The CBC: Literally

When some of my friends heard I was moving to Canada, they were thrilled for me because they "knew" that the media was better here. Specifically, they envied me CBC coverage. I'm not really sure why, except that they also "know" that the BBC news machine is better than broadcast news on this side of the pond, so I suspect that the CBC got some credit by association.

I'm actually not interested enough in media coverage to do a side-by-side comparison of CBC, BBC, NPR, NBC, CNN, whatever, but I suspect at least part of the allure of the BBC is all about the accent. In a workplace, when a crappy idea hits the conference table, those gathered at the table are convinced the crap is a bouquet if the speaker has an accent--any accent--that sounds British.

Anyway, the CBC has what seems to be reasonable news coverage. The evening news is an hour long and it includes at least one, sometimes two, in-depth features. However, its news readers and writers make the same mistakes others make.

Today's example: using "literally" to mean "figuratively." This happened twice in 24 hours, once on yesterday's CBC news at noon (oh yeah: they have news at noon), and once today on a CBC Radio 1 local show. On TV, the weather reader announced that storm systems were moving, literally, in a conga line across the country. On the radio, the host said that they'd interview the manager of a local pet shelter, where the summer heat means it's literally raining cats.

Don't believe it. Canada's a special country, but those things are simply not true. Storm systems here don't grow feet and dance, nor do they precipitate felines instead of water. However, broadcasters here do misuse the language--as do we all, from time to time.

Huh? Ads: Julie "Octopus" Andrews

There's this ad playing here (possibly south of 49, too) that features an animated stay-at-home female octopus who's struggling to keep her home clean and fresh-smelling for her family. The family apparently lives in dry human-land, because the octupus baby sleeps in a crib (occasionally losing one of eight pacifiers) and older octupus children apparently play hockey. (Imagine, if you can, the skate-sharpening fees.)

Furthermore, this stay-at-home octopus sounds exactly like Julie Andrews. If it's not Julie doing the commercial, and I doubt that it is, there's someone out there who can do not only her accent, but the warmth in her voice. It's uncanny.

The product: Airwick Air Fresheners. Because when you think of a smelly home, you automatically assume it's the product of an out-of-their-element, Julie-Andrews-matriarched octopus family. Right?

Why an octopus? Why does she sound like Julie Andrews, other than the fact that everybody loves Julie? Have we all been secretly wondering why Julie's movie sets smell, you know, not so fresh? When Julie sings "Jazz Hot" in Victor/Victoria or twirls in the hills-alive Austrian Alps, who doesn't have an urge to plug in an air freshener?

When I quibble like this, I feel like Dustin Hoffman's character in Tootsie, complaining that tomatoes can't sit down because they don't have knees. He's right, of course; they don't. And I probably will never buy an Airwick plug-in air freshener. Sorry, Julie.

Can't Talk to 'Em

I have a difficult time making small talk with Canadians. For one thing, they're less prone to public, meaningless bonding. Americans are likely to chat up strangers in the grocery line. Canadians aren't.

I know; those statements are gross generalizations. In fact, I'm the living exception--when I lived in the U.S., I rarely felt the need for social bonding. Still, it was nice to know that I could initiate a bit if chitchat, or participate in someone else's, if I felt like it.

When we were in Grand Marais awhile back, I had a great little conversation with the woman working in the bookstore, another with the woman at the bank, and another with a woman working at the national monument at Grand Portage. Gotta love the Minnesotans.

This week, I thought my dry spell north of the 49th parallel had come to an end. I was doing my usual circuit in the gym, where I rarely chitchat with others even though it's a big selling point for this company. I find it difficult to keep the chat going. Also, those who talk a lot usually come with people who are already their friends (and, by the way, rarely get a good workout, so why not just save the gym fees and go for coffee, but that's another matter).

So yesterday while I was chugging away, another woman came in--she was slightly familiar but we hadn't even said "hello" before. Pretty soon, we were chatting away. OK, it was about the weather, but still. I thought I was learning something about passing the time with Canadians without feeling like the Ugly American.

Well, the conversation turned, and guess what--she was born in North Dakota. She grew up in the U.S. and has family in Arizona. She's lived here for many years, but her origins are American.

Sigh. I guess random social connections with Americans living in Canada is a step toward random social connections with Canadians. Not that that's a particular goal, but it would be nice to know it's possible to do.

Ad Nauseum

You'd think, wouldn't you, that having access to only 2.5 channels would cause me to watch less TV. However, you'd be wrong. (Although I don't watch much TV, really.) Having access to less programming, and fewer commercials, actually makes me cranky and overly analytical, particularly about the ads.

It's hard to know what plays in the U.S. and what is unique to Canadian TV. We had a really cute commercial for Diet Pepsi for awhile last winter--in it, Jimmy Fallon and Parker Posey danced on cars in New York on the street, Fame-style, to a jaunty, whistly tune. I found it on YouTube so I could laugh any time I wanted. But when I asked my U.S. friend Trish, who Knows All Things Marketing, about it, it didn't ring a bell.

Normally, we're not that lucky. My current least favorite ad is for toilet tissue. Formerly named Cottonelle, the brand is now named Cashmere. The ad features a woman wrapped in soft-focus white stuff, with a voiceover cooing about how wonderful cashmere is, how soft, blah blah. I like soft toilet tissue as much as the next person, but thinking about cashmere as a toilet tissue is just gross.

And then there are the always-annoying ads for Tim Horton's, but that's a separate post. As is the ridiculous KFC slogan. Yes, I know; I could just watch less TV.

Same Song--and which verse are we up to again?

The City Council in Thunder Bay tonight will consider re-zoning part of the waterfront in the north part of town, formerly Port Arthur. A new Waterfront Development committee has unveiled a multi-bazillion-dollar plan for rejuvenating the waterfront and turning it into a bona fide tourist destination. That will make northwestern Ontario a tourist mecca, for sure.

Also, last week the newspaper had another discussion of "twinning," or four-laning, the highway all the way from Thunder Bay north and east to Nipigon. That will make northwestern Ontario a business mecca, for sure.

Uh-huh.

This summer, I've been going through file folders of junk from my parents' home in Oklahoma. Recently, I ran across two file folders from two different years, both full of interesting (to them) newspaper articles from the Thunder Bay paper in 1992 and 1994.

Both folders contained many articles about--can you guess it? That's right--the "new" waterfront development project and the plans to twin the highway to Nipigon.

At Last...

It's been quite the week on the home front of the war in Afghanistan.

Troops are rotating in from Quebec, where support for the war is weakest.

Two opinion polls, described in the Christian Science Monitor (http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0719/p99s01-duts.html), give new snapshots of how Canadians view their military and this current deployment.

A report commissioned by the UK House of Commons says that Britain and Canada are bearing a disproportionate load in the supposedly all-NATO mission.

And the July 23 issue of Maclean's (Canada's version of Time) has a couple of articles about Afghanistan.

The first, a column by Andrew Potter, is all about "supporting the troops." Potter says people have two "intellectually and morally" honest ways to support the troops: demand that they be brought home or demand that they be given the resources--human, financial, and political--to win.

Meanwhile, a feature by Sean Maloney claims that the two years of effort in Afghanistan are paying off. He says that "the only way the Taliban can win is to generate doubt and fear in Canada." To do that, their strategy is, in part, to attack troops in such a way that produces mass casualties.

I'm no expert. I'm by no means qualified to evaluate Maloney's statements, the methodology of the public opinion polls, or the accuracy of the reporting of their results. I'm just thrilled that Canadians are finally talking about Afghanistan.

Oh--there's also a report from the front I think of as Absurd-istan. This Maclean's also contains a whine by Barbara Amiel, wife of now-convicted felon Conrad Black (who owns Maclean's) about having to move. You see, the four-month lease on their posh digs ran out, and they didn't expect the trial to take this long, and now she has to, like, find another place to live.

Obviously, her column was written before the conviction. In any case, I'm sure the soldiers and civilians being killed in Afghanistan feel her pain.

Anonymous Advertising

You've seen these ads on TV in the U.S.: A man strides through the office, whistling, and everyone knows something is different but can't quite figure out what. A couple sits in folding chairs on a beach, watching a sunset, and the voiceover intones something like, "When the time is right...will you be ready?"

TMI!! TMI!! I don't want to think about another couple's sex life, even if it's a made-up couple on TV. Urg.

In the U.S., ads for prescription medications specify a disease or condition, extol the benefits of a particular medication, and then advise you to call your doctor to see if ___ is right for you. They're ubiquitous and annoying, but at least they're clear, even in the 15-second slots.

By law, Canadian pharmaceutical manufacturers can't specify a disease or condition in connection with a drug. So advertisers have to create recognition without including key information. One ad that's running now for Celebrex features about six different people saying, "This isn't a commercial for..." and naming something related to what they're doing: bowling, for example, or swimming. Then it advises you to consult your physician to see if Celebrex is right for you.

Well, how do I know if I even want to ask? The people taking Celebrex--a mix of men and women who look to be about 55 or older--certainly seem happy and fit. But why are they taking it? Why would I want to ask my physician about it? And given the shortage of family care physicians in northwestern Ontario and Canada as a whole, am I really going to waste valuable time in my next checkup going over a list of medications that may be totally wrong for me?

Advertisers and pharmaceutical companies would argue that drug ads create a public that's better informed about their own health care. I'm not so sure. But at least the ads in the U.S. do give information. Canadians have to rely on Google, where I found out that Celebrex relieves the pain of osteoarthritis.

Sisyphus

This post really has nothing to do with Canada except that I live here and that's where it happens.

Today I was thinking about Sisyphus, the poor guy in Greek mythology whose eternal task was to roll a huge boulder up to the top of a hill. Of course, this being a myth, the boulder came crashing down at night. Every night. Each morning, he started over.

My task today was at least fun. I was clearing the edges of the driveway into one of our camps. Roy, my might-as-well-be-husband, lets me use his loppers, which he keeps sharp, so the work is easy. I was taking out some small balsams and a couple of spruce, as well as moose maple, tag alder, and mountain ash.

Once you lop off branches or take out the tree, you have to dispose of it, so a lot of the work is dragging trees and branches into brush piles. You're supposed to take them to the dump, but eventually, the brush decomposes and fertilizes the next generation of trees. (Decomposition happens more quickly than you'd think, too, especially with wet weather like we've had for the past six weeks.)

And as is true of many sisyphean tasks, the work feels so good. When the trees come down and the brush pile grows, you really feel as if you've done something substantive. See? There it is.

That satisfaction, of course, is deceptive. Those suckers grow back--not overnight, but within a few years. A wee balsam that you overlook one year can be knee-high the next year. So along the paths to our two camps, there is always brush to clear.

At Roy's house, the full cycle has required a couple of decades. The original builder first took out all the trees, then built the house, then landscaped by planting red pine, spruce, and balsam in neat rows. Now, nearly 25 years later, those trees are huge and block the view of the lake from Roy's deck. So we're taking them out, a few each year. Trees were there, then they were taken out, then they were planted, and now they're being taken out again.

Even this version of the cycle isn't permanent: each tree we take out of a row gives the other trees in that row room to spread out. Last year's "view" disappears next year.

At least I can laugh at it. In other settings--business, for example--sisyphean tasks aren't funny. In the 1990s, I was part of the reorganization of U.S. two national laboratories. I recognize the sense of accomplishment you can feel when you successfully draw an organization chart that makes sense to you.

But the real problem is this: you can't organize yourself out of a problem you behaved yourself into. If behavior is the problem--the sales force has no power or the marketing team is targeting the wrong demographic or the product is shoddily made--then no organization will make the company work well. That doesn't even count the fact that organization charts are all theory, and people sitting around in a room drawing new ones isn't selling or making product.

Compared to my prevous life, today's job was easy. Yes, trees grow. That's their behavior. They won't learn not to grow in a path. You just have to keep whacking them out. Fortunately, that's my idea of fun. Life is good.

Canada: A Whole 'Nother Country

When I was growing up, I knew more about Canada than the average Oklahoman. My mother made sure we knew the basics: they have provinces, not states, for example, and their system of government is different, and their Thanksgiving is in October. We even learned the words to the Canadian national anthem. On our annual summer trips, we saw some of the everyday culture--how the money looked, what people wore, how the road signs were the same or different, and how Canadians pronounced some words "funny."

So when I moved here, I didn't expect to feel culture shock. I was wrong, of course. Some differences in culture are obvious. Some aren't. And it's hard to give examples of either kind.

Earlier this week, we drove down to Grand Marais, Minnesota (population 1800), to go to the bank. Since we'd made the drive, we stopped at independent bookstore and just walked around the waterfront for awhile. It's hard to pinpoint how exactly, but the waterfront in Grand Marais looks different from the waterfront in Thunder Bay.

It's only two hours away. The lake is the same lake. Local artists celebrate the same things in paintings and photos: loons, black bears, moose. Icebound bays in the winter, the powerful lake held motionless. In both places, people jetski and kayak; they ride snowmobile trails and cross-country ski.

Of course, the cities are different demographically--Thunder Bay has nearly 100 times as many people, for one thing. The cities also have different histories. Thunder Bay's population swelled after World War II with immigrants from the Ukraine, Poland, many Scandinavian countries, Italy, and Greece. Thunder Bay's economy has depended on logging, mining and shipping. Meanwhile, Grand Marais has mostly been a tourist destination and a jumping-off spot for even more remote parts of Northern Minnesota.

The bookseller at Drury Lane Books said people from Grand Marais often to go Thunder Bay for movies. We agreed that Thunder Bay isn't like a city in the U.S. of a similar size--say, Duluth. We couldn't say how, exactly, but we knew what we meant.

And isn't that the beauty of living somewhere else? The whole world isn't like the U.S. It's different. It's supposed to be. Unlike Texas, Canada really is "a whole 'nother country."

The Afghanistan Tap Dance

I have yet to watch Chicago all the way through, but my favorite line belongs to Taye Diggs: “And now, ladies and gentlemen—a tap dance!” Then Richard Gere uses his tippity-tapping toes to ensure that people pay attention to what he wants them to.

In the past three years, I’ve noticed that Canadians tap-dance a lot. You could also call it finger-pointing. Mostly, the finger points at the U.S. But as we all heard on the playground, every time you point a finger at someone else, three fingers point back at you.

Here’s an example. Recently, The Fifth Estate, CBC’s investigative news program, ran an episode that examined the leadup to the Iraq War. It’s good reporting and you can’t argue with what it says. Yes, the Iraq war started in a testosterone-driven fit of Oedipal insanity. A high percentage of Americans and nearly all Canadians believe that now, and many of us knew or suspected as much at the time, though no one in power was willing to use his or her spine.

And yes, the focus of public discussion in the U.S. needs to change. Unfortunately, the U.S. is at war in Iraq. That’s the sad reality. Although examining how it happened serves a purpose, a more pressing activity now is figuring out how to stop it.

Tippity tap, tippity tap. Look at those Awful Americans! How terrible it must be to be involved in such a purposeless war! I wonder how they’ll get out of this mess!

But here’s what’s happening north of the 49th parallel while everyone’s tuned into the Awful American show.

Canada is leading the NATO forces in Afghanistan. A mission that was sold as “peacekeeping” has become anything but. Casualties are mounting. Six soldiers were killed just this week by a roadside bomb, bringing the total to 66 Canadians killed. Eradicating the Taliban is not the same as building roads and schools and hospitals, which is how the mission was sold to Canada.

Yet Canadians are making many of the same mistakes Americans did. Canadians are encouraged to “support the troops” by wearing red on Fridays. The Prime Minister of Canada, mimicking the petulant tone of all White House speeches, says that the politicians who are out of power are undermining the soldiers by questioning the purpose of their service.

Here’s the biggest mistake: nobody is talking! Nobody is asking questions! What kinds of tasks should Canadian soldiers do in Afghanistan? What is an appropriate role for Canada in the “global war on terror,” as the Americans and Brits call it? People don’t even ask what it means to “support the troops.”

Questions are unpatriotic—apparently north of the border, too.

Beginnings

My father was born in a small town in central Illinois that hasn't changed much since his birth. My mother was born in a slightly larger town, now part of a large city, in northwestern Ontario. They met in graduate school. They got married and had five children, of which I'm the younger daughter. My mother became a U.S. citizen before I was born. So technically, I'm all-American, apple pie, baseball and yadda yadda. After all, I was born to two U.S. citizens.

But my heart has always belonged in Canada--more specifically, to a few acres of real estate about 15 miles outside what is now Thunder Bay, Ontario, on the shores of Lake Superior. Here, the family has two cottages, or "camps" in Northwestern Ontario-speak, that date back to my mother's childhood in the 1920s. My partner lives in a lovely home between them, on property that originally belonged to the family but which my mother sold in the 1980s, in part to finance the addition of plumbing to one of the camps. Currently, we split our time between his house and my apartment in town, though summer finds us mostly at the lake.

When we were children, we came to these camps every summer. My mother needed to be here, partly to escape the heat of her Oklahoma home, but also because being here refreshed her. The icy water and whispering birches spoke to her spirit, as did the mundane challenges of primitive living. On a wood-burning stove, she whipped out dazzling meals; she painted inside and outside walls, hauled water, and chopped wood with the rest of us.

Through the years, I came to share her need to be here, but my life's path continued to wind through the U.S. Finally, in midlife, I arrived, suitcase in hand, to stay. I belong here.

Moving anywhere is painful--leaving behind the familiar, even for new, exciting opportunities, means saying goodbye to part of one's life. Moving to a foreign country, no matter how similar the cultures, has its own challenges. I often wonder if the similarities make the differences even more acute. And then I start to wonder how similar our cultures are, anyway.

There you have it: a bit of who I am, and a bit of what I contemplate.