold in the winter, and years later it caused mildew in the garage ceiling and had to be torn down. But it was there when I needed it.
Dad was always game like that. Whenever my sister or I suggested some crazy kid idea, he’d take it seriously and see if he couldn’t make it happen. I don’t know if it was devotion to his kids, or that sense of adventure, or his own barely-concealed childishness, or that stubborn, puzzle-solving part of the brain, but Dad was almost fearless in his commitment to giving anything a try.
Three more examples, revolving (like my adolescent years) around cars:
- On a family trip to Germany, I said it’d be cool to have a Porsche key-chain. Dad doesn’t speak German, but drives the whole family to the Porsche factory and buys half a dozen key-chains for me to bring home to my friends.
- When I suggested that our creaky old Volvo sedan needed to look cooler, we went down to Canadian tire and bought some ridiculous flame decals to add to the hood. (How mom survived, or spared his life, I’ll never know.)
- High school: Sitting at McDonalds, I pointed out a guy I knew who was always bragging about his souped-up Thunderbird. Dad left me there, walked straight out to the parking lot (wearing his tie and blazer) and in his best English accent, asked the bewildered Dave to pop the hood and show him the new headers he’d heard so much about.
These are all small things, to be sure. But I was a small kid. And a shy one: as my Mom likes to remind me, my McDonalds breakthrough was summoning up the nerve (age six) to go to the counter and ask for an extra packet of vinegar. To have a role model who was unafraid meant a whole lot.
So, what’s the word for it? Dad is brave, but not “throw yourself on a grenade†sort of brave. He’s adventurous and curious and devoted, but none of those quite sum it up either. So I’ll just call it a mental “Secret Roominess.â€
Thirty years later, Dad’s lost a lot, and I’m still shy. But I try to keep that Secret Roominess in mind, and give it a try, whatever it is.
“Dad,†said my daughter last weekend, “I want to make a snowman. But it’ll be made of wood circles, and it’ll be as big as me and have a top hat and pointy arms.â€
Ten minutes later, I was outside showing her how a jig saw works.
Thanks, Dad. Merry Christmas.
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While I’m at it, this seems like a great place to give a shout out to another brave man at Dad’s nursing home. Shawn Gaudier is a 33 years old and severely disabled, but he’s reaching out to the world through music on his two websites, ShawnRocks.com and Andrellica.com. He recorded the latest installment of his Webcam Tour on Christmas Eve. Rock on, Shawn!
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My youngest daughter, age three, has finally glommed on to the idea of making a Christmas list. She heard her sister’s list, and presented us with the following demands:
- One parrot calendar
- One candy cane
- Three hard plastic hyenas.
Hyenas. Three of them. I’m not even sure she knows what plastic means, but they’d better be hard.
I mean, who even likes hyenas? Nobody likes hyenas. Not Simba, and not me.
I actually saw a few hyenas on my honeymoon in Africa. First a family of them, which was cute enough (my photo below), but then an adult ripping flesh from a water-logged wildebeest carcass, which was not. And one loped along behind our safari truck a while, which made me wonder how reliable these vehicles really were.
But, hyenas is what she wants, and hyenas is what she’ll get. My wife, bless her, scoured three different toy stores and came up with the goods. Sales clerks didn’t bat an eyelash.
After all, nothing says Christmas like dirty, leering carrion eaters. Maybe we’ll save her the Christmas turkey bones and entrails, so she can have a whole playset.
Like those unappreciative kids, I have discovered that the best Christmas gift of all is an empty box.
So I gave myself one. More specifically: I’ve emptied my inbox!
Let that sink in a moment. For 10 years now, my CBC inbox has been crammed with business mail, audience mail, personal mail, junk mail, you name it. I try my best to answer, forward, file and delete, but there are days when I’ll get 100 messages, not including spam. And, to my dismay, many of these require some sort of action on my part before I can put them out of sight and out of mind. So I leave them in the inbox until I do something about them.
And I finally did. From its peak of about 1,000, over the past few weeks I whittled my GroupWise inbox down to under 50. (CBC IT’s annual purges of messages over one year old helped.) And today, it’s empty. Well, almost. There are two messages for stuff to do in the new year, but that can’t be helped.
And yeah, I filed away a few that I had been meaning to answer but now replies would be so embarassingly late as to do more harm than good. But only a few.
Those of you who use different systems, who choose not to file, or file everything right away, or use Gmail or whatever, just bite your tongues and let me revel a bit. And if you take this opportunity to e-mail crap to my work address, I’ll personally deliver you a lump of coal somewhere very uncomfortable.
A friend of mine from Journalism School had a theory that I’ve always wondered about at this time of year.
The theory goes like this:
If the parking lot you are trying to use is completely full, you have just as much chance of finding a spot right up front as at the back.
The reasoning seems sound enough. Once the lot is full, someone will have to leave for you to get a spot. And where they leave from is random. Even better, it might even be more likely that they were parked at the front, because they arrived earlier and therefore finished earlier than those at the back.
It’s an appealing theory, and I’d love to verify it - but part of me just isn’t buying. Seems too good to be true.
For starters, lots are seldom completely and utterly full. At this time of year, they are usually 90 per cent full, meaning that your spot is probably waiting for you way back there by the overpass.
Second, this season also brings out a breed of aggressive chauffer dads, who drop off their charges and circle the prime spots like barracudas. You don’t really want to challenge these alpha male minivans. At best you’ll be stuck behind someone who’s staked out what he feels is an impending opening. Worse are the ones who smell blood, burning rubber to “claim” a parcel-laden shopper, then creeping along behind them like a lioness on an elderly wildebeest. It’s the law of the jungle, and you’d be better off taking the long walk and arriving alive.
Still, I hold out the tantalizing hope that my buddy is right (he now works at a major newspaper, and if he ever reads this blog, hopefully he’ll say if he still supports his thesis.) Somewhere out there, right across from the mall entrance and right beside the handicapped spaces, there’s a nice, wide parking spot with my name on it.
And when I find it, I’ll appreciate it. I’m gonna buy someone the biggest, heaviest present in the mall just because I can. ‘Tis the season.
I seldom do blog posts that are just stuff I found on the web, but you’ve got to check this out: Radar Magazine’s “The 10 most dangerous play things of all time.”
(Hat tip to Jayne Bingler for finding this. Jayne fondly remembers item #1, Lawn Darts, while I spent many a fine playdate choking on #9, those little red Battlestar Galactica missiles.)
Be sure to read the comments under each post, and play the video for the Johnny Reb Cannon.
I have a bit of a Christmas theme going here, no? I’ve already mentioned Don’t Shoot Your Eye Out… Any other dangerous toys (store-bought or home-made) that your remaining eye gets misty over? At my house, it was always a race to see whether model rockets or an Easy Bake Oven could burn down Casa Gorbould first. Good times.
I wasn’t looking for another reason to hate MySpace, I really wasn’t.
In fact, I had rather hoped to avoid all contact with the wretched thing.
For those of you (mom) who don’t know, MySpace is a “social networking†website that people use to blog, as well as to cultivate friends/contacts/etc. for chatting, sharing music, etc. With over 100 million accounts, MySpace just overtook Yahoo for U.S. web traffic. It’s the sixth-largest website in the world.
It’s also the first-largest collection of gomers in the world. Although the site is a wonderful tool for artists and musicians who want to network, it’s also the network of choice for pubescent ramblings and sleaze.
Kids as young as 14 can sign up, and that usually sets the tone. The default blog design is hideous and choked with ads that you cannot remove. It rates poorly for accessibility, and user-customized design frequently can be described as “a teenager’s bedroom after a tornado†or worse, “design that can make elves go blind.†And I’ve never seen more horizontal scrolling in my life.
Oh, and it’s owned by News Corp, so all those irritating ads line the pockets of Rupert Murdoch.
There are plenty of people I like and respect with MySpace accounts. Fellow CBC blogger Laurence Stevenson has one; so do George Stroumboulopoulos and Gillian Deacon. And all the cool bands are on MySpace. And there’s Justin Beach’s CBClove, a nice tool for newtorking the corp’s supporters.
But that still leaves about 99 million accounts for teenagers to act like preteenagers, wankstas to talk like gangstas, and predators and spammers and gossipers and identity thieves to do their thing.
All told, plenty of reasons to steer clear. But the more people start using MySpace, the harder it is to avoid. You can’t communicate with a MySpace blogger, or even leave a comment, without having an account. For months I decided Laurence, Gill and Strombo could do without my witticisms. But then a well-meaning and intelligent MySpace user posted a CBC question on my blog, and asked me to respond on hers.
So I decided to finally bite the bullet, and sign up for a MySpace account. And that’s where this adventure begins.
——————————-
Creating an account should be painless enough, I told myself, figuring that I was probably at least as smart as 100 million teenagers.
I should have known right away that this was not, in fact, the case, right after I typed in http://www.myspace.ca/- which turns out to be some guy’s blog, and a WordPress one at that. MySpace may be a worldwide phenomenon, but not enough to make it worth registering or buying out a Canadian domain name. Heck, that could cost tens of dollars, and it’s not like Mr. Murdoch is made of money.
As it turns out, the whole “Canadian†thing is a bit beyond the great minds at MySpace.
To get an account, you must first tell Rupert where you live. This is common enough on sites where registration is required (though not, I should point out, when you sign up for superior blogging sites like Blogger and Wordpress).
So, you head to the drop-down menu to select your country. You’ll notice right away that the list is ridiculously long. In fact, there are more options (228) than actual countries in the world (192).
United States comes up by default and in the middle of the list, so you’ll have to go hunting for Canada. Don’t worry, it’s right there between all those bloggers from Cameroon and Cape Verde.
Once you select Canada, a brand new question pops up:
State/Province: -Please select a Prefecture-
Prefecture? Really? Has nobody at MySpace even traveled to Canada?
Now, if you are from almighty America, you don’t have to pick your state. In fact, almost none of the 200+ options require this level of specificity, and those that do seem completely random. The United Kingdom doesn’t ask for your county, but Ireland does. You’ll also need a Prefecture if you are from Japan… or Australia. Or Denmark (where the only Prefecture to select from is “All”.)
OK, so we select Canada, then the Prefecture of Ontario.
Next box is Postal Code. By this point I wasn’t terribly surprised to find that my postal code didn’t work here, with or without capitals, with or without a space in between. So I reverted to my old standby, “90210″. Worked.
Sort of. At that point it added this new line:
Please enter a valid Postal Code for Canada
Which was nice, in that it acknowledged that they had at least heard of Canada. And once again, no post code variant would work. So, as I often do, I simply picked a different country.
I was torn between Antarctica (penguins!), Vanuatu (looked nice on Survivor) and Libyan Arab Jamahiriya (sounds dangerous) but eventually went for Bouvet Island, one of the dozens of island options that I’d never heard of.
Yesterday I got around to looking it up:
Bouvet Island: This uninhabited volcanic island is almost entirely covered by glaciers and is difficult to approach.
Cooool! Sounds like Skull Island from King Kong, or maybe the place where Happy Feet comes from.
Apparently the place is now a nature preserve run by Norway; its sole feature is an automated weather station. Which, perhaps, has a computer on the internet, so in theory I could blog from there. Except that it’s inaccessible.
So, to recap: while it’s nearly impossible to register on MySpace as a resident of Canada, it’s a breeze to register as someone from a completely uninhabited, glacier-covered, inaccessible volcanic island.
A MySpace search for “bouvet island” reveals 1,050 fellow liars. From perusing their falsehood-ridden profiles, I’ve learned that Bouvet Island was Picard’s intended destination for Starship Enterprise evacuees in First Contact (so they wouldn’t muck up Earth’s history). It may also be “just a piece of shit landfill right off the Jersey Shore.”
There are a few other skill-testing questions, and one of those colourful “verification key” images of psychadelic Scooby Doo letters that you have to type in to prove you aren’t stoned. Then you get to the “profile stuff”.
There’s an opportunity to post a picture of yourself or someone who is better-looking, and to lie about your other physical and mental traits. The defaults are a little odd, even offensive to a father of two like me:
Paul’s Details:
Children: I don’t want kids
You have 1 friends
That one friend is the omnipresent and irritating Tom, who I guess founded MySpace and no doubt got filthy rich, as evidenced by his shiteating grin leering at me under “Paul’s Friend Space”.
That’s about all that you can find on Paul’s MySpace now, apart from ads for the University of Phoenix, Capital One and free horoscopes. Using the default layout, they take up a whopping 75 per cent of the above-the-fold screen real estate. Man, I’m gonna get rich from those, no?
Now that my account has been created, I can go back and enter a few other spurious details about me. For example, I used the dropdown to set my height to the default, which is 1 cm tall.
Though MySpace members have to be at least 14, that’s actually the size of a six-week-old fetus.
However, it does go all the way up to 230 cm, which is 7.5 feet tall. Does Yao Ming have MySpace?
Well, there is in fact one guy who claims to be Yao, but I’m slightly skeptical of his profile comment, “I don’t have to suck Larry Bird’s dick for a spit up chocolate covered gummi bear and a pile of lost tube socks.” Wouldn’t pass the Chinese censors, or Reebok’s.
That said, the real Yao isn’t much of a blogger either - his last official blog entry was March 28th, 2005.
(Oh, and 7′6″ doesn’t actually cover everyone on earth - the tallest man ever was 8′11″. UPDATE: Tallest living man is 7′9″, and just saved two dolphins!)
So, now that the physical business is out of the way (I’ll be damned if I’ll put in my ethnicity or other unecessary tidbits) you can put in stuff to make people think you are interesting: people you’d like to meet, books you claim to have read, your heroes, etc.
But really, I’m exhausted and just can’t be bothered. If you want, you can send me your suggestions and I’ll put them in my profile. They’d be just as accurate as the rest of MySpace.
GASP!
It just occurred to me… I hope MyCBC isn’t going to be like MySpace! The similar nomenclature can’t be a coincidence…
(click to enlarge)
My five-year-old daughter just composed the most wonderfully, charmingly modest Christmas wish list in history:
“Dad, I hope that for Christmas I get a turtle calendar, a candy cane, and new underwear!”
If I can’t make this kid’s holiday dreams come true, I’m gonna have to declare myself unfit. I’m sure next year’s list will consist of 3,921 pieces of expensive, brand-name crap, but I’ll dodge the bullets wherever possible. (Speaking of which, stop reading this post and go play Don’t Shoot Your Eye Out!)
Right, I’ve managed to get away with half a dozen easy one-off posts, so it’s time for a rambling anecdote. To wit: the long-awaited (and possibly final) entry in my Brushes with Fame series.
After my installment on a close encounter with Prince Charles, I posted a poll asking which celebrity encounter to write about next. In a battle of aging dreamboats, Pierce Brosnan lost out to Russell Crowe, 11 votes to 12. So now it’s time for my rendezvous with Pierce Brosnan.
No, not the James Bond Brosnan. Not even the Thomas Crown Brosnan or Grey Owl Brosnan. That’d be cool, but not as kitschy and retro as my encounter. I got to meet Pierce Brosnan as Remington Steele!
(Yes, that’s me, the pimply runt on the left, age 15. If you are sniggering, post your teenage photos.)
Back around 1985, my family took a trip to California for the first of many house exchanges.
We stayed for a month in a house in Concorde, near San Francisco. I was 15, and thought it was the trip of a lifetime simply because I could swim in the pool and watch Live Aid on MTV. But we also took a few days in Los Angeles, and that’s where this story begins.
Back in the day there was a nifty service called Hollywood on Location, which published a daily listing of what TV shows and movies were being filmed on location in the L.A. area. For about ten bucks, you’d get a list of what was being shot, where and when, who the stars were, and a map – then it’s up to you to drive around and find the sets, and see what you can see.
Here’s how the New York Times described the service in 1988:
The problem: How to discover where and when on a particular day your favorite actors and actresses are apt to be performing. The solution: Hollywood on Location, a company with offices on Wilshire Boulevard and an inside line to the movie and television studios.
Each weekday, starting at 9:30 A.M., Hollywood on Location dispenses a $29 package of materials intended to point the way to the stars. The centerpiece is a single sheet of paper that lists the names of the productions being shot on location that day, their stars, the actual locations, the time frame in which filming is scheduled and the kinds of scenes planned. A map of the Los Angeles area is provided, along with detailed blowups of the areas in which filming is planned. Numbers on the blowups correspond to those on the information sheet. A seven-page introduction offers sensible advice on how to use the maps, how to organize the star search, what to expect at the locations - and what not to expect.
The company does not, for example, guaranteee that the stars of a film or TV show will be in attendance on any given day. The odds are pretty good - as the introduction points out, ”It’s impossible to make a film without the stars” - but you may have to spend hours waiting. Nor can you expect to watch the shooting of interior scenes on location, though they are included in the Hollywood on Location listings.
(There’s a website for a company called Hollywood on Location, but it’s pretty crappy and I don’t think it’s the same company.)
So, we bought our temporary map of the stars and started exploring (fortunately, both my parents were geography teachers.)
Our first stop was a warehouse district where Remington Steele was being filmed. There was some initial excitement when we saw the famous R Steele Cadillac parked among the trailers, but otherwise there was nothing to see. We milled around for a while and talked to the crew, and found out that the filming was going on deep inside the building, and we weren’t allowed in. We made a show of looking crestfallen, and were promised a heads up when any of the cast were coming out.
A few minutes later, out walks Pierce Brosnan, unaccompanied.
Since we were the only members of the public within five miles, he came straight over and talked to us for a few minutes. No idea what he said – there’s a certain deafness that comes with being “star-struck”, I guess. (Maybe Alison remembers, but I doubt it. She was uncharacteristically giddy.)
Anyway, he humoured us for a while with small talk, signed an autograph (made out to my father, the least-interested of the four of us) and posed for the above photo. And then he scooted away.
You’d sort of expect a ring of bouncers to keep away those meddling kids - and I bet there would be today - but that wasn’t the case. Our next stop was in a location where we could have used some: a taping of Hill Street Blues.
The scene being shot was an arrest in a seedy part of town. To achieve that look, the crew shot… in a seedy part of town. We, the chipper Canadian family of four, parked our rental car nearby and walked over to gawk at the actors. But after a few minutes we noticed that we were being sized up by numerous shady characters. Given the fact that there were no real policemen in sight, we took a snapshot of Charles Haid and hightailed it out of there.
After that, we drove to a rural location outside L.A. to see The A-Team being filmed. No Mr. T to be found, sadly, but we did se his stunt double leap off the hood of a Jeep. And I got to play with the rubber machine gun props, before being told to buzz off.
And the final stop of the day: a house being used to film Pretty in Pink!
(C’mon, this was 1985, and anything John Hughes was monstrously exciting.) Again, we struck out with celebrity spotting, but my parents did manage to chat up the properties manager, who happened to be Canadian. He took a shining to Alison and I, and offered to let us sit in Molly Ringwald’s pink Volkswagen Karmann Ghia. Score!
So, there it is. Another fawning ode to the cult of celebrity… sorry. I’m a little disappointed to see there’s no mention of me on his website – perhaps he hasn’t got around to blogging it yet. It could use a Brushes with Obscurity section.
Poll:
[poll=8]
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