Let Me Roll It

I had just settled back on to my comfy chair to watch the rest of a Formula One car race when a heard a voice reverberate through the hall, “Who put the toilet paper roll in backwards?” I sat for a moment churning this question through my mind, going through the various machinations of how it was even possible to put a roll of toilet paper in backwards. I didn’t have to wait long as my daughters head popped into the TV room and said, “Was it you?” I stopped with mouth half open and a fistful of greasy potato chips in my hand and looked over at her. To be honest, I have never really been confronted with this sort of accusation before and I stammered a bit before I did admit that it possibly, maybe, could have been, might have been me. I thought I was doing a grand gesture to even remember to put a new roll of toilet paper in the holder in the first place. How mistaken I was. She fixed me with a look that was a combination of exasperation and pity; of all the things she could have inherited from her mother, it would have to have been that look. “Dad, the toilet paper has to come over the top of the roll and hang down.” My only response to this was, “Really?” followed quickly by, “People worry about this sort of thing?” She told me that this was the way they do things at all the four star hotels. I thought about all the hotels that she has stayed at over the years and said,” I don’t think the Super 8 out by Pearson really qualifies as a four star hotel.” I then discovered that she had also inherited that other look that her mother gives me; the one that scares me. “Dad! Don’t you know anything?” Well, anyone who knows me, knows I know a lot of stuff. However, it is stuff that isn’t particularly important or necessary to get you through life. I can blather on and on about a variety of little known facts, but I had never in all my experience or reading ever, ever heard of a proper way to hang a toilet paper roll. In fact, I think I am one of the few who knows and practices the somewhat European etiquette of turning the tines of your fork down when you have finished your meal to signify that you are finished and do not want another serving. So hitting me with this new toilet paper formality was a bit of an eye opener.

But I really shouldn’t have been too shocked at this. The path to the toilet roll standard had been set a few months ago when I was informed that the new policy in the household was not to have folded towels, but instead they needed to be rolled and placed in a basket in the bathroom. This poor old dog was getting exposed to a snoutful of new tricks. It has taken me over half my life just to finally fold towels and put them in a closet in the first place... what next, I thought, roll my dress shirts? Separate my laundry? I did innocently ask what we were supposed to do with the towel racks now that they weren’t used to hold towels. I was told that I could do a physically impossible thing with them. Showing the wisdom acquired over years of self preservation, I declined to follow up on that line of questioning.

I finally ask my daughter what brought on all these changes. I laughingly told myself that they must have done an etiquette episode on “The Simpsons” as that seemed to be the educational stream of choice for my kids. Their knowledge of my music, history and pop culture have been learned through these yellow skinned people so it wouldn’t have surprise me if they somehow made Bart into some sort of cartooned Emily Post, that doyen of manners and etiquette. Well, it turned out it was a TV show, but not the Simpsons. Apparently, there are scores of people now on television that are redefining the conventions that we have all lived with, upsetting the applecart along the way and making life for old dogs very confusing. It is almost that they endeavor to change things just for the sake of changing things. But I guess they are no different than most television networks. Some chase news, some chase headlines and some chase style.

I don’t mind change, I embrace it at times. Even with all of these changes, I was coping with everything, not really noticing these slight alterations, well, until the toilet roll confrontation. But from all that I know of the growth of any civilization, the path to the betterment of society on the whole, is through change.

However, I am lost when it comes to how we can advance our society by having a correct way to hang toilet paper. Unless, of course some tyrant from a third world nation reaches for his toilet paper and finds it hanging underneath the roll and as a result decides to invade a country. Now, that would be news… and a reason to correctly hang toilet paper.

Umm, Spell Check Anyone?

I don't try to slam too many politician's, cause that is just too easy. Like shooting fish in a barrel (I am NOT advocating any sort of gun play) But I can't believe this ad went out for Hudak. Doesn't anyone in his staff read stuff before it goes to press? What the hell is bureacuracies?

Did Yahoo Hijack Your Search Engine on Firefox?

I don't often go into the nuts and bolts operation of computers even though I was in the terms of buzz word people, an "early adopter" of computers. My foray started back in the eighties when I was looking for ways to electronically storing all of my articles, stories and first drafts of screenplays. I went to Bob, my trusted friend, and asked him how many pages would a computer hold. He looked at me and said that it depended on the size of my hard drive, which at the time was about 20 megabytes. I said, yes, but how many pages and he said about 20 megabytes worth and I asked how many pages that was and he said about 20 megabytes worth. This went on for about 10 large draft beers until we really didn't care anymore and I bought a computer off him. Wonderful marketing scheme, I think. My point is that I am not a neophyte when it comes to computer technology or applications, but I was stymied a while back when one day I noticed on my Firefox browser that a Yahoo tab had appeared and subsequently when I went to search for something by opening a new window, the default search engine was Yahoo and not my normal Google. I tried everything I could think of to change this back. I disabled the Yahoo toolbar, I reset my default search engine, but still the tab was on my Firefox toolbar and the search engine kept defaulting to Yahoo. After a few months of frustration, I resorted to a solution I usually tell everyone who encounters a problem on their computer. Do a search online and see who else has the same problem and see if anyone has solved their problem. I guess I should listen to my own advice. After a pretty exhaustive search I found one page that detailed a solution. Apparently, Yahoo has taken to adding an invisible add-on to Firefox's add-ons. You cannot detect it using the standard procedure of looking for it. Smart people that Yahoo group. What you must do is go into the Help of Firefox and select, "Restart with Add-ons Disabled". This brings up a text box in which you select, "Disable all Add-ons" and then restart. Once opened again, you can go to Tools, then "Add-on" and select which of the add-ons you really want back on. Just don't go near any Yahoo ones that are still there. The link to this original page is http://medicine-opera.com/2010/03/how-to-disable-yahoos-theft-of-firefoxs-open-a-new-tab/ . While I am pontificating about little irritating things on Firefox, if you happen to get a text box message stating that something is trying to fake a security update on Firefox, that is a Google updater trying to update. To get rid of that message box, go to add-ons and disable the updater. Simple as that.

Class over, smoke 'em if you got 'em.

Here's the Ying, Now Where's the Yang

I certainly don’t need to preach that we live in a very complex and very complicated world right now. Situations seem to be boiling over in all parts of the world, all at the same time. I am sure this happened before in the history of the planet, but in those days we were not as globally aware of everything that was occurring. The phrase, “out of sight, out of mind” certainly would have described that mind-set. Things that we would never be exposed to come into our house on a voluntary basis or as an intrusion almost every day of the week. To be honest, I don’t need a daily phone call just when I am sitting down to dinner with my family to let me in on a great deal from my bank, your bank, or anybody elses’ bank for that matter. It is nice they think of me and all, but a letter that I could ignore would have the same effect.

I don’t know if it was out of a morbid sense of curiosity or whether there was a inner demon working at the time, but a few years ago I did a few clicks on my computer and watched the execution of Saddam Hussein when it was making its’ rounds on virtually every web page on Earth. At first, I kept thinking, “Okay, here is a very bad man, getting what he deserves”. I don’t think anyone on this Earth would ever be able to tally how many lives this particular man destroyed as he plundered, raped and invaded countries. But still as I watched this video, all I could see was a poor, pitiful, broken old man being hung. I really did have to shake myself and remind myself what this person did to millions of people. Anyone who allows his son to torture the national soccer team because they lost a game really is not quite fit to roam the surface of this planet in my books. But then that does raise the question. Does anyone, no matter what they have done, deserve to die? That is an argument that has been debated for a lot longer than I have been around and I am sure will continue a lot longer after I am gone.

Still that image and thought has stayed with me for quite a while as I thought about very bad things that happen to very bad people. I don’t know anybody who was directly or indirectly affected by Saddam’s life, so it is hard to say. From a global perceptive there are two points of view, one is that he was a maniacal tyrant who deserved everything he got (the US point of view) and the other was that he was a merciless dictator who held together the tenuous relationship of tribal factions in an area that didn’t respect democratically made borders or treaties. A delicate balance of order and terror which kept the lid on the country, and something which was greatly disturbed when he was removed from the picture. Chaos ensued in a vacuum of organized brutality.

The scales seem to swing wildly, back and forth between extremes, one would think that there has to be a balance somewhere, a Ying and Yang of the world. For every bad thing out there, I am sure there are very good things out there that happen to very good people, we just don’t hear about them all the time. Our media prefers to dwell on the bad things as it makes for better press and better sales. But every once in a while we hear of someone, a nice, hardworking someone, who is down on their luck and things are looking as bleak as they can possibly be and then using their last two dollars, they buy a lottery ticket and find themselves the following morning richer than they ever dreamed. Good things that happen to good people.

But even though we are often happy, if not out-right pleased when bad things happen to bad people, unfortunately sometimes very bad things happen to very good people. It is at times like this that I look to the sky and implore, “ What the Hell are you thinking about?”

I find myself exposed to this more and more in my life as my friends and family age. A friend of mine died shortly before Christmas a few years ago. This definitely fell into the realm of very bad things. He was younger and in better shape than I and certainly deserved to stay around a lot longer. As I sat one evening thinking about how delicate everything is in this world was and thinking how horrible the timing was for this disease to claim him. I heard the most heartwarming thing I have heard in many, many years. Just before he died, he had ordered Christmas presents for his family and had them delivered to his home shortly before the 25th . I am sure his spirit was in the room as they unwrapped their presents on Christmas morning. He gave them what was truly an almost impossible present, a wonderful time in what would have been the darkest Christmas of their lives. He took the shadow out of that very bad thing and was able to shine a little light for all of us to see and maybe restore a little balance in the world.

Look! Up in the sky! It's Supertaster!

When I was a child, I always had a rather up and down relationship with food, a kind of uneasy truce. I was what adults liked to distainingly call a “picky” eater. Not that I out and out rejected food on my plate as being just weird looking (although there were some food stuffs that definitely fell into that category), I was just acutely aware that I would get pretty sick to my stomach if I ate certain foods. Nowadays this is referred to as Hyper Sensitive Tastebud Syndrome, the possessors of this syndrome called Supertasters. It is probably the only group of individuals with the prefix super that I will ever be a member of. I know of several occasions I defied Newton’s Third Law of Physics where there is an equal and opposite reaction to an exerted force. I could put one piece of broccoli in my mouth and spew over three quarts of “unequal opposite reaction” back out.. It was definitely Linda Blair quantities. Still, food was more often than not, ordered from my plate to my mouth and then I involuntarily and inevitably delivered it back to my plate, the hallway and bathroom floor and point in between as I ran with hands plastered over my mouth. This always seemed to take people by surprise. It wasn’t that I didn’t particularly dislike the taste of whatever food it was, it was just once the flap of flesh at the back of my throat started the Sammy Davis Junior tap dance on the roof of my mouth, it was a foregone conclusion that whatever went down was going to come right back up and out.

Over the years my attitude towards food changed. I am not sure if this empowerment of having a choice in what I ate, when I ate or even, if I ate. During my teens I often compared eating to an addictive drug. My rather flawed logic was you could die of an overdose of food, you suffered from withdrawal pains and you had massive cravings that only using food could ease. I would often trot this out when people told me I ate like a bird. Considering my past experience of regurgitation, they weren’t far off. However, as I got older I started to appreciate not only eating food, I should add that I did eventually get over the throwing up part, but also cooking has become one of my favourite things to do. As any cook will tell you, there is nothing more gratifying than having people enjoy what you have made.

Cooking is like any other pastime, the more you do it the more you find that you never seem to have enough tools to complete the job properly. I find this is true whether you are building a house or making a cake. On top of that, throw in enticements from any number of cooking shows on the Food Network where you’ll see an array of seemingly indispensable tools that every cook should have. Having the right tools just makes things easier, the secret is when to know you have enough of them. Unlike most guy’s, my attraction to gadgets didn’t stop with electronic stores or golf stores. Cooking stores have become one of my favourite haunts. I can browse the shelves for hours, first off trying to figure out exactly what the tool is for and then whether or not I would have any use for it. I am sure there are just a handful of things that are really needed, but that never stopped me before. I should show you my electronics drawer sometime. My wife is a bit more pragmatic about things. When in the height of strawberry season I thought we should buy a strawberry huller to take the cap off the strawberries she just looked at me, held up her hand and pinched her forefinger together with her thumb. My defending reason that the huller was shiny carried very little weight. I won’t go into her responses for (in no particular order) a pickle container (okay, she said “What? A jar?”), the difference between a vegetable scrubber, a potato scrubber and a mushroom scrubber, pizza scissors or an avocado slicer.

It was during one of these trips to a local store that when I looked down the row upon row of gadgets that included among other things, an individual slicer for every vegetable and fruit on the planet, planers, mandolin’s and graters of every size and configuration, pot holders, spoon holders, hard butter holders, soft butter holders, plastic banana, apple and orange holders (I am still waiting for individual ones for grapes) that it occurred to me that I would need a pantry the size of the master bedroom to hold every utensil that there is available. Although this was certainly an entertaining thought, the idea of determining which of the slicers is for which fruit or vegetable would probably send me into a spasm of indecision. Then there would be whether or not I would be violating some code of cooking ethics if I used an egg slicer to slice a small tomato. But I guess until I have one of those Food Network kitchens the size of a stadium and a budget to match, I will do with what I have available. If it was up to my wife, a utensil drawer would probably consist of a sharp knife or two. But fortunately for me, as long as I keep my strange little utensils out of her way and continue serving up some delicious morsels, she is quite happy to let me indulge in my collecting habit, however useless they may be.

It's not polite to stare, but sometimes....

There are many times when your eyes lock onto something or someone and for all the power in the world you just can’t tear your eyes away. I know it is not polite to stare. I was taught that when I was a kid and pretty much adhere to what I was taught as a kid, but sometimes you just can’t help it. I seem to get so curious about things that I find myself not only staring, but then analyzing what I have just witnessed.

You can sometimes see this with rubber neckers on the highway when an accident has occurred and try as you may, you find your own eyes, almost on their on volition locking onto the scene as well. Of course, this behaviour isn’t reserved solely for the highway, there are many instances where you know you shouldn’t stare, but again, try as you may, your eyes zoom in for a second confirming look. This also happens when it comes to fashion sense. I don’t get in trouble too much anymore, now that I have the troika of fashion police living at home with me. I have had my alertness honed to the point that all I need is one quick glance cast in my general direction that will send me scurrying back in my room to change the offending outfit.

I know it is beyond me to reproach people about fashion and the manner of their dress. When I was younger, if I had a function to go to, the extent of my fashion sensibility was to make sure that I wore the cleanest jeans that I could find on the floor. These were hopefully the ones without 6 months of cigarette ash rubbed into the thigh. If it was a really formal affair I would have at least put a pile of books on those jeans to put a nice crease down the front of the leg. Nothing but the best was my motto. But I was at one of those big box stores the other day and I found myself in wonder as I watched people drifting by in what appeared to be their pajamas. I looked for any signs proclaiming, “Pajama Bargain Days” or something, but there were none. I would have stood there forever with my jaw hanging down if it were not for a quick jab to the ribs from my wife and an admonishment not to stare.

Closer to home, we were eating supper the other night, just the four of us at the table now that my son is engaged and living away from home. We were having a late summer meal of corn-on-the-cob, nothing offside about that. I was just tucking into my cob when I looked around the table and saw my wife and youngest daughter nibbling away on their cobs after applying the required amount of butter, salt and pepper. Each of them proceeding down the length of the cob with their teeth moving in a rhythmic workmanlike fashion. But something struck me odd about our eldest daughter as she ate her cob. That was when I was locked into a stare. Something was not quite right in what I was staring at, but nothing seemed to register on me what it was. I felt like a character in a Stephen King novel. You know the character I am talking about. He is always the one who is staring at something intently just before the head explodes and a creature comes charging out of the blood spurting neck. I didn’t really expect that to happen, but I was preparing myself nonetheless. Then it struck me what was wrong. She was eating the corn off the cob in an entirely unacceptable manner. She wasn’t eating down the row of corn, she was eating around the cob, over the top. She stopped in mid bite when she sensed I was staring at her. “What?” She asked inquisitively. ”Do I have something on my chin?”. “Why are you eating your corn that way?” I didn’t try and sound too accusatory, then I illustrated what I meant. She just shrugged her shoulder and said, “I don’t know, I just like to eat it that way”. “But that’s not the way to eat corn on the cob. We all know that. Didn’t you ever see the old cartoon where they eat the corn like it was a typewriter and it dinged at the end and then they started on the next line? That is the proper way to eat corn-on-the-cob”. She fixed me in a stare that my daughter always uses when she puts me in my place. “First of all, what’s a typewriter?” She always knows how to hit deep. “Secondly, if it happened in a cartoon before the Simpson’s it doesn’t count and finally, I didn’t know there were rules about eating corn. I thought it was more a matter of nutrition than it was in following a set of arbitrary rules as set down by some fictional animated rendering that came from an age where grown up people thought the height of hilarity was watching a duck with a speech impediment dressed up in clothes and talking like a human.” It was at that point I realized we shouldn’t have sent her off to university to develop her critical thinking after all.

I did eventually tear my eyes away, even before I got a jab in the ribs from my wife, but I did punctuate my point. At the end of every row on my corn-on-the-cob I dinged and started on the next row down. Let her stare for a bit.