What will be born of such modest beginnings? Just wait and see. (You can click on the pic to make it bigger.)
random thoughts
Canada Day 2024
On those annual lists you’ve probably seen, lists that are calculated in all kinds of different ways, Canada usually rates as one of the best countries in the world, if not the best, to live in. Though I haven’t lived anywhere else, it’s a judgment I’m on board with. I can complain about the government (terrible and always getting worse) and unpleasant aspects of the national character (we’re passive-aggressive snobs), but being born and raised in Canada was one of the luckiest things that ever happened to me. To paraphrase Robert Frost’s “Birches”: Canada’s the right place for living. I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.
Recalled!
For those of you who have been following the saga of my application for reimbursement from the Quaker company after their recall of a few select products, I’m happy to announce that I did finally receive the proverbial cheque in the mail. Not a cheque though but a Rewards Card. Took twice as long as they said it would take to arrive, but I’m not complaining! Indeed, I’m even a little impressed. I was starting to have my doubts it would happen. Well done! And yes, that does mean I’ll be buying more Quaker Harvest Crunch cereal soon.
The recall recalled
Regular readers of this site (a select and treasured few) may remember a post I had back on January 15 of this year where I mentioned how I’d sent away proof of purchase of a bunch of Quaker brand food products as part of a recall they were having due to concerns over salmonella contamination.
I ended that post with this: “I’m curious to see what happens. Do manufacturers actually pay out when they have a recall? You’re on the clock, Quaker! I’m not expecting anything, but let’s see how you do.”
When I originally applied for the refund online I was notified that my request would take up to 8 weeks to process. Then I received an email notification on January 24 from Quaker saying “We reviewed your submission, and you will be receiving compensation in the mail in the next 8-10 weeks.”
Well, by my reckoning it’s now been 14 weeks and no sign of a cheque! Are they just being slow, or do you think they just won’t be paying up? As I said back in January, “I’m not expecting anything.” Still, the email did raise my hopes. Let’s see if anything happens!
Heart of dogness
“Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge?” Probably.
This is a service dog I met while out walking. He wasn’t on duty and so didn’t have his vest on, which means I got to pet him. Anyway, when I asked his name I thought the woman walking him said “Curtis,” but when I called him Curtis she corrected me and said it was really “Kurtz.” Like in Heart of Darkness, she told me.
Road trip
Last week I went on a road trip. It was pretty grim. First a quick drive down the 401, which is plastered with monster warehouses, mass housing, industry, and powerlines all the way to Toronto. I’ve always found this one of the grimmest stretches of highway on earth, but I imagine it’s much the same outside every major city.
Things got foggy after Toronto. Luckily traffic wasn’t bad.
After a night’s stopover just outside Ottawa, I took the train back home, leaving from the aptly named Fallowfield station.
As you can see, I wasn’t blessed by a lot of sun on this trip. But the grey skies fit my mood. I’ve learned my lesson and will aspire to never leave home again.
Taking flight
Some people, even people living here, don’t know that the major metropolis I call home does in fact have an airfield. I’m not sure if it counts as an airport. Probably not. Though there are hangars. And of course planes and runways. And a café. (You can click on the pic to make it bigger.)
Looking backward
Over at Good Reports I’ve added a review of Chuck Klosterman’s The Nineties. I found this a real nostalgia trip, leading me into all sorts of reflections on what the meaning of that decade might have been.
I’m sure everyone who lived through the nineties will have a different idea or impression of them. If you try to stand far enough back though I think the big changes had to do with the coming of the Internet (social media came later). That would literally change everything, and I think most people understood that, at least somewhat, at the time. I still find it a point of wonder that I’m a member of the last generation to have grown up without the Internet or computers in the home. And overall I consider that a blessing.
In fact, I’m hard pressed to think of things that have gotten better since the nineties. We’re more aware of environmental issues, but nothing significant has been done to address any of them. Politics has become angrier, stupider, and far more polarized. The economy has become more dysfunctional. Culturally the nineties were not a golden age, but they stand up well against what we’ve seen in the twenty-first century.
Sure, this is an old guy grumbling. But I don’t have any complaints about young people, who I like pretty well. I think people my age, and even more the dreaded Boomers, have to answer for most of what’s gone wrong. And I don’t think ignorance is any defence. We knew what we were doing.
Wallpaper: The glory years
This weekend I visited an open house in my neighbourhood that had just been listed. The owner, a 102-year-old man, had moved into a retirement home. I guess it was time, as they say. From the looks of things inside, I don’t think any work had been done on the place since the early 1970s. The layout of the house was fabulous, but the wallpaper not so much. Submitted for your approval.
On our way down to the basement we have this lovely brickwork. But it’s not brick! It is, in fact wallpaper that looks like brick. Does this count as trompe l’oeil? If you run your hand over it, it even has a rough, pebbly texture.
You can really enjoy your trip to the washroom with this fun and friendly wallpaper. Who would want to leave?
This is the wallpaper in the upstairs washroom. Some people might think it’s a bit too much, but it matches nicely with what we get in the large sitting room just outside . . .
Can any words to justice to this? And it covers all four walls of a very large room. I felt I’d stepped onto the set of an Argento film.
Mythbusters
In a review I wrote recently of the book Corruptible by Brian Klaas I talked about the problem of kakistocracy, or “rule by the worst,” and saw it as “the complement to the failure of meritocracy in our time. As many recent commentators have pointed out – see, for example, my reviews of Twilight of the Elites by Christopher Hayes and The Tyranny of Merit by Michael Sandel – meritocracy, which from the get-go was a hard sell (with roots going back to a dystopic satire), has conclusively failed in the Age of Trump.” Near the end of my review I related the following anecdote:
Thirty years ago I was chatting with a professor friend of mine who was sitting on a committee overseeing applications for tenure-track appointments to the department he taught in. I mentioned the long odds that candidates even then were facing and that the successful ones would have to be truly remarkable. What he said has always stayed with me: “You’d think with so many people applying for so few jobs, the people we’d be hiring would be great. Only the best. But they’re not. We’re hiring the worst people. I don’t know why that is.”
This anecdote came to mind yesterday when reading an essay online by Hamilton Nolan on the low quality of thought coming out of opinion columnists even at prestige publications. His main example is Pamela Paul, who writes a column for the New York Times.
There is no reason for there to be even one shitty New York Times columnist. They can hire anybody they want. Anybody. The existence of shitty New York Times columnists, therefore, is an unimportant thing that reveals some important things about the myths of meritocracy. The most self-assured liberal institutions are in some ways more profoundly corrupt than some of the more raffish institutions that they look down on. I mean, the NFL is one of the sickest symbols of America’s barely subdued imperial impulses, but you don’t see a guy playing nose tackle on the New York Giants because he was the owner’s kid’s college roommate at Yale. Can the New York Times say the same?
This is a subject that interests me, and I quote from Nolan’s piece only because it chimes so well with what I (and many others) have been saying. It never ceases to amaze me how in so many fields today we see people who are scarcely even competent at what they do being lionized as geniuses or an “elite.” As Nolan’s example suggests (and I’ve made the same point several times over the years), about the only field where the term “elite” can still be assured of meaning anything is sport.
This might signify a more dangerous shift in public thinking than at first seems. We often decry the current lack of trust the masses have in “expertise,” but the fact is that the institutions that we have traditionally looked to for guidance and to lead public opinion (the media and academia) are now so compromised and even corrupt that you can understand people turning away from them. In order to have faith in elites or experts you have to believe in the process that elevated them to that station. With meritocracy exposed more and more as a myth, that faith has been lost.
Alex Good 